Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs On the first day of his repeat term as president of the United States, Donald Trump went about making good on his promises to make life hell for asylum seekers. Proclaiming a “national emergency” to pave the way for the deportation of millions, Trump also immediately cancelled the CBP One app that previously allowed undocumented people to apply for legal entry to the US by land from Mexico.
The cancellation reportedly leaves some 270,000 people from a wide array of nationalities stranded in Mexican territory, where many had been waiting almost a year in torturous limbo for CBP One appointments. This is to say nothing of the deadly odysseys that refuge seekers have long been forced to undertake prior to applying for said appointments – odysseys that have often entailed being continuously preyed upon by organised crime outfits and corrupt law enforcement officials alike, as well as navigating the notorious corpse-ridden Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia.
Predictably, Trump’s “deportation blitz” – as some outlets have dubbed it – has been a boon for the Mexican underworld and extortion-happy security personnel. When I arrived a week after Trump’s inauguration in Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, which lies just across the border from the city of El Paso, Texas, I was told by a Venezuelan asylum seeker that the price of being smuggled the short distance into the US had suddenly soared to $10,000 per person.
It was my first visit to Ciudad Juarez since April 2023, when I arrived shortly after a fire killed 40 people at a migrant detention centre abutting the border fence. There, Mexican immigration authorities had been dutifully participating in the war on asylum seekers waged by former US President Joe Biden, who, contrary to Republican propaganda, deported more people than Trump did during his first term.
In 2023, the presence of asylum seekers in Ciudad Juarez was acutely visible, with many families camped out in front of the migrant detention facility. This time the streets were emptier, the frigid temperatures and an intermittently fierce, dust-laden wind having forced many to seek more substantial shelter.
With the city now facing an additional influx of folks from the opposite side of the border, too, the local authorities had undertaken to erect giant white tents to temporarily accommodate incoming deportees.
As I made the rounds of downtown Ciudad Juarez in search of asylum seekers to talk to, I met a Mexican man in his 40s who had himself been deported more than a decade earlier from Arizona, where he had worked at McDonald’s and Burger King and had cleaned houses for additional income. He told me that he was detained while out buying food and then imprisoned in an underground cell while Arizona’s authorities went about debating why it was that he had no fingerprints, refusing to believe his explanation that they had been erased by house-cleaning chemicals.
After three months without seeing the light of day he was released and deported to Mexico, he said, with special glasses to protect against blinding by the sun. He subsequently took up work in one of the US-owned maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez – the infamous factories that have long enabled US corporations to exploit cheap labour just beyond the border fence while avoiding taxes and eviscerating workers’ rights. He had recently abandoned the maquiladora job as his employer’s constantly expanding demands did not allow him time to care for his three daughters.
Indeed, Ciudad Juarez has come to epitomise the US-backed decimation of Mexico via so-called “free trade”. In his book Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future, published four years after the signing in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that wreaked havoc on Mexican agriculture and drove countless campesinos north to the increasingly fortified US border, American writer Charles Bowden laid bare the link between the impoverishment and suffering of common Mexicans and the extractive nature of economic relations between the US and Mexico. He described US machinations as “planting ruin about the world and calling it our economic policy” – which is as good an explanation as any for the current “migration crisis”.
However, not only did the US “plant ruin” in Ciudad Juarez, it also backed an ostensible “war on drugs” that was launched in 2006 and saw an obscene quantity of Mexican soldiers and police deployed to the metropolis, which was quickly propelled to the position of world’s pre-eminent “Murder City”, the title of Bowden’s subsequent book published in 2010.
As Bowden pointed out, the narrative of never-ending wars between Mexican drug cartels provides a convenient alibi for ongoing violence in Mexico while handily obscuring the profound involvement of state security forces themselves in the drug trade – and in the lethal brutality that has characterised cities like Ciudad Juarez. Precise homicide statistics are impossible to come by, in part due to the all-too-common phenomenon of enforced disappearances, but most estimates put the city’s homicide total at well over 1,000 for 2024.
The next person I spoke with in Ciudad Juarez was a Mexican woman with grey hair and very few teeth who had planted herself in the road in front of the border crossing, wielding a Styrofoam cup for donations from vehicles arriving from the US. Speaking to me in Spanish, she explained that her rent was due and that yesterday the Styrofoam cup had accumulated only $8.
She then switched to fluent English, and in a southern US accent told me that she, too, had been deported from the US despite possessing a Green Card, and that her 34-year-old daughter had been shot and stabbed to death nine years ago in Ciudad Juarez. The woman suggested that I could probably find some asylum seekers if I just walked west along the border fence, and helpfully warned me to stay away from doorways as I might be grabbed and raped.
I added $5 to the Styrofoam cup and walked west as instructed, the towering fence a constant reminder of my own privileged international freedom of movement as a US citizen and passport holder. At an intersection, I found a young Guatemalan woman and her daughter who were selling candy; they had been in Ciudad Juarez for three months, the mother told me, and had not yet determined an alternate plan of action following the cancellation of CBP One. If I wanted better chances of finding “migrants”, she said, there were a couple of shelters down the road.
These shelters were not marked, consisting of small, derelict constructions that lay practically in the shadow of the border wall but that at the very least provided refuge from the overpowering dust and wind. I gained access to one Evangelical-run shelter by striking up a conversation with a Venezuelan youth who had spent the past seven months in Mexico and had at long last been awarded a CBP One appointment date for January 28, ie eight days after the programme was abolished.
Inside the shelter were numerous Venezuelan families, many of the children barefoot and in shorts even as I shivered in my winter coat and scarf. I spoke with a Venezuelan man in his 30s who did his best to exert optimism but acknowledged that the whole CBP One situation was a bit much to bear after the physical and psychological torment of the journey to Ciudad Juarez, noting: “It’s like swimming across a whole river just to drown on the other side.” By his account, he had escaped four kidnapping attempts in Mexico alone, which had been jointly staged by Mexican authorities and cartel operatives.
Back outside I encountered two Venezuelan men, aged 24 and 31, who had been washing windscreens at a convenience store before their windshield-washing tool had broken and the police had arrived to engage in habitual extortionary activity. I offered to buy them a replacement tool, and as we walked down Avenida Juarez towards the market – pausing for the obligatory selfie in front of the border crossing – the 24-year-old revealed that he had already been deported twice from the US, once from New York City.
Showing me a photo on his phone of him smiling atop the Brooklyn Bridge, he admitted that the American dream was not all it was cracked up to be: “No one in the US wants to talk to you; they don’t want you to get near them.”
The 31-year-old agreed that perhaps the US was overrated and that life was not necessarily worth living if you were just in it for the money. The two debated whether to return to Mexico City to try to eke out a living or to stick it out in Ciudad Juarez, washing the eternal dust from car windscreens. Or, of course, they could give it another go at crossing the border. But whichever way they ultimately turn, the “ruin” of US economic policy has already been planted.
Back in 1998, Bowden called Ciudad Juarez the “ground zero of the future”. And the future, unfortunately, is now.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
