The US Is Dumping Elderly Migrants in Mexico Without ID, Money or Phones

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Marissa Revilla from truthdig on April 7, 2026.

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico — At 83, Miguel never imagined he would have to start over again. Born in Cuba, he had lived for decades in the United States, working and growing old there. But he was deported, and now he sleeps in a bed at a shelter in Villahermosa in the state of Tabasco, near Mexico’s southern border. He has no documents or money. He asked that his full name not be used out of fear of reprisals and the possible impact on his Mexico visa application.

On March 25, the Trump administration informed a federal court that it has deported about 6,000 Cubans to Mexico under an “unwritten” deal in which Mexico agreed to receive them. For the past year, Villahermosa has been receiving a steady flow of non-Mexican deportees, mostly Haitians and Cubans, who are elderly or medically vulnerable. They have no ties to Mexico, and they are arriving in Villahermosa without documents, without phones and with no institutions or loved ones waiting for them. They are stranded in a migratory limbo: too invisible for anyone to care about them, struggling with their health and too old to start over.

Miguel recalls fragments of his detention in October 2025; the confinement at “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida, the bunk beds, the metal mesh separating detainees from one another like caged animals.

“It was like a chicken coop,” he tells Truthdig. The place, he says, was surrounded by swamps. “With alligators,” he adds.

Then came the transfer. Several flights, stops he didn’t recognize. Maybe Louisiana. Maybe somewhere else. He doesn’t know.

“I just looked out the window,” he says, not understanding where they were taking him, until he arrived in Mexico.

He doesn’t know exactly how long he’s been here. Ten days, maybe 12. He has it written down somewhere, but he doesn’t want to check.

“When you leave, you bring nothing,” he says. “No phone, no way to contact family, no way to get back what you left behind.

“I had everything there,” he says. His life, as for many, was built on small certainties: a bed of his own, a familiar kitchen, neighbors who knew his name.

Miguel can’t go back to Cuba, he says. But in Mexico, officially, Miguel doesn’t exist. Without documents or identification, he and other deported migrants fall outside the system. They cannot access health care or formal employment. Many start the asylum-seeking process with the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, known as COMAR, but that process — which in theory should be resolved in weeks — can take months or even more than a year. Applications are often rejected, and there are no other alternatives. While the migrants wait, they are trapped in a legal void, with no effective access to rights.

“For the Mexican authorities, migrants aren’t anybody,” Josué Martínez Leal tells Truthdig. He is the subcoordinator of the Oasis de Paz del Espíritu Santo shelter, better known as Amparito, in Villahermosa where some of the deported migrants are now staying.

Mexico isn’t a safe country for migrants

During the current Donald Trump administration, the U.S. has hardened its immigration policy with the border closure and accelerated removals. In March 2020, during Trump’s first term, he had formalized his closed-border approach with Title 42, a supposed public health measure that allowed for immediate deportations without access to asylum. Although it was lifted in 2023, the practice of expulsions has continued through different mechanisms. Since 2020, Mexico has acceptedCubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans deported from the U.S.

Between May and November 2023, Mexico received at least 19,561 non-Mexican individuals expelled from the United States; in 2025, at least 12,983. A lack of institutional attention for non-Mexicans in Mexico means full and exact statistics are rare. While deported Mexicans can access programs such as Mexico Embraces You, which provides financial support, transport and health services, non-Mexicans are left out of the system.

The Mexican government denies the existence of a formal “safe third country” agreement, and these deportations operate without a clear legal framework or transparent guidelines. Organizations such as the Institute for Women in Migration have documented that Mexico is not a safe country due to the dangers that migrants and asylum-seekers face, including kidnapping and murder by organized crime groups and extortion, robbery and abuse by authorities.

For decades, Villahermosa was not a major stop on migration routes, Martínez Leal explains. “That changed in 2019, when Mexico toughened its migration policy under pressure from the United States and began controlling [migrants] within its own territory. With more detentions and transfers, people stopped moving north and began staying here.” He pauses. “[Villhermosa] became a destination city, by imposition.”

The shelter where many of these men now live was not originally designed for migrants. José de la Cruz Vidal Guzmán founded it in 2006 after he lost his wife in an accident. Days later, while leaving the nearby Dr. Juan Graham Casasús Regional Hospital, he saw someone receiving dialysis while sitting on a storm drain. He decided to create a space for patients and their family members who had nowhere else to go.

The shelter evolved as migrant traffic increased. It added medical staff, psychologists, social workers and legal advisers in coordination with humanitarian organizations.

“The idea was to create a space for psychosocial support to accompany people as they traveled through Mexico,” says Martínez Leal. “In 2024, we served more than 6,000 people. In 2025, only 1,300.”

The numbers reduced, but the cases became more complex. “We started receiving older and sick men,” he says.

“They are trapped from the start. To have access to rights, they need documents. But to get documents, they first have to exist legally. The problem is that the process takes months, sometimes years. Meanwhile, they can’t work, they can’t access health care regularly, they can’t rent. In practice, they don’t exist for the system.”

Sleeping at a gas station

Ángel Inzúa Moré was 18 when he arrived in the United States in 1980 from Cuba. A Catholic Church organization paid for his education, and he learned computer science. He worked for decades in the tech industry.

He describes how he was arrested in the 1980s. He says he was trying to break up a fight. He was sentenced to six years and seven months in prison, but only served six months for good behavior.

He never started a family. “Why would I, if I was going to be deported?” Inzúa Moré asks. Even though he had regularized his migrant status, he worried that the sentence and his record made him vulnerable to deportation.

In April of last year, he was detained for drinking in public. Three days later, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was waiting for him. He was detained for months. They took his money, belongings and documents. He missed out on scheduled eye surgery for glaucoma, and his vision is getting worse every day, he tells Truthdig.

The U.S. tried to deport him to Cuba. “I had a deportation order, but to Cuba, not to Mexico. Cuba didn’t accept me,” Inzúa Moré says. Cuban authorities accept some deportations, but not all. They only admit certain cases under bilateral agreements.

He was deported to Mexico in September 2025. Now, he sleeps at a gas station, behind some bushes, on a cardboard box. In the mornings, he goes to the shelter for coffee or a chance to eat. On the street, he runs into other Cubans in the same situation. They talk, smoke and keep each other company.

One of them is Alberto Rodríguez González, 73. He arrived in the United States from Cuba as a young man and worked for decades in trades such as carpentry and construction. As he got older, he faced various health problems. He suffered a stroke and lost much of his memory. Now, he struggles to speak. He says after his illness, the U.S. government took everything from him — Social Security, Medicare, his pension.

“I think it was because … it was a very bad stroke. I think the treatment was expensive, the machines they used on me were very expensive … I was left with nothing,” Rodríguez González says. He was not picked up in a raid, he adds. He went to immigration authorities himself to complain. “I told them, ‘You took everything from me. What am I supposed to do?’”

The response was to deport him to Mexico, in around November 2025, though because of his stroke he doesn’t remember the exact date. Rodríguez González believes he was discarded, that once he got sick he was no longer seen as useful. He arrived in Mexico disoriented, without documents or access to treatment.

“I lost my mind, I lost my memory and I ended up in a really bad state,” he says.

Now, he too sleeps on the street and depends on intermittent visits by medical teams from international nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors of the World. He has also lost contact with his family. After the stroke, he forgot phone numbers, and his phone — where he stored everything — disappeared during the immigration process. He only remembers his daughter’s name.

Sometimes, he says, he worries he might hurt others. He went to the police and asked them to lock him up. They didn’t. “There’s nothing here,” he says.

Roy, 67, does have a place to sleep — but that’s all. He declined to provide his full name. He arrived in the U.S. at 20, after deserting from the Cuban military following the war in Angola in the mid-1970s. In the U.S., he received asylum, he says. He worked for 44 years at the same company.

“I was doing well,” Roy tells Truthdig. He eventually bought a home, then retired.

Then, on his birthday, Aug. 3, 2025, immigration agents surrounded his home. A helicopter hovered overhead. Several armed agents threw him to the ground. “Like I was a terrorist,” he says.

He was detained for eight months. His asylum status was ignored, he says, and ICE gave him a choice: remain imprisoned in the U.S. or be deported to Mexico. He chose deportation.

“Better to be free here than to stay locked up there,” Roy says.

Upon arrival, he was released with no support. “There’s the door, get out,” he recalls being told. He walked around until he found a shelter. Along the way, he was robbed. “They steal there and they steal here,” he says.

Today, he works at a scrapyard and rents a bedroom in Villahermosa. He believes he is close to obtaining residency in Mexico.

“At least I’m not on the street,” he says. Like most, he doesn’t have access to his retirement funds, which he says were blocked in the United States.

“You start to think: What’s the point of living?” he says.

Some don’t live very long after arrival. Ricardo del Pino, 67, arrived in Villahermosa last year, deported from Las Vegas, also while sick. He had a herniated spinal disc and pancreatic cancer that had not yet been diagnosed.

In the Amparito shelter, his health deteriorated quickly. Despite his lack of documents, staff fought for him to be admitted to the hospital anyway, and he died there 18 days later, Martínez Leal says.

The shelter paid for his cremation. Without documents though, they could not record his nationality on his death certificate. His ashes remain in the shelter’s chapel, alongside the remains of other migrants.

The deportations violate human rights

Luis René Lemus Rivera wants to return to Cuba, he says. Sixty years old, he arrived in the United States in 1998. He never managed to regularize his status, instead living there for more than two decades with a deportation order. For years, various administrations allowed him to stay in the U.S. He worked at whatever he could, almost always in the informal economy.

Then one day, he went to immigration offices to sign paperwork — something he said he had to do every year — and was not allowed to leave. He was deported to Mexico without any explanation, he says. After 28 years in the U.S., he now has nothing: no papers, no stability, no clear future.

Lemus arrived in Villahermosa just over a month ago. He was found on the street, disoriented. He says he lost his mind. He was hospitalized and later transferred to the shelter. He has schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. He depends on medication from the irregular visits of Doctors of the World

“I don’t know how much longer they can keep me here,” he says of the shelter, where “there are people who have been waiting nearly a year for [visas].”

From October 2024 to June 2025, Mexico granted asylum to only 3% of migrants who applied, issuing 5,191 humanitarian visas out of more than 140,000 requests. Mexico was among the top five countries for asylum applications in 2023, but COMAR doesn’t have enough resources or staff to guarantee effective assistance.

When the United States deports elderly and medically vulnerable people to Mexico, it does so knowing they are condemning them to lives of isolation, neglect and desperation. This is a violation of its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture. Displacing people with chronic conditions to a country where they cannot access medical care, medication or stable housing exposes them to severe, rapid and irreversible deterioration of their health, causing intense suffering and a significant reduction in life expectancy.

About 30 older men live on the streets near the hospital and the shelter in Villahermosa. They sleep on the sidewalk. They work at whatever they can, opening and closing convenience store doors for customers and eating when someone gives them something. Sometimes they don’t survive.

“About 15 people have died in the last year,” Martínez Leal says.

This is the result of a deliberate policy. On March 16, a U.S. federal appeals court allowed the government to revive a Trump policy that rapidly deports migrants to a third country. In late February, a judge had blocked the policy because it put people at risk in potentially dangerous countries, without allowing them due process or to raise concerns for their safety first.

Meanwhile, there is also a steady weakening of organizations helping to provide a humanitarian response in Mexico. Budget cuts and decreases in international funding have reduced their operational capacity. Some shelters depend on funds from organizations such as the U.N. Refugee Agency or from U.S.-funded programs that have been slashed. The outcome is a support network that is increasingly fragile, Martínez Leal says.

Near the hospital, the men walk slowly. They recognize each other. They call each other by name. Memory is the only thing they have left. Everything else — documents, homeland, family, the possibility of returning — was lost along the way.

Here, where no one claims them and where even death can go unrecorded, the only thing they can do is endure.

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