IN MEXICO, MIGRATION POLICY RELIES ON MILITARY
Mexico’s immigration enforcement is increasingly militarized with the armed forces and National Guard now accounting for more migrant detentions than immigration agents, according to a report published Tuesday by six nongovernmental organizations.
The human rights and migrant advocacy groups, among them the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic State of Law, say that many of the detentions are also arbitrary, based on racial profiling and have led to abuses.
The armed forces are supposed to just be supporting immigration agents in their work, but the organizations found that they are now responsible for the majority of detentions.
Between June 2019 and December 2020, the armed forces and National Guard detained more than 152,000 migrants just at Mexico’s southern border, according to public information requests made by the Citizen Security Program at Iberoamericana University. During that same period, the Interior ministry reported that 190,000 migrants had been presented to immigration authorities.
Mexico had already been moving toward increased reliance on the military, but it has accelerated under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to the report. Under pressure from then-U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019, López Obrador deployed the newly created National Guard, a security force in theory civilian, but in reality under military control.
At the time, nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations expressed concerns that the shift to more militarized enforcement would lead to abuses. The leadership of the National Immigration Institute was also changed, replacing a sociologist schooled in immigration with the head of Mexico’s prisons. Military officers, some retired, were named to lead at least eight of the institute’s state offices.