When I was there in March, armed members of Mexico’s National Guard stood around in tones of green, looking bored. Every so often, a white van drove up and disgorged around 10 people, most of them men. Trump had promised to deport hardened criminals, but they looked like fieldworkers from California’s Central Valley to me. There were flannel shirts, habitual squints, and long-suffering quietude.

They went straight upstairs to their new rooms without talking to outsiders. They would rest for two or three nights before the government delivered them to a bus station. From there, they could return to homes in Jalisco, Oaxaca, Michoacán, and the like. Flamingos was for Mexican deportees who lived anywhere besides Tijuana, where they would not be allowed to remain.

Members of the Mexican National Guard instruct deported migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, on Jan. 31. Carlos Moreno/NurPhoto via Getty Images

An older couple came out of the building with baffled faces. They had delivered a phone charger and some other things to their son-in-law, Armando, who would board a bus for Michoacán the next morning. Mariano, with two days of gray-flecked growth on his chin, wore a flannel shirt and wire-rimmed bifocals; Yolanda was short and quick-smiling, with a gray-threaded black ponytail swishing down her back. Once they understood what we wanted, Mariano wheeled on me, shook his fist, and shouted about Trump in Spanish.

“Trump will bring America down! He is deporting the workforce.”

“Did Armando commit a crime?” I asked.

“No, he was never in jail!”

But Armando was undocumented. He had been sleeping in his apartment—near Sacramento, California, where he lived with the couple’s daughter—when U.S. agents mounted a nighttime raid on the building, said Mariano. They took Armando away and essentially turned their daughter’s marriage into a long-distance relationship.

“She didn’t come with him?”

“She has papers.”

This happened on a weekend when high numbers of immigration raids were expected around Los Angeles. A few raids made headlines, but most warnings fizzled. In the first three weeks of Trump’s second term, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested around 14,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide, according to Reuters, but that number disappointed his most ardent supporters, who blamed him for falling behind former President Joe Biden’s deportation rate. The relatively modest numbers would lead to “a quarter million arrests annually,” Reuters reported in a piece on the raw statistics, “not millions.”

Trump and his people hate the idea of illegal immigrants, but some also hate the sight of immigrants, especially if they look disadvantaged or poor. “Import the third world, become the third world,” read one sinister post from an official Trump account. According to that outlook, Mexicans and Central Americans hop the border fence and change the tone of U.S. cities, making whole neighborhoods feel violent, trashy, and impoverished. Whether it also sounds racist or anti-American doesn’t bother Trump’s team. Other social media wits have suggested melting down Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” poem, which is cast in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty and characterizes the nation as a “mother of exiles.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at an event in Howell, Michigan, on Aug. 20, 2024.Nic Antaya/Getty Images

We met a man at Flamingos who had tried to hop the border wall. He was young and quiet, with a full dark beard and serious eyes, and said his name was Luis. He had just tried to cross with his brother, who was 17. But U.S. Border Patrol caught them and sent them to different Mexican processing stations. He expected his brother to turn up here, at Flamingos, but he wasn’t sure.

“Where are you from?”

“Michoacán.”

His father lived semi-legally in California, north of Santa Barbara. Luis and his brother had decided to pay a local man $2,000 to bring them all the way to a vulnerable spot in the steel-slatted border wall and sneak them to a neighborhood near San Diego. The smuggler had demanded another $5,000 as a sort of ransom after their arrival in Tijuana; after it was paid, he drove Luis and his brother to a low part of the wall in the pre-dawn dark and set up a custom-built ladder. They just climbed up and over the slats.

“What happened?”

“We got across, but 10 meters from the American side, a patrol caught us and started chasing,” Luis said, shaking his head. “The coyote just left us there.”

The coyote had pissed him off, but Luis planned to try again. His determination and anger were evident. He was a low-smoldering man, focused and patient, and, like the other men I had seen waiting in front of Flamingos, he did not have the look of a felon. He was formal and reserved.

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“Why don’t you try legally?” we asked him.

“Our papa, he tried to get a work visa. But it was denied. And he wants us to be up there immediately.”

“Did you ever try with the app—with CBP One?”

CBP One was an official, portable means of seeking asylum. In January, Trump had canceled most interviews scheduled through the app.

“It’s easier to go like this,” Luis said. But the smugglers in Michoacán had painted a dream scenario. “Like it was gonna be easy,” he added. “They lied to us.”

“What kind of work do you want to do?”

He shrugged. “Agriculture, construction. Or a handyman.”

“Why in California?”

“Things are terrible in Michoacán.”

A migrant tries, in vain, to cross into the United States for an appointment with immigration officials in Nogales, Mexico, on Jan. 21. U.S. President Donald Trump canceled all asylum appointments made with the CBP One app on his first day in office.John Moore/Getty Images

It’s not an unusual story. But why are things terrible in Michoacán? The cliche in California would be that Mexicans are poor because they are lazy; but if Mexicans were lazy then American bosses would not hire them. The main reason for poverty in Mexico—for the incredible gulf between a shack-strewn hill in Chiapas and a luxury apartment in Mexico City—is corruption. “Most workers in Mexico work in the black market under exploitative conditions without social security,” according to a summary of the Mexican economy at the Borgen Project, an anti-poverty nonprofit. “They are unable to find other job prospects, leaving them in situations of underemployment that leads to poverty.”

Cartels and other criminal gangs have money and therefore power in the Mexican government. Francis Fukuyama recently wrote an essay on the “patrimonial” system of corruption, which features a leader who takes cash for political favor. “The impersonal modern state, in which your status depended on citizenship and not on your personal relationship with the ruler,” was a difficult thing to achieve in the West, Fukuyama argued, and to the extent that the United States has achieved it, Trump wants—openly and publicly—to trash it. In March, Wired reported that people were paying $5 million for a personal audience with the president. For the budget-conscious, $1 million just for a seat near him in the candlelit dining room at Mar-a-Lago might do.

It isn’t hard to imagine American workers hitting the road, like Luis. A small club of American professors had already migrated to Canada; what would happen if wages sank, prices rose, and hard-won protections in the United States like social security and minimum wage wound up in the smelter? “Mother of exiles” might become a double entendre.

Outside Flamingos, on a bench, Luis was quiet company but not awkward. He was not ashamed of “being illegal,” of wanting to break the law. Crossing the U.S. border without permission was only a misdemeanor in the United States, after all. Not a felony, and not a capital crime. But as we watched the sun go down, he said, “I’m scared.”

“How come?”

“If I don’t find my brother tonight, I don’t know where to stay. I don’t know Tijuana well.”

“You could check into Flamingos.”

Luis shook his head. He didn’t want to return to Michoacán. “And I heard people aren’t treated well in there. They have bad food.” He was worried about his brother. “I had a friend who went into one of these shelters and found out that some cartelistas go in there, on purpose. They pretend to be migrants who want to cross. Then they get caught, they get processed, they come here—and they approach you and try to recruit you for the cartel.”

Workers unload mattresses at a temporary shelter for deported migrants in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on Jan. 27.Herika Martinez/AFP via Getty Images

In Mexico, you worried about who was trying to fuck you over—who you had to avoid, who you had to appease—and Luis’s father had told him that work in California would be simpler and better paid. That meant the American dream was still a vision in the minds of some people in the world, powerful enough to draw strangers from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The United States wasn’t in tatters yet. But why did Trump voters think the stagnation that corresponds with high tariffs, torn safety nets, and patrimonial corruption everywhere else on the planet would leave the United States alone? Exceptionalism? Give me a break. The invasion has already started. The corruption caravan has moved to Washington with snapping banners and a marching band. In front of Flamingos, it was hard to see how Trump’s proud and glittering rot could do anything besides cultivate more developing-world conditions in the United States.

We watched the sunlight on the hills across the Tijuana highway turn a burnished orange. Traffic shot back and forth. Luis had to stay and wait for his brother, but we had to leave.

“Buena suerte,” I said, standing up. Good luck.

Luis nodded.

“A usted,” he answered. You, too.