But the arrests with López Obrador were 434% more than those notified in the six -year term of Felipe Calderón, which added 509,402, according to data from the Migration Policy Unit of the Ministry of the Interior (Segob).
In official statistics, the denomination has been modified to refer to people in mobility that are arrested and taken to migratory stations. They have been called insurance, presentation before the authority, channels and events. In official reports they also call it “rescues.”
But, in fact, it is a practice of federal forces and the National Migration Institute to stop, despite not committing a crime, to foreign persons who cross the territory without documents.
Figures without updating
To date, it is not possible to know how many migrants have been arrested so that the six -year term of President Claudia Sheinbaum, because the federal government has not updated the figures for six months. The latest available data dates from August 2024.
The Segob web portal explains that this is due to a restructuring: “User notice: the data of people in irregular immigration situation will take up to update due to a restructuring process.”
However, other migratory statistics have been updated. The total number of entries from foreign people has data available until December, just like Mexican figures returned by Canada and the United States. While the registration of migratory procedures reaches until November.
The figure is biased because the detainees have just counted until August and those documented only until November. ”
Lorena Cano, Legal Coordinator at the Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI).
The lack of data on detention events in Mexico generates uncertainty in the current context, when the second time US President Donald Trump presses Mexico to stop irregular migration with the deployment of military.
On this occasion, the elements of the Armed Forces were not sent to the southern border, as happened in the Sexenio de López Obrador, but to the northern border, where 10,000 national and military guards perform patrols and install seals to contain migration and stop drug trafficking.
During the operation called “Border Norte”, which began on February 5 following the tariff pause, the federal forces have arrested 383 people (until Wednesday), however, the authority has not specified how many are migrants in condition irregular.
The reality is that there are no official accurate figures of migrants in Mexico “,
Lorena Cano Padilla, Legal Coordinator in IMPUMI.
Without clear data, a stigmatizing and unreal discourse about the number of irregular foreign or refugee people in Mexico is maintained.
“This is very important because, when we hear ‘they are already a lot of migrants’, ‘Here we have our own poor’, because they are not even 10% of the total population in Mexico,” he says.
“We need a lot of empathy and a lot of sensitivity in the country, but the authorities lack a lot of preparation, a lot of organization,” adds the specialist.
Deportations fall
Despite the large number of arrests during the six -year period of López Obrador, the amount of deportations that Mexico made in that period was lower.
According to official data, between 2019 to August 2024, Mexico expelled 533,563 foreigners, 26% less than in the administration of Peña Nieto, which added a total of 727,674 deportations.
But with respect to the government of Felipe Calderón, the amount of expulsions grew 13%.
The three sexenios have in common who expelled people from Central America, mainly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
In the six -year period of Peña Nieto, in 2014, the South Border Program was implemented, in the middle of the unprecedented arrival of thousands of childhoods in Central America that were traveling without company and that at the time Barack Obama, then president of the United States, described as humanitarian crisis. This initiative resulted in the increase in the number of deportations and arrests.
In 2018, the first migrant caravans were held until Trump’s first pressures arrived in 2019 and the imposition of the “Stay in Mexico” program. So the immigration authorities arrested more Central Americans during that six -year period. A few years later the presence of migrants from Haiti, African countries, Venezuela and Colombia was also increased.
