Tapachula After Trump

The migrants are stuck for now. It won't last.

The Tapachula I visited in 2023 is no more.

Mexico’s southernmost city, on the line with Guatemala, was then the most reliable transit hub in the hemisphere. Tens of thousands of migrants from across Latin America waiting on humanitarian visas from the Mexican government that would let them continue north. The conditions were grim and the visas trickled in.

The extended stay of so many additional people strained the resources in the area, much as it strained the American border towns that migrants eventually found their way to. But people left, in varying numbers and at varying speeds, and the expectation that one would eventually leave remained the organizing logic of the whole arrangement.

In 2026, that expectation has all but vanished. The Mexican government has slowed visa issuance to a near-standstill, and the migrants who came expecting passage are increasingly stuck.

What’s happened in Tapachula has been happening across the region during Donald Trump’s second term: a deliberate restructuring of the status quo and infrastructure around migration, built on three reinforcing factors: tariffs against cooperating governments, deep cuts to the aid that underwrote the NGO transit network, and a revived web of third-country deportation agreements that the Biden administration dismantled in the opening months of 2021.

The Los Angeles Times reported in March that the Mexican government agreed to take in nearly 13,000 non-Mexican deportees the U.S. is sending across the border, regardless of where they originally came from. The same piece documented roughly $2 billion in cut U.S. aid that had funded the extended network of shelters, legal aid providers, and transportation services that migrants relied on to make the long journey north. With those funds gone, large portions of the network have either drastically reduced services or shut down entirely. The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR), indirectly underwritten by U.S. taxpayers through United Nations channels, has had to downsize accordingly.

Mexico’s cooperation runs on the credible threat of tariffs. That is worth being direct about: whatever else can be said about the administration’s diplomatic style, the stick has produced concrete results where the previous administration’s vice-presidential search for the “root causes” of “irregular migration” did not. Mexico is not acting against its own interests out of goodwill, here. The cost of not cooperating with the Trump administration is simply too high.

The third-country agreements matter because they give the administration operational flexibility — the ability to remove people the U.S. cannot return directly to their countries of origin. Costa Rica has expanded its cooperation from 200 last year now to 25 per week for this year. The Costa Rican government retains final say over which deportees it accepts, a provision that has helped the arrangement clear domestic political resistance. U.S. funds that once supported migrants moving north are now supporting their stabilization in place.

Paraguay has gone even further with a new Status of Forces Agreement which allows the U.S. military to operate inside the country for training, joint exercises, and humanitarian operations. The agreement also keeps criminal jurisdiction over American personnel with the U.S. government rather than giving it to Paraguayan courts—which is an unusually deferential provision for a host country to accept, and a signal of how far some governments are willing to go to align themselves with Washington on cartel enforcement and migration.

None of this is permanent, and I would be dishonest if I pretended otherwise. Interior enforcement has hit real setbacks, both from the courts and from leftist protests in response to DHS operations. Border wall construction, accelerated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is making progress but remains incomplete. And every agreement described above is an executive action that a future president can undo immediately, just as Biden unwound the first Trump administration’s deals within months of taking office.

The migrants currently stuck in Tapachula, and in the other Mexican cities where the bottleneck has formed, are not going home.

The people who could not get into the United States before the border was effectively closed, and who have decided to stay and wait it out, will still be in northern Mexico in 2029. The forces holding them there is durable only as long as the political coalition that built it holds power.

Given how the Democratic Party has positioned itself on immigration, and given how quickly the previous shift in policy produced the crisis Trump was elected to end, another reversal is not a remote possibility. It is the default outcome of an election going the other way.

The American electorate will decide whether they get in.