MEXICO CITY — Since President Trump took workplace in January vowing the “largest deportation operation in American history,” Héctor Silva has been bracing for an inflow of deportees on the two migrant shelters he runs within the Mexican border metropolis of Reynosa.

It hasn’t arrived. Silva’s shelters, which may home as much as 5,000 individuals, have been practically empty for months.

“The truth is we haven’t received the massive wave of deportees that they warned about,” he mentioned. “I expected something very different.”

Below Trump, the U.S. is deporting fewer individuals to Mexico than it was presently final yr, new knowledge present.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum mentioned this week that since Trump took workplace Jan. 20, the U.S. has deported 33,311 Mexicans.

That’s significantly fewer than in 2024, when the Biden administration deported 52,253 Mexicans between February and April.

A soldier stands outdoors a migrant shelter in 2019 in Ciudad Juarez, constructed to deal with Central American and different migrants searching for asylum in america who had been despatched again to Mexico.

(Christian Chavez / Related Press)

U.S. federal knowledge present deportations of all nationalities — not simply Mexicans — are lagging behind Biden-era ranges, and that at this charge, the Trump administration is unlikely to fulfill its aim of 1 million deportations yearly.

There are a number of clarification for the decline in deportations.

Unlawful border crossings have dropped to their lowest level this century, because of a Mexican marketing campaign to interdict northbound migrants and Trump’s actions to finish asylum on the U.S. border.

Lots of the deportees counted beneath Biden have been migrants apprehended on the border and turned again rapidly. The Trump administration, nonetheless, has been targeted on deporting migrants already contained in the U.S., the place finding, detaining and eradicating them is extra sophisticated and dearer than it’s on the border.

To hurry up removals, the White Home has requested lawmakers for tens of billions of {dollars} in new funding to rent extra federal brokers and vastly develop immigrant detention. “The more money we got, the more bad guys we take off the street, the safer America is,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” mentioned he advised members of Congress earlier this yr.

In Mexico, in the meantime, the threatened uptick in deportees has not materialized.

“There haven’t been many,” Sheinbaum mentioned just lately, noting that Mexico was contemplating lowering the dimensions of the emergency tent shelters it erected alongside its northern border to supply meals, drugs and psychological assist in anticipation of numerous returning migrants.

In the meantime, Sheinbaum has acknowledged that her nation can be accepting U.S. deportees who are usually not Mexicans — 5,446 since Trump’s second time period started.

For months, the White Home has been pushing international locations all over the world to take migrants who come from international locations that don’t at all times settle for deportation flights from the U.S.

Panama and Costa Rica are two international locations which have agreed to briefly take deportees from as far-off as Iran, Afghanistan and China, on the stipulation that they are going to ultimately be resettled elsewhere.

However the Mexican authorities’s dealing with of the migrants has been opaque, and it’s clear that there are some migrants just lately deported from the U.S. to Mexico who’re languishing right here.

Although Sheinbaum’s remarks this week targeted on numbers, immigrant rights activists — and the migrants themselves — be aware that every quantity displays a really human story, usually one in all desperation.

Osmany Ramírez is a Cuban migrant who lived in Houston since 2021, working legally as an Uber driver whereas he waited for his asylum case to be heard. He mentioned he was detained by federal authorities in an immigration raid outdoors a grocery retailer on Good Friday, a couple of days earlier than Easter.

Shortly thereafter, he was launched into Reynosa, Mexico, together with a Haitian man and a Nicaraguan household. Ramírez, 55, mentioned they have been then pushed by Mexican authorities greater than 700 miles south, and ultimately launched at a migrant shelter within the metropolis of Villahermosa, in Tabasco state.

Ramírez says he’s afraid to both return to Cuba or cross again to america, the place his spouse lives. He says he plans to use for asylum in Mexico, which, if granted, would give him permission to work.

However for now, he has nothing. He mentioned Mexican officers mentioned he could be detained if he tried to succeed in the nation’s capital.

“They left us here with no belongings, without anything at all,” Ramírez mentioned.

Migrant advocates say the authorized standing of third nation migrants despatched from the U.S. to Mexico is unclear, and leaves them susceptible.

“They are absolutely in the shadows once they get to Mexico,” mentioned Adam Isacson, who research the border on the Washington Workplace on Latin America, a human rights nonprofit.

Arturo Rocha, a former senior migration official within the Mexican authorities, mentioned main questions stay about how, precisely, Mexico is collaborating with U.S. immigration officers and the way it will take care of migrants returned right here.

“If you’re accepting migrants for humanitarian reasons, then you should give them documents to help them integrate into Mexican society and the formal labor market, and not leave them going from shelter to shelter and struggling with their families,” he mentioned.

Migrant advocates say that each one deportees — Mexicans and worldwide — are being shuttled by the Nationwide Guard to factors south, together with in Tabasco and Chiapas, that are close to Guatemala.

It appears to be a plan based mostly on optics, they mentioned.

“I believe the Mexican government’s strategy is to prevent large numbers of people from being seen at the border, because that would reflect poorly on the Trump administration,” mentioned Esther Gutiérrez, who runs Casa Nazareth shelter in Nuevo Laredo.

Particular correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico Metropolis contributed this report.