They're so close, but their goal is unattainable. This is the situation for the many migrants stuck on the Mexican side of the border with the United States.

One woman, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for her safety, told DW that she left her home in southern Mexico because criminals tried to kidnap her and her daughter. DW spoke with her in Ciudad Juarez, a city near the border with Texas.

"We have no alternative, because we can't just say, 'Let's start again,'" she explained. "We're still in Mexico, and the gangs are powerful. They're everywhere."

Just the other side of the Rio Grande is the United States. El Paso, a grid-patterned city of 680,000 people at the foot of the Franklin Mountains, is the hometown of Aimee Santillan. She works with a Catholic organization called Hope, which concerns itself with US immigration policy.

"We've had really hard restrictions in the past, and the numbers haven't changed," Santillan told DW. "If people don't feel safe in their countries, they're going to come regardless. So it doesn't really change much if the policies are restrictive, or if they're more just and fair."

Donald Trump, who returned to the White House on Monday, has made border security one of the top priorities at the start of his second presidential term. He declared a state of emergency at the southern border, and took the first step toward deploying the military and beginning mass deportations. Concurrently, Congress passed a law to facilitate arrests and deportations.

Yet the border regime Trump inherited from his predecessor, Joe Biden, was already relatively tough — the strictest of any Democratic president to date. In June 2024, Biden imposed new rules that, among other things, barred people from seeking........

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