Protect their Journey #GirlsWhoMigrate

At the close of the 2024–2026 funding cycle, the migration portfolio included nine groups working across eight states in Mexico: Baja California, Mexico City, Chiapas, State of Mexico, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Querétaro, and Veracruz. Throughout this period, the organizations achieved significant progress in advancing access to rights for migrants and displaced people, strengthening community leadership, influencing decision-making spaces, and creating pathways for more dignified and sustainable integration.

In the area of comprehensive health care, the Centro de Partos de San Cristóbal strengthened innovative strategies to ensure continuity of care in contexts of mobility. Following the dismantling of migrant camps and the resulting relocation of activities from Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Tapachula, the organization developed portable herbal medicine kits that allowed migrants to continue their treatments while in transit.

This accompaniment had a particularly significant impact on migrant and displaced women, especially those who were pregnant. Through information-sharing and holistic care processes, participants strengthened their ability to make decisions about their own health, understand their treatments, and determine how to continue them throughout their migration journeys. Services included therapy, medical care, massages, and acupuncture.

The organization also facilitated processes with adolescents and young people focused on recognizing the body as a territory, promoting tools for self-care, self-expression, and informed decision-making regarding physical and emotional well-being.

Complementing these efforts, Partería y Medicinas Ancestrales delivered training workshops and educational activities in community institutions and shelters.These activities strengthened knowledge related to health, self-care, and human rights among both residents and staff. Sustained collaboration with these shelters has contributed to creating safer, more informed, and more respectful environments, while promoting practices that strengthen autonomy and the exercise of rights among migrants and displaced people.

The period also saw important shifts in migration dynamics. Although shelter occupancy declined in several territories—for example, some shelters in Tijuana were operating at roughly half capacity—internal forced displacement continued, and migration trajectories became increasingly unstable and complex. This context intensified psychosocial impacts associated with migration, including migratory grief, anxiety, stress, complex trauma, depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation.

In response, organizations such as Centro 32 expanded their crisis psychological support services. Through a holistic psychosocial approach, care extended beyond mental health support to include healthcare, humanitarian assistance, and economic alternatives, recognizing that emotional recovery depends in part on having the material conditions necessary to sustain life and rebuild future prospects.

Their work with migrant children was particularly significant in drawing attention to experiences that often remain invisible within institutional responses.

“The reasons families migrate vary, but most are related to violence. When they arrive, parents are focused on what they are going to do, how they are going to survive, or where they will go next, but the children stop being seen.”

— Verónica Ochoa, Centro 32

Overall, the processes supported by these organizations contributed to 939 people increasing their participation and influence in decision-making spaces or gaining access to new resources that strengthened their life projects. Beyond addressing immediate needs, the strategies developed during this period focused on building individual and collective capacities, expanding the exercise of rights, and creating conditions for migrants and displaced people to achieve greater autonomy, security, and well-being.

2025 represented a particularly challenging year for social movements in Mexico. For organizations working in migration contexts, these challenges were intensified by widespread defunding, the tightening of policies at the country’s northern and southern borders, an increase in deportations, and escalating violence against people on the move.

Migrant girls and adolescents, as well as those experiencing internal displacement and forced mobility, have not been exempt from these impacts. They have faced an intensification of structural, community-based, and institutional violence, intersecting with processes of territorial dispossession, militarization, criminalization of community defense, racism, adult-centrism, and gender inequality.

In Chiapas, along Mexico’s southern border, organizations such as Tzome Ixuk, Mujeres Organizadas, A.C. carry out their work in a context marked by widespread violence, the expansion of megaprojects, the presence of organized crime, and the criminalization of territorial defense. These realities stand in contrast to official narratives of “peace,” “calm,” and “respect for Indigenous people,” which obscure the everyday impacts on entire communities, particularly on children.

Indigenous girls experience not only the direct effects of territorial violence but also the erosion of community bonds, the precarization of living conditions, and the normalization of unsafe environments. Surveillance, militarization, and territorial control restrict their rights to free and safe mobility, play, community participation, and a life free from violence.

In response, Tzome Ixuk promotes community-based processes that place girls at the center. Through the School of Memory and Resistance, approximately 100 children participated in formative spaces reflecting on their right to Tojolabal identity, to live in violence-free environments, to care for body-territory, to food sovereignty, and to safe mobility. Additionally, two young women and three girls took part in an exchange with the Colectiva Feminista MAPAS in Michoacán, strengthening inter-territorial networks of learning, self-esteem, and solidarity between Tojol-ab’al and Purépecha communities.

The organization also promoted the Second Gathering on Self-Care, Collective Care, and Healing, with the participation of 62 people, including women, healers, defenders, and children. These intergenerational spaces enabled girls to recognize care as a right, express their emotions, and strengthen community bonds that function as protection networks.

In the northern border region, the organization Partería y Medicinas Ancestrales accompanied migrant families, many with girls and adolescents, who were stranded following the tightening of migration policies. This shift transformed transit mobility into forced permanence, generating conditions of precarity, uprooting, and increased exposure to violence.

A particularly serious issue has been the denial of the right to identity. Approximately 10 babies born with the accompaniment of this organization still lack birth certificates, limiting their access to healthcare, education, and migration regularization, and deepening exclusion from the very beginning of life.

Complementarily, workshops were held in shelters specifically for girls, addressing topics such as menstrual dignity, self-care, and human rights. Through participatory and playful methodologies, girls identified forms of violence that should not be normalized and strengthened their decision-making capacities.

In Mexico City, organizations such as Las Vanders have documented how the closure of legal pathways to the United States and the dismantling of migrant camps have transformed the lives of migrant families. Many girls moved from a situation of transit to forced permanence in contexts of overcrowding, housing insecurity, and community stigmatization.

In this context, the Migrant Leadership School was implemented at a camp in the northern area of the city, integrating girls and adolescents into feminist popular education processes centered on play, care, and community coexistence. These spaces helped reduce tensions with local communities, make visible the leadership of migrant girls and youth, and transform institutional practices.