By Matthew B. Flynn & Chris Ortiz-Gonzalez
When Andrés Manuel Lopes Obrador (AMLO) was elected President of Mexico in 2018, he championed a migration policy rooted in human rights. Consistent with this vision, his administration’s unveiling of a new Strategy on Migration in May 2024 framed it as a rights-based, humanitarian approach to managing irregular migration–a central feature of which was the establishment of “Multiservice Centers for the Inclusion and Development of Migrants and Refugees,” purportedly designed to provide a wide range of migrant-support services.
While authorities claim that these centres will not be used for the purposes of detention, a critical examination of Mexico’s history of immigration control–particularly its role as a proxy enforcer of U.S migration policy–warrants skepticism. As this working paper demonstrates, facing pressure from the United States to impose stringent migration policies since the 1980s Mexico has frequently employed euphemistic and misleading language to reframe coercive practices as humanitarian ones, effectively obscuring actions that contravene human rights obligations. Mexico’s latest strategy may represent yet another case of semantic gymnastics, concealing the persistence of punitive migration enforcement under the guise of humanitarianism and masking the country’s on-going role as a surrogate enforcer of U.S migration control.
