Mexico City, Mexico – Donald Trump dove head first into his second term as President of the United States by enacting sweeping, controversial, and legally questionable immigration enforcement policies, including very public shows of deportations of undocumented immigrants back to their home countries.
His measures have sparked controversy in Latin America, where many of the immigrants that are being deported hail from, including a nearly 24-hour row with Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro which nearly impacted trade between the two countries.
Additionally, Trump’s administration has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to round up undocumented immigrants in cities across the U.S. On Monday, ICE made 969 arrests, tripling the average daily arrests reported by ICE in Fiscal Year 2024, according to Newsweek.
Local news outlets in the U.S. also reported the arrival of 1,500 U.S. military troops to San Diego on the border with Mexico as part of the immigration crackdown, and U.S. border czar Tom Homan has said that fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations could cost taxpayers USD $86 billion.
Read more: Petro makes stand against Trump over migrants; Trump strikes back with travel bans and tariffs
On the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican officials are reassuring citizens that they are ready for an influx of deportees from the U.S. while saying that they haven’t seen significant changes in the amount of Mexicans being sent back from the U.S.
During her morning briefing on January 27, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum and her top officials said there has been no major influx of deportees, with just 4,094 immigrants deported back to Mexico during Trump’s first seven days in office. The president also said that as of Monday, only four deportation flights have entered Mexico – with most of the people on the planes of Mexican nationality. This resembles the weekly average cited by other experts of five planes received by Mexico. It was also reported that one of the planes was briefly denied entry into Mexico on January 23.
“So far there has not been a substantive increase,” she said … “a few days that decreased with the entry of President Trump, but if we take it per week, it is a number that on other occasions we’ve had in our country.”
Under the “Mexico embraces you” plan, a strategy designed to welcome and assist repatriated Mexicans, Sheinbaum has instructed the government to build immigrant shelters along the northern border. However, on January 28, Ministry of Interior Rosa Icela Rodriguez said that these outposts designed to welcome immigrants in the thousands are “almost empty.”
On his first day, Trump ordered to reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols, most commonly referred to as the Remain in Mexico policy from his first term, a decree Sheinbaum has stated won’t be tolerated by Mexico, casting unease regarding what is to be done with a potential mass of deportees from other nationalities.
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