The border between Mexico and the United States in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. — Alejandro Cegarra/The New York Times
ONE thing is hard to miss these days on the Mexican side of the border with the United States: the migrants are gone.
In what were once some of the busiest sections along the border – Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Matamoros – shelters that used to overflow now hold just a few families.
The parks, hotels and vacant buildings that once teemed with people from all over the world stand empty.
And on the border itself, where migrants once slept in camps within feet of the nine meter wall, only dust-caked clothes and shoes, rolled-up toothpaste tubes and water bottles remain.
“All that is over,” said the Rev William Morton, a missionary at a Ciudad Juarez cathedral that serves migrants free meals. “Nobody can cross.”
US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced recently that Customs and Border Protection had apprehended only 200 people at the southern border on a Saturday – the lowest single-day number in more than 15 years.
Trump has credited his crackdown on illegal immigration for the plunging numbers, even as he has also announced he will send thousands more combat forces to the border to stop what he calls an invasion.
But according to analysts, Mexico’s own moves to restrict migration in the last year – not just at the border but throughout the country – have yielded undeniable results.
The number of people heading toward the United States dropped sharply after former President Joe Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum last year.
The Mexican government has also significantly stepped up its own measures in recent years to reduce the number of migrants reaching the border. It established checkpoints along migrant routes, imposed visa restrictions, dispersed caravans and bused people who arrived from places like Venezuela to remote corners of southern Mexico to prevent them from reaching the United States.
Since last spring, Mexican authorities have been apprehending more people than their American counterparts every month.
Now, the numbers at the border have fallen to almost nothing.
“We no longer have major flows of people coming – they have declined by 90%,” said Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua state office responsible for migrants, in Juarez.
And those migrants who do make it to the border are no longer trying to enter the United States, shelter operators say.
“They know they can’t cross,” Morton said.
Jordan Garcia, bottom right, a former mining worker from Venezuela, with his wife and their three daughters at Albergue Vida, a migrants shelter in Ciudad Juarez. — Alejandro Cegarra/The New York Times
“All the holes underground, the tunnels, the holes in the wall, they’ve virtually sealed it – it’s much, much more difficult.”
In Mexican border cities, the scene at migrant shelters is much the same: tables sitting empty at meal time, bunk beds, unused.
Even before Trump took office, the number of people apprehended trying to cross the border had been dramatically dropping, according to US government data.
Many of those waiting in border cities had appointments through CBP One, an app that allowed people to make asylum appointments with authorities rather than to cross the border, shelter operators say.
After Trump cancelled the app on his first day in office, people gave up after a few days and headed south to Mexico City or even for the southern border, said the Rev Juan Fierro, a pastor at the Good Samaritan shelter in Ciudad Juarez.
At a once-crammed shelter in Matamoros whose name translates to Helping Them Triumph, only a handful of Venezuelan women and their children remain, according to its directors.
In Tijuana, at a shelter complex within view of the border wall, the Foundation Youth Movement 2000, which once held hundreds of people of all nationalities, there are now just 55, according to its director, Jose Maria Lara.
They are the same people who have been there since Trump’s inauguration.
They include people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, as well as Mexican migrants from states considered dangerous to return to, such as Michoacan.
There are no figures available for how many migrants like these may be living in the border’s shelters, hotels and rented rooms, and biding their time.
“We are going to wait to see if God touches Trump’s heart,” said a 26-year-old woman from Venezuela, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Maria Elena, as she sat eating with her seven-year-old son at the cathedral in Ciudad Juarez.
In response to Trump’s early demands, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 national guardsmen to the border and hundreds more troops to Sinaloa state, a major fentanyl trafficking hub.
Officials and those who work with migrants are split on whether the troops, several hundred of whom began to appear in and around every border city over the past two months, have had an effect on illegal border crossings.
At the end of the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego, California, the National Guard has set up large tents on the Mexican side, in an area called Nido de las Aguilas.
About 20km from downtown Tijuana, it has long been used by coyotes, the smugglers who take advantage of the steep hills and lack of police presence to lead migrants into California, authorities say.
The Guard has also placed checkpoints at spots up and down the border.
In Tijuana, Jose Moreno Mena, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Defence of Migrants, said the presence of the Guard has been a major deterrent to migration, along with Trump’s promised mass deportations in the United States.
“This doesn’t mean that they won’t keep coming,” Moreno said. “It’s just a pause, perhaps, until they see better conditions.”
But in the state of Tamaulipas, where more than 700 Guard members arrived in January in places like Matamoros, they do not appear to be curbing migration, residents say.
They seem to be concentrated on the bridge into the United States, while migrants are now seeking to enter through the desert or other rural areas.
The real work of curbing migration has been happening far from Mexico’s northern border.
At the southernmost point in Mexico, in Tapachula, few migrants are entering.
Shelters that recently housed 1,000 people now serve just a hundred or so, according to operators.
Waiting for visas that allow them to head north, and dispersed if they try to form caravans, these migrants are all but blocked.
Many are weighing their options. Some have even asked the Mexican government to deport them on flights back to their country. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
