One morning this spring, Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, stood at the edge of the Rio Grande, ready to board an airboat manned by U.S. Border Patrol agents. Settling into the front row, Bárcena put on protective glasses as the blades behind her started to whir. The current seemed mild—the water rushing below was barely audible—but agents said that this was the stretch of river where the most migrants had drowned. Earlier this year, the bodies of a Mexican woman and her two young children were recovered there, after they attempted to cross by night.
Bárcena took office last July, with a mandate from Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to oversee immigration matters. She was at the border to assert her country’s presence in a series of increasingly inflamed arguments. It was in this part of Texas, near the town of Eagle Pass, that Governor Greg Abbott had installed a floating barrier of buoys that drifted into Mexican waters last summer. Bárcena, who had started her job just days earlier, denounced the buoys as “a violation of our sovereignty” and a breach of long-standing treaties between the two nations. She asked the Biden Administration to have them removed. The Department of Justice sued Texas, arguing that the buoys were flagrantly illegal and risked “damaging U.S. foreign policy.”
Abbott ultimately moved the buoys back, but he did not remove them, and his defiance of the federal government’s authority over immigration has only grown more brazen. In January, after stringing miles of concertina wire along the Rio Grande, he deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the area, effectively blocking federal agents. “The only thing that we’re not doing is, we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” Abbott said. “Because, of course, the Biden Administration would charge us with murder.”
One of Bárcena’s aides likened the scene along the river to “a living museum of deterrence.” The concertina wire was strewn with migrants’ belongings—flannel blankets, T-shirts, toddler shoes, backpacks. Armed guards scanned the riverbank; cameras and motion sensors towered above. On the Mexican side, a boy with a fishing pole stood next to an older girl, who waved timidly. A freight train rattled past a smattering of people protesting the presence of the Texas National Guard. Two men—the agents had them pegged as polleros, or smugglers—lounged watchfully in chairs next to a pickup truck.
In the distance, Bárcena spotted the buoys: a string of orange cylinders that extended about a thousand feet. The pilot let the boat drift closer, and it became clear that there were sharp blades in between. A sign read “Peligro”—danger. The corpse of a migrant had been found there less than a year before. Whether the man had drowned upstream or after getting stuck in the buoys had been one more subject of dispute between Texan and Mexican authorities.
Over the years, many have argued that Mexico has no immigration policy of its own; it merely reacts to the United States’ continuous demands. During Bárcena’s short time in office, she has worked to defend her country’s interests. She has described herself as a “diplomática a la carrera”—a high-speed diplomat. In Mexico City and in Washington, D.C., she has met every other month with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of Joe Biden’s Cabinet, working toward agreements on how to contain record levels of immigration. “I once told Blinken, ‘I’m pretty sure I see you more than my husband,’ ” she recalled, with a thin smile.
Bárcena has some advantages in these talks. Biden has been to the border just twice, and has been criticized for being intermittently engaged with immigration policy; also, the two countries are so intertwined that the U.S. can penalize Mexico only so much before harming itself. But she faces powerful constraints, too. Mexico has a Presidential election scheduled for early June, and the U.S. has its own in November. As the American election approaches, the Republican base is feverishly insistent on limiting immigration, and Democratic voters are increasingly impatient on the issue. The negotiations, one Mexican official said, were like a soccer final in which time was running out: “We’ve reached the eighty-eighth minute.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Mexico City, sits at the edge of the capital’s historic center. A tall, rust-colored structure, it was built in the aftermath of a magnitude-8 earthquake, which flattened entire neighborhoods in 1985. The ministry—surrounded by a bustling plaza and decorated with a mural by Rufino Tamayo—was hailed as a symbol of the city’s resurgimiento, or resurgence. Inside, an elevator run by a security detail leads to Bárcena’s office, on the twenty-second floor.
This spring, I met Bárcena in a high-ceilinged conference room with a terrace overlooking the city. Bárcena, who is seventy-two, with cropped gray hair and blue eyes, has been a diplomat for most of her working life, and still has a studious demeanor. She entered the room carrying a large binder, full of notes and statistics, that she deploys to win over skeptics.
A biologist by training, Bárcena came of age at a time of profound social unrest. She attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country’s premier state-funded college, in the nineteen-seventies, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party had been in power for four decades. Young people were taking to the streets to demand change, and many were violently repressed; in 1971, dozens were killed by a paramilitary unit, which contained agents trained by the United States. Bárcena took part in protests, and augmented her political education by reading such leftist thinkers as Eduardo Galeano, who wrote the anti-imperialist tract “Open Veins of Latin America.”
In the mid-nineties, Bárcena joined the United Nations and oversaw economic and environmental programs. In 2006, Kofi Annan named her his cabinet chief. At the time, countries around the world had embraced Annan’s signature project, the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets intended to slash poverty and halt the spread of H.I.V. by 2015. It was a moment of unusual consensus on the global community’s responsibility to address intractable problems. Two decades later, Bárcena retains that idealistic perspective. “Immigration cannot be seen as an issue pertaining exclusively to the United States and Mexico,” she told me. “We have to get to the root causes. Why are people migrating, and where are they coming from?”
Until the mid-two-thousands, Mexico was generally viewed as a country of origin for migration; nearly a third of all immigrants to the U.S. were Mexican. But as the Great Recession turned the U.S. into a less attractive destination, many of them decided that they would be better off at home. In the years that followed, migrants ventured from more distant places: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela, but also Tajikistan and the Philippines. Last year, authorities at the border logged an unprecedented 2.5 million encounters with migrants, many of whom had traversed Mexico on their way north. “We’ve become a country of origin, destination, and transit,” Bárcena said.
She flipped open her binder and handed me a graph of recent arrivals at the border—figures that she reviewed with López Obrador every week. In a month, the numbers of people from such countries as Colombia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua had increased between twenty and seventy per cent. Heading toward the U.S., they had to make their way through a country rife with corruption and violence. “Transiting through Mexico is the hardest part,” Bárcena said.
López Obrador—known universally as AMLO—has persistently argued that changing migrants’ incentives is more important than enforcement. “People don’t willingly leave their home towns,” he said last year. “They do it out of necessity.” Bárcena, who led the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean from 2008 to 2022, endorsed a similar view. “It’s not only about dealing with the result but understanding the structure of the problem,” she said.
The causes are complex and varied. In Venezuela, from which almost eight million citizens have fled in recent years, an authoritarian regime and a failing economy are largely to blame. In Honduras, climate change is a major factor, as unprecedented droughts interfere with farming. Even incremental solutions to these kinds of problems are slow to implement, and migrants keep on coming. Statistics from Bárcena’s binder showed that, in the previous week, U.S. Border Patrol agents had recorded an average of more than seven thousand migrant encounters a day, roughly twice the number that they could handle.
While Bárcena focussed on root causes, her U.S. counterparts were under intense pressure to keep as many people as possible from reaching the border. The negotiations were thus a test not just of what might effectively contain immigration but of what was politically viable in each country. Bárcena saw a stark risk: that “we allow a divisive and hostile rhetoric—one that casts us as adversaries rather than as partners—to grow.”
As President, Donald Trump was fixated on the idea that Mexico was trying to “take advantage” of the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recalled in his memoir that there was hardly a day when the subject didn’t come up. “Mike,” Trump once mused. “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”
At first, Trump’s concern was largely about the economy, as officials negotiated the treaty that replaced NAFTA. But in 2018, with migrant caravans making their way from Central America, his Administration devised a new policy to deter people who wanted to file for asylum. Under existing law, asylum seekers were permitted to stay in the U.S. while their cases were processed, which could take years; Trump staffers reasoned that, if they were instead forced to wait in northern Mexico, their incentives would change.
At a private meeting in Houston, Pompeo informed Bárcena’s predecessor, Marcelo Ebrard, that the U.S. had decided to return asylum seekers to Mexico. If authorities there didn’t agree to accept them, Trump would shut down the border. Ebrard assented to the policy—which became known as Remain in Mexico—but asked that it be presented publicly as an imposition from Trump, and that it remain a verbal agreement. He kept the deal a secret even from the Mexican Ambassador in D.C.
Trump was only briefly appeased. Months later, he grew annoyed by the numbers of migrants reaching the border and raised the threat of tariffs. Even within his Administration, people recognized that this would devastate the American auto industry, which relies heavily on parts made in Mexico. Pompeo recalled that a top official said, “I have just two words for you on tariffs: Michigan. Ohio.” To retaliate, the Mexican Ambassador instructed her staff to compile a list of products on which Mexico could impose its own tariffs.
In the end, a trade war was averted, as Mexico agreed to ramp up enforcement by deploying its National Guard along the Guatemalan border. But when the Trump Administration pushed for a “safe third country” agreement, which would require migrants passing through Mexico to petition for asylum there instead of in the U.S., Mexican officials refused. “They gave in to something that the Trump Administration wanted, but they pushed back against the larger American ambition to make Mexico responsible for asylum seekers,” Andrew Selee, the head of the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “They succeeded in not crossing their own red line.”
Still, many in Mexico have questioned where the line was drawn. López Obrador had initially vowed to promote “curtains of development” across the country, where migrants would find job opportunities and visas. Now anyone who set foot in Mexico was confronted by thousands of soldiers blocking the path.
In government circles, Remain in Mexico stirred persistent unease. “Mexican policymakers like to show their independence from the United States,” Selee said. “There’s enormous pride about not being subservient to the neighbor next door.” Although Ebrard argued that he had no choice but to accept the policy, diplomats felt that a core principle had been violated. Mexico had never before taken back foreign nationals. Now that a new precedent had been set, how could they argue against it?
Biden, during his campaign, offered a fresh start. In speeches, he vowed to restore the United States’ “historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” As the incoming Administration considered the effects of reversing Trump’s border policies, Mexican officials offered a bit of advice: go slowly, to avoid inviting a spike in immigration.
In office, Biden has vacillated between looser rules and tighter ones. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy expert at the American Immigration Council, called the President’s record a “mixed bag.” (A Mexican official described it to me, less charitably, as “schizophrenic.”) Biden has worked to rebuild the refugee system, to expand legal pathways to citizenship, and to enable humanitarian parole—temporary permission to stay and work—for hundreds of thousands of migrants. At the same time, he has continued to crack down on arrivals at the border. His Administration has devoted about a billion dollars a year to addressing the underlying causes of immigration, but it has spent far more—at least twenty-four billion dollars last year—to fund the agencies that handle enforcement.
Biden’s ambivalence has been exacerbated by court battles. When he tried to end Remain in Mexico, which he had called “inhumane,” a federal judge stalled the effort for more than a year. The Administration waited until 2022 to attempt to lift Title 42—a COVID-era policy that Trump used to limit asylum—and then was blocked by another federal judge. By the time the Administration succeeded, last May, the policy had enabled more than two million expulsions of migrants to Mexico. Throughout, Biden has been assailed by Republicans as weak on immigration, and has sought Mexico’s help to counter that perception. Though his Administration has avoided its predecessor’s belligerent rhetoric, its goal appears essentially the same: to push the border farther south and to hold Mexico responsible for managing the flow of migrants.
As Title 42 drew to an end, the Biden Administration asked Mexico if it would continue to take Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Cuban, and Haitian migrants whom the U.S. turned away. Mexico agreed, on the condition that the U.S. provide humanitarian parole to an equal number of people from those countries. Then Biden officials asked Bárcena to consider admitting migrants of other nationalities, too, noting that Ebrard had already agreed to do so. “Where is the agreement?” she asked. There was nothing in writing, the U.S. officials said. In that case, Bárcena replied, there was nothing for her to abide by.
This kind of forceful language set her apart from her predecessor. Ebrard was a political animal, effective but coolly pragmatic. Bárcena, people close to her say, is more concerned with matters of principle and perception. In early meetings, Biden officials pushed to open a safe-mobility office in Mexico—a facility, similar to those in other countries in the region, where the U.S. can screen migrants, process refugees, and assess eligibility for parole. Bárcena declined. “If you want to do that, open a new consulate,” she said.
Last December, the Biden Administration faced a crisis. A huge influx of migrants had arrived at the border, and images spread of thousands of people wrapped in foil blankets alongside the Rio Grande. Biden called López Obrador and said that stronger enforcement was “urgently needed.” AMLO responded by inviting a group of Cabinet members to come meet him in Mexico City. He was offering a “political lifeline,” as one official put it, but the location and the timing—just days after Christmas—made it clear that he was offering it on his terms. Blinken cut his vacation short; Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s homeland-security adviser, flew in from New Mexico.
On December 27th, the U.S. delegation landed at the Felipe Ángeles airport, which López Obrador had built and given to the military to operate. Its three runways, which cost more than four billion dollars to construct, had barely been used. (The old airport remains open and is considerably closer to the city center.) But the facility is a source of pride for the Mexican President—and an emblem of his close alliance with the armed forces.
At the National Palace, AMLO’s residence and office, Bárcena led her counterparts into an ornate room, furnished with chandeliers and gilded mirrors, where they stood around a long table, waiting for López Obrador. After several minutes, he arrived and took a seat at the head of the table.
The situation was dire. In December alone, there had been two hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions of migrants at the border—double the numbers that had prompted Trump to threaten tariffs. Thousands more were making their way north. A caravan of people from twenty-four countries had reached Chiapas, in southern Mexico, marching under a banner that read “Éxodo de la Pobreza”—the Poverty Exodus.
Amid the crisis, Mexico’s National Migration Institute abruptly ordered the suspension of deportation proceedings. An internal memo obtained by the press cited a “liquidity shortage”—the agency had run out of money. Mexican authorities looked on helplessly as migrants climbed onto freight trains heading north. U.S. Border Patrol agents were overwhelmed. At most, they could process about three thousand people a day, and they were now sometimes seeing more than ten thousand.
The Administration had decided to close four ports of entry, in Texas, Arizona, and California, and had ordered customs agents to set aside their duties and help process migrants. Biden’s aides are careful to contrast their approach with Trump’s; they insist that the relationship with Mexico is based not on coercion but on mutual respect and shared goals. “If we see this as a zero-sum game, we miss important synergies,” Sherwood-Randall said. Yet the Administration’s decision was effectively an ultimatum. In Eagle Pass, freight trains were halted, and vehicle traffic slowed to a crawl; with imports and exports stalled, both sides of the border incurred losses estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Mexicans were desperate for the ports of entry to reopen. So were the Americans, but they wanted Mexico to do more to relieve pressure on the border.
After the meeting, Bárcena told the press that Mexico had insisted the ports of entry be reopened. The days that followed showed what it was willing to do in return. Deportation flights resumed; guardsmen prevented migrants from boarding trains; thousands of people who had reached the border were bused back south. In Matamoros, bulldozers rolled through a migrant camp near the Rio Grande. The military swiftly dispersed the caravan in Chiapas, and hundreds of migrants surrendered to Mexican immigration authorities.
Within a month, encounters at the border had dropped by more than a third. The cleavage between Mexico’s rhetoric and its policies became clear, but so did the United States’ reliance on its neighbor. “They are solving one of the Biden Administration’s biggest political problems,” Selee, of the Migration Policy Institute, said.
Still, many Mexican officials argue that the enforcement-first approach is inherently limited. “It might solve the issue between now and November,” Arturo Sarukhán, the Ambassador to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013, told me. “But it’s not going to solve the issue structurally, at a time when you’ve got historic numbers of people on the move in the Americas.” He went on, “You can’t enforce your way out of a migration crisis. You’re going to be playing Whac-A-Mole, changing the routes that smugglers and traffickers take to bring people across the border.”
After Bárcena left the Rio Grande, she headed to Eagle Pass, for a breakfast meeting with members of Border Patrol, the local police department, and Homeland Security’s main investigative unit. She arrived to find a conference room arranged with diplomatic formality: tables with assigned seats were assembled in a large square, and servers circulated with plates of chilaquiles. As Bárcena greeted the officers, a sound engineer played “La Llorona,” a folk song about a ghost who haunts bodies of water, in search of her drowned children.
Bárcena speaks English fluently, but she addressed the crowd in Spanish: “Too often, as federal authorities, we see one reality from our capitals, but when one visits the ground and meets with local authorities—learns what you go through each day—that perspective deepens.” She reminded the attendees that the communities on both sides of the river had a shared heritage. In Eagle Pass, she observed, an overwhelming majority of residents were Latino—“I dare say Mexican.” She invoked a time when there were no walls, buoys, or wires, and when children saw the Rio Grande as their playground. “Probably our grandparents, or your grandparents, used to cross differently,” she said. “We’re faced with a very different situation today.”
With the elections approaching, it was uncertain how the debate over immigration would evolve. Bárcena had built friendly relationships throughout the Administration, from the State Department to Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. But Bárcena knew that both she and her counterparts could be out of office come 2025, while the officers she was talking with would continue making decisions about enforcement on the ground. “We’re here to express the Mexican government’s full support,” she said. “And we want yours, so that anti-immigrant laws don’t prevail.”
Bárcena was referring to S.B. 4, a law endorsed by Abbott that gives state and local police the ability to arrest anyone they suspect of having entered the country unlawfully. The Biden Administration had challenged S.B. 4’s constitutionality in court, and Bárcena’s office had filed an amicus brief. When Arizona passed a similar law, fourteen years ago, the Supreme Court ruled against it, arguing that deportations involved “foreign relations and must be made with one voice.” But it was unclear how the current Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, might rule on S.B. 4. “Fortunately, it hasn’t yet taken effect,” Bárcena said of the law. “But what will we do if it does?”
Lawyers in El Paso and San Antonio had told Bárcena that they could already feel the effects. People were avoiding public spaces, worried that they would be apprehended because of their skin color. Community leaders advised carrying proof of ties to the U.S.: mortgage records, bills, tax forms, anything that might dissuade a potential arrester. The Mexican government had made it clear that it would not recognize any repatriations by Texas, and its consulates were watching out for unlawful arrests and deportations. But Bárcena also needed to secure help from sympathetic American officials.
At the breakfast meeting, the county sheriff, a sturdy, deep-voiced man named Tom Schmerber, said, “I don’t agree with S.B. 4.” Having worked for Border Patrol, he believed that local law enforcement had no business dealing with immigration. He also worried about the guardsmen coming from other parts of the state. “They don’t know the people here,” Schmerber said. His family had come from Mexico; he still had relatives in Coahuila, across the border from Eagle Pass. “Most of us are Hispanic,” he said. “They’re going to be stopping people that are from here.”
Schmerber assured Bárcena that other sheriffs shared his view. “We all think the same,” he said. “This shouldn’t be the state’s problem.” Bárcena leaned into the microphone: “Sheriff, I really do thank you for your stance. If all the sheriffs in Texas thought like you do, we would feel very safe.” Yet, in public, others had conveyed a different message. Dozens of sheriffs had recently assembled at the capitol in Austin to show support for S.B. 4. Dressed in suits and cowboy hats, they clustered around Abbott as one read from a letter signed by a hundred and thirty-nine sheriffs: “We stand in unity with the governor.”
One evening in Washington, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the homeland-security adviser, sat in her office in the West Wing—a secure, windowless room that she and her staffers call the Cave. Sherwood-Randall is sixty-four, with blond hair and a leonine presence. She has held the job since Biden’s first day in office, but her relationship with the President began decades before. At twenty-six, just after finishing a doctorate at Oxford, she joined Biden’s office in the Senate, advising him on defense and foreign policy. She went on to work for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and developed a reputation as a skillful negotiator, credited with persuading former Soviet states to forgo their nuclear arsenals and Iran to restrict its atomic-weapons program.
Sherwood-Randall says that her current job is “to prevent terrible things from happening to the American people and to insure that we’re prepared to deal with those things that we cannot prevent.” This includes everything from wildfires and avian flu to terrorism. Lately, though, there has been an inescapable focus on immigration. When we met, she had recently returned from Mexico City—her tenth trip there in a little more than a year.
From the start, Sherwood-Randall said, a priority for the Administration was to “reëstablish a partnership based on mutual respect.” In part, this meant making sure that the dialogue between the two countries wasn’t limited to the White House, as it had been under the previous Administration; in one Mexican official’s description, “The relationship between Trump and López Obrador was monolithic.” Despite Trump’s public hostility, the two developed a close rapport. During a speech in the Rose Garden, AMLO had bemused many of his citizens by saying that Trump had treated Mexicans with “kindness and respect.” Part of the appeal was Trump’s indifference to Mexico’s domestic affairs; as long as López Obrador helped the U.S. contain immigration, Trump largely left him alone.
When Biden won the 2020 election, AMLO was among the last leaders to congratulate him. Mexican officials insist that the delay had nothing to do with his fondness for Trump. In 2006, López Obrador had run for President and lost by just 0.6 per cent—the result of fraud, he maintained. Afterward, he called for a judicial review, but leaders around the world had already recognized his opponent. “In his view, Democrats did not come to his aid when he felt that the election was stolen,” a Mexican diplomat told me.
Over time, Biden and AMLO have arrived at a careful comity. Both think of themselves as blue-collar men of the people. Both are also conscious that their countries are singularly dependent on each other. “What we do affects Mexico, and what Mexico does affects us,” Sherwood-Randall said.
Since December, apprehensions at the border are down by half. Yet the American electorate’s views have hardened; in one poll, fifty-five per cent of respondents—the largest proportion in decades—called widespread unauthorized immigration a “critical threat to the U.S.” A growing number of voters, especially Republicans, are open to more radical policies. Trump recently declared that if he is reëlected “we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” expelling millions of people. At rallies, he has talked in virulent terms about undocumented migrants, saying, “They are poisoning the blood of our country.”
In this context, Bárcena’s talk of root causes might seem politically inexpedient. But Mexican negotiators seem aware that, with the election coming, the Biden Administration is under even greater pressure to appear in control of the border. In recent months, Bárcena has asked the U.S. for twenty billion dollars in development funds—a sum that even she recognized was enormous. “They might not be able to invest that much,” she allowed. “But at least something that can really help us support the people of Central America.”
For its part, Mexico was working closely with governments throughout the region. Guatemalans have been given temporary visas to work in southern Mexico, one of the country’s poorest regions. Bárcena was finalizing an agreement to cover the first six months of pay for some migrants returning to Venezuela. The idea, Bárcena said, was to give those migrants “a certain incentive to stay.”
In all, Mexico was spending more than a hundred and thirty million dollars on these efforts. But it had budgeted far more money—roughly four billion dollars a year, according to government records—for enforcement. Mexican authorities were flying migrants back home, and shuttling thousands of others south from the border with the U.S., in order to slow their progress. This did little to address root causes, but it reduced the flow of people Border Patrol had to process—and, as Bárcena said gravely, “we made a commitment to lower the numbers.”
Still, there were limits. “We won’t let the United States send back to Mexico those they turn down,” Bárcena said. “They should take them back to their country of origin.” She had conveyed that message to her American counterparts. Nevertheless, in recent months, Biden has repeatedly talked about closing the border—which would likely entail persuading Mexico to take back everyone who wasn’t allowed into the U.S.
Biden first suggested a shutdown in late January, while the Senate was debating a bipartisan immigration bill. Mexican officials were caught off guard; one said that it felt like a “betrayal.” Mexico had not been consulted, even though negotiators for the two countries had committed to “cautiously consider—and preferably agree on—public statements.”
The Administration apparently hasn’t ruled out the idea. In the coming days, according to reports by Reuters and PBS, the White House is expected to announce an executive action that would allow Biden to shut down the border if the number of migrants hit a specific threshold. Bárcena suggested that the tougher rhetoric was linked to Biden’s poll numbers around immigration. “We see it as an electoral matter,” she said. “But our sense is that Biden, or, really, the Democratic Party, have veered slightly to the right—to a tone that is closer to Trump’s.”
At the negotiating table, Bárcena often sits next to Mexico’s Secretary of Defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval. During AMLO’s Presidency, the military has taken on a range of civilian duties—overseeing airports, oil facilities, and trains—and has also assumed a significant role in immigration. Many of the National Migration Institute’s leaders come from the military. The National Guard, which leads the country’s enforcement efforts alongside the Army, has doubled its deployments in the past five years, and now accounts for nearly half the immigration budget. (The commission that handles asylum requests receives less than one per cent as much.) Human-rights groups have repeatedly denounced the military for abusing migrants. “Members of the armed forces are trained to vanquish an enemy,” Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez, a prominent human-rights lawyer, wrote in 2022. “They don’t let go of their training.”
López Obrador, who is nearing his term limit, has increasingly attracted criticism for his deference to the armed forces; he has also been accused of undermining democratic institutions and attempting to subvert electoral rules. Yet as Sarukhán, the former Ambassador, said, “You barely hear a peep coming from Washington.” He suggested Biden was conscious that the Mexican government could affect his fortunes. “AMLO will be in power until October 1st, and he has the ability to impact the outcome of the election by opening those valves at the right time,” he said.
Why López Obrador would help Trump win is a matter of speculation. In private, Mexican officials I interviewed were alarmed by the prospect of dealing with Trump again. Among other concerns, the trade pact is up for review in 2026—a date that both sides encouraged, an official told me, because everyone assumed that AMLO and Trump would be safely out of office. “It was, perhaps, a miscalculation,” Gerónimo Gutiérrez, Mexico’s Ambassador to the U.S. in the early years of the Trump Administration, said. “Or we didn’t contemplate a scenario in which, four years later, Trump could make a comeback.”
Some pointed out an inescapable irony: Trump’s insistence on forcing Mexico to take up the burden of controlling immigration might help return him to power. “You can’t outsource enforcement-driven immigration policies to other countries, because those countries can weaponize immigration flows,” Sarukhán said. “It’s mind-boggling, despite López Obrador’s fondness for Trump, that his actions could deliver a result which in the long run is the most detrimental for Mexican interests.”
Bárcena left Eagle Pass in a convoy headed to Laredo, the last stop on her trip. Looking out at a flat, arid landscape, she said that Texas wasn’t the first border state she had visited, but it was where politics and immigration clashed the most fiercely. In El Paso, she had toured a memorial for twenty-three people who were shot to death at a Walmart in 2019. The shooter, a man in his twenties, had driven more than six hundred miles to kill Mexicans, in what he described as “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
At the memorial, Bárcena approached a woman resting on a bench, her hands folded over a cane. “Cómo estás?” she asked. “Sobreviviendo,” the woman said—surviving. She introduced herself as Liliana Muñoz, one of the survivors of the shooting. She said that her left leg was still numb, and that she could no longer run or play in the park with her two sons. Five years after the attack, she still lived in fear of what might happen to her and her boys.
In the car, Bárcena lamented the violence, both rhetorical and actual, that surrounded the border. “Trump says that we’re criminals, that we’re here to poison the country’s blood,” she said. His followers seem to have embraced his view; a recent poll showed that nearly half of Republican voters saw Mexico as an enemy. Yet she insisted that the two countries were inseparably bound together.
Last year, Mexico became the U.S.’s largest trading partner, with exchanges approaching eight hundred billion dollars. “We’re trading one and a half million dollars per minute,” Bárcena said. “Our economies are so integrated that any unilateral decision from the United States will backfire.” Even Trump would be constrained by this reality, she suggested. “If he comes into office with an overly protectionist set of policies, Mexico will have to look for other paths,” she said. “China is a country that is constantly looking out for Mexico.”
In the meantime, Bárcena said, “the contributions of the Mexican community are not being appreciated.” More than thirty-seven million people of Mexican descent live in the United States. They contribute three hundred and twenty-four billion dollars a year to the economy and pay taxes, “without always reaping the benefits,” she added, noting that undocumented workers have no safety net. Six out of ten farm workers—the people hired to harvest everything from grapes in Napa to strawberries in Tampa Bay—are Mexican. Who will tend to the fields if Trump carries out his plan? “Deport them,” Bárcena said. “We’ll see what people in Florida have to say.” ♦
