On day one of Donald Trump’s second term as president, newspapers published what will undoubtedly become an infamous photo of a Colombian woman falling to her knees in grief as her asylum appointment was abruptly canceled. As Trump’s executive order halted all asylum possibilities and shuttered the popular CBP One application, which allowed migrants from all over the world like her to make their appointments to apply for asylum or reunite family members, she and thousands of others are left in limbo, effectively creating “prison cities” at the southern and northern Mexican borders.

During his first term as president, Trump installed the Migrant Protection Protocols (familiarly known as “Remain in Mexico”), which requires most asylum seekers arriving to the US border via Mexican territory to stay in Mexico while their case is considered, and Title 42 which allowed the US government to expulse migrants without an asylum screening on the basis of a COVID-19 loophole. President Biden did away with MPP in 2022 and Title 42 in 2023. In a critique of these policies, Isaín Mandujano notes that “Mexico is left to do the dirty work for the US” and migrants waiting in Mexico at both the northern and southern borders are vulnerable to cartel violence and feminicide or sexual assault toward women. “Remain in Mexico”’ is now reinstated with Trump, despite the new Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum noting that “Mexico did not accept to receive migrants soliciting asylum in the United States” but that the country would provide humanitarian assistance, which will undoubtedly test Mexican border patrol and military services.  

As an American specializing in African Studies and working in Mexico, I had originally never thought my field of studies would become so close to home. My fieldwork always took me to Senegal and the Sahel region, or to engage with Senegalese migrants in Italy and Spain. However, I received a call in 2022 from a center in Mexico City for unaccompanied migrant minors asking for help interpreting for a young Senegalese migrant who only spoke Wolof. He had made the journey to Mexico hoping to try his chances at the US border. He had been traveling with a group from Senegal, via Morocco and El Salvador when he was detained at the airport in Mexico City by immigration authorities. He was then sent to the center and refused to eat or cooperate. He was confused and frustrated as to why he was detained. He, along with a 13-year-old boy from The Gambia, and a Mauritania boy who had just turned 17, were considered at risk of being taken advantage of by traffickers on their way to the US border. They all faced the same options: be sent back home; the opportunity to ask for asylum in Mexico; or be reunited with a family member by registering through the CBP One application and waiting for their appointment in the detention center. None of them wanted the first or the second option. We located the Senegalese boy’s father and an uncle in the US. However, it wasn’t until his adult brother left Senegal and made the same journey through El Salvador to Mexico City to help release him from the center that they could make their way to the border. 

The Mauritanian boy arrived in Mexico in a very different way. He decided to migrate because his mother had recently died, his father was old and unable to work, and many of his cousins had already migrated to the US. He hoped to join them. He told me that he went by plane from the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott to Morocco where he flew to Turkey, Colombia, then El Salvador, and on to Nicaragua. From Nicaragua, he traveled by bus, boat, and walking through Honduras, again to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. He was detained in Mexico City and was taken to the center. Returning to Mauritania was not an option. Having cousins in the US, the center worked with immigration to find a way to transfer him to a holding center across the border waiting for authorization to be reunited with his cousin. After a year in Mexico—where he learned Spanish—he was transferred and has now settled in Columbus, Ohio.   

The statistics for the number of African nationals coming to Mexico and seeking entry into the US have exploded in the last 10 years, “exacerbating the crisis at the Mexico-U.S border as they join legions of migrants from Central and South America.” As Europe has tightened its borders, many Africans have sought new and often dangerous migration routes to enter US soil, as the three boys from the Sahel had done. US migration statistics show that in 2020, the number of migrants entering via the border who were from beyond Mexico and Central America, often called “extra-continentals,” which include Africans, was 12%. By 2023, they made up 51%. Between 2007 and 2018, the number of African nationals traveling to and through Mexico went from 460 to almost 3,000. During this time, the majority of people arriving from the continent came from Somalia, Eritrea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo fleeing conflict. Beginning in 2015, more people came from Senegal, Guinea Conakry, and by 2019 before the pandemic, there were 7,065 African migrants in Mexico. By 2021, after the borders reopened in Costa Rica and Panama, there were 5,084 Africans coming through Central America to Mexico. An AP News article shows that in 2022 there were 6,672 African migrants in Mexico, numbers that soared to 59,834 in 2023. And the Mexican government’s year-end figures for undocumented migrants from the continent in 2024 were 46,288. 

During the first Trump administration, Mexico was turned into a space of processing migrants, liminality, fear, and dispossession of rights. In 2019, Trump threatened Mexico with tariffs, and in reaction Mexico discontinued travel visas for migrants entering Mexico from Guatemala to pass through Mexican territory and wait at the US border. Many of these migrants, as a result, established communities in southern border towns such as Tapachula, even creating an African and African Migrant Assembly that protested rights violations by the National Guard. Similar to 2019, Trump has threatened 25% tariffs on Mexican imported goods, and in an effort to delay the economic impact, President Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 National Guard troops, this time to the northern border to deal with cartel violence, the flow of fentanyl, and the migrant situation. However, as Santiago Aguirre, the director of the Center for Human Rights, notes, just as they saw in 2019, putting the National Guard in charge of policing the border creates issues of physical abuse and excessive force in addition to the fact that civil society is stretched thin and migrants are left without a governing body serving as a monitor to potential military abuses. Ray and Flores argue in a study considering the public health implications for undocumented African migrants in Mexico that they face a double vulnerability due to language difficulties, racial discrimination, dangerous routes, and the lack of documentation. The absence of consulates in most African countries is also a barrier for migrants to have access to legal aid.

I recently spoke with workers at the center where the boys I met were housed. They informed me they had several young migrants who had their CBP One appointments canceled and that the center was unsure what to do with them. Now that their options have been reduced even further, the Mexican government has a potentially enormous problem on its hands. Is Mexico becoming an unintended destination for African migrants rather than just a transit country?  How will the Mexican government and society respond? As Miranda notes, in 2021, with just 2,034 African migrants detained, the lack of personnel and resources meant the system for refugees collapsed. Now that their numbers are much greater, and their possibilities to reach US soil have been cut off, what will their fates be? And what implications do they have for Mexican society?