Mexico’s southern border is facing a cruel new facet of the migration crisis. Under Donald Trump’s toughening policies, planes from the United States are landing in Tapachula loaded with deported Cuban migrants, many of whom have spent most of their lives living in U.S. territory.
Tapachula, the main city on Mexico’s southern border, began to receive deported Cuban migrants on direct flights from the U.S., adding to the hundreds of people of other nationalities stranded there, in a context of increasing pressure from Washington on Cuba.
Cubans deported to Tapachula
Eduardo Antonio Castillejos Argüello, undersecretary for Human Mobility at the Southern Border Secretariat, told EFE that last year closed with 12,000 people deported from the U.S. and that there are currently two or three flights a week to Chiapas, a southern Mexican state bordering Guatemala.
“We have a large population of Cuban nationality here in Tapachula, distributed throughout the southern border, and who need access to services, but especially to employment. There are many people who are in the informal trade, that is why, from the Undersecretary of Human Mobility we are implementing some actions,” he said.
This is the case of Raúl Morales, 66, one of the Cubans recently deported, who told EFE that after living 46 years in the U.S. he was detained and forcibly handcuffed and then sent to southern Mexico, leaving his family in the United States.
“They simply told me that I was deported and that they were going to send me here. I refused and did not even give them a piece of paper, they handcuffed me by force, I was on the street, I am retired in the United States. They are stealing my retirement. It is also a strong change because they are breaking the entire constitution of the United States. I am a political refugee, I arrived in that country when I was 20 years old”, he assured.
In a direct flight from the United States to Tapachula International Airport, U.S. authorities also deported Cuban migrant Jonas Garcia, who was detained by authorities for driving without a driver’s license.
“We feel very bad because we can’t change money, the family sends us money, but we can’t get paid because we don’t have a passport. But we went to Comar(Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid) and they tell us 90 days and if it doesn’t arrive we have to go again,” he explained about the complex bureaucracy they face.
For his part, Luis Rey García Villagrán, director of the Center for Human Dignification (CDH) in the city, denounced that “in the dark and in a totally opaque manner they bring the migrants by truck, by plane or by road”.
“No institution or agency that has to do with the migration issue is responsible, there is no point in having international organizations that have to do with human mobility if no one takes charge,” he said, noting that an estimated 60,000 migrants are stranded in the area, especially Haitians and Cubans.
Mexico has gone from being a transit country in the migratory flow to the United States to becoming a destination due to the tightening of restrictions decreed by President Trump, since his return to the White House in January 2025.
Filed under: Cubans deported to Tapachula
With information from EFE
