On June 2, Claudia Sheinbaum from the governing Morena Party won Mexico’s presidential election in a landslide, setting her up to become the country’s first woman president in October. A former mayor of Mexico City and an engineer, her victory is being widely hailed as a turning point for the country. Despite the accolades, the sobering reality is that Mexico’s harmful migration policies are likely to continue. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who is ending his six-year term, did not meet progressive expectations for a humanitarian approach to this issue. Instead, he embraced a militarized approach, which all indications show his successor intends to maintain.
During his 2018 presidential bid, AMLO campaigned against U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, aiming to position himself as a champion of migrant rights. He published a book, Oye, Trump, to protest the wall. At first, he followed through. While talking about the government’s approach to migration, AMLO’s secretary of the interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, stressed that migration policy would be based on two axes: the protection of the rights of migrants and development cooperation with Central American countries. Sánchez Cordero announced a full restructuring of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) so that “migrants are not criminalized,” and a record number of humanitarian visas were subsequently issued.
However, this stance was dropped in 2019 after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on goods if the Mexican government didn’t take action to curb migration. Fearing a trade war, AMLO gave in to Trump’s demands. He agreed to let Trump bounce vulnerable asylum-seekers back into dangerous Mexican border towns to await far-off U.S. court dates, and he deployed Mexico’s National Guard to the country’s border with Guatemala. He also appointed Francisco Garduño, who had previously been in charge of prison policy, as the new head of INM, confirming the securitization of migration policy that has now been in place for the past 5 years.
