USA TODAY National
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It is part of a project on reverse migration by Arizona Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez and El Paso Times visual journalist Omar Ornelas.
CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — Ferrying migrants across the murky waters of the Suchiate River was a lucrative job for Alexis Vargas.
Vargas floated groups of migrants across the informal border crossing between Guatemala and Mexico on a makeshift raft made from wooden boards lashed to fat inner tubes. He raked in more than $100 a day, good money in this impoverished region.
As soon as Vargas dropped off one group, another group of migrants waited on the other side to cross, Vargas recalled. From long before dawn until well past dark, similar rafts choked the river, packed with as many as 20 migrants per raft. Hundreds crossed daily from the Guatemalan side to the Mexican side.
Their destination: the United States.
But on a recent afternoon, as the sun began to set, the 28-year-old raft pilot sat on a cement landing with nothing to do but scroll on his phone. His empty raft was parked in the water nearby, alongside other empty ones.
The flow of migrants that kept Vargas and other raft pilots here busy for years, surging during the Biden administration, has vanished under President Donald Trump.
"I'm telling you, after the president closed the doors, hardly anyone crosses anymore," Vargas said, dressed in soccer shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops in the sweltering tropical heat.
Vargas nodded at the nearly deserted river. Only a handful of rafts floated lazily in the water. Instead of large groups of migrants, the rafts carried only small groups of locals going back and forth to shop or to work.
The dramatic decrease in migrants on the Guatemala-Mexico border is the direct result of the Trump administration's border crackdown and mass deportation campaign taking place some 2,000 miles away from this city on the southern tip of Mexico.
The criminal arrests of asylum-seekers who enter the United States illegally, the shutdown of the CBP One app, the deployment of armed military troops to assist the Border Patrol, and scenes of heavily armed masked federal immigration authorities storming worksites and conducting military-style arrests in immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Chicago and other U.S. cities has stoked fear in migrants, effectively staunching the flow.
Mexico's southern border with Guatemala mirrors the newfound stillness along the U.S. southern border with Mexico, where illegal crossings have plunged from record highs during the Biden administration to the lowest levels in decades under the Trump administration.
What's more, a new phenomenon is taking shape. Migrants discouraged by the Trump administration's tough policies are giving up. Instead of heading north, they are turning around and heading south, according to interviews with migrants and migration experts.
Tapachula: Once a gateway, now an exit
For years, Tapachula, a city of 350,000 just a few miles inland from the Suchiate River, was the main gateway for migrants traveling from Central America into Mexico.
From Tapachula, migrants began the long and perilous trek through Mexico to the United States, often in large caravans.
Along the journey, they faced many dangers: illness, dehydration and heatstroke from natural elements; injury and death from vehicle accidents and falls from trains; sexual assault, kidnappings, extortion and human trafficking from criminal gangs; and mistreatment from police and other authorities.
But now, Tapachula is turning into an exit route for migrants headed south instead of north.
The reverse flow is fueled by migrants on the way to the United Staes when Trump took office on Jan. 20. Now, because of the Trump crackdown, they have decided to reverse course and head home or to some other country.
The decision to turn around was painful, said Juan Piña, a 45-year-old migrant from Venezuala.
His extended family of nine left Venezuela in October 2024 for the United States after selling everything they owned, Piña said.
They trekked through six countries, including five days through the notorious Darien Gap jungle between Colombia and Panama, before reaching Tuxtla Gutierrez, a city in southern Mexico about five hours north of Tapachula.
Piña said he and his 68-year-old father, Ramon Piña, worked construction jobs for 11 months to earn money to continue north.
But after reading about the immigration raids and deportations in the United States, they decided to give up and head home.
"It's sad because we had our dreams, and they have been turned upside down," Piña said, choking up.
Piña said his family were not "invaders" as Trump has referred to migrants, but hard workers trying to "better their lives."
"We invested everything we had, and now we are going back with even less," Piña said. "We sacrificed a lot to achieve that dream, to improve our family. Now we will see what awaits us in our country, Venezuela."
Once overcapacity shelters now empty
Signs of Tapachula's remarkable transformation from migrant gateway to exit are everywhere.
Shelters packed beyond capacity with migrants just nine months ago have nearly emptied.
During a recent visit to the Jesus the Good Shepherd Migrant Shelter on the outskirts of Tapachula, most of the dorm rooms were unoccupied.
In December, before Trump took office, 1,700 migrants were packed into the 35-year-old shelter, vastly exceeding the shelter's 1,100 capacity, said Hebert Bermudez, 60, the administrator.
Fewer than 100 migrants remained, including from Venezuela, Guatemala, Cuba, Haiti and Nigeria, Bermudez said.
The migrants who were there headed to other cities in northern Mexico seeking asylum and jobs, he said. Or they returned to their home countries, Bermudez said. Some of the migrants who arrive are now headed south. But they are just a fraction of the flow previously headed north, he said.
Tapachula returns to normalcy
While some migrants remain in Tapachula, gone are the thousands of migrants, including entire families, sleeping on sidewalks, gathered in parks, packed in cheap hotel rooms, or lined up outside banks awaiting money transfers from relatives abroad.
One of the remaining migrants, 20-year-old Liz Valdez, wore black leggings and a T-shirt as she waited tables at Regina's, a restaurant on the main plaza.
As closing time neared, Valdez said she fled Cuba earlier this year to try and reach the United States, where she has family in Las Vegas and Miami.
But after hearing about Trump's crackdown, she had decided to remain in Mexico, at least for now.
Migration plunge suggests Trump's crackdown is effective
Just 35% of migrants surveyed by the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration between June and August said they were headed for the United States, down from 73% between October and December.
The plunge in northbound migration, plus the growing phenomenon of reverse migration, suggests the Trump administration's border and immigration policies are a resounding success, accomplishing in months what previous administrations failed to do over decades.
"After years of Democrat-induced open borders making the U.S. a magnet for dangerous, unchecked migration, it’s yet another sign that President Trump’s unprecedented border security effort is working," the White House announced Sept. 3.
Experts caution that the often horrendous conditions that drove record numbers of migrants to flee their home countries in search of safety, security and prosperity in the United States have not changed. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration's policies will be effective in the long term or are just a Band-Aid fix, experts say.
"If you ask me whether this is a successful policy ‒ a policy that is based on fear ‒ not necessarily," said Diego Chaves-Gonzalez, senior manager of the Latin America and Caribbean Initiative at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
The Trump administration also dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, eliminating funding to countries in Latin America that helped integrate 6 million Venezuelans who fled an economic crisis, Chaves-Gonzalez said.
The lack of a comprehensive policy that addresses the root causes of migration and helps migrants integrate in other countries could trigger more waves of migrants in the future, Chaves-Gonzalez said.
"If there is no stability in Latin America," migrants might decide to either go back to the United States or other parts, creating instability across the entire Western Hemisphere, including the United States, Chaves-Gonzalez said.
"There needs to be a comprehensive policy that is not only based on security and on fear" but also "boosts stability," Chaves-Gonzalez said.
Dramatic difference since Trump took office
The change from before to after Jan. 20 has been extraordinary, said Ivana Saldivar. She oversees the Tapachula office of the United Nations' International Organization for Migration.
Before Jan. 20, more than 1,000 migrants were crossing the border daily from Guatemala to Mexico, Saldivar said. The IOM estimates the number has since fallen to 40 to 50 migrants crossing per day as of September.
Over the years, the IOM has documented migrants from 180 countries ‒ nearly every country on earth ‒ crossing the border from Guatemala to Mexico, Saldivar said.
She noted that smuggling fees have tripled from $5,000 to as much as $15,000 because of the immigration crackdowns in the United States. The higher smuggling fees have further reduced the incentive for migrants, Saldivar said.
But that also means smuggling organizations are becoming more sophisticated and are taking greater risks, Saldivar said. The IOM has seen an increase in migrants crossing the Guatemala-Mexico border on rafts at night or traveling by boat on the Pacific Ocean, she said.
The decline in migration has resulted in a loss of revenue for criminal smuggling organizations. That has raised concerns that kidnappings and other crimes against migrants could increase as criminal organizations look for ways to make up for the losses, said Dana Graber Ladek, the head of the IOM in Mexico.
The conditions that prompted large numbers of migrants to leave countries such as Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba — poverty, hunger, insecurity, political upheaval, persecution — have not changed, Saldivar said.
"The solution is to promote a regular and safe migration" while "respecting the human rights of people who need to leave their countries, who want to leave their countries," Saldivar said. "At the end, migration is a right. We all have the right to migrate but to do it in a sustainable way and regular way."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Migrants in Mexico are heading south. What to know about this Trump-era phenomenon
Reporting by Daniel Gonzalez, USA TODAY NETWORK / USA TODAY
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