Stranded on the shoulder of a dark road in the outskirts of Tapachula in the shadow Siglo XXI, Betancourt remembered how ICE agents at Arizona’s Mesa Gateway Airport had circulated false claims that Mexico would offer detainees asylum, in a bid to get them to accept deportation to Mexico. “In the end they sell you a dream that doesn’t exist,” he said. Betancourt and Maldonado found a public bus to the city center, where the storefronts were shut and the streets all but deserted. They ducked off the street into a hotel, where they shared the cost of a cheap room. Betancourt relied on money transfers that his wife and brothers pooled together, but other deportees couldn’t lean on family for financial support, or simply couldn’t receive wire transfers because they were deported without their identity documents. (Betancourt’s family mailed his expired Venezuelan documentation to Tapachula.) “There are people who are completely vulnerable, without a cent in their pockets, without friends or a support network, without food, without having anywhere to sleep,” Betancourt said. Days stretched into weeks as Betancourt pivoted between state and federal agencies in Tapachula, probing the bureaucratic labyrinth for an escape. “All their answers are evasive or generic. There’s no resolution, they don’t make commitments, they don’t give specifics,” Betancourt said. Authorities instructed him to apply for refugee status. Only if his application was approved — which would likely take over a year — would he be able to leave Mexico’s southernmost state. If his application was denied, he’d have to repeat the same process and hope for a better outcome. Denisse Lugardo, Tapachula’s Director of International Relations and Cross-Border Development, said that her department first became aware of third-country transfers bussed to Tapachula in early February, just after Betancourt arrived. “The foreign deportees weren’t in Mexico’s panorama,” Lugardo said in an interview in March. “Neither the refugee commission nor the migration agency have done anything for them.” “They left them here abandoned,” said Villagrán, the local activist, who has spent long hours in Tapachula’s central park providing refugees with information and helping them with paperwork. “And Tapachula is one of the poorest cities in Mexico. It lacks the basic infrastructure to even attend to its citizens in terms of healthcare, education, and security,” he added. “Migration has completely overwhelmed the city’s capacity.” “We’re talking about 70,000 or 75,000 migrants stranded here against their will,” he explained. He said that around 2014, these numbers had hit 100,000, over a quarter of Tapachula’s resident population. The Mexican government told Forbidden Stories that any foreign nationals in Mexico can apply for legal status through the federal migration and refugee agencies, or seek government assistance to return to their country of origin. But this year, many deportees facing bureaucratic delays and dead ends turned to informal, often dangerous pathways to escape the city. Smugglers circulated rates for forged travel documents or clandestine transport north: to reach Queretaro would cost 1,200 U.S. dollars; $1,600 to Cancun; $1,800 to Mexico’s capital. “The prices are higher if you don’t have documents, and we have to pay a bribe to get you out of Tapachula,” said one smuggler in a voice note. People who tried to travel north were detained and returned to Siglo XXI, or sometimes deported to Central American countries that have deportation arrangements with Mexico, like Guatemala and Honduras. Humberto García, a Cuban national deported after 35 years in the United States, tried to travel through the mountains to avoid migration checkpoints, but was approached by three armed attackers, who robbed him and shot him twice in his torso. He stumbled for nearly an hour until he reached a road and authorities transferred him to the nearest hospital. The bullets hadn’t damaged any organs, but after three days recovering he had no choice but to return to Tapachula. “I had to go back to Tapachula and stay in the park, with nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, the same story,” García said. Many of the Venezuelans who had been told a plane would take them from Mexico to Caracas confronted the route south through Central America and Panama’s Guna Yala archipelago to reach Colombia’s northern coast. A boat carrying a passenger deported alongside Betancourt — who requested to remain unnamed due to fear of repercussions from authorities — capsized on February 10, killing two Venezuelan women and one Colombian man. While Betancourt approached authorities day after day searching for a legal pathway out of the city, he watched other deportees risk informal routes. “I don’t know what their luck will be, if they’ll reach their destination or not, but there’s no doubt that it’s an incredibly dangerous situation,” Betancourt said. Uncertainty in the Mexican Capital One month after arriving in Tapachula, repeated visits to the federal migration office and a chain of emails with Mexican and Venezuelan authorities secured Betancourt permission to travel to the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico City. He told authorities he needed to renew his passport to fly back to Venezuela, but as soon as he arrived in Mexico City he applied for refugee status there. “It was the only way to leave Tapachula legally,” said Betancourt. He hoped his effort would create a precedent that others deported to Tapachula could follow. But six months later he has not heard of anyone else who has managed to use the same pathway. In Mexico City, Betancourt is no longer at the nucleus of containment policies trapping migrants in the south, but Mexico’s refugee agency requires him to remain in the capital until he receives a decision on his application. “I’m not really free,” said Betancourt. “In the United States, they supposedly granted me protection for my human rights, then they violated them. They’re violating them here too, simply with the lack of celerity in a process that limits my day to day life with so many obstacles that I don’t feel fully free.” Nevertheless, Betancourt said he’s approaching his time in Mexico City as a “new opportunity to restart.” Last summer while the world’s eyes were trained on Estadio Azteca’s World Cup matchups and the river of fans enveloping the city’s iconic monument of the Angel de la Independencia, Betancourt launched a sports journalism platform that interrogates professional sports’ economic drivers. “I’ve been able to reconnect with sports journalism in a different way,” said Betancourt. He hopes to build a stable remote career that would allow him to move wherever bureaucratic migration policies offer the chance to be with his wife, daughter and son. Aside from journalism, he’s working as a marketing and communications contractor. “I need to find a way to guarantee stability for my family, for my kids,” he said. In August, Betancourt flicked through photos that his family sent of his children’s first day back to school. With no way of knowing when or where he’ll be able to see them, he said looking at the pictures filled him with simultaneous love and hurt. “We’ve worked so hard to stay together, so that my kids and their cousins can enjoy growing up together, like we did as children, even if it’s not in our country of origin,” said Betancourt. “It’s my parents’ biggest dream — that somehow we all stay as close together as we can.” “I feel frustrated realizing that migrants are treated as second-class citizens,” said Betancourt. “But this is my reality.” But Betancourt stressed that while he’s been able to begin to rebuild, countless others caught up in Trump’s third-country deportation policies remain in legal limbo in Tapachula. “Others are in vulnerable situations without access to a bank, without access to formal employment, without access to healthcare, without access to a whole host of things that logically should be a non-negotiable part of freedom,” he said. “They’re terrified.”