On a recent morning, Maria Del Carmen Cortes, 42, roamed through a concrete path near a bus station in northern Mexico City lined with makeshift homes made of wood and plastic tarps. She stopped in front of an improvised food stall where Mari Ruiz, 42, was firing up a pan of Venezuelan arepas, a thick flatbread made of cornmeal dough.
“You see a lot of things along the way,” Cortes said, leaning against a wooden post waiting for her breakfast. Her curls were fastened into a bun, and a butterfly necklace sat above her collarbone. It had been a year since Cortes and her husband left their seven children in Colombia in search of a better life. Like thousands of other migrants, they traversed the perilous Darien Gap, that connects North and South America and were now trying to make ends meet selling candy at traffic lights. “Yesterday, I felt depressed,” Cortes said.
Until January, would-be immigrants like Ruiz and Cortes waited in this migrant camp for an appointment with officials through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection app, CBP One. The appointments offered a chance to request asylum in the U.S. For many would-be migrants, the opportunity to legally enter the country led them to wait weeks or even months to secure an appointment. However, the day he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump shut down the app, halting the sole pathway to seek asylum. Trump’s crackdown has caused distress and anguish for many migrants, compounding their already precarious mental health.
According to Franking Frías, executive director of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Mexico and Central America, the humanitarian organization has been treating between 40 to 50 migrants a week in Mexico City.
“Since they leave their country, they’re victims to violence,” Frías said. MSF reported that the organization provided more than 490,000 individual mental health consultations in conflict zones around the world in 2023. MSF’s psychological first aid is provided to people who experience acute distress after a traumatic event, helping them cope with shock, panic attacks, and confusion, and deal with changes in appetite and sleeping patterns.
In Mexico, Frías said many of the migrants have had to separate from their families for weeks or even months. They come from places where there are high rates of organized crime, and they can often encounter kidnapping, rape, or extortion along their migration trip.
“It creates a lot of stress and anxiety,” he said. “The majority of people arrive here with a degree of affectation at an emotional or mental level because they’ve seen many terrible things along their journey. This has been agonized more by the cancellation of CBP One.”
Every day, Cortes speaks for an hour over video with her children, who are back in the coastal city of Cartagena, Colombia. She said chatting with them about their school and homework boosts her mood.
“I don’t tell them much about my journey,” she said. Each of her arms is adorned with tattoos of the names of her two daughters, Luisa, 16, and Karol, 12.
“If I tell [Karol] about it, I’m going to traumatize her,” said Cortes. “I’m going to put a weight on her shoulders that she shouldn’t have to deal with because she’s a child. That’s why I chose not to bring her.”
Dr. Psyche Calderon Vargas, a specialist who attends to migrants on a daily basis in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, attributed these mental health struggles to a condition known as “Ulysses syndrome.” Dr. Joseba Achotegui, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Barcelona who has extensively studied Ulysses syndrome, describes the condition as extreme migratory grief — not a mental disorder — that is aggravated by chronic and multiple stresses. It appears in migrants who deal with loneliness, fear, and helplessness daily.
“It’s constant,” Calderon said. “It’s missing where you’re from and not being able to go back. It’s fighting every day to get to where you want to be.”
Ruiz, who opened the food stand, lives in the migrant camp with her two daughters and husband. Some of her other relatives live in another migrant settlement about three miles away. When she cooks, her 9-year-old daughter constantly scrolls through her phone, looking at photos and videos of family.
They left Venezuela a year ago, also making the dangerous journey through the Darien Gap.
“With my daughters, we don’t talk about it,” Ruiz said. “They lived through that experience. What they experienced there died there.”
For Ruiz and Cortes, the limbo caused by Trump’s policies has left them with little idea about what happens next. Ruiz plans to wait in Mexico for a couple more months, hoping to find a legal pathway to Canada where she can work in agriculture.
“I’m a very hardworking and responsible woman,” she said.
As for Cortes, she said if she doesn’t find a way to the U.S. by December, she plans to return to Colombia. “To be with my family is better than suffering and being in need here with no one to help me,” she said. “It’s better to be back in my country with my family.”
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