Waiting in Limbo at Mexico’s Southern Border

Isa and Damian left Colombia in early 2024 and began a journey they intended to bring them to the United States. They survived the treacheries of the Darien Gap, sold candy to fund their way through Central America, and reached the border between Guatemala and Mexico in March. There, the pair, whose names have been changed for their protection, crossed the Suchiate River into the town of Ciudad Hidalgo in the Mexican state of Chiapas. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were entering one of the most perilous sections of their route.

In recent years, U.S. policies seeking to limit the influx of migrants have incentivized Mexico to militarize its own southern border, creating an environment extremely hostile toward migrants, and organized crime has taken full advantage. Under the watch of officials on roads patrolled by Mexico’s National Migration Institute and National Guard, kidnappers trap and extort migrants en masse, and authorities use buses to shuttle them off to unknown destinations.

As Isa and Damian walked up the highway to the closest city, Tapachula, the driver of a van already packed with other migrants stopped and offered them a ride. They accepted, but when the van turned off the highway onto a side road, Isa began to worry. They were met at a ranch by armed men who forced the migrants out of the van, lined them up and taped over their cell phone cameras. The men said no one could leave without paying, not even children, and gave each person a price. Isa and Damian were told they would have to pay up to 1,500 Mexican pesos each, about $80. Then the migrants were forced into an industrial-sized chicken coop.

Dozens of other migrants crowded into the building, a tall structure with barred walls and a cement floor. The structure was equipped with security cameras and Wi-Fi so that, following the armed men’s orders, the captives could call their families for money.

“They started to fire their weapons into the air, so we threw ourselves to the ground,” Isa recalled to Truthdig months later. “They told us to hurry up [finding money] because the Marines were on their way and there would be a shoot-out. And that if there was a shoot-out, we would all die.”

When Isa and Damian couldn’t come up with the full amount, their captors allowed them to leave behind a cell phone instead. Those who paid in full were driven to Tapachula; the rest were sent back to the road on foot with a stamp — a rooster imprinted on their arms in black ink — that would allow them to continue without repeating the ordeal.

Pressure on the southern border

Sitting just 23 miles from the Guatemala border, Tapachula is the first stop on the most common route to the U.S. and home to the largest detention center in Mexico, called Siglo XXI. An estimated 1,000 migrants find their travel plans forcibly disrupted in the city. Some are eventually released and continue north in search of asylum; others are deported. 

The Guatemalan border became a focus of U.S. migration policy enforcement during Barack Obama’s presidency. “We didn’t really start seeing large numbers of Central Americans crossing Mexico with the intention of reaching the United States until 2014,” explains Adam Isacson, the director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nongovernmental research and advocacy organization. “When that happened, the Obama administration leaned on the [Mexican president] Peña Nieto administration to crack down more.” The U.S. contributed at least $90 million to support Mexico’s 2014 Comprehensive Plan for the Southern Border, which funded increased checkpoints and surveillance in the area.

During his first term, Donald Trump’s administration implemented the Remain in Mexico policy, which required asylum seekers to wait out their asylum processes on the southern side of the U.S. border. It also began limiting the number of asylum seekers allowed to cross the border each day, forcing migrants to wait in Mexico for months, in a practice known as metering.

Continuing the trend of pushing migrants deeper into Mexico, President Joe Biden’s administration began deporting Central Americans and Haitians from the U.S. to Tapachula. It also introduced a mobile app called CBP One, ostensibly to streamline the asylum process and prevent migrants from traveling with traffickers. Since May 2023, CBP One has served as the sole means of requesting asylum, but social justice advocates have criticized the app for merely digitizing the Trump administration’s metering strategy while further violating migrants’ rights.

“The CBP One application turns the legal right to asylum into a lottery system based on chance,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, in a statement.

The official tally of appointment requests that migrants submit through CBP One is not publicly available. However, as of February, average monthly appointment requests reached approximately 5 million, according to documents reviewed by CBS News reporters. Each day, more than 166,000 people vie for just 1,450 available spots, and many wait months to find out if they are approved.

“The only thing CBP One has done is leave migrants stranded,” says Eunice Rendon, coordinator of Agenda Migrante, an advocacy organization in Mexico. Other diplomatic changes have done little to help them: Migrants in Mexico who are victims of a crime are legally entitled to humanitarian visas, which give them legal status as they transit the country. But late last year, Mexico’s immigration authorities ceased offering these visas. 

Mexican migrantion officials have “always been under U.S. pressure not to hand out too many humanitarian visas,” Isacson explains. For most of 2023, Mexico was issuing around 15,000 humanitarian visas a month; in late 2023, that number dropped to under 300. “Clearly the Biden administration said, ‘cut it out,’” he adds. “That means more people are trapped in Tapachula.”

As more people seek to cross Mexico without visas, traffickers prosper. “The profits generated by migrants’ desperation are huge,” Rendon says.

When it was introduced, CBP One came with location restrictions that allowed users to access the portal only from states along the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexico City. An August change now allows non-Mexican asylum seekers to request their appointment from within the southern Mexico states of Tabasco and Chiapas.

Trump’s impending return to the White House has created new urgency for migrants, said Sebastián Rodríguez, an employee of Casa Frida, which supports LGBTQ+ migrants in Tapachula. “Whether or not the possible drastic changes in migration policy are put into place, the narrative causes a collective psychosis. Whether or not they have CBP One, the goal right now is to reach [the U.S.] before Trump gets into office.”

This line isn’t new. “In practice, Democratic governments, both Biden and Obama, have worked in the same way,” Rodríguez says. From his perspective, the U.S. crackdown is an opportunity for Mexico, and Tapachula specifically, to take a new tack and position itself as a welcoming destination for migrants. “There will be a lot of money flowing from different governments to continue containing migration, and that can create an opportunity for integration, inclusion and social cohesion,” he adds.

Under the thumb of organized crime

The current Mexican administration has claimed to prioritize easing migrants’ integration into life in southern Mexico. On Oct. 8, the newly installed secretary of the interior, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, announced a “humanitarian contention mechanism” to keep migrants in the south, especially in Tapachula, that would be paired with a development plan to promote local employment. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration also recently announced an employment program that partners with businesses and municipal authorities in Tapachula, the Chiapas state government and the Mexican federal government.

Overshadowing those opportunities, though, is the increase in violence in the region. “Organized crime has near-complete domination of the migration industry,” Rodríguez says. “We don’t see that there’s an agenda to mitigate those risks and deal with the issues of trafficking and exploitation. Without attending those problems and creating a structure to combat those realities, it will be hard for Mexico to become a country that truly embraces and integrates the people who are arriving.”

Rather than welcoming migrants, the Instituto Nacional de Migración’s (INM) practices are confusing and subject to change overnight, with no communication or explanation, at official discretion. The institution has adopted the custom of busing migrants willy-nilly around Mexico before sending them back to southern states to begin their journey anew, all while deceiving them as to their destination.

One young woman who spoke to Truthdig after being released from Siglo XXI said she walked several days north from Tapachula and climbed on an INM bus after officials promised to take her to the Chiapas state capital. Instead, they returned her to her starting point.

“Tapachula is a really small place, and there’s no work,” she laments. “They’ve robbed and extorted us, so we don’t want to be here. How can we eat without work? They don’t understand that.”

In June 2019, then-President Trump announced he would place tariffs on Mexican products if the country failed to stop people from reaching the U.S., and Mexico sent 6,000 National Guard soldiers to its Guatemala border. Security forces and migration officials have since become a permanent fixture patrolling the roads of Chiapas to ensure migrants don’t move north on their own. And on Oct. 2, the day Claudia Sheinbaum took office as the country’s new president, succeeding Andrés Manuel López Obrador, they made headlines.

On a side road between the towns of Huixtla and Villa Comaltitlán — about an hour north of Tapachula — soldiers fired on three trucks of migrants, killing six people and injuring 12. Mexican authorities claimed the soldiers were defending themselves against shots fired from the trucks, which, because the trucks resembled those used by people transporting migrants illegally, had been “confused” with those carrying criminals.

Rather than deterring organized crime, the military’s presence has coincided with an increase in migrant kidnappings. Heyman Vazquez is a priest in Ciudad Hidalgo who offers meals to migrants at the church on the town square. The kidnappers have grown more brazen, he says. “The cars pass full of people. They don’t hide. They don’t try to do it at night anymore.” The INM sometimes buses migrants from the Suchiate River to Tapachula. The service is ostensibly free, but migrants have reported officials charging them around $100 for a ride. Several months ago, however, the INM ceased offering it, Vazquez says. Now, organized crime maintains a monopoly on transporting migrants.

“If a migrant gets in your car, men with weapons stop you after a kilometer. They make you get out, because they think you’re charging money,” he says.

Kidnappers load migrants into vans across from the town hall in Ciudad Hidalgo’s main plaza in broad daylight, promising them rides to Tapachula. They stop buses on the main highway — between National Guard and INM checkpoints — and force drivers to turn over undocumented passengers. Once the migrants pay up, the kidnappers drop them off, still stamped with the rooster, in front of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office, which stands at Tapachula’s bustling Miguel Hidalgo Central Park.

The state cracks down

The chicken coop has become a rite of passage for migrants who reach Tapachula with few resources. On migration routes, as with any other kind of international travel, travelers can pay more for added comfort — like avoiding kidnapping. Out of dozens of migrants interviewed for this story, only two who could afford to pay for a premium border-crossing package avoided the ordeal.

Most endured some version of what a woman named Gloria described: Her family was swept up by kidnappers as they descended from rafts after crossing to the Mexico side of the Suchiate River under the watch of National Guard officers. “They were saying, this way, this way, stick to the group, stick to the group,” says Gloria, who traveled from Venezuela with 13 family members, including nine grandchildren under 13. “Then suddenly you’re climbing into a car. They don’t let you go anywhere else.” The vehicles took the family to the chicken coop, where the cartel charged them $150 per person.

Despite commitments for integration, in the weeks leading up to the U.S. election, the Mexican authorities’ crackdown on immigration has been more visible than attempts at hospitality. 

Early in the morning on Sept. 24, police and migration officials broke down the door of a private home in Mexico City where a group of Venezuelan and Colombian migrants were staying. “They came in telling lies, saying that they had to request the CBP One app outside of Mexico, that they couldn’t get it here,” says Farida Acevedo, the founder of Fundación Humano y Libre, an organization that offers humanitarian aid in migrant camps in Mexico City. Officials detained at least 25 people. Those with children were taken to a state-run children’s home; the rest were sent to Villahermosa, Tabasco, a city in southeast Mexico.

“It’s not the first time that they leave people in the street in Villahermosa, but it is the first time they entered a house and with that level of violence,” Acevedo says. “It’s a strategy of containment and exhaustion. They trap [migrants] in the north or Mexico City and send them down to Tapachula or Villahermosa. They leave them out in the cold.”

To keep people from heading north, the INM also buses migrants between cities in Chiapas. In late October, beneath a bridge along the side of the highway, at the entrance to the Viva México neighborhood, dozens of people lined up outside air-conditioned trailers staffed by INM officials. Some had been waiting days to board buses to take them to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capital, seven hours away. The capital has little infrastructure to receive migrants, but the journey gets them out of Tapachula, where rents are high and work opportunities are scarce.

Below the road, Edjitson and Victor, tattooed Venezuelan boys in their late 20s, shared a cigarette by a muddy creek and contemplated their possibilities. Trump has threatened to eliminate the CBP One app altogether, blaming it for the release of paroled asylum seekers into the United States, a normal part of asylum proceedings. 

“Eliminating that application — what we use to enter the United States — would end our dreams,” Edjitson says.

The young man’s fear reflected a common concern. “It seems 99% certain that CBP One is going to go away. The options for people who want to turn themselves in and ask for asylum are going to disappear,” says Isacson of WOLA. “People who want to come to the U.S., even though they may not be able to get a work permit, are going to have to enter without being detected, cross somewhere else, somewhere dangerous. That’s going to change the nature of the smuggling industry in Mexico. Smugglers are about to enter a golden age.”

Safety in numbers

To enter the U.S. before the door closes, to escape the labyrinth of kidnapping and extortion, busing and detention centers, migrants in southern Mexico have found strength in numbers. Caravans, walking en masse along the highway, have become a common strategy for safe travel.

That is what Isa and Damian ultimately chose to do. After arriving in Tapachula in March, they requested asylum at Mexico’s Refugee Commission (COMAR). They logged into the CBP One application every day to request an asylum appointment in the U.S. They sold cups of fruit while they waited in the city to pay for a rented room. After seven months, COMAR rejected Damian’s refugee status, but Isa’s process was going well. Damian considered heading north alone. The journey scared Isa, but she didn’t want to stay in Mexico without him. Then, the pair heard about a caravan.

On Oct. 20, some seven months after their release from the chicken coop in Tapachula, Isa and Damian left behind their few possessions to begin walking.

“We realized it was a big caravan that was escorted by the police, there were a lot of journalists, the Red Cross was supporting them,” Isa said. “Because there’s so many people, I don’t think it’s as dangerous. We have to stay together.”

The caravan left at 4 a.m. When the sun reached its afternoon peak, it stopped to rest for several hours, then resumed once the heat subsided. Sitting down in the town plaza of Huehuetán, 16 miles north of Tapachula, Isa removed her socks and running sneakers and stretched out her wrinkled feet. It was barely noon, but she and Damian had already walked for seven hours that day.

“This morning, I didn’t even want to come, but he said, ‘Let’s go, let’s go,’” she explains. Around her, some 2,000 other people, including families with children, collapsed in the muggy park.

Within a few weeks, the INM managed to disperse the caravan by loading migrants onto buses. On Nov. 9, four buses of migrants from the caravan arrived in Acapulco, Guerrero. The passengers descended onto the street, disoriented. INM officials had told them they were heading to Morelia, Michoacán; instead, they found themselves in a city recovering from a devastating hurricane that had destroyed local infrastructure, in a state facing a wave of violence that had resulted in the recent decapitation of the mayor of the state capital. Caught between institutional and criminal violence, the migrants’ circuitous journey continued, yet another loop in the serpentine path to the U.S.