“We are seeing mostly families, particularly women traveling alone with their children, who were immediately deported and just left here, in an extremely dangerous city, to sleep in the street and fend for themselves for basic needs,” said Jose Antonio Silva, MSF project coordinator in Reynosa. “These people are scared, in an unknown, unsafe city and often traumatized from a harrowing journey through Mexico and from their experience in US custody.”
For the past month, the number of people deported to Reynosa has continued to increase—as of a few days ago, there were approximately 400 people in the public square. Most are migrants who crossed into the US and were directly deported to Mexico under Title 42, a harmful, discriminatory, Trump-era policy that has continued under the Biden Administration. In violation of domestic and international law, the Title 42 policy exploits the pandemic to essentially shut down the border, rapidly blocking migrants and people seeking asylum in order to expel them directly back to Mexico or their countries of origin.
