On the first day of his repeat term as president of the United States, Donald Trump went about making good on his promises to make life hell for asylum seekers. Proclaiming a “national emergency” to pave the way for the deportation of millions, Trump also immediately cancelled the CBP One app that previously allowed undocumented people to apply for legal entry to the US by land from Mexico.

The cancellation reportedly leaves some 270,000 people from a wide array of nationalities stranded in Mexican territory, where many had been waiting almost a year in torturous limbo for CBP One appointments. This is to say nothing of the deadly odysseys that refuge seekers have long been forced to undertake prior to applying for said appointments – odysseys that have often entailed being continuously preyed upon by organised crime outfits and corrupt law enforcement officials alike, as well as navigating the notorious corpse-ridden Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia.

Predictably, Trump’s “deportation blitz” – as some outlets have dubbed it – has been a boon for the Mexican underworld and extortion-happy security personnel. When I arrived a week after Trump’s inauguration in Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, which lies just across the border from the city of El Paso, Texas, I was told by a Venezuelan asylum seeker that the price of being smuggled the short distance into the US had suddenly soared to $10,000 per person.

It was my first visit to Ciudad Juarez since April 2023, when I arrived shortly after a fire killed 40 people at a migrant detention centre abutting the border fence. There, Mexican immigration authorities had been dutifully participating in the war on asylum seekers waged by former US President Joe Biden, who, contrary to Republican propaganda, deported more people than Trump did during his first term.

In 2023, the presence of asylum seekers in Ciudad Juarez was acutely visible, with many families camped out in front of the migrant detention facility. This time the streets were emptier, the frigid temperatures and an intermittently fierce, dust-laden wind having forced many to seek more substantial shelter. With the city now facing an additional influx of folks from the opposite side of the border, too, the local authorities had undertaken to erect giant white tents to temporarily accommodate incoming deportees.

As I made the rounds of downtown Ciudad Juarez in search of asylum seekers to talk to, I met a Mexican man in his 40s who had himself been deported more than a decade earlier from Arizona, where he had worked at McDonald’s and Burger King and had cleaned houses for additional income. He told me that he was detained while out buying food and then imprisoned in an underground cell while Arizona’s authorities went about debating why it was that he had no fingerprints, refusing to believe his explanation that they had been erased by house-cleaning chemicals.

After three months without seeing the light of day he was released and deported to Mexico, he said, with special glasses to protect against blinding by the sun. He subsequently took up work in one of the US-owned maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez – the infamous factories that have long enabled US corporations to exploit cheap labour just beyond the border fence while avoiding taxes and eviscerating workers’ rights. He had recently abandoned the maquiladora job as his employer’s constantly expanding demands did not allow him time to care for his three daughters.

Indeed, Ciudad Juarez has come to epitomise the US-backed decimation of Mexico via so-called “free trade”. In his book Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future, published four years after the signing in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that wreaked havoc on Mexican agriculture and drove countless campesinos north to the increasingly fortified US border, American writer Charles Bowden laid bare the link between the impoverishment and suffering of common Mexicans and the extractive nature of economic relations between the US and Mexico. He described US machinations as “planting ruin about the world and calling it our economic policy” – which is as good an explanation as any for the current “migration crisis”.

However, not only did the US “plant ruin” in Ciudad Juarez, it also backed an ostensible “war on drugs” that was launched in 2006 and saw an obscene quantity of Mexican soldiers and police deployed to the metropolis, which was quickly propelled to the position of world’s pre-eminent “Murder City”, the title of Bowden’s subsequent book published in 2010.

As Bowden pointed out, the narrative of never-ending wars between Mexican drug cartels provides a convenient alibi for ongoing violence in Mexico while handily obscuring the profound involvement of state security forces themselves in the drug trade – and in the lethal brutality that has characterised cities like Ciudad Juarez. Precise homicide statistics are impossible to come by, in part due to the all-too-common phenomenon of enforced disappearances, but most estimates put the city’s homicide total at well over 1,000 for 2024.

Back in 1998, Bowden called Ciudad Juarez the “ground zero of the future”. And the future, unfortunately, is now.