Mexican authorities made it clear they did not support the Trump administration’s program, but they appeared reluctant to pick a new fight with the White House less than two months into the term of President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.
The decision cleared the way for U.S. agents to begin the new protocols even as many migrants remained bottlenecked in Tijuana – just steps from the border – and officials in the teeming border city said resources were strained to the limit.
The spokesman for Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department, Roberto Velasco, told reporters in Mexico City that the United States was prepared to send back the first group: Up to 20 migrants across the footbridge at the San Ysidro border crossing to await asylum hearings.
Velasco, however, outlined some ground rules. He said Mexico would not accept migrants appealing a denial of asylum, unaccompanied children or people with serious health problems. Unaccompanied minors would be exempt from the U.S. deportations.
“The Mexican government does not agree with the unilateral measure implemented by the U.S. government,” Velasco said. “Nonetheless, and in line with our new migration policy, we reiterate our commitment to migrants and to human rights. Migration should be a choice, not a necessity.”
The deported migrants would be the first group of people to have been affected by the U.S. policy, called “Remain in Mexico” and first announced in December. Wait times for migrants who are currently in the United States can be months, or even years, as a result of a backlog of more than 800,000 cases.
But a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the asylum cases of those sent back to Mexico should be decided within a year, with an initial hearing within 45 days.
The plan would mark a massive change to the system of detention through which asylum seekers are processed.
On Friday, even municipal officials in Tijuana remained in the dark about the details.
Cesar Palencia, chief of migrant affairs in Tijuana, said he did not believe the city would be capable of attending to all of the asylum seekers, and that no new space had been set up to receive them.
“We don’t see a strategy to attend to them,” he said. “It’s not in keeping with the law, and I consider it a violation of migrants’ rights.”
Palencia was also concerned that the strategy would cause more people to be forced to remain in Mexico for the long term, and further limit their options to reenter the United States.
“What happens if someone from Honduras goes in front of a judge and say, ‘My life is at risk, but I’ve been living in Mexico for three years’?” he said. “It seems like a method of denying them.”
Leopoldo Guerrero Diaz, the secretary general of Tijuana, said that it was the responsibility of the Mexican government to prepare spaces for the migrants.
He said El Barretal – a shelter built for 6,000 migrants who arrived en mass in October – had the space for more migrants, but that other shelters in the city were already at capacity.
“Tijuana has traditionally received thousands of migrants, but not in the manner they’re arriving now. No city in the country has the capacity,” Guerrero Diaz said.
Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, said it appears that the “various parts of the Mexican government aren’t on the same page” about cooperating with the United States.
“My sense is that this is still in negotiation,” Selee said. “You get the sense the Mexican government is making up its collective mind.”
“Since there’s nothing written down, there’s no actual formal agreement, all of this is going to be in flux for a while,” he said.
On Mexico’s southern border, meanwhile, the country has been dealing with a different immigration issue: 13,000 people who left in a new caravan from Honduras last week are in line to enter legally. Though authorities have promised them they can stay anywhere in the country for at least one year, it has encouraged them to seek jobs in the country’s southern states.
Yet many could attempt to make the trek north toward the U.S. border to request asylum.
Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s Office at the New York University School of Law, said the U.S. policy change is “intended to create a certain amount of order.”
But it could have the opposite result.
“You need the infrastructure in place to house and feed people,” he said. “If that’s not provided, it’s going to be a humanitarian crisis, or it’s going to be an incentive for people to give up entering at ports of entry.”
In Washington, neither Democrats nor Republicans on Capitol Hill appeared to have a grasp of when the Trump administration planned to roll out the program.
Democrats complained that even senior lawmakers found it easier to get information from the Mexican Embassy than from DHS or the White House, according to aides.
The Washington Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City and Maria Sacchetti and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.
