VILLAHERMOSA – At 83, Miguel never thought he would have to start over. Born in Cuba, he had lived for decades in the United States. He had worked and grown old there. But he was deported and now sleeps on a borrowed bed in a shelter in Villahermosa, Tabasco, near Mexico’s southern border. He has no documents. No money. No country. He asked that we not use his full name for fear of reprisals and the potential impact on his visa application.
On March 25th, the Trump administration informed a federal court that it had deported some 6,000 Cubans to Mexico under an “unwritten” agreement in which Mexico agreed to receive them. Since then, Villahermosa has received a steady stream of people from third countries, mostly Haiti and Cuba, who are elderly or have medical vulnerabilities. They had no ties to Mexico, and today, between 60 and 90 years old, they arrive in Villahermosa without documents, without phones, with no one to meet them. Sick and penniless, they are stranded in a migratory limbo: too old to start over, too invisible for anyone to take responsibility for them.
Miguel recalls fragments of his detention in October 2025. The confinement at Alligator Alcatraz in Ochoope, Florida. The bunk beds. The wire mesh that separated them from one another as if they were caged animals.
“It was like a chicken coop,” he tells Truthdig. The place, he says, was surrounded by swamps. “By crocodiles,” he adds.
Then the transfer. Several flights. Stops he doesn’t recognize. Maybe Louisiana. Maybe somewhere else. He doesn’t know.
“I just stared out the window,” he says. Without 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 twelve. He has it written down somewhere. As if writing the date were a way to fix something amidst the disorientation.
“When you leave, you have nothing,” he says. “No phone, no contact with family, no way to recover what you left behind.”
“I had everything there,” he says. His life, like that of many others, was made up of small certainties: his own bed, a familiar kitchen, neighbors who knew his name.
He can’t go back to Cuba, he says, but in Mexico, officially, Miguel doesn’t exist. Without documents or identification, he and the other deported migrants are left outside the system: they can’t access medical care, formal employment, or even the most basic protection mechanisms. Many begin the asylum process with the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR), but that process—which in theory should be resolved in weeks—can take months or even more than a year. While they wait, they are trapped in a legal vacuum: without effective access to their rights, with applications that are often rejected, and with no other way to regularize their status.
“For the Mexican authorities, they are nobody,” Josué Martínez Leal tells Truthdig. He is the assistant coordinator of the Oasis de Paz del Espíritu Santo shelter, better known as Amparito, in Villahermosa, Tabasco, where some of the deportees now live.
Mexico is not a safe country for migrants
During the current administration of Donald Trump, the United States tightened its immigration policy with the de facto closure of the border and the expansion of expedited deportations. In March 2020, during Trump’s first term, this approach was formalized with Title 42, a measure that allowed for immediate deportations without access to asylum. Although Title 42 was lifted in 2023, the deportation policy has continued under different mechanisms. It was in 2020 that Mexico agreed to accept people deported from the U.S., who are originally from countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Between May and November 2023, Mexico received at least 19,561 non-Mexican people deported from the United States; in 2025, at least 12,983 more. The Mexican government denies the existence of a formal “safe third country” agreement. These deportations operate without a clear legal framework or transparent guidelines.
Furthermore, the treatment differs according to nationality: while deported Mexicans have access to programs like “México te Abraza” (Mexico Embraces You), with economic support and services, non-Mexicans are left out of the system. Organizations like the Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) have documented that Mexico is not a safe country because it is dangerous for migrants and asylum seekers, who face the risks of organized crime such as kidnapping and murder, as well as extortion, robbery, and abuse by authorities.
For decades, Villahermosa was not on migration routes, explains Martínez Leal. “That changed in 2019, when Mexico tightened its immigration policy under pressure from the United States and began to contain people within its own territory. With more detentions and transfers, people stopped moving north and began to stay here.” She pauses. “It became a destination city within an imposed circuit.”
The shelter where these men live today wasn’t originally designed for migrants. It was created in 2006 after its founder, José de la Cruz Vidal Guzmán, lost his wife in an accident. Days later, upon leaving a hospital, he saw someone receiving dialysis over a sewer grate. He decided to build a space for those who had nowhere else to go. For years, they have received patients and their families from the Dr. Juan Graham Casasús Regional Hospital.
With the increase in migration flows, the shelter transformed. Medical staff were integrated with psychology, social work, and legal counsel, in collaboration with humanitarian organizations.
“The idea was to create a space for psychosocial support to accompany people as they travel through Mexico,” says Martínez Leal.
“In 2024, we attended to more than 6,000 people. In 2025, only 1,300,” says Martínez Leal. Fewer people. More complex situations. “Deported older men started arriving. Sick. Alone,” he says. “They’re trapped from the start,” says Martínez Leal. “To access their rights, they need documents, but to get documents, they first have to exist legally. The problem is that this process takes months, sometimes years. In the meantime, they can’t work, they can’t access regular healthcare, they can’t rent. In effect, they don’t exist for the system.”
Sleeping at a Gas Station
Ángel Inzúa Moré was 18 years old when he arrived in the United States in 1980. A Catholic Church organization paid for his studies, and he learned computer skills. He worked for decades.
In the 1980s, he was arrested. He claims he was trying to break up a fight. He was sentenced to six years and seven months in prison, but due to good behavior, he served only six months. He says that this event has haunted him for the rest of his life.
He never started a family. “What for, if they were going to deport me anyway?” Inzúa Moré asks. Even though he legalized his immigration status, the sentence and his record always made him feel insecure.
In April of last year, he was arrested for public intoxication. Three days later, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was waiting for him. They detained him for months. They took his money, belongings, and documents. He even lost the opportunity to have eye surgery for glaucoma, and he says his condition is getting worse every day.
The United States tried to deport him to Cuba. “I had a deportation order, but for Cuba, not Mexico. Cuba wouldn’t accept it,” says Inzúa Moré. Cuban authorities accept some deportations, but not all: they only admit certain cases under bilateral agreements.
Today he sleeps at a gas station, behind some bushes, on a cardboard box. In the mornings he returns to the shelter and drinks coffee. On the street, he encounters other Cubans in the same situation, and they talk, smoke, and keep each other company. One of them is Alberto Rodríguez González, a 73-year-old Cuban. He arrived in the United States as a young man and worked for decades in trades such as carpentry and construction. Over time, his body stopped responding: he suffered a stroke and lost his memory. He speaks with difficulty. He says that the U.S. government then took everything from him: Social Security, Medicare, his pension. “I think it was because of the stroke I had; it was very severe. Apparently, it was expensive; the machines they put in were very expensive… I was left with nothing,” said Rodríguez González. He wasn’t detained in a raid, he says. He went to immigration to complain. “I told them: you took everything from me, what am I going to do?” The response was to deport him to Mexico, around November 2025, although because of his stroke he doesn’t know the exact date. Rodríguez González believes they discarded him, that once he got sick he was no longer useful. He arrived in Mexico disoriented, without treatment and without documents.
“I lost my mind, I lost my memory, and I was a wreck,” says Rodríguez González.
Today he also sleeps on the streets and depends on intermittent medical brigades from international non-governmental organizations like Doctors of the World. He also lost contact with his family: after the stroke, he forgot their numbers and his phone, where he kept everything. He disappeared during the immigration process. He only remembers his daughter’s name.
Sometimes, he says, he feels he might hurt others. He went to the police to ask them to detain him. They didn’t.
“There’s nothing here,” he says.
Roy, who is 67, does have a place to sleep—but that’s all. He prefers not to give his full name. He came to the United States at 20, after deserting from the Cuban army upon returning from the war in Angola. He received asylum in the United States. He worked for 44 years at the same company.
“I was doing well,” Roy tells Truthdig. He says he retired and bought property.
On his birthday, August 3rd, 2025, immigration agents surrounded his house. 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. They ignored his asylum application and gave him a choice: stay imprisoned in the United States or go to Mexico. He chose to leave.
“It’s better to be free here than to remain imprisoned there,” Roy says.
Upon arrival, they released him without any support. “There’s the door, go,” he recalls. He walked penniless until he found a shelter. Along the way, he says, he was also robbed. “They steal from us just as much,” he says.
Today he lives in Villahermosa. He believes he is about to obtain residency in Mexico. He works at a scrap yard. He rents a room.
“At least I’m not on the street anymore,” he says. At his age, he says, he can no longer live in those conditions. Nor, like most, does he have access to his retirement, which, he says, was blocked in the United States.
“You start to think: what’s the point of living?” he says.
Ricardo del Pino arrived last year, deported from Las Vegas and also ill. A herniated disc. Pancreatic cancer that no one had diagnosed. He was 67 years old.
In Villahermosa, his health deteriorated rapidly. He needed medical attention. But he had no documents. The shelter staff managed to get him admitted to the hospital despite everything, and he died there 18 days later, Martínez Leal recounts.
The shelter paid for his cremation. Without papers, they couldn’t register his nationality on the death certificate. His ashes remain there in the shelter’s chapel, alongside the remains of other people who have traveled these roads.
Deportations Violate Human Rights
Luis René Lemus Rivera wants to return to Cuba. He is 60 years old. He arrived in the United States in 1998. He was never able to regularize his status. He lived for more than two decades with a deportation order. For years, different administrations allowed him to remain in the United States. He worked whatever jobs he could find, almost always in the informal sector.
One day he went to immigration to sign in (something he said he had to do every year) and he never left. He was deported to Mexico. Without clear explanations.
Lemus Rivera spent 28 years in the United States, but in the end, he had nothing. No papers, no stability, no clear future.
He arrived in Villahermosa a little over a month ago. They found him on the street, disoriented.
He says he lost his mind. He was hospitalized and then transferred to a shelter. He has schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. He depends on medication and irregular visits from medical brigades like Doctors of the World. “I don’t know how long they can keep me here,” he says of the shelter, where “there are people who have been waiting (for visas) for almost a year.” From October 2024 to June 2025, Mexico granted asylum to only 3% of the migrants who requested it, issuing 5,191 cards for humanitarian reasons, out of more than 140,000 applications. This placed Mexico among the five countries with the most asylum applications worldwide (in 2023), while COMAR operates with insufficient resources to guarantee effective care.
When the United States deports elderly and medically vulnerable people to Mexico, it does so knowing that they will be sent to conditions of isolation, abandonment, and despair, which violates its international obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture (CAT). Displacing people with chronic illnesses to a country where they cannot access medical care, medication, or stable housing exposes them to a severe, rapid, and irreversible decline in their health, causing intense suffering and a significant reduction in life expectancy.
Around 30 elderly men live on the streets near the hospital and shelter in Villahermosa. They sleep on the sidewalk. They work whatever jobs they can find.
They eat when someone gives them something. They stand in doorways of convenience stores, opening and closing doors. Some dig holes for shelter; others die.
“About 15 people have died in the last year,” says Martínez Leal.
What is happening in Villahermosa is the result of a deliberate policy. Just on Monday, March 16th, a U.S. appeals court temporarily allowed the government to reinstate a Trump-era policy that quickly deports migrants to a third country. Previously, a judge had blocked this policy because it put people at risk without giving them a real chance to defend themselves.
Added to this is the progressive weakening of the organizations that support the humanitarian response in Mexico. Budget cuts and changes in international funding have reduced their operational capacity. Some shelters depend on funds from agencies like UNHCR or from US-funded programs, which have suffered budget adjustments. The result is an increasingly fragile support network, says Martínez Leal.
Around the hospital, the men walk slowly. They recognize each other. They call each other by name. Memory is all 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, all that remains is to keep going.
One more day. Without papers, without a country. Hoping not to disappear before their time.
Original article by Marissa Revilla, Chiapas Paralelo, April 13th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.