This piece was originally published in the Spanish-language online publication, Animal Político, on August 29, 2018. With permission from the author, we are providing a copy of the complete English version, below, which features our work in Guadalajara, Mexico.

By: Savitri Arvey (@SavitriArvey)

As Mexican president elect Andres Manuel López Obrador defines his policies in the coming months, the reincorporation of the millions of Mexican migrants will be one of his major migration challenges.  His team will have to address the migrants who come back both after days or decades in the United States, and will have to contend with their varied methods of returning, either from deportation or voluntarily given their desire to reunite with family, continue their studies, or due to the fear of deportation. This was an issue for the past two administrations, who began programs such as Repatriación Humana (2008) and Somos Mexicanos (2014). However, despite these efforts and allocated resources, migrants continue to face challenges over access to legal services, mental health, job training and even re-learning Spanish.

I recently met Rodrigo, a deportee, on a bench in Nogales, Sonora just feet from the U.S.-Mexico border. Only 24 hours earlier, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers had shown up at the Italian restaurant where he worked in Tucson, Arizona and brought him into custody. Now all he had to his name was a transparent plastic bag with a wrinkled sweatshirt and papers, and despite being only an hour drive away from the place he called home for twenty years, hefty coyote prices and a potential prison sentence for illegal reentry stood in the way. With most of his family in the United States and only distant cousins left in Mexico, Rodrigo was debating whether to return to his home state of Oaxaca or to stay in Nogales.

Under the Barack Obama administration (2008-2016), deportations may have been high, but toward the end of his term, fewer of these deportees looked like Rodrigo – with clean records and decades in the United States. Obama’s team increasingly focused on targeting migrants with criminal records, removal orders, and recent crossers. Within days of taking office in January 2016, President Trump issued the “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” executive order that erased this prioritization, making any irregular migrant in the country a contender for removal. In practical terms, this means that an increasing number of migrants who built their lives in the United States are finding themselves in Mexico, a country that they barely remember.

To arrive in Mexico, there are first the logistics of a deportation. The United States’ Border Patrol and ICE coordinate with Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) to officially hand over the deported Mexicans at the gate that separates the two countries at the designated border crossings. INM officials confirm their nationality by asking them to sing the Mexican national anthem and quizzing them on local slang, which helps to quickly distinguish between Mexicans and Central Americans. They have 12 hours to send non-Mexican adults back to the United States and 24 hours for unaccompanied minors.

Next is where these migrants are deported to, since they aren’t deported back to their hometowns or even states of origin. While the majority of Mexican migrants hail from central and southern states such as Jalisco, Oaxaca, Zacatecas, and Puebla, roughly nine out of ten Mexicans are deported to eleven towns and cities lining the U.S-Mexico border. To put this in context, Rodrigo was deported 1,500 miles from his hometown in Oaxaca. In 2013, the United States recognized that this was an issue and began sending about 10 percent of deportees to Mexico City on three flights per week, to be closer to their home states. U.S. authorities recently stopped these flights with the goal, according to foreign secretary Luis Videgaray, to prioritize the repatriation of Central American migrants.

The 90 percent of Mexican deportees that end up on the U.S. Mexico border will be dropped off between 5am and 10pm, and high-risk populations—such as women, the elderly, unaccompanied minors, and people with medical conditions—must be deported before 7pm. Until 2014, U.S. authorities used to deport Mexicans 24/7, stranding roughly one in five in unknown cities during the middle of the night and putting many at a greater risk of extortion, robbery and kidnapping.

Today, when the deportees arrive and are certified to be Mexicans, the Repatriation Humana modules at the border crossings provide them with temporary identification, a sandwich, a phone call to loved ones in the U.S. or Mexico, medical assistance, and a ride to the nearest shelter or soup kitchen. These shelters and soup kitchens once catered to Mexican migrants hoping to build a new life in the U.S.  Today, they are mostly filled with deportees (roughly 90 percent of the population), with Central Americans making up the non-deportees. For those who want to return to their home state, the Mexican government will pick up the tab for a bus ticket up to 1,500 pesos.

The deportees must then attempt to integrate back into their country, which can prove challenging. In 2014, Mexico created a federal program, Somos Mexicanos, to support this process in the country’s 32 states by providing advising on documents, recuperating personal belongings, finding jobs, and providing health services, self-employment programs, options to continue studies, and other local resources depending on the state and municipal budgets.

Like many irregular Mexican immigrants, Rodrigo lost his birth certificate and voter identification (INE) during his decades in the United States, which will prevent him from opening a bank account, finding a job in the formal sector, and accessing public healthcare until he can resolve the paperwork. In November 2017, the government made it possible to apply for a birth certificate online, which has greatly facilitated the process. But deportees recently came up against a new problem. During the run-up to the elections in July, INE completely stopped processing voter IDs, leaving thousands of deportees undocumented and without access to services for several months.

Once his documents are fixed, Rodrigo will need to find a job. The Mexican government created a job portal through the program Repatriados Trabajando with listings based on profession and state. According to the statistics, it connected 4,516 migrants to jobs in 2017, less than 3 percent of returned migrants that year. The INM Somos Mexicanos Coordinador in Guadalajara has taken a creative approach to supporting the job hunt by making agreements with companies in the private sector that recognize the unique skillset that returned migrants gained in the U.S. and offer them the opportunity for an interview. Shelters also serve as intermediaries between migrants and contractors in the informal and formal sector.

Yet even if deportees can find a job, the low-skill jobs that they can find, especially without developed social and professional networks, can pay just several thousand pesos a month, a fraction of what deportees earned working for minimum wage in the United States. Low blue-collars wages, which pushed many migrants to leave in the first place, make it hard to rent a room and build a new life. Call centers and hotels that place a high value on returned migrants’ English skills often offer the best paying jobs, and deportees’ families sometimes send remittances from the U.S. to help out.

Even with a job and place to live, deportees must readapt to a country they might no longer know, a bureaucracy they don’t understand, and sometimes a language they no longer speak fluently. This form of family separation takes a psychological toll, which has led to a spike in homelessness and drug abuse in the border cities. The issues have become so serious that psychologists are now located at some repatriation points and shelters, but this insufficient to meet the high need for longer term mental health services. 

To fulfill these unmet needs, returned migrants in Mexico City have started organizations such as Otros Dreams en Acción, Deportados Unidos en la Lucha, and New Comienzos, that offer advising about processing documents, as well free classes in Spanish and other skills such as accounting. But more importantly they provide deportees with a community of peers with a similar cultural background going through the same bureaucratic and emotional process.

Other civil society actors have also been coming up with innovative solutions. In the last several months, the Scalabrini Migrant Network opened a technical school in its Tijuana migrant shelter to teach deportees marketable skills and help them brush up on their Spanish. It is also going to expand its Guadalajara shelter that was created specifically to reintegrate returned migrants, who can stay for several months to receive integral bureaucratic, employment, and psychological support. In partnership with the Scalabrini network, Tran Dang, a U.S. lawyer, started The Rhizome Center for Migrants to provide post-deportation legal services to returned migrants in Jalisco.

Civil society initiatives offer lessons to the incoming Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration of how to build upon current programming to craft strategies that also include language lessons, technical job training, as well as legal and mental services for Mexicans who have spent years north of the border.

Back in Nogales, Rodrigo pulled out a photo of his 16-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son, boasting about how Marta was at the top of her class in math and Luis was a promising basketball player. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to give them a hug next”, he mumbled, eyeing the border wall 30 feet away, “but I think I’ll stay here, closer to them”.