Mexico sent lawyers into American courts this week to stop the enforcement of American law. Its foreign ministry began filing criminal complaints against the officers who deport people, and sent cease-and-desist letters, formal demands to stop, to the detention centers where its citizens had died. It asked the United Nations to investigate how the United States removes people. The target is Mexican nationals the United States has every legal right to send home. President Claudia Sheinbaum said the deaths are "not just a matter for the Mexican government" but a cause for "all of Mexican society."

About 4.3 million of those Mexicans are living in the United States illegally. Few ever go home. Mexico is now in American courts to keep it that way.

The traffic only ever ran one way

The numbers are not close. Pew counted 14 million people living in the country illegally in 2023, a record, up 3.5 million in two years. About 4.3 million are Mexican. Another 2.5 million came from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the corridor Mexico polices when it feels like it. Customs and Border Protection logged more than 10.8 million encounters between 2021 and 2024.

Against that flood, the return is a trickle. The United States removes Mexican nationals at a rate of tens of thousands a year. Millions came north. A handful go home.

The flow was never free to the people already here. Mexico collected $61.8 billion in remittances, the money migrants wire home, in 2025, according to the Inter-American Dialogue. The Federal Reserve found that the illegal-immigration surge drove about 30 percent of home-price growth and 20 percent of rent growth in the average metro area between 2021 and 2024. Even Cato, which argues for more immigration, concedes it: immigrants push up rents and home values. The people Mexico is fighting to keep here bid up the rent for the people who were already here.

Seventeen names for its dead. None for Laken Riley.

Mexico says seventeen of its nationals have died in American custody or during arrests since 2025, and it wants American prosecutors to charge the officers involved. Those deaths are its allegation, and it is asking that they be investigated. The shooting that set it off, in Houston on July 7, is disputed. Mexico calls it a killing. American accounts say the man drove a car at a federal agent.

The flood killed Americans too, and what separates those deaths from Mexico's seventeen is not the count but the cause. The government could have prevented every one of them by enforcing laws already on the books. CBP released Jose Ibarra after he crossed illegally, and he murdered Laken Riley. Border Patrol released Franklin Peña Ramos with a notice to appear, and three weeks later Jocelyn Nungaray, twelve years old, was dead in a Houston creek. No one has yet been tried. ICE released a man a court had already ordered deported, and months later he beheaded a Dallas motel manager in front of the man's wife and son. DHS called it "completely preventable."

Mexico wants our prosecutors to charge the agents who carried out lawful deportations. It has filed nothing over the Americans its emigrants killed. Its dead count. Ours do not.

Mexico guards a border. Just the one to its south.

Mexico knows how to enforce a border. It detained more than 780,000 migrants in 2023. It deported almost every person it held in 2019 straight back to their home countries. It removed thousands of Guatemalans in a single stretch of last year. And when President Trump threatened tariffs at the start of 2025, Mexico deployed 10,000 troops to its northern border inside a week, to stop the fentanyl heading north.

A government that can do all that has not lost the ability to police a border. It has chosen which border it minds, and which direction of traffic.

This is a sovereignty story, not a story about custody

The coverage calls this a case about deaths in custody. JURIST reported Mexico taking legal action in American courts over the deaths of its citizens in custody. That framing is wrong. Mexico is trying to claim a veto over whom the United States deports, filed in American courts and carried to the United Nations.

If Mexican nationals died wrongfully in American custody, there is a remedy, and it is already here: American courts and the Justice Department. That is what one sovereign country offers another when it has a grievance. It is not a foreign criminal case against the officers who did the deporting.

Living in this country is a privilege. The people already here extend it, and it carries one condition: that you do not harm them. Mexico's consulates can look after its citizens, and they should. This filing reaches past that, for the power to decide who stays, the same power Mexico guards with soldiers and used to send more than 780,000 people home the year before last.

Accountability sits with the country willing to do something about it, and that is the United States. Mexico moved against the cartels running fentanyl north only when America threatened tariffs. Left alone, it looked away.

So Mexico has a cheaper fix than a criminal case in an American court. If it does not want its citizens dying in American custody, it can keep them from leaving in the first place. The country that will not keep its people home does not get to prosecute the one they fled to.