Fort Lewis College sociology professor Ben Waddell spent last fall in Guanajuato, Mexico, working on a book about the country’s missing-persons crisis, with the goal of contributing to a broader understanding of America’s immigration system.
More than 130,000 people are missing in Mexico, largely because of cartel violence. According to public policy group Mexico Evalúa, there has been a 200% increase in missing people within the past decade.
Amid the crisis, a nationwide phenomenon of mother-led search groups has emerged to make up for what Waddell said are authorities’ indifference, incompetence and stigmatization of missing people as cartel-involved.
This grassroots response and the mothers and families impacted are the subject of his upcoming book, “The Migrant Trap.”
“The reason that so many people are searching for asylum right now has to do with the types of conditions that you see and hear about and witness when you walk with women like this,” Waddell said.
In 2023, a record number of asylum-seekers arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom were fleeing cartel violence in Mexico or similar threats in other central and South American countries.
“The missing people phenomena in Mexico right now is reflective of the reason why so many people have come to the United States searching for asylum over the last six, seven years,” he said.
Waddell sees himself as a storyteller, and believes stories – like the ones of the women led search groups in his book – provide necessary perspective to expand the American public’s understanding of immigration issues and create more effective asylum policies.
The U.S public is too far removed from the conditions driving migration and policymakers can’t design effective solutions if they don’t understand why people leave, he said.
In Guanajuato, one of the states with the highest prevalence of violence, there are about 25 collectives searching for the disappeared, he said. One of those is the Madres Guerreras de León (Warrior Mothers of León), which Waddell walked with after meeting several women involved in search groups.
He said that to truly understand what the women and communities were going through he needed to participate in the searches.
The searches are organized with the military and the location is kept private until the last minute. Participants meet in a parking lot with military, National Guard, firefighters and forensic teams; mothers and relatives walk in a military-led caravan with armored vehicles with turrets and sirens.
Military drones fly ahead, scouting for danger and recently removed earth – indicative of unmarked graves. Many civilians carry iron poles with pointed ends that are pushed deep into the dirt – the scent of the dirt on metal indicates whether a site may contain human remains.
“It’s a strange space because it’s very sad – the reason you’re there – but at the same time, you can tell it’s therapeutic,” Waddell said. “I’ve heard them (the women) say this before that on the searches, they feel like they can just be themselves because people understand what they’ve gone through.”
Many women and families involved in searches have been told to stop and received death threats, pushing them to begin looking toward the U.S. to seek asylum.
“This is the other side of the migration trap,” he said.
He spent the past eight years working on professional affidavits for asylum cases for people coming from Central America, Colombia and Mexico that shaped his understanding of the U.S. immigration system and bottlenecked asylum process.
“There’s a very large backlog of people that are trapped in this immigration system,’ he said. ”There’s no real way forward or out. They’re just waiting.“
Waddell was born in Telluride and raised in Norwood, where as a young adult he worked on construction crews, surrounded by colleagues from Mexico and Latin America.
“I think understanding where they came from and why they came was something that was in the back of my mind long before I ever started studying it,” he said.
Politicians frame migration as an invasion, but for people in violent, economically blocked contexts – like the ones he covers in his book – leaving is the most rational decision, Waddell said.
If deported, many will try again, because conditions at home are worse than the dangers of the journey.
“It doesn’t look like immigration is going to subside in the years to come,” he said. “So a better understanding of how these things work now could go a long ways in trying to think about actual solutions in the future.”
Waddell is in the final stages of completing a draft of “The Migrant Trap.” He is seeking a publisher.
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