Revenues from hotels, shops, restaurants, and pharmacies have fallen by almost 30%.
14ymedio, Angel Salinas, Mexico City, June 11, 2025 — “Some businesses are on the verge of collapse,” says Miguel Reyes del Pino, a hotel entrepreneur from Tapachula, Chiapas. Without migrants, whose number has declined radically with the new US administration, and tourism (the city doesn’t have the charm of other places in Chiapas), the rooming houses, restaurants, inns, shops and pharmacies “look almost empty,” and their income has fallen by almost 30%.
Luis García Villagrán, of the Centro de Dignificación Humana A.C., explains to 14ymedio that an individual migrant’s daily expenses are 300 pesos (almost 16 dollars). “We are talking about basic expenses: travel, meals, water, buying a cigarette, a soft drink or a telephone recharge.”
Villagrán says that it was common to see migrants “eating in the market, shopping in stores, looking for places to sleep and receiving shipments. Now there is hardly anyone in the streets, and without them, the activity has dropped a lot.”
About the various businesses on the verge of collapse, the activist says: “It really hurts them. Before they did not want to see the migrants, but today, now that they’re gone, they feel the blow. Tapachula is largely dependent on migrant money, and that’s what the authorities didn’t understand.”
Yaniel Ponce de León, a Cuban, is still waiting for an email from the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (COMAR) to finalize his process and regularize his stay. “For a month I ate two meals a day of bread and hotdogs. At first they were from the Oxxo, where they sold me three for 20 pesos (a dollar),” and I got water from the tap. A Coca Cola was too expensive for me.”
“For a month I ate two meals a day of bread and hotdogs. At first they were from the Oxxo, where they sold me three for 20 pesos (one dollar),” says Yaniel Ponce de León
The migrant indicated that he slept for days between cartons in the Bicentennial Park, because renting a room cost 1,500 pesos (79 dollars) for two weeks. It was crazy, I couldn’t pay them.”
Odalys, a Cuban woman, told the local media Diario del Sur that “just to go to work, pay for transport, breakfast, a meal, some water, all simple, I spend 300 pesos, since one meal is between 80 and 90 pesos, and water is 25 or 30 pesos.”
The migrant told the same media that in the eight months she has been in Tapachula, she hasn’t been in a restaurant. “We are spending on the basics and saving money here, because what we earn is not enough for anything.”
The city on the border with Guatemala once housed up to 120,000 migrants who sought to reach the United States, but with the arrival of Donald Trump as president, “the American dream was cut short,” says attorney José Luis Pérez.
The National Institute of Migration has stopped publishing updated reports since last December. “COMAR reported 5,700 applicants at the end of last year. Certainly many migrants have returned to their country, but others continue to arrive,” says Pérez.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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