As the sun rises on the rustic town of Ixmiquilpan in central Mexico, and the smell of chili-laced eggs and slow-roasted sheep wafts from the market, queues grow outside the various money transfer shops that surround the central square. When they open, women with young children, middle-aged men in baseball caps, and grandmothers with weathered faces pick up cash payments sent from their loved ones labouring in the United States.
The tellers count out piles of pesos worth $500, $300, $100 or whatever the relatives are able to send from their wages picking tobacco, mixing cement, or washing dishes. These “remittances”, as the money sent home is called, have kept Ixmiquilpan afloat for decades along with its surrounding villages, an area dominated by the indigenous Otomí people. While Mexico suffers heavy cartel violence, Ixmiquilpan is a fairly peaceful area. Families use the dollars to build sprawling homes on ancestral corn fields, put money into community groups to construct parks and churches, or they open grocery stores and taco stalls. But most of the dollars are used to just keep food on the table.
Despite Donald Trump waging a crackdown on undocumented migrants, especially those with criminal records, migrant dollars keep flowing south. In February, Mexico received $4.4 billion in remittances, according to Mexico’s Central Bank which tracks transfers. That was a 0.8% fall compared to the same month last year but it’s still historically a huge number. In total in 2024, Mexico received a record-breaking $64 billion in remittances, the second highest in the world behind India.
Inside the United States, the Trump administration has been making high-profile raids that make media splashes in both English and Spanish. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even went on an operation where she rather awkwardly pointed a rifle at an agent’s head as she spoke into the video camera in front of a heavily armoured vehicle. The administration has been flying deportees on military planes and it released videos of migrants with the amplified sounds of chains. Most controversially, it deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to the unforgiving CECOT prison in El Salvador. (Lawyers for many of the deportees claim they were innocent people caught up in the sweep because of tattoos of football teams or local carnivals).
All of this is on people’s minds here. María Quezada, 61, lines up to collect money sent to the family from a brother working in construction in North Carolina. “They need to keep quiet there in El Norte,” she says, using a common term for the US. “They are worried right now. This famous president, he doesn’t like migrants.” Yet others have high hopes that their own families will be okay. “I think those who get deported are the ones who have done something wrong,” says Benita Huerta, 30, as she cradles a baby in her arms. “If you don’t owe anything, you should be fine.”
The issue of the US-Mexico border, of millions of migrants swimming over the river and of smugglers sneaking in fentanyl, was a core factor that drove the MAGA movement and propelled Trump to power. Since returning to office in January, Trump has indeed transformed “The Border”, sending troops to the Rio Grande, virtually shutting down asylum claims and pressuring Mexico to hit drug cartels. The number of “encounters” by Border Patrol agents (the government term for when agents find migrants on the border area) has plummeted 94% since a record high under Joe Biden in 2023. The amount of fentanyl seized has gone down 73% since September.
Yet while deportations make headlines, the overall numbers have stayed fairly steady under Trump. The frequency of deportation flights has been similar to the last months of Biden and the total quantity of deportees appears to be slightly lower.
While Trump has massively reduced the number of new migrants coming in, therefore, he has not cut deeply into the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants already in the United States. (Some claim the true figure is much higher.) It’s hard to predict Trump, but if he does eventually do real mass deportations, as has been threatened, then it would massively disrupt many businesses, especially farms, construction sites and restaurants by taking away their workers.
In Ixmiquilpan, almost every family has members working in the US. Most of them went over illegally, either plodding over the seething desert or swimming over the river — although they usually went some years ago. None I speak to has had a loved one deported since Trump regained power, although I find several who were deported under previous presidents.
“In Ixmiquilpan, almost every family has members working in the US and most of them went over illegally”
Heriberto Pedraza, 58, who sits on a sidewalk a few blocks from the central square. He says he worked construction for two decades in the US, mostly in Florida, but was deported in 2009 under President Barack Obama after he was caught drunk driving. (The liberal hero Obama actually has the record for the highest number of “removals,” at over 3 million. Migrant activists call him the “deporter in chief.” This was in response to a rising number of undocumented workers at the time and use of expanded agencies). Pedraza said he never tried to return after that. “The Nineties were a great time to be in the United States. But things have changed now,” he says. “I’m happy here in my hometown.”
Immigration over the US-Mexico border has gone in waves over the past century. In the 1910s, people in northern Mexico fled over the Rio Grande from the desperado armies of the Mexican Revolution. From the Second World War to the Sixties, millions of Mexicans went over legally to toil in fields in what was called the Bracero Program to bring over farm workers. In much of central and southern Mexico, including Ixmiquilpan, people began heading to the United States in big numbers from the Eighties. This coincided with a 1986 amnesty for undocumented migrants under Ronald Reagan, which could have encouraged further immigration.
“It used to be that men here would go to Mexico City to get work,” says Martín Rodríguez, 75, as he sits in the shade in his tyre repair shop on the outskirts of Ixmiquilpan. “But then it changed. Instead of people saying, ‘I’m off to Mexico [City], they would say, ‘I’m off to El Norte.’” Locals went especially to Florida and North Carolina, where they built particular links with towns and jobs, although they worked in many other states, from Kentucky to Michigan.
Emigration from Ixmiquilpan probably reached a peak in the 2000s, but then hit a wall with the Obama deportations and great recession. Another problem was that cartels took over the Mexican side of the border running the human smugglers, or coyotes, and making it dangerous to cross without paying them. Locals tell me that coyotes now charge as much as $15,000 to go from Ixmiquilpan to a US destination, and most can’t afford that.
Instead, the record wave of migration under Biden was from elsewhere; more than two-thirds of those caught crossing in his term came from countries other than Mexico, especially Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Cuba but also as far afield as China and Central Africa. This was due to instability and violence in those countries and increased use of refugee claims; many applied for asylum rather than just sneaking over to work like the people of Ixmiquilpan used to.
The difficulty in going to the US means those already there fear coming home. A woman waiting to pick up money has a tear in her eye when she tells me she hasn’t seen her daughter in 15 years. But despite living away for decades, migrants still loyally send money home.
Many migrants from the area now have children who were born in the United States and are citizens. The American influence means that many in Ixmiquilpan speak English as well as Spanish and the indigenous Otomi tongue (which the locals call hñähñu). You can see this influence in palatial houses amid the breezeblock shacks, with migrants using techniques they learned building walls in North Carolina and adding in their own touches like Romanic pillars. There are also hundreds of half-finished houses scattering the villages waiting for those last dollars.
Some residents have tried hard to turn the remittances into a sustainable economic base. In the nearby village of Puerto Dexthi, Hilario Cerroblanco, 59, saved money from construction to build a small factory using a local plant to make brushes. “We need businesses so we can stay here,” he says. He secured orders from some shops in Mexico City but it’s hard to compete with Chinese plastic goods.
A lot of locals have been more successful selling cement and tools for migrant families to build their homes, or food stalls to spend the dollars on delicious meals. Ixmiquilpan market is buzzing with families. They are eating sheep that has been slow-cooked for more than ten hours in ovens carved in the earth, and they are drinking fresh green juice of celery, parsley, and nopal cactus. It’s a vibrant atmosphere that has been built on decades of global movement and cross-border transfers. But as turbulent new politics smash this old order, the resilient community of Ixmiquilpan will have to adapt to the new era.
