Ciudad Juarez, Mexico:
Mexican authorities have started building giant tent shelters in the city of Ciudad Juarez to prepare for a possible influx of Mexicans being deported under US President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations.
The temporary shelters in Ciudad Juarez will have the capacity to house thousands of people and should be ready within days, city official Enrique Licon said.
“It’s unprecedented,” Licon said Tuesday afternoon, as workers unloaded long metal brackets from tractors parked in the vast empty lots of the Rio Grande, which separates the city from El Paso, Texas.
The tents in Ciudad Juarez are part of the Mexican government’s plan to prepare shelters and shelters in nine cities in northern Mexico.
Authorities on the ground will provide deported Mexicans with food, temporary housing, medical care and assistance in obtaining identity documents, according to a government document outlining the strategy, called “Mexico embraces you.”
The government also plans to have a fleet of buses ready to transport Mexicans from shelters back to their hometowns.
Trump has promised to carry out the largest deportation effort in American history, which would remove millions of immigrants. However, an operation of that magnitude would likely take years and be enormously expensive.
Nearly five million Mexicans live in the United States without permission, according to an analysis by the Mexican think tank El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF), based on recent US census data.
Many come from parts of central and southern Mexico, ravaged by violence and poverty. According to the COLEF study, some 800,000 undocumented Mexicans in the United States come from Michoacan, Guerrero and Chiapas, where intense fighting between organized crime groups has forced thousands of people to flee in recent years, sometimes leaving entire towns deserted.
MEXICO CAN FIGHT
The Mexican government says it is ready for the possibility of mass deportations. But immigration advocates have their doubts, fearing that the combination of mass deportations and Trump’s measures to prevent migrants from entering the U.S. could quickly saturate Mexican border towns.
The Trump administration on Monday ended a program known as CBP One that allowed some migrants waiting in Mexico to legally enter the U.S. by making an appointment through a government app. On Tuesday, it said it was reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), an initiative that forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for the resolution of their U.S. cases.
On Monday, Jose Luis Perez, then director of migration issues for Tijuana, became one of the few Mexican officials to raise public concerns about whether Mexico was truly prepared.
“Basically, with the cancellation of CBP One and the deportations, the government has not been coordinated to accommodate these,” he said.
Hours later, he was fired in retaliation for issuing such warnings.
The city council has not answered questions about his dismissal.
“Mexico will do everything necessary to care for its countrymen, and will do everything necessary to receive those who are repatriated,” Mexican Interior Minister Rosa Icela said Monday during the daily press conference in the morning.
But with slow economic growth expected this year, Mexico could struggle to absorb millions of Mexicans deported from the US, while a significant drop in remittances could cause “serious economic disruptions” in its cities and villages across the country that depend on such income. Wayne Cornelius, professor emeritus at the University of California-San Diego.
On Thursday evening in Ciudad Juarez, about twenty soldiers worked in the tent shelter near a high black cross, where Pope Francis held an open-air mass in 2016, warned of a humanitarian crisis and prayed for migrants. In the deepening darkness, the soldiers began building an industrial kitchen to feed the deportees.
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