Piedras Negras, Mexico – It took Ana Elizabeth Melgar four tries to reach the U.S. border.
Every time she headed north, Mexican immigration authorities intercepted her and sent her south on a bus, not to her hometown of El Salvador, but to a city in southern Mexico.
“If you take me and I’m an immigrant, please send me back to my country,” she said while resting at a Catholic shelter in this Mexican border town across from Eagle Pass, Texas. “Okay, I don’t belong here. But what nonsense is sending me to southern Mexico? It’s not logical.”
The Biden administration and Texas take credit for an unusual spring lull in illegal border crossings, with the White House touting legal routes and Gov. Greg Abbott defending the military and concertina wire. There is. But analysts, immigrant advocates and even the immigrants themselves say it is Mexico that is blocking the path north.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s immigration agency arrests migrants on highways, rail lines and airports and transports them to the southernmost tip, undermining their chances of reaching the U.S. border, or at least preventing them from arriving. The bus program aimed at slowing down traffic has been strengthened. of his country.
López Obrador is likely motivated by financial gain. Hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded into the southwestern United States last fall, crippling trade between Mexico and the United States, traditionally its largest trading partner.
Immigration advocates say the policy forces vulnerable people into the arms of smugglers. Migrants report being extorted on their way north, only to be stopped at checkpoints and then returned to southern Mexico to do it again.
“The Mexican government is moving people around in circles,” said Andrew Selly, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute.
“The numbers aren’t down because of Texas busing,” he said. “In Mexico, the numbers are down because of the buses.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer than 189,372 encounters with migrants in March, down slightly from 189,914 in February, when immigration typically begins to surge. Encounters remained lower than normal during the first 10 days of April, according to Congressional testimony.
This decline bucks historical and seasonal trends and is “the second time this century that encounters have decreased from February to March,” said Adam Isacson, defense oversight director for Latin America in the Washington office. Stated.
Mexico cracks down on immigration: “More checkpoints, more buses”
Analysts say the bus program is a response to a surge in migrants arriving from Venezuela and other countries where Mexico cannot return as easily as the United States. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry, and National Migration Institute did not respond to requests for comment.
Mexico’s repression is evident in the number of migrants detained or held in shelters without being deported.
According to Mexico’s Interior Ministry, such encounters rose from less than 179,000 in 2021 to more than 726,000 in 2023. In January and February alone, Mexico reported more than 230,000 encounters with migrants who were detained or placed in shelters and then released.
Melgar was among them.
One Tuesday in April, she sat alone on a bench in the courtyard and smiled while the migrants roamed the shelter and ate breakfast. After more than four months of effort, she arrived at the US border.
While Melgar was resting, the person in charge, Sister Isabel Turcios, led a group of American women on tour. Medical volunteers set up an outdoor clinic in the courtyard. There were 108 migrants taken into custody that day, which was a small number compared to last year, Turcios said.
In December, thousands of people arrived daily in Piedras Negras and other points just south of the border. On the U.S. side that month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a record number of encounters with 301,981 migrants.
That same month, President Biden and López Obrador spoke by phone to discuss “additional enforcement actions,” and President Biden sent a team of high-level negotiators to Mexico City.
By mid-April, the number of checkpoints had increased.
Mexican authorities had set up at least six entry checkpoints between the Monterrey and Piedras Negras borders., According to Tursios’ conversations with the immigrants. Even for her, a nun from El Salvador, traveling by land had become difficult.
“The authorities came together and decided to increase the number of checkpoints and increase the number of buses to transport migrants south,” she said. “Because of that and because there was rounding up, the numbers started going down.
Texas’ population is not decreasing “because of the barbed wire,” she said. Migrants passing through Mexican checkpoints “continue to pass under the wire.”
Texas border czar says ‘tactical infrastructure’ will deter border crossings
The same day, Mike Banks, the state’s first “border czar,” crossed the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas, to address his troops at Shelby Park, the city park that became ground zero for the state’s public fighting. , climbed the sloping riverbank. He is at odds with the Biden administration over border security.
Banks climbed over a series of bellows wires, sustaining injuries in the process.
Three small cuts on his upper forearm were evidence of the difference between “concertina” wire, which grips the skin, and “razor” wire, which cuts through the skin. It was a lesson in Texas’ “tactical infrastructure” to deter illegal border crossings.
“If it wasn’t for what we’re doing in Texas right now, we wouldn’t be looking at our numbers the way we are now,” Banks told USA TODAY.
Texas is credited with reducing migration along the state’s 1,254-mile border with Mexico. Banks, a former Border Patrol agent, and his boss, Gov. Greg Abbott, said the state’s $11 billion Operation Lone Star is working and the numbers prove it.
According to CBP statistics, Texas saw a larger drop in migrant arrivals than the entire border in the first three months of this year, while California saw an increase in migrant arrivals.
“We’re averaging 200 (migrants) a day in this whole area, versus 4,000 to 6,000 in this park alone,” Banks said last year, referring to the Border Patrol’s Del Rio area. “So deterrence is working and Texas is going to protect Texas.”
Other Republican-led states are also cooperating, with 16 states sending military or law enforcement personnel to support Operation Lone Star, according to a spokesperson for the governor’s office.
The state has also sought to export the border crisis nationally, with Abbott’s Operation Lone Star busing more than 112,700 migrants to Democratic-led cities across the country.
In Texas, immigrants are offered bus rides and travel independently. In Mexico, authorities are giving them no choice.
During a recent visit to Eagle Pass, Banks, who is an advisor to the governor, addressed camouflage-clad Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission employees. He joked around with a group of Texas Highway Patrol troopers while trying to beat the heat in a shady tent where two stray dogs were napping.
The river was calm, except for the two Honduran men who had been at the Turcios shelter earlier that day. They walked along the U.S. bank, looking for a place to climb the bellows wire.
“Cold, heat, hunger, thirst”
Melgar, a mother of three, worked as a seamstress in Costa Rica for years, earning money she couldn’t make in El Salvador.
However, when the job ran out, she returned to her home country. In December, pressure to pay for her teenage children’s education led her to Mexico for the United States.
She said Mexican immigration officials in brown uniforms first picked her up in Puebla, a colonial city in southern Mexico.
The second time he captured her in the northern factory town of Torreon.
The third time, he caught her in Monterrey, a wealthy business hub in South Texas.
Each time, she was bused back to an immigration detention center in southern Mexico, where she was held for several days before being released.
On her fourth attempt, she rode on top of a freight train, walked miles through arid desert, and avoided multiple checkpoints in Mexico. She said she lived through “days and nights of cold, heat, hunger and thirst.”
Melgar said he applied for an appointment to cross the border legally through the CBP One app, but has not yet received one.
“I’m waiting,” she said in a WhatsApp message last week while still in the shelter. “If it is God’s will, it will come true soon.”
How long will Mexico’s crackdown last?
Mexico’s immigration crackdowns have rarely lasted as long as this one.
“The reality is that Mexico makes it harder for people to get to South Texas,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “It’s this widespread change as a result of Mexican enforcement that could cause it to collapse.”
There are already signs of collapse along the U.S.-Mexico border, about 500 miles northwest of the Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras intersection.
In recent days, a large influx of migrants into Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, has heightened tensions at the border crossing.
The El Paso Border Patrol has seen a slight increase in its average daily encounters with migrants, from 940 encounters earlier this month to 1,025 as of Friday.
Earlier this month, more than 140 migrants broke through a series of bellows wires on the El Paso side of the Rio Grande and were confronted by Texas National Guard troops. A local grand jury indicted the immigrants on misdemeanor charges of participating in a riot, according to the district attorney.
And last week, a freight train from the outskirts of Mexico City plowed into Ciudad Juárez carrying hundreds of men, women and children in boxcars. If a train stopped even briefly at military and immigration checkpoints outside the city, authorities would release the train.
Adults clung tightly to children or shaded them with blankets until the train slowed, and migrants disembarked a few blocks from the U.S. border to decide their next move.
Contributor: Omar Ornelas, El Paso Times
Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
