Mexican Deportees, Once Ignored Back Home, Now Find ‘Open Arms’
Now, Mexican politicians are eagerly embracing them, portraying deportees as the embodiment of President Trump’s hostility toward their country
and their people — even though deportations of Mexican citizens actually fell in the opening months of his term.
"We gave lip service to the migrants" in the past, she added, and now "you have a sector of society
that is really moved by this reality and trying to do things." But to some, the sudden rise in concern for migrants feels like political opportunism, taking advantage of the public fury over Mr. Trump before Mexico’s elections next year.
The Mexican government’s statistics also show a slowdown in Mexican citizens being kicked out of the United States during January
and February, with fewer deportations in those months than during any month last year.
It’s really self-serving," said Nancy Landa, 36, who was pulled over by immigration agents in Los Angeles one morning in 2009 and,
after 20 years in the United States, dumped across the border in Tijuana before nightfall — with only a cellphone and $20.
"Unlike what’s happening in the United States, this is your home," the labor secretary, Amalia
García, told deportees in the audience at a recent event for the city’s jobs programs.
According to statistics from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the number of Mexican citizens deported
from the United States in the first three months of 2017 dropped by nearly 20 percent from a year earlier.
When signing the legislation last month, Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said of the migrants, "As a society
and as a country, we have the ethical and moral duty to receive them with open arms, to treat them with affection, respect and dignity." Mexico is still bracing for an increase in deportations from the United States.