The Americans were not happy.
The migrant situation at the border was out of control, they said, and Mexico was not doing enough to stop it, according to officials from both countries.
In fact, the crisis was worse than Mexican officials had been led to believe by their own immigration chief, Francisco Garduño Yáñez.
The revelation in October 2023 led Mexico’s defense secretary at the time to fly into a rage at an emergency meeting, officials with knowledge of the encounter said.
“You fooled me,” the defense secretary, Luis Cresencio Sandoval González, yelled at Mr. Garduño, according to two people familiar with the incident.
The defense secretary regularly briefed Mexico’s then-president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But, Mr. Sandoval had learned days earlier from the Americans that the migrant crisis was more dire than he realized.
“You hid information from me, making me lie to the president,” the defense secretary lashed out.
It was a tense chapter in U.S.-Mexico relations, according to five Mexican and American officials privy to bilateral talks on migration, and Mr. Garduño, 76, had landed in the middle of it. Beyond being accused of mismanaging and minimizing the migrant crisis, he is separately facing criminal charges in connection with a fire at a migration detention center that killed 40 people in 2023.
Now, as Mexico stands on the precipice of what are expected to be contentious border discussions with the incoming Trump administration, the same Mexican official blamed for mismanaging the migrant crisis, Mr. Garduño, will be a pivotal player in those negotiations. The American president-elect has vowed to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants as soon as he takes office.
The Defense Ministry, Mr. Garduño and the agency he led, the National Migration Institute, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Controlling the Mexico-U.S. border is a sprawling endeavor, involving thousands of government agents from both countries. The issue is often used as a political cudgel. U.S. House Republicans accused the Biden administration of failing to control the border and voted to impeach his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
In Mexico, Mr. Garduño was the one in the cross hairs.
A former director of Mexico’s prison system, he has been criticized for relying on troops to help manage migrant flows. Mr. Garduño’s agency has also been accused of essentially waving migrants through to the northern border for bribes. In interviews, migrants said they had to pay Mexican migration agents to travel through the country to reach the United States.
In 2022, the British Embassy also commissioned a classified report on Mexico’s migration system, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. It found systemic corruption in the government’s handling of migrants, including extortion, sexual abuse and collusion with criminal organizations to kidnap migrants for ransom.
In a 2022 interview, Mr. Garduño defended his performance, saying he had fired nearly half of the agency’s employees for extorting migrants. His agency had issued documents to nearly two million migrants from 2018 to 2022, he said, helping to regularize their presence in the country.
It is “a humanitarian policy of integration and brotherhood,” he said.
But interviews with officials from both countries have laid bare the discontent of American officials with how Mexico was handling migration.
In 2023, President Biden’s popularity was slipping ahead of the 2024 elections. Migration was a top concern among American voters. So the president dispatched Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Mr. Mayorkas for an emergency meeting in Mexico City that October.
They told Mr. López Obrador that American border agents had encountered nearly 220,000 migrants at the southern U.S. border that September — one of the largest flows ever recorded, officials with knowledge of the meeting said.
Border patrol agents were overwhelmed. The freight trains from Mexico to the United States had no security. Corrupt conductors, the Americans said, were stopping or slowing the trains to allow migrants to hop on.
They asked Mexican officials to move more aggressively to break up large groups of migrants heading to the U.S. border and to end visa-free travel for countries whose nationals used Mexico to enter America illegally, officials said.
The reality that the American delegation revealed was grimmer than the one presented by Mr. Garduño’s agency, which gave daily briefings to the Mexican administration on the number of migrants intercepted in southern Mexico.
Three officials working on migration and were privy to those figures said the numbers rarely correlated with the data presented by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the government of Panama, which many migrants pass through to reach Mexico.
The Mexican military reported that it and the migration agency encountered five million migrants from 2018 to 2024, but Mexico’s Interior Ministry reported about half that number in that time. The 2023 numbers varied widely as well; the migration agency reported nearly 1.5 million encounters that year, whereas the Interior Ministry reported about 500,000.
“Mexico’s government is blurring the picture by issuing two widely divergent numbers, without even explaining the divergence,” said Adam Isacson, a director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institute. “It’s confusing, it undermines the government’s credibility, and it makes it harder to anticipate emerging trends.”
After the U.S. delegation returned to Washington, Mr. López Obrador called the emergency meeting of Mexico’s most senior security and migration officials on Oct. 13, 2023. It was held in Tapachula, a city on the border with Guatemala and a funnel for migrants entering Mexico.
The city’s refugee agency was about to collapse, with about 7,000 migrants a day flooding its offices to register as asylum seekers — a fast track to receiving a migrant permit.
The permits were sort of a golden ticket: They allow asylum seekers to study, work and get access to basic services. Though asylum seekers are supposed to stay in the state where they apply, many use the Mexican permits to navigate to the U.S. border without being detained, officials say.
At the emergency meeting, the interior secretary at the time, Luisa María Alcalde Luján, zeroed in on the permits, officials said.
She grilled Mr. Garduño about whether his agency was handing out the permits but allowing asylum seekers to head north toward the U.S. border, according to four officials with knowledge of the meeting, two in attendance.
Yes, Mr. Garduño replied.
As Ms. Alcalde berated him, Mr. Garduño looked down at his lap and fell silent, officials with knowledge of the encounter said.
She then announced to the room that she was stripping Mr. Garduño of the ability to hand out new migration permits without the approval of other government branches.
Ms. Alcalde did not respond to requests for comment.
As soon as the migrant permits stopped, thousands of asylum seekers in Mexico were plunged into legal limbo.
The move made them “easier prey for criminal groups,” said Dana Graber Ladek, the Mexico chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration. It left “migrants with basically no option to be able to work legally in the country,” she added.
Eventually, Mexico restarted issuing the migration permits, but today they are a trickle of what they once were: Only about 3,500 permits were issued last year, compared with nearly 130,000 in 2023.
After the meeting, Mr. Garduño quickly moved to demonstrate that his agency was capable of controlling migrant flows, officials said.
His agents made it harder for migrants to reach the U.S. border and stepped up security on the trains many used to travel north. The number of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexican border dropped from September to November by nearly 13 percent, according to November 2023 statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
But just as the numbers trended down, a leak prompted high-level officials to call another emergency migration meeting in Mexico.
The Mexican treasury secretary temporarily stopped funding parts of the government in November 2023, including Mr. Garduño’s agency, because of budgetary constraints. But instead of lobbying the treasury to release funds, as other officials did, Mr. Garduño proactively halted his agency’s operations.
On Dec. 1, he sent a memo ordering his agency to pause deportation flights that carry undocumented migrants, withdraw personnel from checkpoints and shut down the busing program that had relieved pressure on the northern border.
The memo was swiftly leaked and went public.
Migrants rushed to the U.S. border, many unhindered by Mexican migration agents. That December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection registered the highest number of migrant encounters on the border in history: nearly 250,000 migrants.
Overwhelmed American border patrol agents shut land border crossings in Lukeville, Ariz., and San Diego. The U.S. border protection agency suspended several railway crossings in Texas.
Mexico’s government, trying to contain the fallout, publicly pledged more funds to its migration agency. Mr. Blinken flew back to Mexico City, on Dec. 27 — with an even larger delegation.
The next month, January 2024, after Mexico and the United States cooperated to enforce stricter measures, the migrant flow at the U.S. border was cut in half.
The pressure from Washington has continued to work; unlawful border crossings have declined. Last June, Mr. Biden issued an executive order to essentially block undocumented migrants from receiving asylum at the border.
Mexico has deployed National Guard troops to immigration checkpoints and bused migrants farther south, exhausting their efforts to head north. The authorities have also broken up migrant caravans so they no longer reach the U.S. border.
In October, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president of Mexico. She named a new immigration chief, but said Mr. Garduño would continue to advise the government to create a “profound transformation” of its migration agency and to help weather the storm after Mr. Trump takes office Jan. 20.
Mr. Garduño still faces criminal proceedings over the migration center fire. Several Mexican and American officials said they thought he would resign after the tragedy. But he has been a confidante of Mr. López Obrador for decades.
Mr. Garduño is not under arrest, but every two weeks, he must check in with the prosecuting judge.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Paulina Villegas contributed reporting.