Outside Tijuana’s El Chaparral entrance, I looked on Friday as a handful of deportees trickled south from San Ysidro, their Mexican government “repatriation” documents in hand.
A 25-year-old man from the southern state of Guerrero, wearing a soiled white t-shirt and torn-up shoes, said he’d be taking the Mexican government’s offer to pay his bus fare home. A 21-year-old man, in a red-and-white baseball cap, told me that he had no plans to return to his hometown of Culiacan, Sinaloa, a city besieged by organized crime. A middle-aged woman silently laced her red sneakers, checked her phone, then walked into the city.
With incoming President Donald Trump’s plans for “the largest deportation operation in American history,” was this the calm before the storm?
In recent days, I listened to shelter directors, academics, government officials, human rights workers and other experts on both sides of the border who follow the city’s migrant flows. They offered a range of reactions, coinciding that there is much uncertainty as to how the new policy would play out in Tijuana and other Mexican border communities.
“I get the sense there’s a real debate within the Trump world about how far they want to go early on,” Andrew Selee, president of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, during a talk on the UC San Diego campus last week. “We don’t know the extent of what they’re going to do.”
A big challenge will be tracking down those 1.3 million people who have existing deportation orders, Selee said. “They are hard to find, it’s logistically complicated to go after them, at least under current regulations.”
Some called for a greater sense of urgency in Mexico.
“We should get ready for hurricane 5.0,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. “I believe every single border town will be hard hit.”
Father Patrick Murphy, director of the 140-bed Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, called upon government authorities to step up collaboration with the network of shelters that have long been at the forefront of meeting the shifting needs of migrants arriving in the city.
“As far as I know, nothing has been done. The government has not called anybody together to say, ‘how are we going to do this?’ They’re just relying on goodwill,” he told me. “I don’t see any panic, but I don’t see any planning. So I’m hoping in January they start bringing people together.”
Deportations are Nothing New
In the 1950s, Operation Wetback sent as many 1.3 million undocumented Mexicans across the border, and thousands of them remained in Tijuana. The city was a major recipient for record numbers of Mexicans sent back during the Obama administration, which carried out more than 3 million deportations, the majority of them to Mexico.
As the largest city on Mexico’s northern border, Tijuana continues to receive large numbers of deportees. Mexican government figures show that of 154,203 U.S. “deportation events” to Mexico from January through September of 2024, the greatest number took place to the states of Sonora (34 percent) and Tamaulipas (24 percent), with Baja California in third place with 22 percent.
Today, U.S. authorities on average have been returning 125 people a day to Tijuana–over 3,000 a month, said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, director of Tijuana’s small migrant affairs office. “Many of these people immediately try to cross back to the United States, by jumping the fence, or entering by water, or through certain canyons,” he told Heraldo Noticias.
Tijuana’s network of 40-some shelters, operated by churches and nonprofits, has the capacity for 5,000 people at a time, he said, and are currently housing about 3,000. Besides food and shelter, the deportees arrive with many other needs: from psychological care, help in obtaining identification documents, bus fare to their home communities, or housing, jobs and schools for their children if they remain at the border.
When I interviewed Perez Canchola last week, he said he’s met with shelter directors, state officials, and with private employers who could offer jobs to deportees. “We have the capacity to cope at least through the end of February,” he told me.
If Trump eliminates the CBP One asylum application process–as he has vowed to do–things could get more complicated, leaving large numbers of migrants fleeing violence in southern Mexico stranded at the border and in need of support.
Perez Canchola said the backup plan, if the existing shelters become overwhelmed, is to open two government shelters, the largest with a capacity for up to 2,000 people. With lack of personnel to operate the centers, both currently operate at a minimum capacity, he said.
In Other News
Asylum applicants in limbo: President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate the Biden administration’s year-old asylum appointment system under the CBP One app. Last week, KBPS reported on asylum seekers in Tijuana who fear the program will end before they can secure an appointment. NPR reported on a similar situation across the Texas border in Ciudad Juarez.
A showdown over immigrant enforcement: San Diego County has been in the national spotlight in recent days after Sheriff Kelly Martinez said she would follow California’s sanctuary law but would not comply with a stricter resolution passed earlier this month by the county’s Board of Supervisors preventing county employees from transferring an inmate to U.S. immigration custody without a court order. (KPBS, inewsource, San Diego Union-Tribune.)
From politics, to lucha libre to rock’n’roll, three bajacalifornianos who passed away in recent weeks were pioneers in their fields.
Lucha libre legend dies: Fans of lucha libre, the theatrical form of Mexican professional wrestling, are mourning the death on Friday of fighter Miguel Angel Lopez Dias, known as Rey Misterio Sr. He was 66 years old. Dias was born and based in Tijuana, and operated a lucha libre gym there. He mentored several other top lucha libre stars, including his nephew, Oscar Gutierrez, a Chula Vista resident who fights under the name Rey Mysterio. (Newsweek, San Diego Union-Tribune)
“Father of Mexican rock” dies: The Tijuana-born Mexican rock’n’roll pioneer Javier Batiz passed away in his native city on Dec. 4 at the age of 80 after battling prostate cancer. Known as “El Brujo (the sorcerer) Batiz recorded dozens of albums and continued to perform in his later years, sporting a thick curly mane, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune’s music critic George Varga, “I want to die on stage.” Batiz was the object of numerous testimonials in recent months, and was featured in a video documentary by the Union-Tribune’s Alejandro Tamayo. Batiz was an early mentor to the legendary guitarist Carlos Santana. (Union-Tribune, El Imparcial)
Former mayor, hotelier, tourism promoter passes: Rosarito Beach has been mourning the passing of Hugo Torres Chabert, owner of the iconic Rosarito Beach Hotel and former mayor of the municipality he helped create in 1995. Years later, as the region fought rising drug violence, Torres led an effort to root out police corruption; in 2007 his newly named police chief, a retired army officer, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a heavily armed commando. Torres later presided over the “Baja Image Committee aimed at bringing back U.S. visitors, long the lifeblood of the small coastal city, home to thousands of U.S. retirees. Torres died on October 31 at the age of 87. (Zeta, El Imparcial)
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