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CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Still reeling from memories of the racially driven Walmart massacre in El Paso last year, Frida Aguilera did the only thing she said she knew to cling to hope for both her countries.
Last weekend, Aguilera, a U.S. citizen, crossed this Mexican border to El Paso and became a first-time voter.
“I’m scared of the hatred,” she said.
President Donald J. Trump’s America First foreign policy, critics say, has come at the expense of other nations, especially Mexico, which has been under constant threat of tariff hikes by Trump. Many here feel the nation has been bullied into serving as a U.S. immigration enforcement machine by, for example, caving in to the Trump administration by using the Mexico national guard to halt the flow of mostly poor migrants from Central America.
Along the border, the region hears the daily drumbeat of Trump’s obsession for a wall and has borne witness to tearful immigrant family separations and the growth of refugee camps where migrants seeking asylum are forced to stay in Mexico while their claims are processed in the U.S. It’s driving Americans in Mexico to make sure their vote is cast and counted.
In the western Mexican state of Jalisco known for its carefree way of life for U.S. citizens who live there lies the small town of Ajijic. Expat retirees Barbara Hildt and her husband Allan MacGregor have been witnessing what’s happening in their native land over the past four years and, as soon as they could, they requested their absentee ballots, filled them out and signed them, attached sworn affidavits and got them back to their town clerk in their native Amesbury, Massachusetts.
“We’re so relieved to have voted,” said Hildt, a former state legislator. Added MacGregor, 81, “The U.S. needs to get its act together.”
Whether living on the border, or in a posh lakeside community in Mexico, Aguilera, 18, and Hildt, 74, share a common trait: They’re U.S. citizens, and like millions of others, international politics remains downright local for these Americans.
Mexico is home to the largest American population abroad on the planet, with more than 1.5 million U.S. citizens. In addition to them are hundreds of thousands of binational citizens who call the 2,000-mile border home, bringing the total to more than 2 million.
The vast majority of them are unhappy with Trump.
“Mexico has been Trump’s piñata and his puppet,” said Jesus Velasco, an expert on U.S.-Mexico relations at Tarleton State University in Stephenville. “A country he can criticize, manipulate and denigrate whenever he wants without any serious repercussions and a country that he can use for domestic political purposes.”
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., who specializes in border issues, said, “It has made us feel insecure and fearful; it has separated our families and has limited our mobility between the two countries we call home.”
Correa-Cabrera lives in D.C. and owns a home in Brownsville, Texas, near the Mexico border, too. “The symbolic wall that has been constructed in the past few years between my two homes is big and it is not beautiful,” she said.
Most Americans in Mexico who vote travel home to do so. Others vote through absentee ballots, and those numbers are on the rise.
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Democrats Abroad Mexico, part of the party’s worldwide apparatus, says 12,564 Americans have requested ballots, a 100 percent increase from 2016. Will Chapman, president of the organization, credits the “pandemic” and Trump administration policies that he said have proven “more than a little embarrassing” for the increase in absentee ballots. “We thought the United States was better than this.”
Some Republicans are just as excited about the upcoming election. In Mexico City, Larry Rubin is the Republican National Committee representative for Mexico and presides over the American Society in the capital.
Rubin described the relationship between Trump and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as “very good, solid” and says efforts to build a wall “is a good thing for security. Every nation has a right to secure its border and Mexicans, I believe, understand that.”
Lopez Obrador has said he will have “no problem” with either Trump or his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Some locals in Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende, and the Lake Chapala-Ajijic region and border communities in Ciudad Juarez beg to differ with Rubin. They share stories of deepening divisions among friends abroad, not unlike that in the United States. They debate over facemasks, the border wall, and what some calls a smoldering cultural war seeping across borders.
Karen Cage, 74, originally from Plano and now living in Ajijicis a fervent Trump supporter. She and her husband Ed, who passed away in August, lost many “liberal” U.S. friends “over these silly things and that’s so sad. I hope we heal, here and in the United States.”
She says she reminds her Mexican employee at her home that “Trump is not racist. It’s not that he doesn’t like you. He just wants you to come legal” an explanation she concedes “he just doesn’t quite understand.”
Along the border, some U.S. citizens point to the August 3, 2019, massacre of 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso as a turning point in motivating them to vote.
The shooter, Patrick Crusius of Allen, absolved Trump of any responsibility for the killings, saying in his manifesto that his decision to hunt down Mexicans was his own way to “stop the invasion of Hispanics.” But the words he used mimic language used by Trump and members of his own administration.
Acting U.S. Customs & Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan recently parroted Trump again, warning in a tweet, that without Trump’s immigration policies “we’ll have an invasion.”
Such language is what scared Aguilera into voting, she says. She was born in El Paso, but like over 100,000 Americans, either U.S. citizens or permanent residents, lives in Juarez. She is also majoring in biology at the University of Texas at El Paso.
She turned 18 in June and by September she was registered. She remembered the insults hurled at her community by outsiders and images of migrants standing on the same bridges she crosses routinely to work and attend school.
The day of the massacre her father had planned to cross the border to shop at the same Walmart where the shootings took place. At the last minute he canceled. The violence shattered a sense of peace for Aguilera and pushed her to get involved, even though she says at times she feels like a broken bridge between both countries.
“Yes, I think about that day, and I’m still frightened,” said Aguilera. “We have to vote because this is about protecting the future of our countries, our community on both sides.”
Like Aguilera, Camila Marquez, 21, is a UTEP marketing major, a binational citizen living in Juarez. She too felt a sense of urgency to get involved, helping at least seven other friends to register to vote.
“I may have been born in one country and live in another one,” she said. “But because I live on the border, anything that happens in both countries concerns me. I’m in a situation in which the decisions made in any of the two affect me.”