What Trump’s ‘deportation blitz’ looks like in Ciudad Juarez

On the first day of his repeat term as president of the United States, Donald Trump went about&nbsp, making good on his promises&nbsp, to make life hell for asylum seekers. Proclaiming a “national emergency” to pave the way for the deportation of millions, Trump also immediately&nbsp, cancelled the CBP One app&nbsp, that previously allowed undocumented people to apply for legal entry to the US by land from Mexico.

The cancellation reportedly leaves some&nbsp, 270, 000&nbsp, 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 only the start of the deadly odysseys refuge seekers have long been subjected to before applying for positions in the organization. They have frequently involved being followed by organized crime organizations and corrupt law enforcement officials as well as navigating the notorious and 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. A Venezuelan asylum seeker informed me that when I arrived a week after Trump’s inauguration in Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, the cost of being smuggled into the US had suddenly increased to $ 10,000 per person.

I arrived in Ciudad Juarez shortly after a fire at a migrant detention facility abutting the border fence that had killed 40 people. This was my first visit there since April 2023. Former US President Joe Biden, who, in contrast to Republican propaganda, deported more people than Trump did during his first term, had a reputable involvement with the&nbsp, war on asylum seekers there.

As asylum seekers were acutely present in Ciudad Juarez in 2023, and many families set up camp in front of the immigration detention facility. Many people were forced to seek more substantial shelter due to the chilly temperatures and occasionally fierce, dust-laden winds this time.

The city’s local authorities had begun erecting massive white tents to temporarily accommodate incoming deportees because they were now facing an additional influx of people from the opposite side of the border.

I ran into a Mexican man in his 40s as I searched for asylum seekers in downtown Ciudad Juarez after being deported from Arizona after working at McDonald’s and Burger King and cleaning homes for extra income. He claimed to have been detained while out buying food and was later imprisoned in an underground cell while Arizona’s authorities deliberated on why he had no fingerprints, rejecting his claim that his evidence had been destroyed by house-cleaning agents.

After three months without seeing the light of day he was&nbsp, released&nbsp, and deported to Mexico, he said, with special glasses to protect against blinding by the sun. After that, he began working for one of the maquiladoras owned by the US in Ciudad Juarez, which has long allowed US corporations to exploit cheap labor just outside the border fence while avoiding paying taxes and violating the rights of its employees. Due to his employer’s never-ending demands, he had recently left his maquiladora job.

Indeed, Ciudad Juarez has come to epitomise the US-backed decimation of Mexico via so-called “free trade”. American author Charles Bowden uncovered a link between the impoverished and suffering of common Mexicans and the extractive nature of US-Mexico in his book Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future, which was published four years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. He described US machinations as “planting ruin about the world and calling it our economic policy” – which is as good an explanation&nbsp, 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.

The narrative of never-ending wars between Mexican drug cartels serves as a convenient justification for the ongoing violence there, Bowden argued, while handily obscuring the significant involvement of state security forces in the drug trade and the lethal brutality that has plagued 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&nbsp, most estimates&nbsp, put the city’s homicide total at well over 1, 000 for 2024.

A Mexican woman with grey hair and few teeth who had planted herself in the road in front of the border crossing and was distributing donations from US vehicles with Styrofoam cups was the next to speak with in Ciudad Juarez. She explained to me in Spanish that she had already paid her rent and that only $8 had been accumulated from yesterday.

After that, she switched to more sophisticated English and informed me that her 34-year-old daughter had been shot and stabbed to death in Ciudad Juarez and that she had also been deported from the US despite having a Green Card. The woman helpfully advised me to stay away from doorways as I could be grabbed and raped, and suggested that I might find some asylum seekers if I just walked west along the border fence.

As a US citizen and passport holder, I added $5 to the Styrofoam cup and headed west as directed. The towering fence serves as a constant reminder of my own exclusive, international freedom of movement. A young Guatemalan woman and her daughter were selling candy at an intersection when I discovered them. They had been in Ciudad Juarez for three months, the mother said, and had not yet come up with a different course of action as a result of CBP One’s cancellation. If I wanted better chances of finding “migrants”, she said, there were a couple of shelters down the road.

These shelters, which were essentially hidden behind the border wall, were not marked and consisted of tiny, abandoned structures that at least offered shelter from the blazing wind and dust. By striking up a conversation with a Venezuelan youth who had spent the previous seven months in Mexico and who had finally received a CBP One appointment date of January 28, or eight days after the program was overturned, I had gotten access to one Evangelical-run shelter.

Many Venezuelan families lived inside the shelter, many of whom were children who were barefoot and in shorts as I shivered in my winter coat and scarf. After the physical and psychological agony of the journey to Ciudad Juarez, a Venezuelan man in his 30s tried his best to keep things up, but he acknowledged that the entire CBP One situation was too much. He said, “It’s like swimming across a whole river just to drown on the other side. According to his account, cartel operatives and Mexican authorities had collaborated on four kidnapping plots in Mexico alone.

When the police arrived at the scene, I came across two Venezuelan men, 24 and 31, who were attempting to extort money from a convenience store before their windshield-washing tool broke and they had been arriving to engage in routine extortion. As we walked down Avenida Juarez toward the market and made an offer to buy him a replacement tool, the 24-year-old revealed that he had already been deported from the US twice, once from New York City.

He acknowledged that the American dream was not everything it seemed to be when he showed me a picture of him smiling atop the Brooklyn Bridge. “No one in the US wants to talk to you, they don’t want you to get near them,” he said.

The 31-year-old shared the view that perhaps the US was overrated and that living was not necessarily worthwhile if you were only interested in earning money. The two debated whether to relocate to Mexico City to make a living, or to settle down in Ciudad Juarez and remove the perpetual dust from their automobile 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.

Source: Aljazeera