Migrants leave the city of Tapachula in southern Mexico in a caravan on Aug. 20, 2026. Thousands of deportees and refugees from around the world have collected there.
Georgina Pease/Puente News Collaborative
Migrants leave the city of Tapachula in southern Mexico in a caravan on Aug. 20, 2026. Thousands of deportees and refugees from around the world have collected there.
Georgina Pease/Puente News Collaborative
Daniel Ramirez, a Mexican national, was deported from the U.S. and flown to Guatemala. From there, he went to the city of Tapachula in southernmost Mexico. Above, he boards a bus for the first leg of a two-day journey to his grandmother’s home in Matamoros.
Georgina Pease/Puente News Collaborative
TAPACHULA, Mexico — Just days after U.S. immigration agents detained Daniel Ramirez 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 skepticism.
Article continues below this ad
This story is published in partnership with Puente News Collaborative a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
Georgina Pease is an independent journalist and a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She reports on migration and border regions in the U.S. and Latin America.
“How are we going to put the life preserver on if we have handcuffs on our hands and feet?” another detainee asked.
The shackles were the least of the discomforts Ramirez would face. Instead of being expelled to his native Mexico, he and his compatriots were flown to Guatemala City. They were among at least 2,200 deported Mexicans who have been transferred to Guatemala this year as part of the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy.
“It’s like a punishment for us so we don’t go back again,” said Ramirez, who was born in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state and raised in Brownsville and who lived in the U.S. for years without legal status.
Article continues below this ad
Felipe Flores, who was deported with Ramirez, said that before arriving in Guatemala, he spent days in cramped U.S. detention facilities, unable to shower or brush his teeth. Then came a 15-hour stint in handcuffs.
Once released into Guatemala City, he, Ramirez and other Mexicans were bused across the border to Tapachula, a city of 400,000 that has become a purgatorial holding area for an estimated 50,000 deportees, refugees and other migrants from around the world. Many of them call it “a prison city.”
Previous U.S. administrations rarely deported people to countries to which they had no connection. But after changes to U.S. immigration policy in early 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began carrying out such transfers on a large scale.
They appear to be intended to make it harder for deportees to re-enter the United States. Third-country transfers are also a way to remove from the U.S. migrants who cannot legally be returned to Mexico because they have demonstrated in asylum proceedings a well-founded fear of violence or persecution if repatriated.
Article continues below this ad
Mexico has worked with the Trump administration to receive deported Mexicans. But it has objected to the U.S. policy of sending Mexican citizens to third countries.
“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 government said in an Aug. 20 statement.
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said: “The Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised.”
Migrants leave the city of Tapachula in southern Mexico in a caravan on Aug. 20, 2026. Thousands of deportees and refugees from around the world have collected there.
Georgina Pease/Puente News Collaborative
The deportation station
After the deportation flight dropped Ramirez in Guatemala’s capital city, authorities bused him to Mexico’s southern border. Mexican authorities then released him in Tapachula, more than 1,000 miles from the U.S. border. Before buying a bus ticket to his grandmother’s hometown of Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Ramirez reflected on the journey ahead.
Article continues below this ad
“I’m like 1,000 pesos short,” he said in an interview in Tapachula’s teeming bus station. “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 other countries.
Here, in the shadow of the Tacaná Volcano that marks the junction between Central and North America, human movement clashes with Mexico’s increasingly militarized immigration policies, which are designed to discourage migrants from traveling north to wealthier states or the U.S. border.
The U.S. has long coordinated with the Mexican government to try to curb the flow of northbound migrants. After a spike in migration from Central America in 2014, Mexico used U.S. financial assistance to increase the number of checkpoints in the country and ramp up deportations of non-Mexicans under its Programa Frontera Sur (the Southern Border Program).
Article continues below this ad
“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, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Mexico City that provides legal assistance and other support for female migrants.
Since January 2025, thousands of Mexican nationals — including unaccompanied children — and third-country deportees from Cuba, Venezuela and Central America have been transported on planes and buses directly to Tapachula.
The result has been a bottleneck: The tens of thousands of migrants in the city face difficulties moving north because of pervasive checkpoints and long waits for decisions on their applications for visas or refugee status.
So they wait and ponder their futures. Some still hope to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. Many say they can’t return to their native countries. Others consider making Mexico their home.
Article continues below this ad
The influx burdens infrastructure, refugee services and job markets, said Denisse Lugardo Escobar, Tapachula’s director of international relations and cross-border development.
Mexican local, state and federal authorities and international organizations try to 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.”
José David Murcia Valdez rides his bicycle at the rear of a caravan on the highway outside Tapachula on Aug. 20, 2026. The 30-year-old Honduran refugee planned to ride all the way to the city of Monterrey, more than 1,000 miles north.
Georgina Pease/Puente News Collaborative
Long road home
On the day Ramirez reached Tapachula, hundreds of migrants gathered in the city’s Parque Bicentenario under a light rain, behind a banner with hand-painted blue and black lettering that said Sueños sin Fronteras — Dreams without Borders.
Article continues below this ad
One of them, 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 to ride all the way to Monterrey, northern Mexico’s industrial center, about 150 miles from the Texas border.
The 30-year-old fled Honduras six years ago after a machete attack cost him a finger and left scars across his arms and shoulders. He made it to Monterrey and worked for three years at a recycling plant — until Mexican authorities arrived one day to check employees’ papers.
“They dumped me back in Honduras, but I can’t (stay in) my country because of the machete attack,” Murcia Valdez said. “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 on foot in a large group, migrants seek to reduce the risk of detention and of being targeted by organized crime.
Article continues below this ad
“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 around, exhausted and hungry. Mexican officials bused others back to Tapachula, which many migrants now call a “prison city.”
Murcia Valdez said that the last time he walked out of Tapachula in a caravan, it disintegrated in Oaxaca, and authorities sent him back south. This time, after a few days on the road, Murcia Valdez and the remaining members of the group had logged 62 miles but still had not made it out of Chiapas state.
“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.”
Article continues below this ad
‘Basically impossible’
Ramirez’s Mexican citizenship spared him the ordeal of a caravan. Instead, he took a days-long bus ride to Tamaulipas, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, the Texas home to which he can’t return.
As an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. with no viable path to legal status, he lived in fear of being deported to Mexico, a country he only vaguely remembered. He said it was worse to be dumped in Guatemala and then left to his own devices in southern Mexico.
“It’s wrong, you know. It’s bad,” he said.
Article continues below this ad
This time, Ramirez said he will stay on the Mexican side of the border. He said it has become “basically impossible” to cross into the U.S.
In Matamoros, he’s found work painting cars and plans to self-publish a book about his experiences.
“I don’t want to go back because I don’t need it,” Ramirez said. “I’ve got my own way to make money.”
Article continues below this ad