With Asylum Out of Reach, Daily Border Patrol Apprehensions Near 1,500 Threshold; Death in the Darién Gap; Kamala Harris’s Border and Migration Record Under Scrutiny; Texas Updates
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
A double crackdown—Mexico’s stepped-up blocking of migrants and the Biden administration’s June 5 asylum-restriction rule—has brought a sharp short-term downturn in the number of migrants seeking to cross the border between ports of entry. Border Patrol apprehensions dipped below 1,500 on July 22, nearing the threshold under which the June 5 rule could be suspended.
Ten migrants drowned to death in a rain-swollen river while attempting to cross the treacherous Darién Gap in Panama. The country’s new president, who had pledged to stop Darién migration through stepped-up deportations, said that U.S.-backed repatriation flights would be voluntary.
Shortly after Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential campaign, opponents took aim at the border and migration record of his virtually certain successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, widely referring to her as the Biden administration’s “border czar.” No such position existed, and Harris’s role encompassed only “root causes” of migration from Central America. Nonetheless, a resolution that passed the Republican-majority House of Representatives on July 25 “strongly condemns” Harris’s performance in the putative “border czar” role.
For the second time, a state judge ruled against a Texas state government attempt to prosecute a border-area migrant shelter. State government jailings of migrants under “Operation Lone Star” are costing counties like El Paso millions of dollars. The National Guard Bureau’s chief says that “Lone Star” deployments are hurting the force’s military readiness. And despite the “Lone Star” crackdown, Border Patrol apprehensions have dropped only slightly more in Texas than they have in Democratic Party-governed Arizona.
By a vote of 220-196, the Republican-majority House of Representatives approved a resolution“Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”
Six Democrats from swing districts voted with the Republicans: Yadira Caraveo (Denver suburbs, Colorado); Henry Cuéllar (Laredo and Rio Grande Valley, Texas); Donald Davis (northeastern North Carolina); Jared Golden (rural Maine); Mary Peltola (Alaska); and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (southwestern Washington).
The resolution had originally read “on March 24, 2021, President Biden asked Vice President Kamala Harris to serve as the administration’s border czar.” After Democrats in the House Rules Committee pointed out that this was factually inaccurate, the language changed to “came to be known colloquially as the Biden administration’s ‘border czar.’”
“This is like voting on a press release. What a colossal waste of time,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee.
Much press coverage continues to analyze Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s border and migration record. Republican statements and advertising, meanwhile, continue to seek lines of attack on the same issue.
Media analyses point out that Harris’s role was not the “border” but addressing “root causes” of migration from Central America. A Los Angeles Times examination of Harris’s role indicated that the Vice President’s interest in the issue flagged during her tenure.
On a visit to the border in San Diego, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) added to attacks on what he called “the Biden-Harris border catastrophe,” adding the false talking point that undocumented migrants will play a role in voter fraud against Republicans in the November elections.
Border Patrol has now found the remains of 140 migrants in its El Paso sector, a segment of the border stretching from the Arizona-New Mexico border to just east of El Paso, during fiscal year 2024. In all of fiscal 2023, the figure was 149 migrant deaths, a record for the sector that is certain to be broken, as the region’s scorching-hot summer is far from over.
The rising fatalities are occurring even as migrant apprehensions plummet in the sector (and border-wide). It may be that, with asylum blocked for many under the Biden administration’s new June 2024 restrictions, more people are trying to evade apprehension in the desert. The organization No More Deaths announced a new update to its El Paso migrant death map for 2024.
The Senate Appropriations Committee will “mark up” (amend and approve its version of) the 2025 Homeland Security Appropriations bill on Thursday, August 1. The bill text is not yet public.
After suffering judicial setbacks in efforts to prosecute or sue El Paso’s Annunciation House and McAllen’s Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R) is now going after a third respite center that receives migrants released from CBP custody. Paxton is now seeking to compel management of Team Brownsville to sit for a deposition. The hard-right state official believes that these charities, whose work prevents releases of migrants onto border cities’ streets, are encouraging undocumented migration.
A new report from nine U.S. organizations presented more than 30 examples of due process and human rights violations suffered by asylum seekers at the border since the Biden administration’s June 5 rule restricting asylum went into effect. Abuses include arbitrary deportations without an opportunity to seek protection in the United States; obstacles to accessing legal representation; inhumane detention conditions; and family separations.
The outcome of Venezuela’s Sunday presidential election could have a big effect on migration from a country that has seen a quarter of its population exit since the mid-2010s. If the opposition wins, as polls predict, migration could slow and some Venezuelans could return. If the authoritarian Maduro regime declares itself the victor, migration could increase further.
10 people drowned while trying to cross the Darién Gap. A government shelter closes in Ciudad Juárez amid reduced migration. Texas's attack on Catholic Charities suffers a judicial setback.
Panamanian police found the bodies of ten migrants, their nationalities not yet identified, who drowned in the Darién Gap while trying to cross a river swollen by seasonal rains. They had apparently sought to take a shorter route through the treacherous region, involving more boat travel and less walking, for which smugglers charge a higher fee.
Panama’s border police (SENAFRONT) urged migrants to cross the Darién using “the authorized passage for irregular migration leading to Cañas Blancas, where specialized patrols are available for their protection and humanitarian assistance.” Panama’s new government has sought to block some other routes with barbed wire.
As the Biden administration’s June 5 asylum restrictions have brought a short-term drop in migration, Mexico’s migration authority (National Migration Institute, INM) is closing a tent shelter for migrants that it had established in Ciudad Juárez in late 2023. As of earlier this month, Border Report reported, Ciudad Juárez’s migrant shelters were more than half full, housing many families awaiting the 200 daily CBP One appointments at a port of entry across the Rio Grande in El Paso.
A Texas state judge ruled that Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a large shelter for migrants released from CBP custody in McAllen, does not have to give a sworn deposition to state prosecutors.
Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R) has launched a legal offensive against charities that receive released migrants, accusing them of encouraging illegal migration. A judge in El Paso recently struck down a similar effort to investigate El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter network, which is also associated with the Catholic faith. Paxton is appealing the Annunciation House ruling, and yesterday’s Catholic Charities decision only stops the deposition, not Paxton’s larger investigation.
Discussing Hamas cross-border raids into Israel before an audience of Texas sheriffs, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) added, “You can use my analogy, not to the same magnitude of course, but you can use my analogy, something that Texas law enforcement deals with” at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A look at Border Patrol apprehensions shows that the Texas state government’s $11 billion “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown has had little effect amid a border-wide drop in migration, and it has not pushed migration into other border states, as Gov. Abbott has claimed.
Since the record-setting month of December, after which Mexico began an aggressive campaign of blocking northbound migrants, Border Patrol apprehensions in Texas fell 82 percent by June—but they fell 70 percent in Democratic Party-governed Arizona and 67 percent border-wide.
Since January, migrant apprehensions in Arizona (-52%) have actually dropped more sharply than in Texas (-40%). From May to June, Texas fell 36 percent and Arizona 33 percent; the whole border fell 29 percent.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s role in border and migration policy continues to receive scrutiny. Many media outlets have clarified that, as vice president, Harris had no direct border responsibilities, and that oft-repeated Republican claims that she was a sort of White House “border czar” are false.
Harris was tasked, however, with a diplomatic effort to address the root causes of migration in northern Central America. While it is hard to link this long-term effort to short-term migration impacts, Central American migrants are among very few nationalities whose numbers have declined since 2021 at the U.S.-Mexico border. Comparing an average month in fiscal 2024 to an average month in fiscal 2021, migrant encounters with Hondurans have fallen 50 percent, with Salvadorans 39 percent, and with Guatemalans 14 percent. Border encounters with all nationalities’ migrants, meanwhile, are up 40 percent.
The numbers show that "Operation Lone Star" hasn't caused declines in migration to Texas much greater than declines elsewhere. We should be relieved that cruelty hasn't paid dividends.
Here are Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants, by U.S. border state, since the record-setting month of December 2023.
Since December, unauthorized migration has declined by two thirds. Since January—after Mexico started cracking down hard on migrants crossing its territory—migration declined by one third. From May to June, after the Biden administration issued a rule severely limiting asylum access between ports of entry, migration dropped by 29 percent. (This effect is likely to be short-term, but may keep numbers down through Election Day—even as it sends many would-be asylum seekers back to danger.)
Texas’s hardline governor, Greg Abbott (R), likes to claim that his state government’s “Operation Lone Star,” a $10 billion-plus series of security-force deployments, imprisonments, and wall-building, is responsible for the drop in migrants coming to Texas. Abbott even alleges that Texas has pushed migrants to other states.
But did Texas see the largest drop in migration?
Since December, the answer is “yes, though not dramatically more.” Migrant apprehensions in Texas declined by 82 percent from December to June. But in Arizona, where Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has not implemented any “Operation Lone Star”-like policies, apprehensions dropped by 70 percent. Both states, with their very different approaches, experienced declines greater than the border-wide average.
If one takes January—after Mexico’s crackdown began—as the baseline date, Arizona in fact declined more sharply than Texas. (52 percent to 40 percent.)
From May to June, Texas dropped 36 percent and Arizona 33 percent, a near tie.
From this, It’s really hard to conclude that Greg Abbott’s policies made a big difference. Arizona experienced similar declines without the hardline policies. The 2024 migration decline is a border-wide trend, not a Texas phenomenon.
We should be relieved that cruelty hasn’t paid any dividends.
On a party-line vote, the Republican-majority House of Representatives’ Committee on Rules approved the chamber’s consideration of a resolution “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”
The legislation claims that “on March 24, 2021, President Biden asked Vice President Kamala Harris to serve as the administration’s border czar.” As numerous media have pointed out, this is fully inaccurate. Biden tasked Harris with the portfolio of addressing root causes of migration from Central America. (That is a role that Biden himself had taken on in the Obama administration in 2014, after the first major wave of child and family asylum-seeking migrants from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border.) Harris did not have larger border or migration policy responsibilities.
The resolution is being rushed to the floor just days after President Joe Biden decided not to seek re-election and endorsed Vice President Harris to run in his stead.
U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said, and New York Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz separately tweeted, that Border Patrol apprehended fewer than 1,500 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border on July 22. (Salazar said this was the fewest in a day since 2018, which is inaccurate: the last month during which apprehensions averaged less than 1,500 per day was July 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic.)
The Biden administration’s June 5, 2024 asylum restriction rule states that, should the weekly average of migrant apprehensions drop below 1,500 per day for 3 weeks, and should the average remain below 2,500, then U.S. border authorities will no longer automatically deny asylum access to people who cross between ports of entry to ask for protection. (The administration’s May 2023 rule, denying asylum to most who fail to seek it in another country through which they passed, would remain in effect.)
A “caravan” of migrants—estimates range from several hundred to about 2,000—has walked about 35-40 miles from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. A few have walked a bit further into Chiapas, more than 1,000 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
La Jornada reported it as “the fourth largest caravan so far this year.” The participants, mostly from Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, say they have been waiting for months to secure appointments with Mexican migration authorities.
Many tell reporters that their goal is to reach a part of Mexico (from Mexico City northward) where they might be able to use the CBP One app to make appointments with U.S. authorities at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Mexico has been more aggressive this year in blocking undocumented migrants’ efforts to travel northward.
When the Texas state government arrests migrants on trespassing charges under its “Operation Lone Star,” counties must pay the cost of those who end up in county-run jails. El Paso County’s commissioners unanimously approved sending a grant application to the office of Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to reimburse $8 million in costs it has incurred in holding people arrested by Texas state forces. By the end of the year, Operation Lone Star incarcerations could end up costing El Paso’s Democratic Party-governed county $18 million.
Responding to some U.S. politicians, Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said that any closure of the U.S.-Mexico border “will not be allowed, and Mexico will never have a closed border.”
“Dozens of makeshift ladders,” most made out of rebar, “mysteriously appeared in a dumpster” near the 30-foot border wall south of San Diego, Border Report reported.
The Congressional Budget Office, an independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, published a report finding that recent years’ sharp increase in migration will reduce the U.S. budget deficit by $900 billion over the 2024-2034 period. The projection is based on estimates of the number of people paying taxes and receiving benefits ($1.2 trillion in tax revenue and $0.3 trillion in demand for benefits), and of the rising migration’s effect on interest rates and U.S. workers’ productivity.
CNN reported from the Tohono O’Odham Nation reservation, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora. Its people do not recognize the borderline and have long guarded their sovereignty, but border realities like migration, smuggling, and migrant deaths have placed stress both on the Nation’s autonomy and its uneasy relationship with Border Patrol and other U.S. authorities. That relationship grew more tense after agents shot and killed an O’Odham man, Raymond Mattia, outside his house in May 2023.
At Foreign Policy, Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center and Channing Lee of the Special Competitive Studies Project punched holes into claims that large numbers of spies or saboteurs might be embedded in the increased number of migrants from China arriving at the border. Instead, they argue, the United States should view as a moral victory that so many people from a competing power are choosing the U.S. political and economic model.
Republicans repeatedly and erroneously call Kamala Harris the Biden administration's "Border Czar." For the first time since 1997, Border Patrol agents no longer ask migrants if they fear deportation.
The border and migration issue has become a principal Republican line of attack against near-certain Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Messaging from GOP figures, including Donald Trump, refers to the Vice President as the Biden administration’s “Border Czar,” a term that the White House never used to refer to Harris’s role as its point person for addressing root causes of migration in northern Central America.
“Joe Biden has now endorsed and fully supports his ‘Borders Czar’ Kamala Harris to be the Democrat candidate for president,” tweeted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), adding, “I think I will need to triple the border wall, razor wire barriers and National Guard on the border.” The term even appears in the title of an “emergency” resolution that the House of Representatives’ Republican leadership intends to move through the Rules Committee and onto the chamber’s floor in the next day or two.
CBS News, Mother Jones and other media published analyses debunking the claim that Harris was ever in a position of developing or implementing border and migration policies beyond Central America. “In reality, the only role close to that of a ‘border czar’ under the Biden administration was held for only a few months by Roberta Jacobson, a longtime diplomat who served as coordinator for the Southwest border until April 2021,” recalled Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS.
While Harris’s “root causes” effort is unlikely to have been the main cause, migration from northern Central America has declined sharply since the beginning of the Biden administration. CBP encounters with citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped from 58,421 per month in fiscal 2021 to 38,657 per month (34 percent fewer) in fiscal 2024. All other major nationalities, except Nicaragua and Brazil, have increased during that period.
Harris’s critics note that she only visited the U.S.-Mexico border once during her term, and that she had not spoken to two of the Border Patrol chiefs who served since 2021. This would appear to confirm that she has played little role in border policy.
Two crime-ridden Mexican border regions saw shakeups of state policing capabilities. The eastern border state of Tamaulipas announced improvements to the “General Center for Coordination, Command, Control, Communications, Computing and Intelligence (C5)” of its troubled state police force, with new vehicles and a helicopter. The western border state of Sonora took over control of the municipal police force in the border city of San Luis Rio Colorado, near Yuma.
Under the Biden administration’s June asylum rule, Border Patrol agents no longer ask migrants if they fear deportation to their countries. Under what is called the “shout test,” asylum seekers must voluntarily speak up and hope that the agent listens to them. The practice of asking migrants whether they feared return dated back to 1997, the Associated Press reported. Some recently deported migrants told the AP’s Elliot Spagat that agents ignored their requests to seek asylum.
If Donald Trump is re-elected, his pledge to carry out mass deportations would be eased by dramatic recent improvements in surveillance and artificial intelligence capabilities, warned an analysis from Context (an outlet backed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation). While removing undocumented migrants is difficult, “making people look over their shoulder—creating an atmosphere of fear, he [Trump] can do that,” said Muzaffar Chisti of the Migration Policy Institute.
Recent polling suggests that more than 10 percent of Venezuelans may try to emigrate if authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro wins or steals this Sunday’s presidential election, noted a Los Angeles Times column from Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“You can have good faith disagreements about immigration and migration and especially around the border without resorting to dehumanizing the migrants themselves and without trying to say that they are all here to destroy us or that they are some sort of existential threat to the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council in an interview with Documented.
“Immigrants today account for 13.8% of the U.S. population. This is a roughly threefold increase from 4.7% in 1970. However, the immigrant share of the population today remains below the record 14.8% in 1890,” noted an updated analysis from the Pew Research Center.
Border Patrol apprehended an average of 1,650 migrants per day last week, CBS News reported. If the average drops below 1,500 per day, people who cross the border between ports of entry will once again be able to apply for asylum, under the Biden administration’s June rule curtailing asylum access. The right to seek protection for those who cross between the ports would be shut down again if the daily average were to rise above 2,500 per day.
If the current tempo were to sustain for an entire month, it would be the month with the fewest Border Patrol apprehensions since September 2020, late in the Trump administration.
An American Immigration Council blog post recalled that the Biden rule is not the only reason why migration has dropped to its current relatively low level: Since January, Mexico has pursued a crackdown with the goal of “wearing out” migrants.
The scope of Mexico’s crackdown, which involves mass busing of non-Mexican migrants away from the U.S. border deep into Mexico, was laid out in a July fact sheet by the Mexico-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) and a July report from two El Paso and Ciudad Juárez-based groups, the Hope Border Institute and Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción (DHIA).
Panama’s recently inaugurated president, José Raúl Mulino, said that his government would only deport migrants from the Darién Gap if they agree to voluntary repatriation. This softens Mulino’s campaign pledge to halt Darién migration by flying migrants back to their home countries after they cross the 60-70 mile jungle region. The Biden administration pledged to help Panama fund these flights.
Panama’s border service counted 11,363 migrants crossing the Darién Gap during the first half of July, one of the lowest daily averages since late 2022.
Several hundred migrants—some reports claim 2,000 or even 3,000—from many countries began walking north from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. They chose to start walking en masse, some told reporters, after Mexico’s migration agency (INM) refused to give them travel documents and Mexico’s refugee agency (COMAR) proved too slow to respond to their asylum applications.
Some told the Associated Press that they feel some urgency to get to the U.S. border before a possible second Donald Trump term, when pathways like the CBP One app would probably shut down.
The group is just arriving in the southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. No “migrant caravan” has reached the U.S. border even partially intact since early 2019.
Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the outgoing chief of the National Guard Bureau, repeated earlier criticisms of the Texas state government’s large-scale deployment of guardsmen to the state’s border with Mexico. Hokanson argued that the long-term border mission is undermining the National Guard’s readiness to carry out more traditional military missions like warfighting.
Attorneys for Border Patrol agent Dustin Sato-Smith succeeded in moving a prosecution against him from California state court to federal court, where they argue that he will be immune from prosecution. In February 2023, while performing an abrupt U-turn to respond to a report of undocumented migrants nearby, Sato-Smith collided with an uninvolved U.S. citizen aboard a motorcycle, killing him. (Despite reporting requirements, CBP did not release information about the fatal crash.) His attorneys claim that, because he was performing his duties at the time of the crash, the federal court should grant Sato-Smith immunity under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
“He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job,” said Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, during Trump’s marathon July 18 Republican National Convention speech. Trump attacked Bukele—who admires the former U.S. president and has cultivated ties with key Republicans—for supposedly lowering El Salvador’s crime rate by “sending” his country’s criminals as migrants to the United States. While a small number of gang members are mixed in with the Salvadoran migrant population, no proof supports the claim that Bukele is deliberately exiling them to the United States.
Calling Donald Trump “a man of intelligence and vision,” Mexico’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said that he would write Trump to warn him, if he is elected, not to close the U.S.-Mexico border or blame migrants for cross-border drug trafficking.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, visited Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, to discuss fentanyl interdiction with U.S. and Mexican authorities. Only about 2 percent of border-wide fentanyl gets seized in the south Texas region that Kaine visited.
The July 19 Microsoft / CrowdStrike global software glitch paralyzed border ports of entry, forcing people to wait several hours to cross from Mexico into the United States.
By busing more than 120,000 migrants to Democratic Party-governed cities, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) reshaped migration patterns and drew national attention to the border and migration issue, a New York Times feature reported. Without the paid buses, it contends, Venezuelan migrants would have been more likely to join existing communities in Florida and Texas instead of coming to New York City.
The number of migrants aboard Texas-funded buses is a single-digit percentage of the more than 3 million people, mostly asylum seekers, released into the U.S. interior since 2022. The busing program has cost Texas over $230 million, the Times reported, which would add up to nearly $2,000 per passenger.
William Murillo of the Ecuadorian organization “1-800 Migrantes” told the Guayaquil daily El Universo that people migrating from Ecuador tend to follow at least four clandestine routes: by air to Panama and the Bahamas then by boat to Florida; overland to Colombia, then flying to Central America and overland through Mexico; overland through the treacherous Darién Gap, Central America, and Mexico; and by air to Panama then overland through Central America and Mexico.
I've been reading a lot of Wendell Berry's and Barbara Kingsolver's views of Appalachia, which sharpened my personal disdain for J.D. Vance.
(As with everything I post here without mentioning WOLA, this is my personal view expressed while writing at home and not during work hours. It does not necessarily reflect my organization’s point of view.)
Political writers are devoting a lot of pixels right now to J.D. Vance’s opportunism, digging into how his ambitions led him to ditch his former views and fully embrace white rage and Trumpism, riding that wave to the Republican vice presidential nomination.
Beyond that, I’m more concerned with a position that Vance hasn’t changed, but has only intensified: whose side he is on in the region he calls home, one of the poorest corners of America.
My view is colored by some reading I did over my two-month work sabbatical, which ends in a few days. More by circumstance than design, I dug into the work of two authors who come from Appalachia, not far from where Vance’s branch of his family lived before they moved to Ohio.
For many Americans—and to some degree for Vance, whose memoir Hillbilly Elegy I read in 2017—the mountainous, deeply rural, coal-and-tobacco region stretching from north Georgia into Pennsylvania is notable for high unemployment, family breakdown, drug addiction, and severe environmental degradation. Popular culture often ridicules its residents as “rednecks” or “hillbillies.”
The essays of Wendell Berry, the 90-year-old farmer and author from Port Royal, Kentucky, lament this condition, but place the blame far away. In his collected essays, which I re-read over my break (don’t miss the audiobook read by Nick Offerman), Berry’s Appalachia is a colony of the United States’ more prosperous areas, especially its cosmopolitan cities and big corporations.
[O]ur once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.
…At present, in fact, both the nation and the national economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities – as all small-town and country people have reason to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as the nation, most of us have experienced the losses that I have been talking about: the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless present, in which the past is forgotten and the future, even in our most optimistic ‘projections,’ is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?
A blighted area stripped clean of its natural assets, where a small-farmer economy is no longer viable, and from where people need to migrate elsewhere, to cities? That sounds like many regions I’ve known during my work in Latin America, where levels of economic inequality still generally exceed those in the United States, but by less than they used to. One could switch out “campesino” for “farmer” in much of Wendell Berry’s writing, and the argument would be identical. From a 2017 New York Review of Booksessay:
Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value—minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and “labor”—has been taken at the lowest possible price. As apparently none of the enlightened ones has seen in flying over or bypassing on the interstate highways, its too-large fields are toxic and eroding, its streams and rivers poisoned, its forests mangled, its towns dying or dead along with their locally owned small businesses, its children leaving after high school and not coming back. Too many of the children are not working at anything, too many are transfixed by the various screens, too many are on drugs, too many are dying.
…The rural small owners sentenced to dispensability in the 1950s are the grandparents of the “blue-collar workers” of rural America who now feel themselves to be under the same sentence, and with reason.
I also read a work of fiction set in Lee County, the westernmost county in Virginia: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I recommended it unreservedly.
Kingsolver, who lives in that area, reminds us that while the people of Appalachia seem defeated now, it was not always so. Two centuries ago, the population of these areas of rural Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia were smallholding farmers. Few owned slaves, and many supported the Union in the Civil War against their states’ plantation owners.
Their farms struggled to get beyond subsistence, then were bought up by coal barons (and much of the Black population migrated north, to industrial centers). They carried out some of the most militant union organizing in U.S. history to improve conditions in the coal mines.
“Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.
…Anyway, it was all in the past, nobody in class had parents working in the mines now. We’d heard all our lives about the layoffs. The companies swapped out humans for machines in every job: deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces. ”
The labor struggle cost many lives but earned some important gains in living standards—until mechanization, market forces, and captured politicians (of both parties) caused coal labor demand to dry up. Governments under-funded basic services, schools were not competitive enough to prepare students for a life of something better than coal mining. Then, in this century, came prescription opioids, ushered in by pharmaceutical companies’ lies, and then heroin and fentanyl.
Kingsolver, like Berry, paints a portrait of communities devastated by outside political and economic forces.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he [the main character’s teacher] asked us, “the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?”
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.
Kingsolver’s lament about the state of the region closely echoes Berry’s:
“Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.”
This brings us back to J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy notes the same misery, but blames the people themselves, especially their “culture,” instead of predatory outside forces. Instead of corporations, globalization, and government siding with the economic winners and discarding the losers, Vance’s book blames government welfare programs for creating a culture of dependence and “laziness.”
We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
…As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”
Why would people vote for a politician who, like Vance, believes that they are lazy and that they only have themselves to blame for their problems? Because, the book explains, even the region’s most shiftless laggards insist that they have a strong work ethic.
People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [Ohio, where Vance grew up, a town featured in Dreamland, Sam Quiñones’s study of the opioid epidemic]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. … Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, because the Armcos of the world are going out of business and their skill sets don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground.
While Vance passingly refers to economic realities besetting the region, he insists that its residents, and their culture, are more to blame: “It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”
J.D. Vance became a corporate lawyer who worked in Silicon Valley venture capital, getting to know donors like hard-right billionaire Peter Thiel. He published his memoir and, despite once being a harsh Trump critic, ran for Senate as one of the most unabashedly pro-Trump candidates of the 2022 election cycle. In so doing, he cast his lot with the coal barons, agribusiness enterprises, and corporations that, Berry and Kingsolver forcefully argue, have done such harm to Appalachia’s beleaguered population.
Appalachia’s rural population, though, has voted overwhelmingly for Vance and Trump—not for people who, like Berry or Kingsolver, lean leftward. Even though they enable pollution, oppose wage hikes, under-invest in education, and de-prioritize access to drug treatment, pro-big-business conservatives win by huge margins in the region today.
They do so, usually, by whipping up anger about social issues like immigration, religion, and culture-war rage, often by repeating utter lies including about the 2020 election result. J.D. Vance’s 2022 campaign was a master class in this.
Reading what Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and others have written about the damage done to Appalachia makes J.D. Vance’s political success one of the most extreme existing cases of “the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.” It’s a cycle that the Democratic Party is far from figuring out how to break.
A big part of the blame lies with the Democrats themselves. When I was young, this region voted solidly Democratic, a legacy of the New Deal era when the federal government invested in infrastructure and jobs, and supported labor unions. That investment and labor support ebbed badly during the past 50 years, as leading Democrats turned away from the region’s population, in some cases even embracing business elites just as Republicans have. From Bill Clinton to Joe Manchin, Democratic politicians have backed big energy companies and advanced free-trade deals and farm policies that harmed small producers.
That opened up a political space that opportunists like J.D. Vance leapt into. And now, like impoverished Colombian campesinos who back the large landowner-aligned candidate promising the harshest security crackdown, the colonized line up behind their most outspoken colonizers.
It’s going to take a lot of work, and a long look in the mirror, to break out of this.
CBP hasn't increased the allotment of appointments—currently about 1,450 per day—in a year. Asylum seekers now routinely spend months in Mexico seeking, then awaiting, appointments.
Here, by month and by country, are appointments that CBP has granted to asylum seekers, using its “CBP One” mobile phone app, to approach U.S.-Mexico land border ports of entry.
The app’s use for this purpose began in January 2023, and today it is very hard to request asylum at the border without an app-scheduled appointment.
It is especially hard since June 5, when the Biden administration imposed a rule banning asylum for most people who cross the border between ports of entry, even though the law specifies that people have the right to ask for asylum on U.S. soil regardless of how they crossed.
Though it is the only pathway for most, appointments are scarce. CBP hasn’t increased the allotment of appointments—currently about 1,450 per day—in a year. Asylum seekers now routinely spend months in Mexico seeking, then awaiting, appointments.
For monthly US Border Patrol migrant encounters since October 1999,
May 2024 (latest month available) was number 59.
Number 1 was December 2023 (249,739).
Number 296 was April 2017.
May 2024 (latest month available) was number 59.
Number 1 was December 2023 (249,739).
Number 296 was April 2017 (11,127, migrants and smugglers were in a temporary “wait and see” mode after Donald Trump’s inauguration).
During the first five months of the 2024 fiscal year (October 2023-February 2024), people from Asia, Africa, or Europe were one out of every eight migrants whom Border Patrol apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.
That’s never come close to happening before. Non-Americas countries are non-blue in this chart:
Great to be back in El Paso again. I'm here until mid-July, almost to the end of my 2-month work sabbatical. Say hi if you see me at a café or taquería.
View from this morning’s jog.
Great to be back in El Paso again. I’m here until mid-July, almost to the end of my 2-month work sabbatical. Say hi if you see me at a café or taquería.
WOLA has just published a report about migration to, through, and from Colombia, based largely on fieldwork that colleagues and I did in the Colombia-Ecuador and Colombia-Panama border regions in October and November 2023.
(Did I have to go on work sabbatical to find the time to finish this report and get it out the door? No comment.)
I think it turned out great: it’s loaded with facts and images, and had a lot of reasonable policy recommendations for a situation that promises to remain extremely challenging for quite some time.
For this report, WOLA staff paid a two-week research visit to Colombia’s borders with Panama and Ecuador in late October and early November 2023. Here are 5 key findings:
1. Organized crime controls the migrant route through Colombia. From the informal crossings or trochas at the Ecuador border to every step of the way through the Darién jungle border with Panama, violent criminal groups are in control. That control is dispersed among many groups near Ecuador, and concentrated in a single, powerful group—the Gulf Clan—in Colombia’s Darién region. Their profits from migrants now sit alongside cocaine and illicit precious-metals mining as a principal income stream for Colombia’s armed and criminal groups, some of which the International Committee of the Red Cross considers parties to armed conflicts. [1]
2. The Colombian state is absent from both border zones, although this is a reality that we have observed in past fieldwork in many of Colombia’s zones of armed conflict and illicit crop cultivation. The national government is not doing enough to manage flows, determine who is passing through, or protect people at risk. At all levels of government, responsible agencies are poorly coordinated and rarely present. Checkpoints, patrols, and detentions are uncommon, but so are humanitarian services and access to protection. Despite ambitious plans to “introduce the state” to conflictive areas—most recently, Colombia’s 2016 peace accord—key points along the migration route are vacuums of governance that get filled by armed and criminal groups.
3. Colombia faces challenges in integrating Venezuelan refugees and migrants. Amid Venezuela’s collapse, Colombia’s humanitarian response to fleeing Venezuelans remains more complete and generous than those of much of South America. However, the Colombian government’s recent trajectory is troubling. It is now harder for Venezuelans—especially more recent arrivals—to get documentation and to access services in Colombia. Pathways to permanent residency, including asylum, barely exist. As those efforts lag and people fail to integrate, more are joining in-transit migrants, attempting the dangerous journey north.
This reality has a differentiated and more severe impact on the more than a quarter of people transiting Colombia, or seeking to settle in Colombia, who are adult women—especially women heads of migrant households—and the nearly a quarter who are children. The risk of physical harm including sexual violence, or of enduring hunger or lack of access to health care, is much more challenging for women, Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ migrants.
4. At the same time, U.S. supported initiatives to help Colombia integrate migrants, to open up legal migration pathways for some who wish to come to the United States, and to encourage greater cooperation and collaboration between states seeking to manage this moment of heavy migration are promising. However, we note that at the same time, the U.S government orients much of its diplomatic energy and security programs toward minimizing the flow and discouraging Colombia and other states from making the journey more orderly, for fear that it might encourage more to travel. As a result, governments and migrants receive a muddled, unclear message from Washington that, for migrants, can be drowned out by poor-quality information gleaned from social media.
5. Resources to help Colombia and other nations along the migrant route are scarce, meeting only a fraction of projected needs—and they are shrinking as wars elsewhere in the world draw humanitarian resources away.
Countries like Colombia that are experiencing large amounts of U.S.-bound migration have a very difficult needle to thread. Blocking migrants is a geographic impossibility and would violate the rights of those with protection needs. Providing a managed “safe conduct” and an orderly transit pathway with robust state presence would prevent today’s immense harms and loss of life while cutting organized crime out of the picture—but the impression of “green-lighting” migration alarms the U.S. government. While some states do something in between: some measure of blocking, detaining, and deporting that dissuades few migrants but creates robust opportunities for organized crime, human traffickers, and corrupt officials who enable them, Colombia is leaning into an additional option: do little to nothing, with minimal state presence, leaving a vacuum that armed and criminal groups are filling.
This poor menu of options for managing in-transit migration leads WOLA to recommend some version of “safe conduct,” even a humanitarian corridor—but with an end to Colombia’s hands-off, stateless approach. Creating a safe pathway through Colombia must come with vastly increased state presence, far greater implementation of migration policies from a protection and human rights approach, dramatically improved cooperation between governments, and strongly stepped-up investment in integrating people who would rather stay in Latin America.
Until it expands legal migration pathways and vastly improves its immigration court system’s capacity, much migration will be forced into the shadows. This situation will worsen further as the Biden administration implements a June 5, 2024 ban on most asylum applications between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry. In that context, the United States must be more tolerant of efforts to provide safe conduct to migrants. U.S. tolerance of such approaches, though, would hinge on big changes to the “neglect migrants in transit,” “de-emphasize integration,” and “cooperate minimally with neighbors” status quo in Colombia and elsewhere.
After increasing at the beginning of 2024, migration through the Darién Gap has declined somewhat, settling at about 1,000 people per day.
Last month (May), 69 percent of migrants passing through the treacherous jungle region were Venezuelan. In fact, Venezuelans now make up 50 percent of all migrants who’ve passed through the Darién Gap since 2010, when Panama started keeping and publishing records.
Between January 2022 and May 2024, 588,872 citizens of Venezuela journeyed through the Darién. Venezuela had about 30 million people in the mid-2010s when the nation’s exodus began—so fully 2 percent of Venezuela’s population has made the jungle journey since the pandemic’s end.
Colombia for the first time was the Darién Gap’s second-place nationality in May. Haiti, Ecuador, and China are dropping. India and Peru are up.
Commentators backing the Biden administration's asylum rollback fail even to mention the obvious alternative: "undoing backlogs by fixing the asylum system."
When coming out in support of rolling back a decades-old human right, it’s best to at least make it look like you considered the alternatives.
Some prominent centrist and center-left commentators have published pieces supporting last week’s Biden administration imposition of severe restrictions on the legal right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. Some viewed it as an unfortunate but necessary step; some were downright celebratory.
“I’m conflicted, finding myself caught between pro-refugee instincts and a practical recognition that the system wasn’t working,” wroteNew York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Couching it as an “open borders” question, not a “right to seek protection” issue, he concluded, “we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.”
Also at the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt called the right to enter the U.S. asylum system, which was created after the United States’ 1968 accession to the Refugee Convention and 1980 passage of the Refugee Act, a “loophole.” It may be true that some people are applying for asylum because they know the backlogged U.S. system will let their cases drag on for years, but Leonhardt does not discuss options for fixing that.
At his Liberal Patriot Substack, Democratic Party-adjacent demographer Ruy Teixeira excoriated the “progressive left” for holding Joe Biden “prisoner” on migration policy, and celebrated the new asylum curbs as a “jailbreak” for the President.
These columnists are entitled to their views. They may be right that inaction on the border could cost Joe Biden with some swing voters. And as noted, they may be right that the asylum system’s slowness and inefficiency could be a “pull factor” for some migrants.
These opinion pieces fail, though, by refusing to recognize that another option exists: an option that isn’t “swinging the doors open” (Kristof’s phrase). If the asylum system is broken (of course it is), then the Biden administration could fix it. This would be an administrative challenge—a fair amount of hiring and training—but hardly a moon shot for the U.S. federal government.
None of these columns talks about making the U.S. asylum system viable, and faster, adjusting it to a new era of historic worldwide migration. They don’t even mention it as an option to be discarded. Their analyses treat the asylum system as a fixed and immutable variable that we can’t do anything about. (So, incidentally, does the text of the administration’s interim final rule laying out the new asylum restriction: it laments the system’s backlog but scarcely mentions ways to address it.)
The new rule focuses only on the asylum system’s initial entry point: the U.S.-Mexico border. That makes it yet another in a ten-year-long series of efforts to deter asylum seekers at the borderline itself, or just before it. Like the others, from family separation to Remain in Mexico to Title 42 to Mexican government crackdowns, it will hurt people in the short term but will fail to move the numbers in the long term.
Where change is most urgently needed is further along in the asylum process. The backlog isn’t at the border: it lies in what happens afterward.
Imagine if it took less than a year to hand down most people’s asylum decisions, with full due process and without locking them up in detention. Imagine it being rare and unusual for cases to take longer than a year, because the system had enough judges, asylum officers, processors, case managers, and access to legal representation.
Right now—a full ten years after the first wave of Central American child and family asylum seekers surprised the Obama administration—the U.S. government is very far from that. With 725 immigration judges—9 fewer than in October!—and much fewer than 1,000 asylum officers available to attend to 1.3 million asylum cases and about 2 million other immigration cases, asylum decisions commonly take many years. In 2022, TRAC Immigration estimated an average of 4.3 years.
People who may not have understood the intricacies of U.S. asylum requirements when they came here—they just learned about the backlog’s effects via social media—end up in the United States, living their lives and awaiting a decision, for a very long time.
In many cases, such a long stay could be a good outcome because of the contributions people make while here. But it is insanity to require them to hire smugglers to get through the Darien Gap then run Mexico’s predatory organized-crime gauntlet just to touch U.S. soil, suffering abuse along the way.
Along with opening up other legal pathways, then, the goal should be to slash asylum backlog wait times while respecting and expanding rights. Fewer people who are unlikely to qualify would opt for the asylum system if the normal wait was shorter.
All that stands in the way of that is the hiring and training of a few thousand judges and asylum officers. A hiring expansion along these lines ($110m for new immigration judges, 4,338 new asylum officers) was part of the “border deal” legislation that failed in the Senate earlier this year.
What the Biden administration did last week is not that solution. Far from it. They decided to shut things down on the front end, rather than move to reduce the backlog.
Instead of shoring up and rebuilding the system to match an era of historic protection-seeking migration, they have made the system itself harder to access, in a way that is likely to endanger people and is almost certainly illegal.
We need an explanation for why the administration chose not to pursue the “reduce the backlog” option (and why that hasn’t been an important part of DHS budget requests since 2021). Defenders of last week’s “asylum shutdown” should at least add a sentence somewhere saying, ”We considered this but decided against it because X.”
The opinion columnists defending the “shutdown” fail even to mention action to reduce the asylum backlog. None even glance at building up asylum processing and adjudication capacity to get those ridiculous wait times down.
They don’t even raise it in order to shoot it down. They don’t say “this is impractical,” “this costs too much,” or “this might be a good way forward, but it’s gradual and can’t move the needle between now and November.” Instead of engaging this viable alternative, they blame “the left” for constraining the President from cracking down on asylum seekers.
Others have pointed out factual inaccuracies in these widely read pieces. But the most unsatisfying part of what they wrote is the failure even to acknowledge the “reduce the backlog” option, even just to dismiss it.
The United States is watering down a human right granted in past generations. This shouldn’t be done lightly, by blithely ignoring widely proposed, doable alternatives.
11 events about Latin America this week, that I know about, that can be attended in person in Washington or online anywhere.
(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)
Monday, June 10, 2024
11:00-12:15 at the Inter-American Dialogue: Addressing the Root Causes of Migration: Insights from the US Strategy for Central America (RSVP required).
2:00 at the Atlantic Council: From competition to competitiveness: Unlocking growth and productivity in LAC (RSVP required).
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
9:45-11:00 at CSIS and csis.org: Report Launch: Friendshoring the Lithium-Ion Battery Supply Chain (RSVP required).
10:00 at the Brookings Institution and brookings.edu: The economics and politics of immigration (RSVP required).
10:00-11:00 at wilsoncenter.org: New Hurdles for Elections in Latin America (RSVP required).
3:00-4:15 at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld: Children at Risk at the Border Report Release (RSVP required).
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Due to an extended period of staff travel and commitments, this will be the last Weekly Border Update until July 26; we look forward to resuming a regular publication schedule on that date.
As of 12:01 AM on June 5, migrants who enter U.S. custody between U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, with few exceptions, may no longer apply for asylum. The Biden administration made this long-signaled change with a proclamation and an “interim final rule” on June 4. Asylum access is “shut down” until daily migrant encounters at the border drop to a very low average of less than 1,500 per day. The ACLU, which challenged a similar asylum ban during the Trump era, plans to sue. It is not clear whether, with its current resources, the administration will be able to deport or detain a significantly larger number of asylum seekers than it already is.
Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, reported receiving 36,860 requests for asylum during the first five months of 2024. That is 42 percent fewer than during the same period in 2023. As in recent years, Honduras, Cuba, and Haiti are the top three nationalities of asylum seekers in Mexico’s system, and most applications are filed in Tapachula and Mexico City. This year’s drop in applications is unexpected, as Mexico’s government reports stopping or encountering over 480,000 migrants between January and April alone.
Many links to coverage and analyses of the new Biden administration rule curtailing asylum access. Border Patrol has counted over 300 migrant deaths since October.
Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Due to staff travel, this is the last daily update for a while. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.
Developments
The Biden administration’s new proclamation and rule curtailing asylum access at the U.S.-Mexico border, which it calls “Securing the Border,” went into effect at 12:01 AM on Wednesday, June 5. A leaked ICE implementation guidance is also available.
For migrants who cross the border between ports of entry, fail to specifically ask for protection (known as the “shout test”), or cannot prove a very high standard of fear of return, the legal right to asylum is now suspended until the daily border-wide average of Border Patrol migrant apprehensions drops below 1,500.
The last month with an average that low was July 2020, in the early moments of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reporters from the New York Times and CBS News tweeted that Border Patrol apprehended about 4,300 people on Tuesday June 4 and about 4,000 on Wednesday June 5. The daily average in May, one of the Biden administration’s lightest months, was about 3,800. The Washington Post cited internal DHS projections expecting an average of 3,900 to 6,700 apprehensions per day between July and September.
Should the daily average ever drop below 1,500, the rule would suspend the asylum restriction until the average once again climbs above 2,500.
The new measures add to the Biden administration’s May 2023 “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” asylum ban, which already denied asylum to non-Mexican citizens who crossed between ports of entry, cannot prove a higher standard of fear, and did not have an asylum application turned down in another country along the way.
It is unclear whether the new rule resulted in increased returns or deportations of migrants yesterday—a briefing from DHS officials offered no numbers—and if so, how they were carried out.
“We intend to challenge this order in court,” the ACLU announced. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council noted that the ACLU “successfully blocked” a similar “2018 Trump asylum ban within days.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), the principal Democratic negotiator on an unsuccessful “border deal” that sought to legislate a similar asylum limit, said “I am sympathetic to the position the administration is in, but I am skeptical the executive branch has the legal authority to shut down asylum processing between ports of entry on its own.”
The administration’s announcements did not refer to increased capacity to implement its new barriers to asylum seekers. That would involve costly measures like more asylum officers for expedited removal proceedings, more detention space, or more capacity to deport migrants (more flights, or permission from Mexico to deport more non-Mexican citizens by land). Three DHS officials told the Washington Post that “the administration has not scheduled a short-term increase in deportation flights to ramp up the number of migrants returned to their home countries under the new measures.”
The New York Times’s Hamed Aleaziz reported that when asylum seekers in custody try to prove that they meet higher standards of fear of return (called “reasonable probability” of harm), they will have just four hours to find legal representation. “Migrants previously had at least 24 hours or more to find a lawyer.”
Reports from the border documented worry and perplexity among migrants. Migrants passing through the northern state of Durango told Milenio that the U.S. policy change did not alter their plans. “We do not have a plan, and we cannot return. This is a low blow,” a 64-year-old man from Colombia told the Guardian in Ciudad Juárez. Some told the Guardian that they are now considering crossing through the dangerous nearby desert. Shelter operators in northern Mexican border cities braced for new strains on their capacity.
Coverage of the new rule’s political and electoral implications found progressive Democrats outraged by the rollback of asylum rights; most Republicans claiming it is “too little, too late” and doesn’t do enough to stop migrants from arriving; and centrist Democrats—especially those from tightly contested states or districts—supporting it.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters that, in a June 4 conversation with President Biden, he encouraged Biden to deport non-Mexican migrants directly, not into Mexico: “Why do they come to Mexico? We have no problem, we treat migrants very well, all of them, but why triangulate?” (Mexico accepts up to a combined 30,000 U.S. deportations per month of citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.)
Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens tweeted that the agency has documented more than 300 deaths of migrants on U.S. soil since the fiscal year began in October, with the hot summer months just beginning.
Mexican migration agents and National Guard personnel carried out a June 5 operation to evict migrants from a plaza near the Mexico City headquarters of the country’s refugee agency, COMAR.
The Panamanian government’s human rights ombudsman filed a criminal complaint about more than 400 alleged cases of sexual violence perpetrated against migrants in the Darién Gap region. Before Panama’s Health Ministry suspended its permission to operate in March, Doctors Without Borders had been documenting these cases.
“Though there’s little to be done now about this recycled immigration policy” at the border, President Biden “could use his executive power to shield immigrants from deportation and allow them to work legally,” argued Andrea Flores of Fwd.us in a New York Times column.
An Inter-American Dialogue slide presentation cited “1145 charter flights of at least 150 passengers en route to the Mexico-US border” landing in Managua, Nicaragua between July 2023 and January 2024.
The Catholic Charities humanitarian migrant respite center in McAllen, which receives people released from CBP custody, commemorated ten years of operations. Headed by Sister Norma Pimentel, the well-known shelter was a response to the first major arrival of child and family asylum seekers, which at the time was mostly Central American citizens arriving largely in south Texas.
Past generations granted new rights. We’re living in an era when government is taking those rights away. Roe v. Wade (1973) got perforated two years ago by Republican judicial nominees. Now the right to asylum, enshrined in the Refugee Act of 1980, no longer applies to threatened people who came to the border to ask for protection “the wrong way” and at a time judged “too busy.”
What we know about today's executive action curtailing the right to asylum between ports of entry. House Republican appropriators consider their draft 2025 DHS budget bill.
Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.
Developments
Later today, President Biden will sign a sweeping proclamation shutting down the right to seek asylum for migrants apprehended on U.S. soil between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry. Several border-region mayors, mainly from Texas, will be on hand, along with some centrist Democratic legislators. The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice will issue an interim final rule laying out how they will implement the “asylum shutdown.”
According to several media reports, the “asylum shutdown” would be triggered when Border Patrol’s daily migrant encounters exceed 2,500 per day, as they have in every month since February 2021. The right to asylum between ports of entry would not be restored until migrant apprehensions drop below a daily average of 1,500 per day, which has not happened since July 2020.
Of the 296 months since fiscal 2020, the daily average has exceeded 2,500 in 110 of them: 37 percent of the time. During those 110 months, had the executive order been in place, it would have triggered an asylum shutdown. The daily average has dropped below 1,500 just 42 percent of the time (124 months), which would have made restoring asylum difficult had the executive order been in place.
Unless there is a radical change in migration patterns at the border, then, this is an effective ban on asylum between ports of entry. The Trump administration sought to implement a similar “asylum ban” 2019—making it absolute, without the numerical thresholds—but courts threw it out because it violated Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which guarantees due process for people asking for asylum on U.S. soil.
Other likely elements of the executive order, according to secondary reports:
Its legal justification will be Section 212(f) of the INA, which allows the President to prohibit the entry of entire classes of non-citizens considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” It is doubtful, however, that 212(f) applies to people who have already arrived on U.S. soil and are requesting protection. “ A reliance on 212(f) that prevents access to asylum arguably directly conflicts with the INA,” reads a new policy brief from the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association.
It will not apply to unaccompanied minors or victims of “severe” trafficking.
It will not apply to people who have made appointments at border ports of entry using the CBP One app. We have heard nothing about any possible changes to the number of appointments that this app will make available; the current cap is 1,450 per day.
People will be screened for fear of return only if they specifically manifest such fear to U.S. authorities.
Unlike Title 42 expulsions, those who are removed under this new arrangement will be penalized, probably by being barred for several years from reentering the United States.
Elements that are not clear include:
What would happen if the number of apprehended migrants exceeds border authorities’ ability to deport them, detain them, or screen them for the executive order’s likely elevated criteria for fear of harm. All of these require resources. During the “Title 42” era, thousands per day were released into the U.S. interior because authorities could not detain or remove them.
What the Mexican government’s cooperation with deportations of rejected asylum seekers might look like.
Democratic legislators who defend migrants’ rights are upset, the Washington Post reported. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus told White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients that the measure is “very, very disappointing.”
The Republican-majority House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee met this morning to “mark up” (amend and approve) its draft of the chamber’s 2025 budget bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The draft bill, which reflects Republican priorities, has virtually zero chance of passage before the November election.
It includes mandatory spending on border wall construction. It provides funding for a total of 22,000 Border Patrol agents, nearly 3,000 more than the present workforce. It would eliminate funding for the Case Management alternatives-to-detention pilot program, the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Family Reunification Task Force, and the Shelter Services Program. It would prohibit use of the CBP One app “to facilitate the entry of aliens into the country.” It would increase ICE’s detention bed capacity to 50,000, up from the currently funded level of 41,500.
Arizona’s Republican-majority legislature is close to approving a law similar to Texas’s controversial S.B. 4, which makes it a state crime to cross the border improperly. Rather than go to Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who would veto it, the law would become a ballot measure when Arizonans vote in November. S.B. 4, which would let Texas enforce its own immigration policy and incentivizes racial profiling, remains suspended as litigation continues.
The police chief of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico—a border city just south of Yuma, Arizona—was assassinated in a broad-daylight ambush in the middle of the city yesterday.
Following a U.S. Government Accountability Office report about Border Patrol agents’ confiscation of migrants’ belongings and documents while in custody, Cronkite News talked to advocates and service providers in Arizona who are documenting the problem and filing complaints.
10:05 in Room 2175 Rayburn House Office Building and online: Hearing of the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education on The Consequences of Biden’s Border Chaos for K-12 Schools.
1:00 at Hope Border Institute Zoom: Reimagining Humanitarian Protection from the Border (RSVP required).
Expect a White House executive order tomorrow truncating access to asylum at the border. May was the 3rd-lightest month for border migrant arrivals of the Biden administration's 40 full months.
Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.
Developments
President Biden is expected to issue an executive order tomorrow (Tuesday June 4) at least partially “shutting down” the right to ask for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. It is likely to enable U.S. border authorities to channel asylum seekers into rapid removal from the United States, at times when daily migrant arrivals exceed a certain threshold, probably 4,000 or 5,000 people per day. At busy moments along the border, the executive order could institute a policy similar to the pandemic-era Title 42 expulsions regime.
The administration is expected to claim that the new “shutdown” authority’s legal underpinning is Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which allows the President to bar the entry of entire classes of non-citizens considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” However, courts have cast doubt on whether 212(f) can in fact be used to remove an asylum seeker already on U.S. soil and asking for protection, who are protected by Section 208 of the INA.
It appears that the “shutdown” would only apply to asylum seekers apprehended between the land border ports of entry. Those with appointments made using the CBP One smartphone app would still be processed.
The move comes just after Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico, whose government will be expected to cooperate in receiving at least some of the migrants refused asylum access and sent back across the land border. Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City and the candidate of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s MORENA party, won in a landslide.
At least two Texas border-city mayors are expected to be on hand in Washington for tomorrow’s executive order announcement.
CBS News and Fox News reported that Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border apprehended about 118,000 migrants during May 2024, which would make May the third-lightest month for border migrant arrivals of the Biden administration’s 40 full months in office. This continues a trend of reduced migration, dating from January, that appears to owe a lot to the Mexican government’s migrant interdiction operations.
ICE removed migrants to their countries of origin on 151 flights in May, the most in a month since August 2023 (153), according to the latest “ICE Air Flights” report by Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border. This added up to 6.6 deportation flights per weekday, “just over the prior 6-month average of 6.4.” 90 percent of those flights went to Guatemala (47), Honduras (29), Mexico (18), Ecuador (17), El Salvador (13), or Colombia (12). For its part, Mexico carried out nine deportation flights: five to Honduras, three to Guatemala, and one to Colombia.
“The United States is in talks with Venezuelan authorities to resume direct repatriation flights” to Caracas, noted the Venezuelan opposition-aligned daily Tal Cual.
For the second straight week, the chief of Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona sector reported more migrant apprehensions than did the chief of Border Patrol’s San Diego, California sector. Tucson had been the border’s number-one migration destination, measured by apprehensions, between July and March, but was outpaced by San Diego in April. A Fox News correspondent cited preliminary Border Patrol data indicating that Tucson apprehensions exceeded those of San Diego in May by a margin of 33,000 to 32,000.
Corrupt Mexican migration (INM) agents operating a checkpoint at the Tijuana airport have been using it to extort money from migrants passing through, and this has happened “for years,” municipal migration official Enrique Lucero told Border Report.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced the completion of construction at a state government military base near Eagle Pass. 300 Texas National Guard soldiers are now quartered there, a number that will rise to 1,800.
Abbott also reported that since April 2022, Texas has bused over 117,900 released migrants to the Democratic Party-governed cities of Washington DC, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and Los Angeles, without first coordinating with or informing those cities’ municipal officials.
The New York Times detailed an election-year spike in threats and infiltration attempts suffered by humanitarian organizations, like shelters, assisting migrants on the U.S. side of the border. It identifies James O’Keefe of the provocateur organization Judicial Watch as a ringleader of the campaign against border charities.
In 2023, only 56 percent of unaccompanied migrant children defending their cases in U.S immigration court had attorneys representing them, ABC News noted. The immigration court system does not guarantee a right to counsel, even for parentless children, so “minors are left to navigate the different avenues of relief alone, fill out documents in a foreign language, and argue their case before a judge.”
At the New Yorker, Stephania Taladrid profiled Mexico’s foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, who has sought to defend Mexico’s interests and to push for more action on migration’s “root causes” amid U.S. pressure to crack down on migration transiting Mexico. That pressure has intensified this year, the article notes, as perceptions of border security and migration could determine some voters’ decisions in a tight U.S. election. An unnamed Mexican official described the Biden administration’s approach to migration policy as “schizophrenic.”
At the San Diego Union-Tribune, Wilson Center analysts Alan Bersin and Diego Marroquin Bitar predicted that Mexico’s approach to the border and migration will change little with the June 2 electoral victory of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s chosen candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum.
The Nicaraguan opposition-aligned investigative media outlet Onda Local identified some of the officials directing a thriving human smuggling route through Nicaragua, which does not require visas for most visiting nationalities. It alleges that the director of Air Transportation of Nicaragua’s Civil Aeronautics Institute, Róger Martínez Canales, “has the task of collecting the ‘fee’…from the money generated by human trafficking, which amounts to several million dollars, since for each migrant a sum of between $5,000 and $10,000 is charged then distributed among those involved, the airlines and international companies indirectly involved in the business.”
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Due to an extended period of staff travel and commitments, we will produce Weekly Border Updates irregularly for the next two and a half months. We will resume a regular weekly schedule on July 26.
After failing twice to enact such a measure through legislation, the Biden administration appears poised to issue an executive order that would allow U.S. border authorities to turn back or deport asylum seekers whenever the number of arriving migrants exceeds a specific threshold. The legal authority on which such an executive order would be based appears shaky, and there is a significant probability that it would not withstand challenges in the judicial system.
Mexico’s government reported encountering or stopping 120,879 migrants during the month of April, a record that only slightly exceeds similar numbers reported every month since January. Well over half of April’s total were citizens of South American nations. Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to block migrants, which appear to involve aggressive busing into the country’s interior more than deportations or detentions, have left large numbers of migrants stranded there amid a notable drop in U.S. authorities’ migrant encounters.
The U.S. Border Patrol was founded 100 years ago this week. Some analyses of the milestone have focused on the agency’s checkered human rights record. The Southern Border Communities Coalition and congressional Democrats, drawing attention to a recent GAO report’s findings, voiced concern that reforms aimed at more impartial oversight of use-of-force cases aren’t going far enough.
Colombia voices skepticism about Panama’s new president’s promise to shut down Darién Gap migration. UNHCR data continue to show that many Venezuelan migrants in the Darién first sought to settle elsewhere in South America. Ecuadorians are skipping the Darién route by flying to El Salvador.
An asylum-curtailing executive order could come from the White House as early as Tuesday. Texas appears to be routinely shooting non-lethal ammunition at migrants south of El Paso.
Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.
Developments
Reports that the White House may launch an executive order to limit asylum access at the border are converging on Tuesday (June 4) as a likely date for an announcement. The measure would enable U.S. border authorities to “shut down” access to asylum seekers, instead channeling them into rapid removal from the United States, at times when daily migrant arrivals exceed a certain threshold, probably 4,000 or 5,000 people per day.
At busy moments along the border, then, the executive order would institute a policy similar to the pandemic-era Title 42 expulsions regime.
The Biden administration appears to be relying on a provision in U.S. law (Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act) that allows the president to ban arrivals of entire classes of migrants. Any order will face legal challenges, and courts may rule that Section 212(f) does not apply once a migrant has already arrived on U.S. soil and is requesting protection under U.S. asylum law.
“The talks were still fluid and the people stressed that no final decisions had been made” about the executive order, the Associated Press cautioned.
Texas security forces, principally National Guard soldiers, have begun firing non-lethal ammunition at migrants—mainly pepper irritant projectiles but perhaps also rubber bullets—on what seems to be a routine basis along the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The Texas personnel are discharging these weapons even though the migrants are usually on the other side of fencing and concertina wire, and thus pose no imminent threat. Those claiming to have been in the line of fire include families and journalists.
Migrants in Ciudad Juárez told EFE that the Texas personnel fire at them even “while they sleep.” They displayed bruises and un-ruptured projectiles. “In addition to aggressions with weapons, said migrants on the river, are constant verbal aggressions and the use of laser beams to damage the eyes,” the report added.
As May draws to a close, “the El Paso, Texas-Juarez, Mexico area recorded a maximum temperature of 96 degrees on Thursday,” Border Report reported. “Juarez city officials say several migrants in the past two weeks have come down with heat-related illnesses, including dehydration.” Most of the city’s migrant shelters, which are about 60 percent full right now, force single adults to spend daylight hours off their premises.
The University of Texas’s Strauss Center released the latest in a long series of reports about asylum processing at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. “In May 2024, the ports of entry in Tijuana and Matamoros each had nearly 400 daily CBP One appointments, constituting 52 percent of all available slots,” while all official border crossings border-wide allowed about 100 “walk-ups” per day.
The report discusses some of the difficulty that asylum seekers are experiencing in reaching the U.S.-Mexico border due to Mexico’s 2024 crackdown on migration. Mexico’s Migration Policy Unit released data this week showing that authorities had stopped or encountered 481,025 migrants between January and April, 231 percent more than during the same period in 2023.
The International Refugee Assistance Project published a second update with information about the State Department-coordinated “Safe Mobility Office” (SMO) program. As of mid-May 2024, about 190,000 people had registered for appointments to seek legal migration pathways at SMOs, managed with UNHCR and IOM, in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. The majority of SMO registrants—at least 110,000—were Venezuelans in Colombia. Over 21,000 registrants at all offices have been approved for resettlement under the State Department-run Refugee Admissions Program.
The SMOs already refer a few registrants to legal migration pathways in Spain and soon Canada. CBS News reported that the offices may soon channel some Latin American migrants to Greece and Italy.
Telling the story of a Northeast Cartel hitman killing carried out in Zapata, Texas, a feature from USA Today’s Rick Jervis illustrated the difficulty of carrying out cross-border organized crime investigations. Political disagreements about “Operation Lone Star,” Jervis noted, has worsened law enforcement cooperation between Mexico and the state of Texas.
Between January 1 and April 16, Guatemala has expelled over 7,500 migrants into Honduras, UNHCR reported. “77% were Venezuelans, 9% Colombians and 6% Ecuadorians.” Meanwhile, funding cutbacks have drastically reduced, “from over eight to three,” the number of humanitarian organizations offering assistance in Agua Caliente, the Honduran border town where most Guatemalan expulsions take place.
At Public Books, S. Deborah Kang examined the historical and current challenges that asylum seekers face in Border Patrol custody, from many agents’ predisposition against asylum to the expansion of Expedited Removal.
I had to do a triple-take on this observation, from a recent On Being podcast episode about Hannah Arendt. The speaker is Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge:
I hadn’t realized this until I’d looked either, that in The New Yorker, between ’62 and ’63, the autumn of ’62 and the spring of ’63, three essays were published. One was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Then that was followed by James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. Then Hannah Arendt on the Eichmann Trial. Within six months. And with laying out with visionary precision, the poisonous master plots of contemporary life: violent racism, planet catastrophe, banality of evil, right in front of us.
Wow. Silent Spring, The Fire Next Time, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, all published within six months of the life of a print magazine.
If there’s an outlet that vital today, I don’t know about it. (I’d love to hear about it.)
Or maybe there are outlets, and individuals, out there today doing similar caliber work. If so, they’re no doubt being relegated to obscurity by “the algorithm” and by gatekeepers saying things like “nobody is going to read a 40,000-word piece.” I hope they keep on producing their best work in spite of all that.
House Democrats call for improved oversight of Border Patrol "critical incidents." Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) visits El Paso and warns of terrorists crossing the border.
Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.
Developments
Three San Diego-area House Democrats, along with Texas Rep. Joaquín Castro, sent a letter to leadership of DHS and CBP with questions about oversight of Border Patrol in human rights cases. Castro and Reps. Juan Vargas, Sara Jacobs, and Scott Peters called on the border agencies to follow recommendations in a May 13 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which found that Border Patrol’s Office of Professional Responsibility needed to improve the independence and impartiality of personnel investigating critical use-of-force incidents. The Southern Border Communities Coalition had raised the issue at a May 28 event in San Diego.
Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) visited the border in El Paso, Ciudad Juárez, and New Mexico. The centrist member of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned, “The threat of terrorism associated with unlawful entry to the United States is real.”
Upon searching a mobile phone at a vehicle stop of a car smuggling migrants in Arizona, Border Patrol agents claim to have discovered a Telegram group chat involving 1,000 people sharing information about plans to pick up and transport undocumented people.
About a quarter of people in Venezuela are considering migrating, but of those, 47 percent would stay if the opposition were somehow allowed to win the country’s July 28 presidential elections, according to a Delphos poll reported by the Associated Press.
In a Time excerpt from a new book about immigration, Stanford University Professor Ana Raquel Minian provided a rapid overview of the history of U.S. detention of apprehended migrants. It concluded: “Rather than caging migrants and refugees, the government should simply release them and allow them to reside with friends, family, or community members in the U.S. while it examines their cases.”
No deep relaxation or deep thoughts yet... just a polished draft of a long-overdue report on Colombia.
I’m in the middle of week two of this two-month work sabbatical. I’d hoped that by now, I’d have had many moments of solitude and calm, as I caught up on reading and posted deep thoughts to this site.
There haven’t been a lot of deep thoughts posted here, and I haven’t been having many to begin with.
I recall that this happened the last time I had a sabbatical: I spent the first part catching up overdue projects that my regular schedule hadn’t allowed me to work on. It’s happening again.
This time, the main project is a long-suffering report. Back in October and November, I spent two weeks in Colombia (I posted many photos here at the time). I came back, got all my notes together, and then started writing about it. I worked bit by bit, section by section, whenever I had the chance to move the project forward.
As winter and spring passed, there were entire weeks—even some two-week periods—when I did not have that chance at all. It turns out that running a communications-heavy advocacy program about the U.S.-Mexico border and migration, during the highly charged 2024 election year, doesn’t lend itself to also writing an in-depth field research report about migration in Colombia.
Now that I’m on sabbatical, it’s finally happening. I’ve put in about 24 of the past 96 hours working on it, and today I handed off a polished draft to WOLA’s program and communications teams. It’s really nice to no longer say “the report is coming.”
It hasn’t been painless. What was a 16,000-word draft at the beginning of the weekend, with 170 footnotes, by Monday night was a 20,000-word draft with 242 footnotes. By today, I’d managed to whack it back to 14,500 words and 169 footnotes.
If you’ve never had to cut 5,000 words from a 20,000-word report, eliminating entire lines of research that you’d gathered from your fieldwork… well, I don’t recommend it. It’s brutal.
Between that and posting “daily border links,” I never made it outdoors at all today. (It was raining, anyway.)
But it’s great to have it behind me (except for suggestions and revisions). Being able to shut down much of the work over the past 10 days is what made it possible.
It still doesn’t really feel like a sabbatical, though.
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