What Trump’s ‘deportation blitz’ looks like in Ciudad Juarez

On the first day of his repeat term as president of the United States, Donald Trump went about making good on his promises to make life hell for asylum seekers. When I arrived a week after Trump’s inauguration in Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, which lies just across the border from the city of El Paso, Texas, I was told by a Venezuelan asylum seeker that the price of being smuggled the short distance into the US had suddenly soared to $10,000 per person. In his book Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future, published four years after the signing in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement that wreaked havoc on Mexican agriculture and drove countless campesinos north to the increasingly fortified US border, American writer Charles Bowden laid bare the link between the impoverishment and suffering of common Mexicans and the extractive nature of economic relations between the US and Mexico. However, not only did the US “plant ruin” in Ciudad Juarez, it also backed an ostensible “war on drugs” that was launched in 2006 and saw an obscene quantity of Mexican soldiers and police deployed to the metropolis, which was quickly propelled to the position of world’s pre-eminent “Murder City”, the title of Bowden’s subsequent book published in 2010. I spoke with a Venezuelan man in his 30s who did his best to exert optimism but acknowledged that the whole CBP One situation was a bit much to bear after the physical and psychological torment of the journey to Ciudad Juarez, noting: “It’s like swimming across a whole river just to drown on the other side.” By his account, he had escaped four kidnapping attempts in Mexico alone, which had been jointly staged by Mexican authorities and cartel operatives.