TAPACHULA, CHIAPAS – Just days after United States immigration agents detained Daniel Ramirez last month near his home in Brownsville, the 30-year-old Texas resident found himself shackled to a thinly cushioned seat on a deportation flight with other Mexican nationals. He listened to the pre-flight safety instructions with some skepticism.
“How are we going to put the life saver on if we have handcuffs on our hands and feet?” he remembered another detainee asking.
But the shackles would turn out to be the least of the discomforts on this flight. Instead of being expelled to his native Mexico, Ramirez and his countrymen were flown to Guatemala City, joining a parade of at least 2,200 deported Mexicans transferred this year to Guatemala – part of the U.S.’s third-country deportation agenda. To Ramirez and critics of President Donald Trump, the third-country drop-offs make the journeys home more difficult and dangerous for detainees; final insults to migrants rounded up in a campaign to remove every undocumented person in the U.S.
Felipe Flores, deported alongside Ramirez, described the policy as “negligent.” He said that after days in cramped U.S. detention facilities, unable to shower or brush his teeth, and then a 15-hour stint in handcuffs, it was a relief to be out of immigration custody.
However, after crossing back into Mexico from Guatemala, both men struggled with the prospect of an expensive, multi-day bus journey in a part of the country they barely know. Ramirez’s trip, ironically, would deliver him to Matamoros, on Mexico’s border with Texas.
“It’s like a punishment for us so we don’t go back again,” said Ramirez, who was born in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, but raised in Brownsville, just across the border in Texas. He and Flores spoke to Puente News recently about their deportations inside a teeming bus station in Tapachula.
Previous administrations almost never deported people to countries that they have no connection to, but after changes to DHS policy in early 2025, ICE began regularly carrying out such transfers worldwide. Of an estimated 22,000 people deported to third countries during the second Trump administration, around 19,000 have been to Mexico. Many end up in Tapachula, a city of 400,000 that has emerged as a bustling Ground Zero for thousands of migrants and refugees from around the world.
Mexico’s migration agency, which has been working with the Trump administration to receive deportees, nonetheless said deporting Mexican citizens to Guatemala was a move to make it difficult to re-enter U.S. territory.
“The Mexican government has communicated to U.S. authorities its opposition to this practice and reiterated that every Mexican person has the right to enter national territory,” the Mexican government said in a press release on August 20.
In response to questions about the deportation of Mexican citizens to Guatemala, a DHS spokesperson wrote, “The Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised.”
The deportation station
After the deportation flight dropped Ramirez in Guatemala’s capital city, authorities bussed him to Mexico’s southern border. Mexican authorities then released him in Tapachula. Before buying a bus ticket to his grandmother’s hometown of Matamoros in Mexico’s state of Tamaulipas, Ramirez reflected on the journey ahead:
“I’m like a thousand pesos short,” he said. “I’ll be driving for like three days. Sitting down in a bus. It’s bad.”
In the last decade, Tapachula, the second-largest city in Mexico’s Chiapas state, has received refugees fleeing gang violence in Haiti and Honduras, hunger in Venezuela and Cuba, and wars and political persecution in countries across the globe. And here, in the shadow of the Tacaná Volcano that marks the meeting of Central and North America, human movement clashes with Mexico’s own increasingly militarized anti-migration policies designed to discourage migrants from traveling north to wealthier states or the U.S. border.
Since January of 2025, thousands of Mexican nationals – including unaccompanied children – and third-country transfers mainly from Cuba, Venezuela, and Central America have been deported on planes and buses directly to the city.
“Both countries are following a similar deterrence logic – keep people as far away from the Mexico-U.S. border as possible to avoid recidivism,” said Gretchen Kuhner, Director of the Institute for Women in Migration, in an email to Puente News.
The U.S. has long coordinated deportations with – and exerted pressure on – the Mexican government to extend prevention by deterrence policies. After a spike in migration from Central America in 2014, Mexico’s Programa Frontera Sur – the Southern Border Program – used U.S. funding for more checkpoints and deportations of non-Mexicans.
The program helped create a bottleneck: Central Americans, even many already deported from the U.S. and Mexico, have crossed back to Tapachula. They’ve joined an estimated 50,000 people from around the world unable to move farther north into Mexico because of increased checkpoints and arduous waits for visa decisions and applications for refugee status.
In Tapachula, they contemplate their futures. Some still hope to reach the U.S.-Mexico border; many say they can’t return to their native countries, while others consider making Mexico their new home.
The influx and containment of migrants in Tapachula strains infrastructure, refugee services and job markets, said Denisse Lugardo Escobar, Tapachula’s Director of International Relations and Cross-Border Development. City, state, and federal authorities and international organizations provide migrants with work opportunities and legal advice. But “the demand is too much,” she said. “It’s like putting more and more water in a bottle. At some point it’s going to spill, it’s going to overflow and I keep pouring more water but it doesn’t fit,” Lugardo added.
A long road home
On the day Ramirez was released, hundreds of migrants gathered in Tapachula’s Parque Bicentenario under a light rain, behind a banner with hand-painted blue and black lettering reading “Sueños sin Fronteras” – Dreams without Borders.
José David Murcia Valdez carried two light backpacks slung over his shoulders and gripped the handlebars of a small black mountain bike that he hoped would carry him back to Monterrey, northern Mexico’s industrial center, about 150 miles from the Texas border. The 30-year-old fled Honduras six years ago after suffering a machete attack that cost him a finger and left a network of scars covering his arms and shoulders. He made it to Monterrey and for three years held a steady job at a recycling plant – until Mexican migration authorities arrived to check employees’ papers.
“They dumped me back in Honduras, but I can’t go to my country because of the machete attack,” said Murcia Valdez, whose earlier refugee application in Tapachula had been denied. “As soon as I got there I turned around and came back again, but in Tapachula things are very difficult for us, for migrants.”
His next option was the Sueños sin Fronteras caravan – the fourth one organized this year in Tapachula. By traveling in a large group, migrants seek to reduce the risk of detention and of being targeted by organized crime.
“What we want more than anything is to be a little further north, where there’s work,” Murcia Valdez said.
But hope fizzled quickly. Just 30 miles from Tapachula, some people turned back exhausted and hungry. Mexican authorities bussed others back to Tapachula, what many migrants now call a “prison city.”
Murcia Valdez said that the last time he’d walked out of Tapachula in a caravan it disintegrated in Oaxaca, and migration authorities returned him south. This time, after a few days on the road, Murcia Valdez and the remaining members of the Sueños sin Fronteras caravan had logged 62 miles – still inside Chiapas state borders.
“I’ll get there,” Murcia Valdez said. “I have faith, and I trust God. If he’s kept me alive, it’s for a purpose.”
Daniel Ramirez’s Mexican citizenship saved him the travail of a caravan. Instead, it was a costly days-long bus ride back to Tamaulipas, just across the Rio Grande from the Texas home he can’t return to.
Ramirez said he knew that without documentation in the U.S., it would be hard to find work after years of schooling and off-the-books odd jobs. With no viable path to legal status, he also lived with the fear of being deported to Mexico, a country he had only vague memories of. What’s made his deportation experience worse, though, is the sting of being dumped first in Guatemala, a country he has no connection to, and then left to his own devices in southern Mexico, nearly 1,300 miles from his birthplace.
“It’s wrong, you know. It’s bad,” he said.
Ramirez will stay on the Mexican side of the wall. He said he doubts he’ll test an increasingly hard border that’s become “basically impossible” to cross.
In Matamoros, he’s already found work painting cars and plans to write a book he’ll self-publish.
“I don’t want to go back because I don’t need it,” Ramirez said. “I've got my own way to make money; I don’t need to go over there.”
