MEXICO CITY – Donald Trump's victory in the United States presidential election instantly changed calculations for millions of migrants or potential migrants across the globe.
But perhaps not in the way Trump imagined.
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Trump has pledged to reduce immigration. But by narrowing the already limited legal pathways into the U.S., migrants will just recalibrate their plans and resort in greater numbers to hiring smugglers, experts say.
In many cases that will mean turning to organized crime groups that increasingly profit from migrant smuggling.
Those potentially affected come from dozens of countries and many have already sold their homes and their possessions to fund the trip.
Venezuelans continue arriving at the U.S. southern border in reduced, but still large numbers. Mexicans made up half of U.S. Border Patrol arrests in September. Chinese come through Ecuador and make their way up through the Americas. Senegalese buy multi-stop flights to Nicaragua, then move north.
The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration estimates there are around 281 million international migrants in the world, or 3.6% of the global population. An increasing number of people will be displaced for political, economic and violence reasons, and more migrants will seek asylum, according to its annual report. It warns that when people cannot find regular pathways, they start looking for “irregular channels that are extremely hazardous.”
During Trump's first administration, Mexican border cities were saturated with migrants. Cartels preyed on them, kidnapping them, extorting their families for ransoms and forcibly recruiting them into their ranks. There were hundreds of arrivals every day, as well as thousands who were made to wait out the potentially yearslong U.S. asylum application process in Mexico.
A U.S. program called CBP One brought some order after it was introduced by the Biden administration in early 2023. Migrants no longer have to come to the border to schedule an appointment and can do it on their smartphones. Once overflowing border shelters have emptied and many families are making every effort to go the legal route.
Trump has pledged to end CBP One. He also wants to again restrict refugee resettlement and warned throughout his campaign of mass deportations.
While his victory was deflating and worrisome to those en route to the United States, it was not a deal-breaker.
On Tuesday night, Bárbara Rodríguez, a 33-year-old Venezuelan, should have been sleeping after walking more than eight miles through southern Mexico's tropical heat with some 2,500 others from at least a dozen countries.
Instead, she was watching U.S. election results on her cellphone.
Back in Caracas, Rodríguez helped monitor a polling place for the opposition during Venezuela's July election. After President Nicolas Maduro claimed reelection, his supporters began to harass her family.
“Either my family’s lives were going to be at risk or I had to leave the country,” she said. In September, she sold her house and left her three children with her mother.
Now her plan of waiting for a CBP One appointment to request asylum at the U.S. border has an expiration date.
“Plans changed. We have until Jan. 20," she said, referring to inauguration day. She has not ruled out hiring a smuggler, she added.
Martha Bárcena, Mexico’s former U.S. ambassador during most of Trump’s first administration, said migrants were the losers from his immigration policies and that could happen again.
“Organized crime is the big beneficiary, because the income from illegal human trafficking is already equal to or greater than the income from drugs,” she said.
Estefanía Ramos of Guatemala woke up worried Wednesday in a Ciudad Juarez shelter across from El Paso, Texas.
“We’re trying to figure out what’s going to happen to us,” the 19-year-old said. “This wasn’t the plan.”
She and her husband left Guatemala after a gang threatened to harm him and kidnap her, she said. They have been waiting for three months for a CBP One appointment. Two months ago they had a baby girl.
“If we can keep waiting for an appointment we will,” Ramos said, adding that she doesn’t want to risk an illegal crossing with the baby.
On Wednesday in Ciudad Juarez, a few dozen asylum seekers with appointments waited patiently to be called across the international bridge.
Gretchen Kuhner, director of IMUMI, a nongovernmental legal services organization in Mexico, was in the southern Mexican city of Tuxtla Gutierrez last week, where she found migrant families with young children living in the streets waiting for CBP One appointments.
“They are getting their cellphones charged every day at some makeshift place on the street so they can check their CBP One appointments ... while they’re breastfeeding and sleeping in a tent without any water,” she said.
"People who need protection are really trying to do it the right way.”
Further restrictions on the already difficult process would leave vulnerable populations with few options, said Mark Hetfield, CEO of the U.S.-based refugee support organization HIAS.
“It would mean they have no place to go because there are many, many countries in the hemisphere where there is effectively no asylum system or where even if you could get asylum, you’re not necessarily safe,” he said.
And then there's the specter of massive deportations. Trump made a similar threat before and didn't deliver, but there's real concern.
Deportations to countries like Cuba and Venezuela could be complicated by icy relations, though Venezuela’s Maduro issued a conciliatory message congratulating Trump Wednesday. Advocates in Haiti on Thursday demanded countries, including the U.S., halt deportations because of the country's domestic crisis.
And no country stands to be more impacted than Mexico. There are some 11 million Mexicans living in the U.S., about 5 million of whom don’t have legal status. Mexicans sent home more than $63 billion in remittances last year, mostly from the United States. Mass deportations would shake the finances of millions of families and the Mexican economy would struggle to absorb them.
Migrant advocates and shelter directors in Mexico said they've heard of no government plans to deal with large numbers of deportees.
Mexican aid groups are “not in a position to receive that quantity of people and let's be honest, it's civil society that carries on its shoulders most of the humanitarian response toward those who are deported or in transit,” said Rafael Velásquez García, Mexico director for the International Rescue Committee.
Mexico needs to prepare itself for all manner of pressures coming from a Trump administration, said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a professor of international relations at Mexican public research center CIDE.
“What Mexico has to accept is that our country is going to be a holding country for migrants, whether they want it or not,” he said. “Trump is going to deport thousands, if not millions of people and he's going to impede the flow of migrants.”
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Pesce reported from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. AP writer Juan Zamorano contributed from Panama City.