Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said on Monday there has not been a rise yet in the number of deportations of Mexicans from the US under President Donald Trump.
Videgaray said in a television interview that Mexican consulates in the US have received three times as many phone calls from citizens there as before the US election in November, after Trump promised during his campaign to deport millions of undocumented migrants.
Last week, US federal immigration agents arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least four states, in what officials called routine enforcement actions.
Despite Videgaray's comments, Mexican officials have reportedly taken steps to prepare for a new wave of deportations.
Already this year, there was "a meeting between federal and state authorities to deal in terms of developing a strategy on how they're going to handle the proposed Trump deportation into Mexico," Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, told Business Insider, citing conversations he'd had with a Mexican security official.
As a part of that strategy, Mexican officials intend to keep arriving deportees in a central area temporarily before transporting them to their places of origin around the country in order to keep a few states or municipalities from becoming overburdened, Vigil said.
The Mexican government has also take steps in the US about coming changes in US immigration policy.
Mexican consulates in the US "have intensified their work of protecting fellow nationals, foreseeing more severe immigration measures to be implemented by the authorities of this country, and possible violations to constitutional precepts during such operations and problems with due process," the country's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday.
(Reporting for Reuters by Christine Murray and Veronica Gomez; editing by Bernadette Baum)
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