Mexico bars US from returning many migrant families, threatening to make border crisis worse

AUSTIN, Texas — Mexico has barred the United States from sending migrant families back across the border, using emergency measures put in place at the start of the pandemic, the Washington Examiner has learned, a development that threatens to exacerbate the border crisis.

The decision to prohibit a great number of non-Mexican migrant families from returning to Mexico is expected to force Border Patrol to release more people into the U. S. because it lacks space at existing facilities to hold the thousands coming into custody daily.

More than 20,000 people were encountered last week in the busiest of the border’s nine regions, the Rio Grande Valley. It marked the most people ever apprehended in a week in the region.

Late last week, Mexico quietly began refusing to accept certain groups of migrant families who were caught at the border. The groups were families taken into custody crossing the border in one area but pushed back into Mexico hundreds of miles away on another part of the border, a senior Customs and Border Protection official told the Washington Examiner, confirming a local report.

For example, because the Tamaulipas state of Mexico across from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas stopped allowing many families to be returned earlier this year, the Border Patrol began flying migrants to El Paso, Texas. Once in El Paso, the families are pushed back into Mexico. That will no longer be possible, as an unspecified number of Mexican states along the border have stopped accepting families returning from a different state from where they initially crossed.

A spokeswoman for Mexico’s National Institute of Migration declined to comment.

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