Trump's Plan to Kick Out Mexican Immigrants Will Absolutely Need Mexican Cooperation Roque Planas - The Huffington Post
go to original December 21, 2016

A humorous short film called 'M.A.M.O.N. (Monitor Against Mexicans Over Nationwide)', reveals how president-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport three million immigrants will cause havoc in Central America (wecanfxit)

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on the promise not just to crack down on illegal immigration, but to humiliate the country’s southern neighbor by forcing Mexico to pay for his proposed border wall.

There are two sides, however, to Mexico’s key role in the United States’ immigration problem. The incoming administration, like those before it, will have to depend heavily on Mexico to help carry out whatever deportation program Trump settles on.

The very act of deporting a foreign national usually requires the consent of the receiving country, which has to issue travel documents for incoming deportees. More than two dozen foreign governments routinely refuse to accept deportees from the United States. In some cases, like Cuba, refusal is a matter of policy. In others, like with some African nations, their national bureaucracies can’t efficiently verify the identity of their undocumented citizens abroad and issue travel documents.

That’s not true of Mexico, the country that receives by far the most deportees from the United States. The U.S. has several agreements in place, including memorandums of understanding with the Mexican consulates in nine U.S. border jurisdictions, to expedite the removal of undocumented immigrants, with or without travel papers.

But Trump’s loudly expressed hostility toward Mexico has led prominent political figures there to contemplate some kind of retaliation.

Last month, Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican secretary of foreign affairs, floated the idea of refusing to accept the return of Mexican nationals who can’t first prove their citizenship. Since many Mexicans who cross the border illegally do so without taking a passport or other identification - and since about three-quarters of undocumented immigrants removed from the U.S. last year were Mexican nationals - such a requirement could jam up the entire U.S. immigrant detention system. And that system is already operating over capacity.

“Since many unauthorized Mexican immigrants have no documents, this would shift the political and economic cost of deportation from Mexico to its northern neighbor,” Castañeda wrote in The New York Times. “There would be backlogs, litigation and crowded detention centers. The news media would broadcast scenes of children separated from their parents who are stuck in limbo.”

Despite this potential “humanitarian catastrophe,” Castañeda argued such a move would be justified because “the outcry could conceivably force [Trump] to abandon detestable attempts at mass deportation.”

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

Related: U.S. and Mexico: Trump's Ignorance About the Border (Mexico Voices)

Related: Mexican Immigrants' Holiday Trips Home Overshadowed by Worries About Trump Presidency (Dallas News)

Related: In New Era of Trump, Mexico, US Groups Offer Aid to Migrants (Boston.com)

Related: Undocumented Parents Rushing to Get Their American-Born Children Mexican Citizenships (ABC News)

Related: The US Already Built Trump's Wall and It's Not on the Border (teleSUR)

Related: When You Have Ten Minutes to Say Goodbye to Your Mom Before She is Deported, There Aren’t Enough Words (The Good Men Project)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!