Mexico and other countries may block Trump’s border plans

On January 28, 2025By Littum

President Donald Trump’s plans to seal the US-Mexico border and carry out mass deportations may soon run into a major roadblock: Mexico and the countries where the immigrants come from may not want to accept some of them back.

Trump signed an order Monday to revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires asylum seekers to stay outside the United States while their claims are processed. But on the front lines of the US-Mexico border, it requires some degree of cooperation from the Mexican government, which seems resistant.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters on Wednesday that she has not agreed to accept non-Mexican migrants seeking asylum in the United States, and such a move would require Mexico to accept, according to the Reuters report.

An expert witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday listed other countries that have refused to take back migrants, such as Cuba, Venezuela, China, India, Bangladesh and Iran.

Late. Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Thursday that getting Mexico to cooperate with the Remain in Mexico policy could be very problematic.

“It’s really hard to actually launch that program if the Mexican government doesn’t agree, and I don’t think we can take it for granted that they’re going to agree,” Peters said.

Peters also said the issue of Mexico being forced to accept non-Western Hemisphere migrants, such as those from China, “also complicates matters.”

“The type of migration we’re seeing is different, and it’s coming from outside of Latin America,” Peters said. “Not entirely, but an increasing number are coming from outside of Latin America. People are flying into Mexico. People are flying into Canada, they’re flying into other countries and then coming over the border.”

Late. James Lankford, R-Okla., listed at a hearing last week a few of the kinds of migrants Mexico would not be willing to accept again.

“These are people coming in from Tajikistan and other areas that the Mexicans won’t take back,” Lankford said. “These are recalcitrant countries that won’t accept people back.”

In fiscal year 2024, nearly 38,000 nationals of China were found by the Border Patrol to have entered the United States illegally from Mexico, a steep increase from the 2,200 encountered in all of fiscal year 2022.

Lankford said international organizations like ISIS are sending people from Tajikistan in from Mexico because they saw the success the drug cartels had with immigrants coming to the United States.

The senator concluded that “some kind of legal response” is needed, including a legislative change that would give the State Department the authority to put pressure on some of those countries as well.

Late. Rick Scott, R-Fla., during the same Homeland Security hearing last week, questioned why Mexico would be able to resist migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere when they entered Mexico in the first place for to try to enter the United States.

“They come into Mexico and then they come to the United States — why shouldn’t that be Mexico’s problem?” Scott said. “Why shouldn’t we just say, ‘You’re the one who let them into your country’? Why (is it) our problem? It’s their problem. You raise their rates until they do.”

The previous versions of the Remain in Mexico policy had some degree of agreement from Mexico, some of which was the result of the kind of tactics Scott mentioned.

Back to ‘Stay’

In his first term, Trump announced the policy of staying in Mexico in 2018 in cooperation with then Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The reasoning behind why Mexico initially agreed to accept migrants in 2018 under the program is unclear, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said Thursday.

“We don’t quite know,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “In fact, there was quite a bit of confusion about what the specific boundaries of the agreement were, and we’re still not entirely clear on that.”

While the program was initially limited to one point of entry and specific nationalities, Trump’s threat in 2019 of 25 percent tariffs prompted Mexico to agree to expand it further, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“So very clearly Mexico played a significant role in determining the boundaries of the program,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “Nonetheless, the official position of the Mexican government has always been, ‘This actually has nothing to do with us. We chose not to do this.'”

Although Trump has said Mexico has accepted it, the Mexican government has signaled it has not, Reichlin-Melnick said.

“We don’t have full agreement on this,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “What does that really mean? It’s a little bit more confusion and we’re waiting to hear more from the Trump administration about how the program will … come back, who it will be applied to and when.”

Ariel Ruiz, senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, said whether Mexico agrees to the policy again in 2025 depends on new factors because “the negotiating landscape between Mexico and the United States is very different.”

“Since May, Mexico has detained more migrants in Mexico than the Border Patrol has detained at the US-Mexico border every month since May,” Ruiz said. “And that’s a really significant achievement because Mexico has a fraction of the funding that U.S. agencies will receive.”

Doris Meissner, director of the US Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said during a conference call Tuesday that Trump’s other policies “could really hamper” US-Mexico cooperation on migrant return.

“The issue of tariffs on Mexico imposing 25 percent very soon, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, threats to recapture the Panama Canal will make it much more difficult for these countries to cooperate with the United States going forward.” Meissner said. “So there are these obstacles and the internal tensions, similarly with mass deportations.”

Back to ‘Stay’

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