A recent ProPublica study written by Sebastian Rotella documents the changing nature of the nationalities of illegal immigrants trying to gain access into the United States by crossing the U.S–Mexico border.  The report states that “for years, non-Mexicans have accounted for only a small fraction of U.S. border arrests. The proportion has changed, however, and Central American migration has surged during the past year. Statistics indicate that U.S. agents caught at least 90,000 non-Mexicans at the U.S-Mexico border in the fiscal year, the great majority of them Central Americans.” The largest proportion of non-Mexican migrants came from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The growing problem of the illegal trafficking moving across Mexico to the U.S. border has even prompted the idea of establishing a Mexican Border Patrol force to police the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Doris Meissner, a former U.S. immigration commissioner and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., is quoted in the report as saying that, “Mexico is increasingly finding itself in the most complex situation for a county in regards to migration: It is simultaneously a sending country, a transit county and a receiving country.”