As USAID freezes, thousands feel the impact along the US-Mexico border

That’s transformed border towns from pass-throughs — where job opportunities are scant for the undocumented and services are only meant to be temporary — to migrants’ final stops. The shelters don’t have a fallback beyond the local community. Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum’s priority is to stave off recession-inducing tariffs by proving to Trump that the country can stop people and drugs at the border. The administration is directing federal resources toward developing giant tarp-covered facilities for deportees and has begun to deploy the National Guard to border states.

For González, the problems are acute: The UN helped pay for the dorms and bathrooms. Its children’s fund provided the basic medical checks for kids and teenagers. Even the toothpaste, deodorant and a stash of OFF! bug spray came from the UN.

These agencies receive much of their funding from the US, which under Trump’s direction has moved to strip the United States Agency for International Development — the world’s largest provider of foreign assistance — of most of its projects and put the majority of its employees on leave. The American Foreign Service Association and American Federation of Government Employees filed suit in federal court challenging the decisions.

Other organizations with funds from the US government are being affected, too. Kids in Need of Defense closed up its northern Mexico border programs in January. Asylum Access posted an advisory that its funds had been affected, limiting its ability to hire in Mexico.

In response to a request from Bloomberg News, a spokesperson for the United Nations’ refugee agency known as UNHCR said that it works with 140 shelters in the country that help people get access to humanitarian protection options within Mexico, and that it was “continuing to evaluate the impact in the pause in financing.” A spokesperson for UNICEF in Mexico said that the US “has over the course of our history been an important donor” and that the organization hoped the funding would resume as soon as possible.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration, known as IOM, declined to comment.

Most activists are not optimistic, since people close to the Trump administration — including billionaire Elon Musk — have derided the aid programs. And the Mexican government’s priorities are focused elsewhere.

“We’re people of faith, and so we’ll continue doing this work whether or not they help us,” said González, who converted his own bedroom into a larger kitchen for shelter residents. “It’s something we do from the heart. But if we pay for all of this, and on top of that pay for food, we won’t manage.”

For now, officials in Chihuahua State — which includes Ciudad Juárez — say deportation numbers have dropped slightly instead of having the kind of explosive increase Trump’s rhetoric had led them to expect. Some 2,200 Mexicans were deported to the state in January. The government has said it would provide each Mexican deportee with 2,000 pesos, or just under $100, help with their paperwork and transportation back home.

Sheinbaum’s government has also been readying a new facility for them in Ciudad Juárez, one of ten it’s planning to operate along the US-Mexico border that seeks to dignify the arrival of Mexicans. The shelter, which is not yet in operation, stands between a sports stadium, a fire station and a statue of Pope Francis.

“Mexico is trying to work with the United States to improve the conditions for Mexicans, in anticipation of the mass deportations that they are doing,” said Emilio López Reyes, a researcher associated with the Autonomous University of Chihuahua.

Sheinbaum’s plan has made clear the future of the Mexican population that is returning to the country, but she has said people of other nationalities will have to apply for protection in Mexico in order to stay here. In northern cities, staffing is limited at refugee offices. Refugees International estimated that 270,000 people had been waiting in Mexico for appointments on the CBP One app, while the Mexican government has insisted that the population is a fraction of that.

“The majority of them want to be repatriated to the countries, in which case we facilitate transport so they can arrive, primarily to Central America,” Sheinbaum said in January.

While Mexico agreed to establish working groups with the US on issues including trade, migration and security, its more immediate move has been the deployment of 10,000 National Guard members to supplement those already on the border. Sheinbaum and Trump agreed on a call at the start of February to reconsider after a month whether the measures had been sufficient to maintain the suspension of 25 percent tariffs on goods that Trump said he’d impose on Mexico and Canada.

In Chihuahua, the guard more than doubled the forces that were already positioned in the northern part of the state, said Col. José Luis Santos Iza. Dressed in military-style fatigues, the guardsmen peer into suspicious vehicles at checkpoints, patrol in remote stretches and station themselves along the wall.

The facilities set up by the Mexican government are meant to tend to deportees — not the other migrants still hoping for a chance to cross over into the US.

The National Guard and US border patrol have scared off some of them from crossing. So has the fear that the US may now choose to deport them back to their countries of origin. Many say they have their fingers crossed that the situation could change, though it’s not promising.

So, many migrants are biding their time. Some have sought other kinds of lodging in the city that allow them to settle in. They line up for food handouts at the foot of the city’s cathedral, where the Missionary Society of St. Columban disperses eggs and rice. Others have found day jobs paving roads or remodeling rooms.

Lesdy Marín took her 2-year-old to Hotel Ursula, which has newspapers plastered onto the windows of its ground floor and advertises a bed for 180 pesos a night. She joked with her mother — who is fronting the room’s cost — that it was only thanks to Mexican officials that she had ever been on a plane: They had forcibly sent her back to the country’s south twice, as she tried to reach Ciudad Juárez.

On Trump’s first day in office, Marín said she had a dream that she had finally gotten an appointment to hand herself in at the US border to claim asylum. When she woke up, she found out that the US president had revoked that option.

Turning back isn’t an option. Marín fears a custody battle with abusive ex-boyfriend if she returns to Colombia, or debt-collectors if she returns to her mother’s town in Venezuela. She says she’s convinced her daughter that much of their running was part of a game and spent time calling her cousins in the US to figure out what to do.

“My cousins say I should stay here and not move, because according to them, I’m going to be able to cross at some point,” she said. “But I don’t know when.”

González, the pastor, says that there are about 400 migrants living in the network of dozen faith-based shelters of which he’s president in Ciudad Juárez. He estimates that if they had to pay 90 pesos out of pocket to house every migrant, the costs would balloon to over 1 million pesos a month, or close to $50,000.

At the Casa del Migrante, one of the city’s larger shelters, deported Mexicans who had spent decades living in the US have appeared in the last two weeks alongside foreigners figuring out their options. There are crosses at the entrance decorated with the baggage tags from the US Department of Homeland Security and the plastic wristbands worn by the deportees from years passed, hung next to dozens of rosaries they’d brought from detention.

María, a woman in her 50s who asked that her last name not be used, has given up on the idea of joining her adult sons in New York City. But she isn’t planning to return to her Mexican home state of Oaxaca, where her husband was murdered for failing to pay extortion costs.

She had also received handwritten and verbal threats. Fearing for her life, she didn’t even return for her father’s funeral. Her best option now, she thinks, might be to go stay with a more distant relative in Mexico City.

“I wish I could be with my kids,” she said.

Others who have given up on crossing into the US are simply waiting for the IOM to fly them back home. It’s one of the services that hasn’t yet been cut.