Mexico City/The merchants of Tapachula, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, are up in arms against a group of migrants deported from the United States, among them Cubans, who, in a migratory limbo and without access to job opportunities, survive as best they can in the vicinity of Plaza Miguel Hidalgo. Specifically, they propose hosting them in the tents located in the Olympic Stadium that are part of the Mexico Abraza Te program, originally created last year for Mexicans expelled by Donald Trump’s Government.
The deportees, regrets the president of the Association of Established Merchants and Property Owners of Tapachula (Acepitap), José Elmer Aquiahualt Herrera, in statements to the South Journalthey wander and relieve themselves everywhere.
Furthermore, he denounces, they generate conflicts. For the merchant, the tents of the Olympic Stadium are the ideal place for the deportees to be. “The place is conditioned for this and this way we avoid having migrants in parks doing their business,” he insisted.
At the beginning of April, the Tapachula city council denounced the Cuban Eduardo Tosco for an alleged attack on the worker Teresa Estrada. However, the man is still in the square. “The authorities looked for him for a few days. Surely when they saw him they noticed that they were not going to get anything out of his arrest,” he tells 14ymedio the lawyer Roger Ernesto Goitia.
The lawyer believes that in order for the transfer to the Stadium to take place, “the migrants must first be convinced that they will not be detained and expelled from the country.” Goitia affirms that these people communicate through WhatsApp messages, and “when they see workers or migration vans, they disperse.”
The lawyer specifies that the federal program is for fellow nationals and is designed to provide minimal support
The lawyer also specifies that the federal program is for fellow nationals and is designed “from Tapachula to provide minimal support for the return of Mexicans to their places of origin.” Unfortunately, he acknowledged, there is no data on the results in Tapachula. In addition, care is offered at the location three times a week and it is “a transit place.”
The closest precedent is the care offered to 121 compatriots – 91 men, 17 women and 13 minors – who were returned to the southern border last January. According to official data, between January 2025 and 2026, 11,089 Mexicans were received in Tapachula. The National Migration Institute confirmed to this newspaper that the country has a record of 142,706 beneficiaries of the Dignified Repatriation program, which is activated after arriving in the country through “Mexico embraces you.”
Last March, the district judge in Boston, William Young, denounced an “unwritten” agreement with Mexico through which The United States has deported 6,000 Cubans. According to Luis Rey García Villagrán, director of the Center for Human Dignification, at least 500 people from the Island were expelled in March and abandoned “without papers or money” in the state bordering Guatemala.
