On July 10, 2025, immigration officers conducted a violent raid at a cannabis greenhouse in Camarillo, California. Workers fled in horror. Outside, behind rows of police officers, families and community members fought to reach workers amidst clouds of tear gas and flashbang bursts. By nightfall, immigration agents had detained over 200 laborers, and Jaime Alanís, a 57-year-old migrant from Huajúmbaro, Michoacán, lay in an intensive care unit. During the raid, he fell thirty feet from the greenhouse ceiling while trying to flee. He died a day later, leaving behind his community, wife, and daughter.
Days after his death, on July 16, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced her administration would consider legal action over Alanís’s death. Her words, and a pending legal response, raise a key question: As the United States government expands its assault on immigrants—many of them Mexican—what role should the Mexican state play in defending their dignity?
Recent raids have upended communities by removing people who were long anchored in them. Through mid-July, over half of the Mexicans detained in this year’s raids in Los Angeles had been living in the city for over a decade. More than one-third had lived in the United States for over twenty years. Family members and neighbors—torn away and warehoused in deplorable conditions. The Mexican state can help repair these wounds by fortifying its consular efforts, supporting the work of advocacy organizations, and modeling a politics of migrant dignity.
While navigating tariff threats and pressures over narco-trafficking and violence, the Mexican government can still do more to push a politics of migrant dignity, in the United States and at home. It has before. Indeed, the Mexican state can play an essential role in hemispheric immigration politics because it has for over 100 years.
Shifting Migration Policy
From the 1900s through the early 1970s, Mexico’s government opposed long-term Mexican migration. Seeing it as detrimental to the country’s economic development, Mexico aided efforts to stifle and reverse migration. In the early 1930s, the U.S. government repatriated and deported between 350,000 and 2 million ethnic Mexicans—both citizens and non-citizens—who were blamed for “taking jobs” during the Great Depression. The Mexican government aided removals by transporting migrants from the border deep into the country’s interior, hindering migrants’ attempts to re-cross. Similarly, in the 1950s, during “Operation Wetback”—the mass deportation campaign Donald Trump promises to emulate—the Mexican government transported deportees far into the country’s territory to solidify their removal from U.S. soil.
Yet, while the Mexican government opposed the emigration of its citizens through the early 1970s, it also recognized the importance of giving asylum to political refugees and other migrants from across the globe. In the late 1930s, the Lázaro Cárdenas administration opened Mexico’s doors to thousands of refugees of the Spanish Civil War, despite some Mexicans’ objections. Later, during the Cold War, Mexico gave asylum to thousands of political refugees from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—even while the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party waged its own campaign against Mexican social movements.
As Mexico faced a series of economic downturns starting in the 1970s, it shifted its posture on its citizens migrating to the United States.
As Mexico faced a series of economic downturns starting in the 1970s, it shifted its posture on its citizens migrating to the United States. Historical inflation peaked in the mid-1970s, debt rose in the 1980s, and a recession and peso devaluation took hold in the mid-1990s. These crises pushed the state to view migration as a potential solution to poverty. While it largely abandoned these communities—mostly in underserved rural regions—the Mexican state built up its support for immigrants in the United States.
In 1990, the Foreign Relations Secretariat established the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad (PMCE), which aimed to protect Mexican migrants and build ties with organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the National Council of La Raza. Then, in 2003, as the North American Free Trade Agreement—better known as NAFTA—displaced millions of rural Mexicans, the Mexican state institutionalized its migrant advocacy. Consolidating the PMCE and the Presidential Office for Mexicans Abroad into the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, it enshrined the protection of Mexican immigrants in the United States in its foreign relations agenda.
Migration under Morena
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Claudia Sheinbaum, the former and current presidents of Mexico’s ruling left-wing party, known as Morena, have made symbolic and material gestures in support of Mexican immigrants. In his final Independence Day ceremony, AMLO voiced his embrace of Mexican migrants. “Long live our migrant siblings!” he shouted from the central balcony of the National Palace during the famous Grito—the annual commemoration of the Cry of Dolores, which marked the start of the Mexican War of Independence. In this year’s Grito, Sheinbaum made a similar call: “Long live our migrant sisters and brothers!”
Mexico’s relationship with the United States has shifted since AMLO left office. Much of Sheinbaum’s early presidency has been defined by the Trump administration’s hostility—expressed in tariff threats and a politics of xenophobia and mass deportation. Though she has been praised for her handling of the tariff threat, her response to the assault on migrant communities has been limited, reflecting Mexico’s uneven political and economic relationship with the United States.
Rather than voicing outright objection, the current Morena administration has responded to U.S. deportation campaigns by promising modest stipends, benefits, and jobs for deported Mexicans. As in the past, the broader Mexican state has also provided support by monitoring migrants’ work conditions and immigration enforcement through its consular and foreign relations programs. In addition to voicing condemnation over the death of Jaime Alanís, Sheinbaum criticized the conditions for migrants at the Florida detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz”. However, her position has not been that migrants detained in the facility must be returned to their communities in the United States, but rather “for them to return to [Mexico] immediately and not be detained in this manner.”
For much of the twentieth century, Mexico’s government opposed Mexican migration but embraced some immigration into the country. Now, it embraces Mexican immigrants abroad but complicates life for countless migrants within its borders.
Both AMLO and Sheinbaum’s approaches to the broader issue of immigration have been contradictory. For much of the twentieth century, Mexico’s government opposed Mexican migration but embraced some immigration into the country. Now, it embraces Mexican immigrants abroad but complicates life for countless migrants within its borders.
When threatened with tariffs in 2019, AMLO’s administration cooperated with the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)—also known as “Remain in Mexico”—a policy created under Trump and momentarily continued by Biden. MPP turned asylum seekers away from the United States and forced them to remain on the Mexican side of the border while they awaited entry. This policy put countless Central American, South American, and Caribbean migrants in peril in Mexican border towns, exposing them to abuse, extortion, and violence. Mexican armed forces, in many instances, contributed to the brutalization of these migrants. AMLO’s cooperation with this policy—and more broadly with U.S. immigration enforcement—reflects Mexico’s long history as an immigrant buffer zone for the United States. However, it also reveals how Morena administrations have restricted migration in Mexico to curry political and economic favor with the United States.
Earlier this year, President Sheinbaum faced a similar predicament. Calling tariff threats “nothing new,” she evaded their enactment in February by expanding Mexican cooperation with U.S. immigration enforcement. She has stationed 10,000 National Guard officers to patrol Mexico’s northern border. Although this deployment is primarily connected to concerns over drug trafficking, it is also linked to preventing the smuggling of immigrants. Sheinbaum has additionally accepted over 6,000 third-country immigrants deported from the United States, directly aiding Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Much like in the past, Mexico’s participation in today’s immigration politics is rife with contradictions born from its unbalanced relationship to the United States. Mexico’s government supports Mexican migrants in certain circumstances, but it extends far less grace to most immigrants in its own territory.
Transforming the Politics of Migration
The Mexican state should build upon its monitoring of immigration enforcement in the United States. Through the work of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles, local advocates have accessed crucial information regarding the number of undocumented immigrants detained in 2025 raids. Statistics and official observations are critical for better understanding the magnitude and severity of deportation campaigns. They are also essential as migrants and their families seek justice, in a backdrop of increasingly unjust immigration policy by the Trump administration.
The Mexican state can also fortify its relationship with advocacy organizations to challenge the power of private detention centers, a key element in Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Though difficult for the Mexican government to litigate against private companies in the United States—as evidenced by its failed efforts to sue U.S. gun manufacturers—its own investigations through consular agents can aid organizations like MALDEF and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles in their efforts to dismantle detention centers run by companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic.
In 2020, Mexican consuls used legal pressure against the Irwin Detention Center in Georgia for subjecting four Mexican women to medical malpractice. By doing so, it prevented the deportations of three of the four women. As this year shapes up to be one of the deadliest for migrants in the custody of U.S. immigration agencies, legal pressure is crucial. For it to be successful, coordinated—rather than disjointed—efforts by the Mexican government and immigrant advocacy organizations will be critical.
In the past several months, migrants from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, and several other countries have died in detention and immigration raids. Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a man who migrated from Mexico as a child and spent most of his life in the United States, died after detention officers rejected his pleas for medical help. As more migrants with diverse origins face Ayala-Uribe’s fate, Mexico must aid the legal work of advocacy organizations and extend this model to similarly affected nations.
In the long term, the Mexican state can—and must—espouse a politics of migrant dignity.
In the long term, the Mexican state can—and must—espouse a politics of migrant dignity. By law, Mexico offers robust rights and some protections to migrants and refugees: temporary residency, job security, education, and health care. In practice, however, these promises go largely unmet because of institutional bottlenecks, pushing immigrants into perilous situations that force them to attempt migrations farther north. By meeting these guarantees, the Mexican state can reify the politics of migrant dignity already written in its law and give concrete terms to a political framework that should be emulated beyond borders—including in the United States.
By acting now, the Mexican state can transform the politics of migration. The country’s ability to make these changes is constrained by tariff threats, pressures over narco-violence, and its uneven relationship with the United States. But the injustices committed against Jaime Alanís, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, and countless other migrants demand that the Mexican state do far more to stand up for migrants beyond its borders.
Gabriel Panuco-Mercado is a PhD student in History at Stanford University. His research focuses on late-twentieth-century Mexican migration to the United States.