DeportationsMexico, rejecting Trump’s scheme, will only accept deportees who are Mexican nationals

Published 27 February 2017

A key element in President Trump’s deportation scheme is the deportation to Mexico of everyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, regardless of the deportee’s nationality. The deportation scheme indicates that the United States expects Mexico to build detention facilities for the hundreds of thousands which will be deported. Mexican officials, in meetings with Rex Tillerson and John Kelly last Thursday, said that Mexico would not, under any circumstances, agree to accept and hold deportees who are not Mexican nationals.

Mexico refuses to accept non-Mexican deportees // Source: theconversation.com

Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, Mexico’s interior minister, has made it clear that Mexico will not accept unauthorized immigrants deported from the United States – unless the deportees are citizens of Mexico.

A key element in President Trump’s deportation scheme is the deportation to Mexico of everyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, regardless of the deportee’s nationality. The deportation scheme indicates that the United States expects Mexico to build detention facilities for the hundreds of thousands which will be deported. Moreover, these facilities should be equipped with video-conferencing equipment to allow America judges to hear and adjudicate asylum applications from deportees being held in these facilities in Mexico.

In a high-level meeting in Mexico City last Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and DHS Secretary John Kelly discussed the plan with Mexican officials, but Osorio Chong, in an interview on Friday, said that the Mexican government informed the two U.S. cabinet members that Mexico would not, under any circumstances, agree to accept and hold deportees who are not Mexican nationals.

“They can’t leave them here on the border because we have to reject them. There is no chance they would be received by Mexico,” he said.

“They asked us that while their legal process is happening there if they could be here,” Osorio Chong said. “And we told them that there’s no way we can have them here during that process.”

The Detroit News reports that amemo published by DHS last week suggested that immigrants who are in the United States illegally should be deported “to the contiguous country” they had entered from, which in most cases would be Mexico.

The Mexican government and immigration experts note that most of the immigrants crossing the into the United States from Mexico in recent years have been Central Americans, not Mexicans.

Osorio Chong also said if the U.S. government were to pressure Mexico by threatening to cancel funding from the $2.5 billion Mérida Initiative, which aims to fund the fight against narco-traffickers and other organized crime, Mexico will give up the money.

The Mérida Initiative, which was launched in 2008, is winding down in any event.

“If that resource could be an issue for pressure or if they want to pressure the government, honestly, we have no problem, none, if they withdraw it,” he said.