More people who are not its nationals have been removed here from the United States than to every other receiving state combined. Nobody is screened on arrival. People are bussed two to three days to the far south, past the thirty-six hour limit Mexico's own Supreme Court set. For Central Americans the stop is not the end.
What the record showsA receiving stateAs of September 11, 2026
Arrangement reported
Yes
Transfers reported
Yes
People with protection among them
Yes
Onward return reported
Yes
These are statements about the public record, not about the country. "Investigating" means the Coalition has not located a report or a decision on that point and is still looking. It is not a finding that the thing did not happen.
AlertChain refoulement and violence in transitMexico
Basis: Mexico’s own immigration institute records, obtained by freedom of information request; a Human Rights Watch report based on interviews with 53 people moved this way; a Refugees International field study; a ruling of Mexico’s own Supreme Court; and a finding of grave human rights violations by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. Mexico has received more people removed from the United States who are not its nationals than every other receiving state put together. It is also the state on this list that has done most to constrain its own immigration detention, and this page says both.
Refugees International, 27 February 2026
A Salvadoran man who had won protection against removal to El Salvador under the Convention against Torture “was shackled and bussed by ICE to Mexico without notice. Mexican authorities then transferred him to the Guatemalan border, where Guatemalan officials put him on a bus to El Salvador.” That is the precise sequence the Committee against Torture told Mexico in 2019 to prevent.
Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, 15 March 2023, against the journey that is actually made
Mexico’s Supreme Court held that immigration detention may not exceed thirty-six hours, striking down the fifteen and sixty working day provisions of the Migration Act. Refugees International records that people are “rapidly placed on buses for trips that can take roughly 40 hours”. The journey alone exceeds the lawful maximum before anything else is counted.
Human Rights Watch, 27 May 2026
“Upon arrival in Mexico, ICE agents removed detainees’ shackles and handed them over to Mexican officials”, who bussed them south in convoys three times a week. “Once in Mexico, INM officials do not screen third country nationals nor explain to them that they can seek asylum in Mexico.” Mexico refused Human Rights Watch permission to visit the detention facilities at Tapachula and Villahermosa.
National Human Rights Commission of Mexico, 30 June 2023
On the fire at the Ciudad Juárez facility on 27 March 2023, in which 40 people died and 27 were injured, the Commission found grave violations of the rights to dignity, life and personal integrity. People “requested the support of INM personnel to be released” and were not permitted to evacuate. Three years later nobody has been convicted.
Mexico’s acceptance of the Inter-American Court, and the hole in it
Mexico accepted the Court’s contentious jurisdiction on 16 December 1998 “a excepción de los casos derivados de la aplicación del artículo 33 de la Constitución”. Article 33 is the provision governing the expulsion of foreigners. Mexico carved out precisely the power this page is about.
What an Alert meansDesignated September 11, 2026Review: on the Committee against Torture’s examination of Mexico’s eighth periodic report, which has been filed and is pending
The Coalition’s position. This state agreed to receive people who are not its nationals, moved against their will, under a programme United States federal courts have found punitive and whose purpose was stated publicly before the agreement was made. On the Coalition’s position it has knowingly facilitated that programme, and the wrong is complete at the moment of agreement. Nothing on this page is offered as mitigation. What a receiving state agrees to.
What has happened
Mexico is the largest case in this project by a wide margin, and the one where the counting matters most, because two figures that look alike measure entirely different things. This page keeps them apart.
Arrangement. Documented in operation, never published. Mexico’s president says Mexico “has not agreed to be a third country” and receives people “for humanitarian reasons”. The United States Department of Justice, in briefs filed in a habeas case in March 2026, referred to a “standing (unwritten) agreement” with Mexico. No text exists in Treaties in Force, the Federal Register or Mexico’s official gazette that the Coalition has been able to locate.
Transferred. At least 18,487 people who are not Mexican, recorded by Mexico’s own National Migration Institute as received from the United States between 20 January 2025 and 15 June 2026, obtained by freedom of information request. United States records give lower numbers: 12,977 on immigration enforcement data to 9 March 2026, and 7,257 on the Department of Homeland Security’s own accounting to a federal court. All three appear below with their sources.
People with protection among them. Documented. At least one man who had won protection under the Convention against Torture against return to El Salvador was moved through Mexico and returned there. At least 300 children who are not Mexican have been removed to Mexico.
Onward return. Documented, and it is systematic rather than exceptional. Mexico moves Central Americans on to the Guatemalan border. No aggregate figure exists.
The two numbers that must not be confused
Human Rights Watch reports that 18,453 people who are not nationals of the receiving country were removed from the United States to every destination in the world between 29 January 2025 and 9 March 2026. Mexico’s National Migration Institute recorded 18,487 such people arriving in Mexico alone between 20 January 2025 and 15 June 2026. The two figures are thirty-four apart and they measure different universes. Any page that treats them as the same figure, or quietly uses one for the other, is wrong.
What can be said on the American data, and it is the strongest defensible form of the claim: of 18,453 third-country removals worldwide, 12,977 went to Mexico. Mexico took about seventy per cent of them, roughly two and a half times every other receiving state combined.
A caution about corroboration. The Mexican figures were obtained by the Institute for Women in Migration through freedom of information requests, and are reported by both Refugees International and Third Country Deportation Watch. Those are two reports of one dataset, not two independent counts.
What happens on arrival
Human Rights Watch interviewed 53 people who had been moved this way, between 17 February and 4 March 2026. Its account of the handover is short and specific: “Upon arrival in Mexico, ICE agents removed detainees’ shackles and handed them over to Mexican officials.” Mexican migration officers, escorted by the National Guard, then transported people south, usually in a convoy of at least three buses, three times a week.
The destination is not the border. It is Tapachula in Chiapas or Villahermosa in Tabasco, at the other end of the country, with Palenque and Tenosique also recorded. The journey takes two to three days. People were not allowed off the buses and were given very little food. One man, quoted by Human Rights Watch: “You don’t know what it’s like to come all the way here by bus from the United States. It’s inhumane, we had nothing but bread and water.” Refugees International records journeys of roughly forty hours, buses arriving in the middle of the night at a detention station in an industrial zone, and food and hygiene supplies that are unavailable or insufficient.
On 15 March 2023 the First Chamber of Mexico’s Supreme Court held that immigration detention may not exceed thirty-six hours, and struck down the provisions of the Migration Act that had allowed fifteen and then sixty working days. The bus journey alone exceeds that limit. The Migration Institute has since stated that people may not be held more than thirty-six hours. The sources above describe something different.
Nobody is screened. Refugees International: “Once in Mexico, INM officials do not screen third country nationals nor explain to them that they can seek asylum in Mexico.” At the far end most people are released within hours, told they have ten days, when Mexican law gives them thirty working days to apply for asylum.
The places people are held, and the fire
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission inspected the country’s immigration holding facilities in 2023 and reported that of all of them, not one was adequate: thirteen insufficient, twenty-one inadequate, and the rest in a critical state. It found that the physical and operational conditions did not allow people to be treated with dignity.
On 27 March 2023 a fire in the men’s quarters at the Ciudad Juárez holding facility killed forty people and injured twenty-seven. The Commission issued a recommendation on grave human rights violations on 30 June 2023, finding that migration officials were guarantors of the detainees’ safety and omitted the preventive measures necessary to preserve life. The record shows that the men asked to be let out and were not permitted to evacuate, and remained locked in as the smoke filled the room. The cause of death recorded is asphyxia by inhalation.
That is a finding by a national human rights institution and a recommendation. It is not a criminal verdict, and there has been none. Three years on, four people remain in custody, six officials face proceedings at liberty, one defendant has been a fugitive since 2023, and the then Commissioner of the Migration Institute was charged with a non-serious offence and granted a conditional suspension of proceedings. At least thirteen unresolved constitutional appeals are holding the cases short of trial. The families of those who died, and fifteen women who were present, have not been recognised as victims entitled to reparation.
A point of Mexican terminology that a Mexican reader will notice. Mexico has two kinds of facility, estaciones migratorias and estancias provisionales. The Ciudad Juárez facility was the second kind. This page uses the Commission’s own description of it.
What is documented outside detention
This section is confined to named bodies with stated methods, because it is the part of any page about Mexico where impression most easily replaces evidence.
Médecins Sans Frontières documented, in Tamaulipas alone, 230 cases of kidnapping and physical violence with 775 victims, of whom 52 per cent were women and 22 per cent children and adolescents. It states in terms that it does not keep exhaustive records and that this is a sample drawn from its own medical contacts, not an estimate of how often this happens. It assisted 232 survivors of sexual violence in 2023, of whom fewer than eleven per cent were reached within the first seventy-two hours.
Amnesty International records that people travelling through Mexico “continued to be forced to make illegal payments to Mexican authorities, criminal gang members or unidentified individuals at immigration checkpoints set up on roads throughout the country”, and were frequently subject to extortion and kidnapping.
The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances, after a country visit in November 2021, recorded that it “received allegations that migrants illegally detained at unknown locations had their mobile phones taken by perpetrators who then demanded money from families, sometimes with the support or acquiescence of public servants”. The Coalition prints that as what it is: allegations the Committee received, not a finding it made.
Two limits the Coalition states rather than leaving to a critic. The evidence of official involvement in crimes against people moved into Mexico comes from 2021 and 2022, from the era of the Migrant Protection Protocols. The Human Rights Watch report on the people being moved now documents attempted recruitment by criminal groups but does not provide evidence of Mexican officials taking part in crimes against them. This page does not carry the earlier findings forward onto the present cohort.
Onward, and the paragraph written for it in 2019
Mexico is not the end of the journey for Central Americans. Human Rights Watch documents a chain: the United States removes people to Mexico, and Mexican authorities remove them onward through the southern border to Guatemala or to their own countries. Refugees International records that the Migration Institute contacts the Salvadoran consulate to arrange the repatriation of Salvadorans even against the will of people who, in its words, “claim they fear torture there”, and gives the case of a man who had won protection under the Convention against Torture and was passed from American custody to Mexico to Guatemala and into El Salvador.
In 2019 the Committee against Torture wrote a recommendation for exactly this. At paragraph 53 of its concluding observations on Mexico it said the state “should ensure the adequate reception of persons returned to Mexico under United States immigration and nationality law, and guarantee that they are not returned or extradited to their countries of origin if there are substantial grounds for believing that they would run a personal and foreseeable risk of being subjected to torture”.
Those concluding observations remain the most recent the Committee has issued on Mexico. They were adopted in May 2019, six years before any of this. They predate the Ciudad Juárez fire, the Supreme Court ruling, the collapse of the refugee agency’s staffing, and the whole of the present programme. Mexico’s eighth report has been filed and is waiting to be examined.
The asylum system, which is real and which lost half its staff
Mexico recognises refugees in numbers no other state on this list approaches. The United Nations refugee agency records more than 70,500 claims registered in 2025 and status confirmed for 26,855 people. Amnesty International gives a different figure for the same year, more than 58,800 applications, and the Coalition publishes both rather than reconciling them. In 2024 nearly 79,000 people began an application and about 25,000 were resolved in their favour.
The obstacle is time, and the reason for it is documented. Human Rights Watch records that funding cuts reduced the refugee agency’s support for the Mexican refugee commission by twenty per cent in 2025, and that United States funding to the agency in Mexico fell from 50 million dollars in 2024 to 8 million in 2025. The refugee agency’s own annual report records “nearly a 50 per cent decrease in COMAR personnel between mid-2024 and mid-2025”. Refugees International records a wait of one to four months for the first email and about a year for an interview, during which a person may not lawfully leave the state where they filed.
So the queue that a person is pointed towards on the day they are put across the border lost about half its staff in the same year the removals began, in large part because the government doing the removing stopped paying for it.
What routes exist, and the door Mexico closed in advance
The Committee against Torture is open to individuals. Mexico ratified the Convention on 23 January 1986 and accepted the Committee’s competence to receive individual complaints under article 22 in 2002. The depositary record has since been read and the date is settled: 15 March 2002. Mexico’s declaration recognises the competence of the Committee “to receive and consider communications from or on behalf of individuals subject to its jurisdiction who claim to be victims of a violation by a State Party of the provisions of the Convention”. The same record shows no declaration under article 21, so the inter-State procedure is not available against Mexico. The Committee has decided an individual complaint against Mexico on its merits, so the route is not merely formal. This paragraph replaces one that left the date and the article 21 position open on 11 September 2026.
There is a national preventive mechanism, and no way for a detained person to reach it. Mexico signed the Optional Protocol on 23 September 2003 and ratified it on 11 April 2005. The mechanism sits inside the National Human Rights Commission and its mandate covers immigration detention, which is established by its own published inspection of an immigration holding facility. It publishes no direct telephone number or address that the Coalition could verify. A complaint has to go through the Commission’s national line. The Coalition states that plainly: the body charged with inspecting immigration detention has no contact route a person inside one can use.
The Inter-American Court has been closed to this subject since 1998. Mexico accepted the Court’s contentious jurisdiction on 16 December 1998, with an express exception for “cases arising from the application of article 33 of the Political Constitution”. Article 33 is the article that governs the expulsion of foreigners. Of every treaty fact on this page, this is the one that matters most to a person who is not Mexican, and it was decided twenty-seven years before they arrived.
The first days
Drawn from what is documented above. Nothing below is advice, and no page can tell a particular person what to do in their case.
What exists, in the order in which it usually matters
Say you are afraid, before the bus, and keep saying it
Nobody is screened and nobody is told they can claim asylum. The documented practice is that people are handed over and put on a bus within hours. A fear of return has to be volunteered, to a named official, with the time noted, and repeated at every stage, because no step in the process asks the question.
Call the refugee agency's free line, which is the best first call
The United Nations refugee agency operates toll-free numbers inside Mexico and two WhatsApp lines, staffed in Spanish. It funds and works alongside the Mexican refugee commission and can direct a person to it. It is free, it can be called from anywhere in the country, and a relative abroad can call it too.
Count thirty working days, not ten
People in the documented cases were told they had ten days. Mexican law allows thirty working days from entry to lodge an asylum claim. Anyone told a shorter period should hear the longer one from someone.
Understand where the bus is going, because the help is at the far end
The buses go to Villahermosa and Tapachula, not to the border city where the person crossed. The organisations with verified addresses that take individual cases are in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico City, Villahermosa and Tapachula. Asylum Access has offices in both Villahermosa and Tijuana.
A complaint to the National Human Rights Commission is the route to the torture prevention mechanism
The mechanism that inspects immigration detention has no separate public contact route. A complaint made to the Commission on its toll-free national line, or through its online complaint form, is the way to reach it.
Who is reachable in Mexico
Every entry below was checked on 11 September 2026 against the source named in it. There is one structural gap the Coalition states rather than papers over: in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa, the three cities in the state where the largest documented cluster of kidnapping and violence was recorded, it found shelters but no organisation offering legal help with a contact route it could verify.
Official bodies
The national human rights institution, which also houses the national mechanism for the prevention of torture. The mechanism has no separate published contact route, so a complaint about immigration detention goes through this office
Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos
Address
Periférico Sur 3469, Col. San Jerónimo Lídice, La Magdalena Contreras, 10200 Ciudad de México
Free and staffed in Spanish, and the best first call for someone just put across the border. It funds and works with the Mexican refugee commission and can direct a person to it
Information and legal representation for refugees and asylum seekers. Its Villahermosa office matters more than any other address here, because Villahermosa is where the buses arrive
Runs a legal clinic and works nationally. It is also the organisation whose freedom of information requests produced the Mexican government figures used on this page
The shelter entries above come from a compiled directory whose vintage is not stated, and shelter addresses and capacity in border cities change quickly. Telephone before travelling. The Mexican refugee commission could not be reached at all: its own site fails on a certificate error and the government portal refuses requests, so the Coalition prints no address or number for it and routes people through the refugee agency instead, which funds it. Al Otro Lado works in Tijuana but publishes only a United States address and telephone number, which is worth knowing before dialling. Espacio Migrante in Tijuana is a real organisation with no direct route the Coalition could verify.
What is not established
A single number of people transferred. Mexico’s own institute recorded 18,487 to 15 June 2026. American enforcement data gives 12,977 to 9 March 2026. The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court 7,257. The Coalition publishes all three with their sources and reconciles none of them. The wider figure of about 20,000 is an extrapolation and is labelled as one.
Whether anyone arrives by air or only across the land border. No source the Coalition opened separates the two.
Any total for onward removal from Mexico. Individual cases are documented. No aggregate exists.
That Mexican officials have taken part in crimes against the people removed since 2025. The report on this cohort found cartel recruitment and expressly did not find official involvement. The evidence of official acquiescence is from 2021 and 2022 and concerns a different programme.
That the Migrant Protection Protocols have restarted. A proposal to resume was published in April 2025. The Coalition found no figures showing anyone enrolled and does not assert that it is operating.
Whether Mexico has made the declaration under article 21. The depositary record could not be opened.
The Coalition writes Investigating rather than none found, because the second phrase reads as though a question has been answered when it has only been asked.
What runs the other way
Mexico has refused things, publicly and in writing. Its president says it has not agreed to be a third country. Its foreign ministry stopped answering American requests to accept people who were not recent border crossers, and in July instructed consuls to ignore the emails. In September 2026 Mexico formally protested that the United States had deported more than 2,900 Mexicans to Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica rather than to Mexico. Mexico objects to both ends of this programme.
Mexico’s own institutions have constrained it. Its Supreme Court capped immigration detention at thirty-six hours and struck down the statutory provisions allowing longer, which is the strictest judicial limit any state in this project has imposed on itself. After the Ciudad Juárez fire the Migration Institute suspended thirty-three of its fifty-four provisional facilities, more than half, and they remained closed a year later. There has been a prosecution, of a limited kind, which is more than any other receiving state in this project has produced.
Mexico accepts international scrutiny to a degree most states on this list do not. It accepts individual complaints to the Committee against Torture and has been found in violation on one. It ratified the Optional Protocol and maintains a preventive mechanism. It accepted a country visit by the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which is a rare step, and hosted the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture in January 2026.
And Mexico gives refuge, on a scale that makes the rest of this page harder rather than easier to write. It registered more than 70,500 asylum claims in 2025 and confirmed status for 26,855 people. A page that left that out would not be worth reading.
Running against Mexico in the same breath: it refused Human Rights Watch permission to visit the facilities at Tapachula and Villahermosa, and as at May 2026 had not granted it.
What this page does not yet carry
Any contact route for the Mexican refugee commission, which is the body a person is actually told to go to. Its own site fails on a certificate error and the government portal refuses every request. This is the most useful thing missing from this page.
Any verified legal help in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros or Reynosa.
The Inter-American Commission’s press release on the rights of people returned, deported or expelled, which is directly on point and which the Coalition could not open.
The visit report of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances in the original, which is quoted here only through the press release announcing it.
The tracking by Human Rights First of attacks on people returned under the earlier programme. Its site refuses automated requests, and the Coalition will not reproduce a figure it has only seen quoted by someone else.
If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.
Sources
Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.
United Nations. Committee against Torture, concluding observations on the seventh periodic report of Mexico, CAT/C/MEX/CO/7, adopted at the sixty-sixth session, 23 April to 17 May 2019, paragraphs 42, 43, 48 to 55, read in the copy held by ecoi.net. Committee on Enforced Disappearances, report on its visit to Mexico of 15 to 26 November 2021, CED/C/MEX/VR/1, quoted here through the announcement of its findings of 12 April 2022, the document itself being unreachable. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Annual Results Report 2025, Mexico, 8 May 2026.
Treaty status. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9 and IV-9-b, for the ratification of 23 January 1986 and the Optional Protocol ratification of 11 April 2005. Mexico’s declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court, deposited 16 December 1998, from the Mexican government’s own legal portal.
United States material. Department of Homeland Security, notice on the Migrant Protection Protocols, 90 Federal Register, 25 April 2025. National Immigration Project, comparison of the 2023 and 2024 State Department human rights reports on Mexico, March 2026, which records that the 2024 edition deleted the account of the Ciudad Juárez fire, the section on abuse of refugees and asylum seekers, and the section on detention conditions.
Compiled 11 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. Every quotation was taken from the document itself or, where the document could not be opened, from a named source that is identified as the intermediary. Two errors in the Coalition’s working notes were corrected before publication. A figure of about 19,000 was being used without saying whose count it was; the American and Mexican counts differ by thousands and are now given separately. And a worldwide total of 18,453 third-country removals was within thirty-four of the Mexican arrival figure of 18,487, which are different quantities that this page is careful never to merge. Corrections to the Coalition.
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