Dismayed migrants who were en route to the U.S. are starting to turn back now that they’re staring at a border about to be controlled by the incoming Trump administration, according to a new report from Mexico.
“I’m just going to give up and go back to Venezuela,” one woman in a migrant camp in Mexico City told Todd Bensman, a border expert and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“I’ll just go back because, with Donald Trump, it’s going to be too hard,” the woman told Mr. Bensman, who regularly tracks the change in immigration flows on the ground from Mexico and further south.
Some migrants told him they would stay in Mexico rather than attempt to reach the U.S., hoping to make the best of the thousands of dollars they had already spent paying smugglers to get them this far.
“The Mexicans don’t want us to go farther. They want us to go back. That’s why I’m staying in Mexico City,” a migrant named Josmer told Mr. Bensman, who wrote his findings in The Daily Mail.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to use his first day in office next month to reverse a host of Biden policies that dismantled border enforcement and invited an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants into the U.S.
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Mr. Trump has already gotten an early start with his threat to impose crippling tariffs on Mexico if it doesn’t do more to head off the migrants that use its territory as a launchpad for their attempt to reach the U.S.
Mexico now routinely apprehends migrants and moves them back to its own southern border, Mr. Bensman reported.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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