Stranded in Villahermosa: How the US is Deporting Elderly and Medically Vulnerable Individuals to Mexico

[Coline Schupfer Galia is an international human rights lawyer. This article is part of a larger investigation by the Everywhere Border project, https://www.everywhereborder.org/]

The second Trump administration has distorted the concept of “safe third country” beyond recognition, creating what amounts to a system of legal abandonment for some of the most vulnerable migrants. In January 2026, a small group of us from the Everywhere Border project travelled to Mexico’s southern states to conduct interviews and focus groups with migrants, service providers, and local officials, seeking to understand how movement through the country is being reshaped by the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the revival of overtly violent, exclusionary border policies. What we witnessed there was a predictable operation of an increasingly externalised bordering regime. In this article I seek to demonstrate how this externalisation in practice has resulted in the removal of elderly and medically vulnerable non-citizens to southern Mexico without assessment of individual risk, and I argue that these transfers fail to meet the legal conditions for “safe third country” designations under international and regional human rights standards.

Safe Third Country Under International Law

The principle of “safe third country” emerged in the mid-1980s, initially modelled on the “country of first asylum” concept, but evolved into a distinct procedural mechanism allowing states to transfer asylum seekers to countries where protection is presumed available, even if not yet granted. The principle spread across Europe and beyond during the 1990s, formalised through bilateral and multilateral agreements that increasingly detached the designation from actual protection conditions on the ground. Safe third country designation became a procedural tool for filtering asylum claims, allowing states to transfer asylum seekers to countries where they can receive effective protection, but only under strict conditions. While the term has been criticised for accelerating procedures with fewer safeguards, for undermining the principle of non-refoulement, and for increasing the risk of “refugees in orbit,” international bodies like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have nonetheless accepted the concept only if the third country provides effective protection, including access to fair procedures and respect for basic rights. The UNHCR has prepared legal considerations in the context of safe third countries and has established that for a country to be considered as such, it must provide (1) protection against refoulement; (2) access to fair and efficient asylum procedures; (3) treatment in accordance with international human rights standards; and (4) the possibility of local integration or durable solutions.

In recent years, the concept has been contested in various forums, notably in relation to the United Kingdom (UK)-Rwanda agreement, which the UK Supreme Court unanimously found to be unlawful, holding that Rwanda did not qualify as a “safe third country” because of systemic asylum-procedure defects and risks of onward refoulement to persecution zones. The Court, in assessing the legality of the Rwanda policy, confirmed that for a country to be designated as a “safe third country,” it must meet four cumulative conditions: (1) the applicant’s life and liberty must not be at risk due to protected grounds; (2) the principle of non-refoulement must be upheld; (3) the country must respect international prohibitions against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment; and (4) there must be a genuine opportunity for the applicant to claim asylum and, if qualified, receive refugee protection. The Court emphasised that meeting these standards requires not only formal assurances but credible evidence that the receiving state’s asylum procedures function in compliance with international obligations. In the case of Rwanda (relying heavily on expert evidence and UNHCR reports), the Court concluded that systemic deficiencies in the Rwandan asylum system posed a real risk of refoulement, thereby failing to satisfy the necessary legal standards for a safe third country designation.

Deportations to Villahermosa, Tabasco

Of the cities we visited, Villahermosa stood out for a distinct and troubling pattern. Since March 2025, Villahermosa has seen a consistent influx of elderly and medically vulnerable third-country nationals, predominantly from Haiti and Cuba, many of whom had lived in the US for decades and had no ties to Mexico. The scale of arrivals is difficult to quantify precisely because there is no public register of these transfers, but shelter staff estimates that at least two dozen elderly deportees cycle through the shelter at any given time. During our visit, one Cuban man who had lived in the US since the 1980s described how his social security payments were terminated upon deportation, and how he lost access to his diabetes and heart medications as a result. His was no isolated case. We were told that during our visit, another Cuban shelter resident was dying of pancreatic cancer inside a dorm room. Two Haitian individuals I spoke to, who didn’t speak Spanish and had no connections to Mexico, displayed signs of severe psychological distress, including disorientation, anxiety, and incoherent speech, which shelter staff attributed to untreated mental health conditions. Across the board, seniors deported to Villahermosa exhibited significant health, mental health, and social protection needs.

Another change that has emerged since the second Trump administration is the expanded use of overland deportation routes, managed by border control. Accounts of three-day overland bus transfers to Villahermosa, including reports of minimal food, water, or access to toilets, and degrading conditions, have raised serious concerns regarding potential violations of the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Those deported described arriving at detention facilities in Villahermosa’s Ciudad Industrial, sometimes held for hours or days, sometimes released immediately with no clarity about their location or status. Many reported being released in the middle of the night, disoriented and without means of orientation or assistance. Legal aid providers we spoke to told us they cannot reliably determine how many people are detained, transferred, or released, since access to detention sites is heavily restricted. One Cuban man I spoke to at the shelter told me that another Cuban man with critical dialysis needs from his community in the US was taken into ICE custody around the same time and has not been located since his supposed deportation to Mexico.

Socio-Legal Structural Abandonment 

What is happening in Villahermosa is a direct example of how border externalisation evolves if unchecked, and how it contributes to the hollowing out of human rights and international protection standards. Without logs, public records, or accessible detention facilities, these transfers operate in the shadows, and form part of a larger invisibilisation of migration that we witnessed in the region, and where the criminalisation of migration becomes core to the operational workings of border externalization and the systems of violence it depends on and perpetuates.

Returning to the safe third country criteria enumerated in part 1 of this article, according to UNHCR and authoritative legal interpretations, a country may only be designated as a safe third country if it meets four cumulative conditions: (1) the applicant’s life and liberty must not be at risk due to protected grounds; (2) the principle of non-refoulement must be upheld; (3) the country must respect international prohibitions against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment; and (4) there must be a genuine opportunity for the applicant to claim asylum and, if qualified, receive refugee protection.

Risk to liberty and life

To remove elderly, infirm, and medically vulnerable individuals to a country where they cannot access healthcare, income, or stable housing is to place them in danger. As the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held in Paposhvili v. Belgium, deporting seriously ill individuals to a country would violate Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment) and Article 8 (right to family life) where:

“the absence of appropriate treatment in the receiving country or the lack of access to such treatment, exposes the individual to a serious, rapid and irreversible decline in his or her state of health resulting in intense suffering or to a significant reduction in life expectancy.”

As is the case here, deporting individuals with chronic health conditions to Villahermosa where they will be cut off from treatment, medication, and support systems is to expose that individual to a “serious, rapid and irreversible decline” in health. In other words, deporting such individuals to Villahermosa is to engineer a foreseeable and preventable acceleration of their decline and death. As for the Cuban man deported despite having pancreatic cancer, we later learned that he passed away in late February. The foreseeability of this harm should have triggered the duty to refrain from removal under both the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Failure to uphold Non-Refoulement

The principle of non-refoulement, enshrined in Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention is recognised as a rule of customary international law, and thus binds all States, regardless of whether they are parties to the 1951 Convention. The principle of non-refoulement has also been incorporated into various human rights treaties, including the CAT (Article 3), the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (Article 16), and in regional human rights instruments. 

The non-refoulement principle prohibits returning individuals to territories where they face serious threats to their life, freedom, or human dignity. It applies extraterritorially to returns, interceptions, pushbacks, deportations, expulsions, extraditions, and third country transfers, including risks of onward “chain refoulement.” Under international human rights law, states remain bound by their obligations when they exercise effective control over individuals, even outside their territory. This principle is well established in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (Saadi v. Italy), the UN Human Rights Committee (General Comment No. 35), and the Committee Against Torture (General Comment No. 2), all of which affirm that the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment applies during deportation, detention, and transit.

As we heard in Villahermosa and across Mexico’s southern border, migrants and asylum seekers face a well-documented and systematic risk of serious abuses, including sexual assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, and extortion, at the hands of both criminal groups and, in some cases, complicit Mexican officials. In light of the documented conditions and the applicable principles of international law, it is reasonable to conclude that Mexico, as currently constituted, does not offer effective protection against refoulement, including chain refoulement.

Moreover, the targeted removal of elderly and medically vulnerable individuals to environments of systemic precarity constitutes a distinct but equally serious form of refoulement, when deportation results in the deliberate denial of essential medical care, leading to severe suffering, or premature death, and a foreseeable risk of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Exposure to Inhuman or Degrading Treatment

The conditions of overland transfer (multi-day journeys with minimal food, water, or access to toilets, often without medical supervision) raise serious concerns under international law. For anyone, but especially for elderly and medically fragile individuals, these conditions could amount to violations of Article 16 of the CAT and Article 7 and 10(1) of the ICCPR.

Furthermore, deporting individuals with chronic physical and mental health conditions to Mexico, where they are cut off from treatment, medication, social support, and the communities they have built over decades, constitutes a further, distinct form of inhuman and degrading treatment. To be removed at an advanced age, often after decades in the United States, is to be severed from family, language, culture, and care networks. The result, for these seniors deported to Villahermosa, is a denial of the basic conditions for a dignified end of life. Under international human rights law, the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment extends beyond physical suffering to include serious mental distress and the intentional infliction of profound social and emotional harm (A.H.G. v. Canada). When states knowingly deport vulnerable individuals into conditions of isolation, neglect, and despair, they inflict suffering in violation of their obligations under the ICCPR and CAT (see also Savran v. Denmark), emphasising the necessity of personal and social support networks to prevent treatment contrary to Article 3).

No Genuine Access to Asylum or Durable Protection

In terms of durable solutions, regularisation is limited to narrow channels, primarily employment sponsorship or family reunification, both of which are difficult to access due to restrictive eligibility criteria, bureaucratic hurdles, and limited capacity. As a result, many turn to the asylum process administered by COMAR, Mexico’s refugee agency. However, the COMAR process is marked by severe delays and procedural burdens. Applicants are required to appear in person on a weekly basis to maintain their place in the queue. The gap between initial application and substantive interview can extend to many months, even years. We were told that these delays function as a de facto policy of attrition, de facto discouraging claims through exhaustion.

Between October 2024 and June 2025, Mexican authorities recognised refugee status in only 3% of asylum claims, underscoring the limited access to formal protection. With no legal right to work or access social services, many are forced into informal labour markets, increasing their dependence on precarious employment and heightening exposure to exploitation and violence.

Conclusion

What is unfolding in Villahermosa is the logical endpoint of a border regime designed to evade accountability, where the systematic invisibilisation of suffering and the erosion of human dignity are  foundational features of the policy architecture. They are features of a system built to render suffering invisible. By effectively treating Mexico as a “safe third country” under policies that lack transparency, while deporting vulnerable, elderly, infirm, and isolated individuals into conditions of extreme precarity, the United States is effectively engineering situations of abandonment in which decline and death are accelerated, and it could be argued, is not merely risking, but actively inflicting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment through a policy of calculated abandonment.

Note from author: This piece offers a critical legal and humanitarian perspective grounded exclusively in international human rights and refugee law, and does not engage or rely upon US domestic legal interpretations. It is intended for informational and advocacy purposes only. The observations and analysis in this article are based on interviews and field research conducted in southern Mexico in early 2026. All accounts are reported in good faith and reflect lived experiences shared by individuals affected by US deportation policies. While consistent with documented trends, some claims cannot be independently verified. We have elsewhere called for further investigation by authorities with oversight power in the US and Mexico.

Photo attribution: Photo of Albergue Amparito, Oasis de Paz del Espíritu Santo, Villahermosa taken by the author and reproduced here with permission.