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Nueve millones de víctimas del conflicto armado declaradas oficialmente en el territorio nacional tendrán representación política en el Congreso de la República. Así lo determinó este viernes la Corte Constitucional
El Tribunal Superior de Pasto ordenó al Ministerio del Interior garantizar la consulta previa de comunidades afro e indígenas de Nariño, a quienes no los han tenido en cuenta para el eventual retorno de la aspersión
Estos videos serán culpa de Luigi Echeverri, un asesor irresponsable e incendiario al que Duque acude cuando se siente acorralado
“La Mala Hora” (Somos Defensores (Colombia), May 21, 2021).
En 2020 confirmamos un total de 969 agresiones individuales contra personas que a través de sus actividades ejercen diferentes tipos de liderazgo en las regiones; y dentro de estos hechos violentos, registramos 199 asesinatos
El general Jorge Luis Vargas, director de la institución, respondió a los cuestionamientos y le afirmó a EL TIEMPO que “la Policía Nacional sí se va a reformar”
La Defensoría del Pueblo tienen entre sus cuentas por el Paro Nacional 106 reportes de violencia basada en género, de los cuales 23 corresponden a denuncias por violencia sexual
Ya involucra no sólo a Apure, en donde los enfrentamientos empezaron el 21 de abril, sino también el Zulia, el estado en donde habría ocurrido el supuesto asesinato del guerrillero colombiano
When forensic teams searched his house, they discovered at least seven pits containing bodies, some of which may have been buried as long as two years ago
On the same day Pérez Molina had the charge against him dropped, the Attorney General’s Office announced the arrest of Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa, the country’s former tax chief who helped build a corruption case against Pérez Molina
As part of the exercise, U.S. military engineers will also work side-by-side with Guatemalan military forces to renovate a training site at a Guatemalan military base in Poptún, Peten
Biden should grant the request of 69 members of Congress, who wrote to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken , to appoint a high-level, neutral, independent, and well-resourced special envoy to Haiti
Ortega is seeking his fourth consecutive presidential term in November. Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council and congress have been narrowing the space for maneuver for the country’s opposition
Biden needs to move faster to give the nation a more effective and humanitarian border-enforcement plan, because the longer he takes to bring one into focus, the less credibility he has as a force for positive change
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.
Title 42’s gradual loosening continues
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, issued an unusually direct statement on May 20 voicing alarm about a major state’s treatment of protection-seeking migrants. Grandi called on the U.S. government “to swiftly lift” the pandemic measure known as “Title 42,” for the part of the U.S. Code that allows border closures during quarantines. Since March 2020, Title 42 has swiftly expelled more than 750,000 undocumented migrants apprehended at the border back to Mexico or their countries of origin—including nearly all migrants who would seek asylum or other protection.
The Trump administration justified the mass expulsions in the name of public health, though later reporting revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not view it as necessary to expel asylum seekers. Still, the Biden administration has maintained the expulsions order, with no timetable for lifting it.
“The use of Title 42 is not a source of pleasure, but rather frankly, a source of pain,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on April 30, adding “the timeline is as quickly as possible.” Todd Miller, the official performing the duties of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner, told the House Appropriations Committee on May 19 that his agency is “preparing for the eventuality of Title 42 to be lifted.”
The UNHCR statement calls on the United States “to restore access to asylum for the people whose lives depend on it, in line with international legal and human rights obligations.” Grandi acknowledges that in its first four months, the Biden administration has been building capacity—CBP’s Miller mentioned five “soft-sided,” or tent-based, processing facilities coming online near ports of entry—and is now allowing a few vulnerable asylum-seekers to present in the United States. “A system which allows a small number of asylum seekers to be admitted daily, however, carries with it a number of risks, and is not an adequate response.”
As noted in last week’s update, DHS has stopped a program of daily flights that were transporting asylum-seeking Central American families from parts of the border where Mexico was not allowing expulsions with young children, to other parts of the border where Mexico does allow such expulsions. That update also noted an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been in negotiations with the Biden administration over a lawsuit challenging Title 42 expulsions of families, to allow 35 of the most vulnerable expelled family members to re-enter the United States to pursue their protection claims on U.S. soil.
That number expanded this week. The ACLU told CBS News on May 18 that DHS has agreed to allow up to 250 of the most vulnerable asylum seekers to present inside the United States each day. “So far, 2,000 asylum-seekers have been admitted into the U.S. through the ACLU’s negotiations with the Biden administration,” the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt told CBS.
The modest increase in access to asylum is a stopgap measure. The 250 would be identified by advocacy groups. This “puts the burden of deciding who gets access on NGOs, which is really not our role,” Tracey Horan of the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Arizona told Public Radio International (PRI). The loosening of Title 42 is no substitute for the ACLU lawsuit, Gelernt told PRI. “We are troubled, to say the least, that the Biden administration has chosen to keep a Trump administration policy that was always a sham, was never justified by public health.”
Meanwhile, about 700 expelled asylum seekers remain stranded in the dangerous border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. A tent encampment in the Plaza de la República near the port of entry is to be moved about a mile west to a space next to Reynosa’s church-run Senda de Vida shelter.
Remain in Mexico continues to unwind
The Biden administration meanwhile continues a slow but steady unwinding of the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico,” policy, which in 2019 and 2020 sent more than 71,000 asylum-seeking migrants from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries back across the border into Mexico to await their U.S. hearings. After canceling Remain in Mexico on January 20, the administration has been working with UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies to bring asylum seekers into the United States to pursue their claims.
As of the end of April, Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration data project reports, 8,387 asylum seekers had been brought into the United States under the Remain in Mexico unwinding. Another 18,087 people with open cases remained in Mexico. By May 14, the number permitted to enter the United States had risen to 10,707, a UN official toldBorder Report. “They’re extremely happy to be back. The program is unwinding extremely well. It was well thought out, well planned,” added Ruben Garcia of El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter.
Beyond the approximately 26,500 who still had open cases when the Biden administration took over, many migrants subject to “Remain in Mexico” had missed their court dates in the United States due to security reasons or other obstacles to showing up at a Mexican border city’s port of entry at the appointed time. Some were even being held by kidnappers when they were supposed to appear in court. As a result, U.S. immigration courts threw out their asylum claims because they were no-shows. BuzzFeed reported this week that DHS officials “have agreed that those ordered deported in absentia should have their cases reopened.”
One migrant subject to “Remain in Mexico” who will never get the chance to pursue his asylum case in the United States is Cristian San Martín Estrada, a citizen of Cuba. Estrada had been waiting in Mexico since 2019, when he was returned as an 18-year-old asylum seeker. He was scheduled to re-enter the United States “in the coming days,” according to a tweet from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Cristian San Martín Estrada was shot to death in Ciudad Juárez on the evening of May 17.
Documents reveal a CBP counter-terror unit’s focus on asylum lawyers
The Santa Fe Dreamers Project, a public interest law firm, shared with ProPublica’s Dara Lind some documents obtained from CBP through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They reveal that U.S. asylum lawyers were flagged and interrogated by a secretive CBP unit, its “Tactical Terrorism Response Team,” apparently based on questionable and politicized intelligence.
El Paso-based asylum lawyer Taylor Levy (interviewed about her work in a May 2020 WOLA podcast) tells ProPublica that CBP held her for hours at the port of entry in January 2019, when she returned from dinner with friends in Ciudad Juárez. ProPublica reports, “She didn’t know why she was being questioned by an agent who’d introduced himself as a counterterrorism specialist,” along with attorney Héctor Ruiz.
The documents revealed that the Tactical Terrorism Response Team was acting on incorrect intelligence alleging that Levy had met with members of a October 2018 migrant “caravan.”
These “caravans”—migrants who, seeking to avoid having to pay a smuggler, attempted to cross Mexico in large groups for safety in numbers—never added up to more than a single-digit percentage of migration from Central America to the United States. Today, Mexican or Guatemalan forces tend to disperse caravans long before they get anywhere near the U.S. border.
Nonetheless, the caravan phenomenon had alarmed the Trump administration and conservative media outlets, leading the president to send active-duty troops to the border, where some remain today. Now we know that the Trump administration also devoted CBP’s counter-terrorism resources to caravan-related missions, and that it cast its net so widely as to include asylum lawyers.
Among the documents newly released to the Santa Fe Dreamers Project is a remarkable mid-2019 Border Patrol intelligence report from El Paso, which reads more like a Breitbart editorial than the work of intelligence professionals:
Mass migration from South America into the United States is said to be coordinated at some level by non profit organizations who wish to line their pockets with proceeds deriving from migrants transportation fees up to the U.S Mexico border, and ultimately proceeds deriving from the migrants paying for their asylum case lawyers once they have arrived to the United States.
The report, ProPublica states, “goes on to associate this effort with ‘other groups such as Antifa,’” which is not in fact a “group.”
Taylor Levy’s colleagues recall that she was critical of the migrant caravan tactic, and had not met with its members, nearly all of whom went to Tijuana, not Ciudad Juárez. Ruiz, the other lawyer, had spoken to an assembly of caravan participants when they passed through Mexico City, advising them about the stringency of U.S. asylum law and the low probability that those with unclear claims would be allowed to stay.
Levy and Ruiz “also recall being asked about their beliefs,” ProPublica continues. “Levy remembers an agent asking her why she worked for a Catholic aid organization if she didn’t believe in God, while Ruiz told ProPublica they were asked about their opinions of the Trump administration and the economy.”
A modest increase in unaccompanied children, amid concerns about emergency shelters
After weeks of steady decline, including a sharp drop during May 9-13, Border Patrol encountered a larger number of non-Mexican unaccompanied migrant children during May 16-19. The agency averaged 393 encounters with unaccompanied kids so far this week, similar to the 387 daily encounters two weeks ago but up sharply from last week’s 268.
This may just be a normal fluctuation, while arrivals of unaccompanied kids remain over 100 per day fewer than they were in late March and early April. Other possible explanations could be seasonal variation, as May is often the heaviest month of the year for migration; smugglers adjusting to Mexico’s increased migrant interdiction efforts; more parents expelled under Title 42 making the gut-wrenching decision to separate and send their children across the border alone; or an increase in children from one or two particular countries.
The number of “encountered” children in Border Patrol’s holding facilities remains a tiny fraction of what it was, an average of 736 per day this week, compared to more than 5,000 at the end of March. This means that the agency remains able to hand unaccompanied kids over quickly to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A 2008 law requires that ORR shelter non-Mexican children while seeking to place them with relatives or other sponsors in the United States, with whom they stay while the immigration court system considers their asylum or protection needs. (Most Mexican children are quickly deported, as the law allows, regardless of their protection needs.)
As of May 19, ORR had 19,344 unaccompanied migrant children in its shelter system. The agency expanded its capacity by hastily opening up 13 emergency facilities around the country, at sites like convention centers, tent camps, and a U.S. Army base, Fort Bliss, in El Paso.
Unlike ORR’s normal shelters, these emergency facilities are not licensed childcare facilities: instead, they more closely resemble shelters for hurricane evacuees, with rows of cots in giant rooms and few activities to pass the time. On May 14 HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra visited one such site, at the Long Beach, California convention center. He acknowledged that conditions at the various emergency facilities vary “site by site.”
Child welfare advocates have voiced alarm. Lawyers permitted to visit facilities under the 1997 Flores settlement agreement described to CBS News “limited access to showers, soiled clothes and undercooked food” and children feeling “sad and desperate,” even suicidal.
“As of late April,” CBS notes, “more than 300 migrant boys had spent over 50 days at a Dallas convention center” with no ability to go outside. At Fort Bliss, “multiple white tents…each house about 900 children, who sleep on bunk cots.” About 4,400 children are currently at the army base, and the number could grow to 10,000 as the pandemic’s ebbing causes other facilities, like convention centers, to revert to their original purposes.
“I know the administration wants to take a victory lap for moving children out of Border Patrol stations—and they deserve credit for doing that,” Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law, one of the lawyers permitted to tour some facilities, told the New York Times. “But the truth is, thousands of traumatized children are still lingering in massive detention sites on military bases or convention centers, and many have been relegated to unsafe and unsanitary conditions.”
Under great pressure to do so, ORR has been working to speed its discharges of children from shelters to families and sponsors. The agency has discharged an average of 481 children per day this week, down slightly from over 500 during the previous two weeks. An HHS official told CBS News that children are spending an average of 29 days in its shelters, down from 42 days in late January. Obstacles to faster discharges include a shortage of case officers and the time-consuming nature of vetting relatives and sponsors, including background checks, to ensure that children will be safe with them.
Links
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is closing two ICE detention centers where alleged abuses of inmates had been widespread. The Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia gained notoriety last September when women detained there said they had been subject to non-consensual hysterectomies and other surgeries. Also closing is the C. Carlos Carreiro Immigration Detention Center in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
On May 12, DHS requested that the Defense Department extend the Trump administration’s National Guard deployment at the border beyond September 30, when fiscal year 2021 ends. “The Department is currently considering that request,” Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Mitchell said on May 18. Defense Department press secretary John Kirby would not confirm whether a post-September border presence would include active duty troops in addition to National Guardsmen, an unusual deployment that Trump launched in 2018. About 4,000 guardsmen remain at the border.
The number of internal affairs officers at CBP—professionals who investigate claims of corruption, human rights abuse, or other malfeasance—increased from 174 in 2015 to 252 in 2019. The agency would need about 750, the Cato Institute reports, to have a ratio of agents to internal affairs officers comparable to that of the New York Police Department.
Lawyers working with the Biden administration have located 54 more parents whom the Trump administration separated from their children in 2017 and 2018. “Now the parents of 391 children have yet to be reached, down from 445 in April,” NBC reported. Roughly 1,000 families remain separated overall. Meanwhile, as BuzzFeed reminds, it is still CBP policy to separate asylum-seeking children traveling with non-immediate relatives, like aunts or uncles.
The latest Metering Update from the University of Texas Strauss Center finds 18,700 names of asylum seekers waiting their turn to approach still-closed ports of entry in eight Mexican border cities—a 15 percent increase from February. The authors warn that border cities’ waitlists have become an inexact indicator of trends: many on the lists have since sought to cross between ports of entry, returned or been deported to their countries of origin, or moved elsewhere in Mexico, while new asylum seekers continue to arrive and don’t always sign on.
“Rather than attempting to drive down migration through more-stringent enforcement, Biden officials in recent weeks have been seeking to change the perception that high border numbers equate with a crisis, a failure, or even something manifestly negative,” reports Nick Miroff at the Washington Post.
January 23 was the date that Tamaulipas, Mexico stopped taking back expelled non-Mexican families with children under age 7, according to House Appropriations testimony from Todd Miller of CBP. After Mexico and Central America’s “Northern Triangle” countries, Miller revealed, the next six countries whose citizens Border Patrol is currently apprehending at the border are Ecuador, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua. More Brazilians are arriving “on the western flank” of the border.
On May 27 at 11am ET WOLA is hosting with a webinar with the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center, La 72 Migrant Shelter, and the Jesuit Migration Network-Guatemala about the impact of migration enforcement policies in Mexico and Guatemala. You can register for the event here.
I’m in the midst of writing two internal memos (one done, one to go), a weekly border update (drafted), a written interview with a Colombian paper (drafted), and an article for another Colombian publication (semi-drafted). And I’m recording a podcast about Brazil in the early afternoon. I won’t be able to come up for air much today, and will be hard to contact.
Desde la década de 1990, diversos informes han adjudicado casos de cáncer linfoma no Hodgkin y de neurotoxicidad como producto del contacto con el glifosato
Colombia
Sarah Cahlan, Drea Cornejo, Anthony Faiola, Elyse Samuels, Steven Grattan, “Killed by Police in Colombia” (The Washington Post, May 20, 2021).
An analysis of video evidence in four cases of protester deaths shows the extent to which police appear to have overstepped their rules of engagement
While the issue of the Leahy Law specifically is not an issue for Colombians to decide, many are looking with desperation toward foreign actors to pressure their government in a way that the people have been unable to
The human rights organization is calling on Secretary of State Blinken to immediately cease the direct or indirect supply, sale, or transfer of equipment used for repression
Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Eduardo Tellez Betancourt told Reuters his team of four specialists had delivered its report on Haiti’s kidnapping crisis on Tuesday after three months of on- the-ground research
U.S. lawmakers and analysts said the lists appeared to exclude a number of officials who have faced corruption allegations in recent years, including Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández
“Estamos advirtiendo de un camino sin vuelta atrás, en el cual el Gobierno está utilizando a las FFAA para asuntos de orden interno y de seguridad pública, cuestiones que no les competen”, aseguró
All signs indicate that the foundational document they will draft will enshrine principles of civic participation, justice, gender equality and Indigenous rights
“A large part of the Colombian establishment doesn’t understand that these calls for change are coming from the people in the streets of cities, and not from an armed guerrilla group in the countryside”
The outpouring quickly morphed into a widespread expression of anger over poverty and inequality — which have risen as the virus has spread — and over the violence with which the police have confronted the movement
Las historias de vulneración de derechos se repiten en aquellas ciudades donde las expresiones callejeras de inconformidad con el actual gobierno nacional trascurren de manera pacífica y en las que acaban en batallas campales
Aunque la Fiscalía dice que es aliada del Clan del Golfo de alias Otoniel, la Policía dice que es hace poco forjó un pacto mafioso con la Segunda Marquetalia de “Iván Márquez”
The U.S.-Colombia Action Plan (USCAP) will resume training in May 2021. USCAP training halted when the stakeholder nations’ implemented COVID-19 mitigation strategies to protect their populations
Just before the death of Mr. Hernández, the Colombian Supreme Court had indicated it was in favor of extraditing him to the United States to answer to drug charges
Aunque la muerte de Santrich resuene en Colombia como una derrota para las disidencias en general, lo cierto es que en Arauca el frente Décimo está ganando la guerra. No solo a la Segunda Marquetalia, también al régimen venezolano
Declaró que desde que el país regresó a un sistema democrático “el Ejército ha sido el principal baluarte de que la estabilidad política del país se mantenga”
Al carecer de servicios sanitarios y sin agua, los reos castigados tenían que hacer sus necesidades fisiológicas en pedazos de papel, bolsas y botes, volviendo el sitio insano
“El gasto en las Fuerzas Armadas es actualmente de 140 mil millones de pesos, el nivel más alto registrado, los mayores niveles de gasto coinciden con el mayor uso del ejército para combatir los crímenes de la delincuencia organizada”
Mientras que el Ejército está entrenado bajo una lógica de combate al enemigo y protección del territorio, las policías son quienes, desde una lógica eminentemente local, regulan y controlan las interacciones cotidianas de la ciudadanía
Daniel Ortega acusó al embajador de Estados Unidos, Kevin Sullivan, de elegir los «candidatos» para los partidos políticos de oposición que correrán en las próximas elecciones de noviembre
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine., said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on National Guard and Reserve forces that the Defense Department received a request from Homeland Security to continue the Guard’s border deployment into the 2022 fiscal year
This report provides an update on metering lists, asylum seekers, and migrant shelters along the U.S.-Mexico border amid CBP’s asylum processing suspension. It documents approximately 18,700 asylum seekers on waitlists in 8 Mexican border cities
A Cuban asylum-seeker who was forced to wait in Mexico under a Trump-era policy was fatally shot Monday night in Ciudad Juárez a few days before he was to be allowed into the US
I’m most reachable at the beginning of the morning and mid-day. (How to contact me)
I’ve got an internal meeting in the morning, and in the afternoon a brief border coalition meeting and a meeting with some international organization representatives to talk about Colombia. When not doing that I’ll be doing some research, writing an article about Colombia, writing much of our weekly border update, and hopefully keeping up with e-mail and whatsapps.
It’s also a pleasant spring day—one of the last we’re going to have here in Washington before it gets really hot—so I may have to break and go for a long walk while the sun is up.
I’ll be sort of reachable in the morning and mid-day. All meetings after that. (How to contact me)
Getting a bit of a late start today after catching up on sleep. I’ll be doing some writing and answering messages until early afternoon, when I’m meeting with an academic colleague, Senate committee staff, and a coalition of groups working on Colombia. Those commitments will make me impossible to contact all afternoon.
Jose Vargas photo at El Espectador (Colombia). Caption: “Cientos de mujeres en Cali marcharon el pasado viernes desde la Universidad del Valle hasta el sector de Puerto Rellena, conocido en el marco del paro nacional como Puerto Resistencia.”
Rear Admiral Don Gabrielson, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. Fourth Fleet (USNAVSO/FOURTHFLT), hosted delegates from the Brazilian Navy for the 15th annual Maritime Staff Talks (MST), May 5
In a major blow to the traditional political forces in Chile, weekend voting for the 155-member constitutional assembly gave 48 seats to independent candidates, most of them identified with leftist ideology
Con la intención en firme de visitar Colombia, la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH) aguarda la respuesta de la Cancillería colombiana sobre si una delegación suya puede arribar por octava vez al país en los próximos días para adelantar una visita de trabajo
Por lo menos 30 personas han sido agredidas en sus ojos durante las manifestaciones del paro nacional de 2021. Catorce jóvenes que denuncian haber recibido disparos de la Policía y el Esmad en sus rostros hablaron con El Espectador
The confrontation between armed civilians and indigenous groups in Cali has highlighted unaddressed forms of violence that the state has yet to acknowledge
Discussions included how the Guatemalan Army envisions leveraging the ALLP’s methodology and processes to update doctrine, support army-wide modernization, and to employ available resources more wisely
The DHS attributed the damage to construction undertaken during former President Donald Trump’s administration, which the DHS said “blew large holes” in the levees
Under the new agreement, the Biden administration has committed to processing up to 250 asylum-seekers deemed to be vulnerable by advocacy groups on a daily basis and permitting them to continue their legal cases on American soil
A bottleneck continues to build in Mexico near the US-Mexico border, as a public health order invoked by the Trump administration remains in place and shuts out many migrants and asylum-seekers
El Gobierno actual ya había presentado en las cámaras el proyecto FONDEF (Fondo de Defensa), que, por medio del uso de un porcentaje del presupuesto nacional, lograría obtener recursos mínimos que permitan un cierto nivel de recuperación de capacidades militares
About 27,000 Yanomami live on the reserve which is the size of Portugal. But in recent years, the territory has seen a new invasion by about 20,000 wildcat miners
Chile’s ruling coalition of Conservative President Sebastián Piñera was the biggest loser of the weekend, as a fragmented leftwing opposition took a sizeable majority of the 155 seats
Fabio Espitia Garzón, director de la Justicia Penal Militar, dice que, a pesar del desprestigio histórico de esa entidad, no va a haber impunidad en los casos por las muertes de decenas de manifestantes
It’s getting more and more difficult to come to an agreement because the government is very weak. So I think that conversations are going to take a long while
No es cierto que Cali sea una ciudad hoy sitiada por bloqueos y protestas de unos pocos, pues es un levamiento popular encabezado por la juventud y por muchos sectores que se concreta en control territorial, control de vías y carreteras en toda la macrorregión
La capital del Valle lleva una semana sin homicidios ni hechos de violencia en medio de las jornadas del paro nacional, sin embargo, los retenes extorsivos continúan y la gente se siente estigmatizada
Informe de Temblores ONG e Indepaz a la CIDH sobre la violación sistemática de la Convención Americana y los alcances jurisprudenciales de la Corte IDH con respecto al uso de la fuerza pública contra la sociedad civil en Colombia en el marco de las protestas realizadas entre el 28 de abril y el 12 de mayo de 2021
22 días después del secuestro de ocho efectivos por parte de las FARC, fue cuando el Alto Mando confirmó el hecho. Analistas militares asocian el silencio a la improvisación manifiesta, las debilidades en el profesionalización castrense, que se ha traducido en fallas operativas, y la falta de control del territorio
Brig. Gen. Barrientos, who was sworn in as commander in March 2019, took several courses at WHINSEC in 2007-2008, including the Command and General Staff Officer course and the Joint Interagency Operations course
Este es uno de los estados con mayor presencia del crimen organizado, con el Cártel del Golfo y el Cártel del Noreste (escisión de los antiguos Zetas) disputándose el territorio. Además, aquí son continuas las denuncias de violaciones a los derechos humanos perpetradas por Ejército, Guardia Nacional, Marina o policía estatal
Mexico is facing its own crisis — an escalating humanitarian emergency caused by what authorities and advocates call an unprecedented increase in migrant families traversing its territory
El politólogo estadounidense- quien residió en el Perú- afirmó que los peruanos no quieren volver a un régimen fujimorista, pero tampoco quieren ir a uno bolivariano
Trump officials cited conspiracies about Antifa to justify interrogating immigration lawyers with a special terrorism unit. The documents also show that more lawyers were targeted than previously known
According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries
Biden officials have quietly agreed to narrow but substantial changes — among them, an end to the lateral expulsion flights and expelling migrants late at night, which exacerbate their vulnerability
Thousands of immigrant children who have been separated by US immigration authorities after showing up at the border with relatives who aren’t their parents or legal guardians
Over the last year and a half, the El Perú Syndicate (Sindicato del Perú) – a gang that extorts illegal miners and operates crude gold processing plants in southern Bolívar state – has been the target of repeated operations by Venezuelan security forces
I’ll be intermittently available and unavailable all day. (How to contact me)
I’ve tried to keep this day clear on my calendar to write a 4,000-word article on civil-military relations in Latin America, and I’ve been mostly successful in keeping it clear. I do, however, have about 500 e-mails to process that I couldn’t get to last week, when I was writing that New York Times piece, producing that podcast, and writing the weekly border and Colombia updates.
I want to spend the morning and early afternoon updating news and email (I got too busy to post news links here over the past several days), while watching the event about Colombia that WOLA is co-hosting. (I have no specific duties for that, but want to watch and recommend it.) I have a 2PM meeting with legislative staff, and starting after that I’m going to turn off devices and communications apps so that I can have several solid hours of writing time.
In addition to an article on the state of civil-military relations, I’m also giving two talks about the subject next week at the Latin American Studies Association congress. As I put those together, I’ve been playing around with a screencasting app on my Mac, and pretty pleased with the results. So as I practice, I look forward to having a screencast to share here.
I just sent off another e-mail update to those who’ve subscribed. It’s got links to a podcast and a New York Times column about Colombia, robust weekly updates about Colombia and the U.S.-Mexico border, some upcoming event listings, and some funny tweets.
11:00 at Zoom: Debt, Austerity and Human Rights in Latin America (RSVP required).
12:00-2:00 at thedialogue.org: Evaluating the Socioemotional Competencies of Students During the Pandemic and School Reopening (RSVP required).
Tuesday, May 18
11:00-12:30 at USIP Zoom: Understanding the Crisis in Colombia: Perspectives from Cali on Dialogue, Justice, and Healing (RSVP required).
11:00-12:30 at canninghouse.org: Life, Livelihoods and Liberty (RSVP required).
1:00 at Zoom: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and Authoritarianism in Unrevolutionary Mexico: A Book Talk with Paul Gillingham and Gema Kloppe-Santamaría (RSVP required).
3:00-4:30 at thedialogue.org: The Decisions of Facebook’s Oversight Board – Implications for the Global South, particularly in Latin America (RSVP required).
Wednesday, May 19
9:30-10:30 at atlanticcouncil.org: What is the road ahead for Colombia? (RSVP required).
10:00 at semanajusticiafiscal.com: La política fiscal como clave para avanzar hacia la justicia ambiental y climática en América Latina (RSVP required).
My schedule is largely clear, other than a long internal meeting in the morning and a mid-afternoon check-in with some groups working on the border. I have an article to finish writing and a backlog of unanswered e-mail to wind down, as it’s been very busy lately.
The security forces’ response to Colombia’s nationwide protests became less lethal over the past week. Three people involved in protests were killed in the 8 days between May 7 and 14, increasing the overall confirmed toll from 39 to 42, according to a database maintained by the non-governmental organizations Temblores and Indepaz.
Heavy, and often outraged, international scrutiny of the police and military response has likely contributed to restraint. So has a reduction in the protests’ overall intensity, as formal negotiations begin. While large turnouts continue in Bogotá, Medellín, and elsewhere, they are not consistently large every single day. Colombia’s southwest, though, remains very active, especially the cities of Cali, Valle del Cauca; Popayán, Cauca; Neiva, Huila; and Pasto, Nariño.
As of 11:30pm on May 12, Temblores had counted 39 killings committed by security forces; 1,055 “arbitrary detentions,” 442 “violent interventions in the framework of peaceful protests” including 133 uses of lethal firearms and 30 protesters suffering eye damage, and 16 cases of sexual violence.
Hundreds of people are still missing, with most probably in police custody. Sebastian Lanz, the co-director of Temblores, toldVice that some are being charged with crimes, but others “have ended up in unauthorized ‘clandestine’ detention centers where ‘there is no legal authority to verify the human rights situation there,’” or in “special centers for protection“ where people may be held without charges for up to 12 hours.
Geography of protest
Activity remains widespread geographically. On May 12, the protests’ two-week mark, the Defense Ministry’s “Unified Command Post” counted 170 protest activities in 391 of Colombia’s 1,123 municipalities (counties). That day, Defense Minister Diego Molano said that protesters continued to block 80 roads around the country.
In Cali early in the week, protesters maintained blockades stopping most road traffic in and out of the city. Some of these protesters were members of an Indigenous minga (“coming together”) that brought thousands from Cauca, to the south of Cali, to show solidarity with protesters in Colombia’s third-largest city. The blockades generated reports of shortages of goods in Cali, including gasoline, and an inability to get export cargo to Buenaventura, Colombia’s busiest port.
The Defense Ministry deployed 10,000 police and 2,100 soldiers to Cali. Most road blockades were lifted peacefully, but the military and police used heavy force in Siloé, a neighborhood in western Cali that has seen many casualties. On May 9, assailants in civilian clothes shot at indigenous protesters in broad daylight, wounding eight. The mingapulled back to Cauca on May 12, citing government plans for “an armed police and paramilitary attack against our delegations” if it stayed in Cali.
A road blockade in Buga, along the Pan-American Highway north of Cali, was the site of bitter, prolonged clashes between protesters and a combined police-military force on May 13. No deaths were reported. In fact, the Temblores and Indepaz database shows no new deaths in the Cali metropolitan area since May 7. Still, of the 42 fatalities on this list, 29 happened in Cali or the neighboring municipality of Yumbo.
In Cauca’s departmental capital of Popayán on May 12, police threw to the ground and sexually abused a 17-year-old girl who had been using her phone to record abuse during a protest. The girl was taken to an “Immediate Reaction Unit” (URI)—a facility of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía)—where she reported what was done to her. After being freed hours later, the girl reportedly took her own life. Popayán human rights lawyer Lizeth Montero said that a total of three underage girls denounced sexual abuse at the hands of police on May 12.
News of the abuse spurred angry protests in Popayán on May 14, during which some protesters burned down the URI where the girl had been taken. During the police response, an ESMAD anti-riot policeman fired a projectile, possibly a tear-gas canister, into the neck of 22-year-old college student Sebastián Quintero Múnera, killing him.
Rural areas appear to be joining the protests in increasing numbers. About 5,000 coca-growers from rural Cauca converged on Popayán to demand that the government comply with peace accord commitments to assist with the transition to licit crops, and that the government abandon plans to restart a program to eradicate coca by fumigating fields with herbicides from aircraft.
Casualties
Lucas Villa, a 37-year-old activist who was known for his ebullient nature—he appeared often in videos dancing during protests—died in a hospital in Pereira, Risaralda, on May 10. A gunman on a motorcycle hit Villa with eight bullets during a peaceful protest in Pereira on May 5.
The Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) is seeking aggravated homicide charges against a Cali motorcycle police officer who, in a much-shared April 28 video, repeatedly shot and killed a 17-year-old who had run up and kicked him. This is the fourth case of a protest-related fatality for which the Fiscalía has filed charges. On May 12 Prosecutor General Francisco Barbosa told Colombia’s House of Representatives that the Fiscalía had counted 14 homicides so far; by that date Temblores and Indepaz had confirmed 41, including 1 policeman.
Investigations haven’t moved in the case of Maycolt Stiven Florido, a Bogotá barber attacked April 30, on video, by 12 police who accused him wrongly of throwing stones. The police knocked out three of Florido’s teeth, among other injuries, while stealing the equivalent of US$135 and his mobile phone.
Negotiations are getting underway
President Duque met on May 10 with the Comité del Paro, the group of mostly union leaders that called for the initial April 28 protests. The three hour exploratory meeting yielded little other than a government announcement that it is willing to open a process of negotiations with the Comité, managed on the government side by High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos.
President Duque announced on May 11 that the government would pay tuition for public university students who come from the bottom three levels of the government’s six-layer income system. The measure would waive tuition for 97 percent of students in public universities.
On May 14 the Comité del Paro, after a long meeting with mediators from the UN and the Catholic Church Episcopal Conference, agreed to the negotiations framework proposed by the government, and the first round of talks is to occur on May 16.
“If the National Government thinks that this process will be managed under the same scheme of the ‘great national conversation’ of late 2019 [after November 2019 protests], consisting of listening, taking notes, and then sitting in front of a computer to see what can be accommodated in the government’s plan and then coming out with what seems feasible, this new dialogue won’t calm things down either,” warned an El Espectadoreditorial.
An El Tiempoanalysis outlines some of the points that a dialogue between the government and protest leaders would be likely to cover. They include basic income guarantees; affordable college education; reopening of schools closed by the pandemic; suspending forced coca eradication, especially fumigation; ending gender, ethnic, and sexual-orientation discrimination; withdrawing a controversial health care reform; and more participation in the national Covid vaccination plan.
La Silla Vacíaprofiles the 20 members of the Comité del Paro, finding the group to be overwhelmingly male and representative mainly of workers in the formal economy. The Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), organizers of the “minga” (coming together) that brought thousands of its members to Cali, issued a statement declaring that it does not feel represented by the Comité del Paro.
134 environmental groups signed a statement supporting the protests. They added a list of demands including securing communities’ prior and informed consent, opposing large extractive projects, and opposing coca eradication with the herbicide glyphosate.
Political fallout
Foreign Minister Claudia Blum resigned after 18 months in office, amid a steady drumbeat of international communications voicing concern about the severity of the government’s response to protests. “The country will reject external pronouncements that do not reflect objectivity and seek to fuel polarization in the country,” Blum had said a week earlier. The comment was not well received. Blum was the second cabinet minister to quit since the protests began. Alberto Carrasquilla, the author of the proposed tax hike that first detonated the protests, resigned as finance minister on May 3.
A Datexco telephone poll of 700 adults found75 percent in favor of the national strike, 15 percent against, and 10 percent with no opinion. 82 percent disapproved of the government’s management of the situation.
President Duque told the New York Times “he did not believe the police department needed significant reform. He said that the police have a ‘zero tolerance’ policy toward abuse, and pointed to the fact that the police inspector general has opened at least 65 investigations into alleged misconduct.”
Conspiracy hypotheses
National Police Commander Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas is among authorities who insist that the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas, along with both of Colombia’s principal networks of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissident bands, are behind disturbances. While members of these groups may be taking advantage of disorder to pursue drug trafficking and other criminality, sources in the security forces tellEl Espectador that evidence does not point to them playing a leading or coordinating role.
“What we are seeing here,” Gen. Vargas toldEl Tiempo’s María Isabel Rueda, “is a systematic attack against the police. This has happened in Chile and in other countries around the world, including the United States. There are organized systematic attacks, platforms in foreign countries, with a lot of false news and disinformation, that want to attack the Police for its role in crime containment, not public and peaceful demonstration.” He added, “In the ELN’s computers, in those of the FARC dissidents, we have found intentions to systematically attack the credibility of the police.”
Former president Álvaro Uribe, the maximum leader of President Iván Duque’s Centro Democrático party, called on May 13 for a greater military role in maintaining order during the protests, during an address before Colombia’s House of Representatives. Uribe warned that people exercising their right to “legitimate defense” might begin “the organization of private justice, with all its cruelty and the deinstitutionalization that the country had overcome.”
El Espectadorrecounted leaked audio of a Google Meet conversation between legislators from the governing Centro Democrático party and business leaders from Pereira, Risaralda. The CD legislators rejected any negotiation with groups carrying out road blockages and suggested boycotting advertising for all media outlets whose reporting has been unfavorable to the government and the security forces.
Business-sector representatives on this call recalled the “dissipated molecular revolution” thesis, popularized by a Nazi-sympathizing Chilean polemicist and advanced by former president Uribe, which contends that even peaceful protest is part of a dispersed, transnational leftist plot to overthrow the government. “They are looking to take over a government and I feel that businessmen have remained quiet on this issue. We need to support the institutional framework, because they have taken advantage of us, light years, in letting the outside world know what is happening in Colombia.”
Economics
Of the 11 million Colombians between ages 14 and 28, 3 million (27 percent) are neither employed nor in school. These “ni-nis” are heavily represented in the ongoing protests.
The Ministry of Finance said that the protests are costing the economy about half a trillion pesos (US$135 million) per day.
Comments and analyses
55 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the State Department to more forcefully denounce police brutality in Colombia, to freeze police aid and sales of crowd control equipment, and to promote dialogue.
The leads of the Colombian government’s negotiating team during the 2012-16 peace process with the FARC, Humberto de la Calle and Sergio Jaramillo, published a series of 10 recommendations in El Tiempo outlining how dialogue might go forward, suggesting a big role for young members of Congress and the use of mechanisms envisioned in the peace accord. “If we were able to reach an agreement between the government and the FARC, our institutions can do the same with the citizenry. But this requires, in addition to political will and respect for the other side, methods to reach agreements and guarantees for the participants.”
“One way to move forward is to stop thinking about the peace agreement in terms of concessions made to the much-disliked former FARC combatants,” reads an Americas Quarterlyanalysis from former finance minister Mauricio Cárdenas. “The peace agreement is about building a new social contract, where marginalized groups will have more political representation while bringing the state in, in the form of roads and schools, to some parts of Colombia for the first time in our history.”
“By helping Colombia move toward dialogue,” WOLA’s Adam Isacson writes in a May 12 New York Timescolumn, “the Biden administration would be developing a template for engaging with counterparts throughout Latin America, where several countries battered by the virus are confronting authoritarian populism amid stark social divides.”
In a May 13 WOLA podcast, Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli explains why she’s optimistic that ongoing protests “can allow for more diverse voices to take up leadership in the country” and why she rates the US government’s response so far as “3 or 4 out of 10.”
Government acknowledges outreach efforts to the ELN
The Duque government’s high commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos, announced that the government has approved or participated in 32 meetings over the past 17 months “to verify the ELN’s true will to seek peace.” Outreach, Ceballos said, has included 22 meetings with intermediaries in the Vatican Nunciature in Bogotá, 6 meetings with intermediaries in the presidential palace, often with President Duque’s participation, and 4 trips to Havana, at which Catholic Church and UN representatives spoke to ELN leaders. The OAS mission in Colombia (MAPP-OEA) also took part in some of the meetings.
A few top ELN leaders remain in Cuba after a January 2019 bombing at Colombia’s police academy in Bogotá brought an end to an earlier peace process. Though protocols for the end of those talks called for their low-profile return to Colombia, the Duque government refused to allow that and demanded their extradition. In the meantime, the ELN ex-negotiators remain in Cuba and available for exploratory talks.
The first Cuba “good offices” trip took place in February 2020, when Father Darío Echeverri, who for years has played an important go-between role in peace efforts, traveled to Havana in representation of the Vatican. Echeverri was accompanied by Carlos Ruiz Massieu, head of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia. Subsequent meetings in Cuba took place in September and November 2020 and March 2021.
At the time, the Duque government, with Ceballos playing the most vocal role, was ramping up diplomatic pressure on Cuba to extradite the ELN leaders stranded on the island. This week Pablo Beltrán, a top ELN leader and former negotiator who is among those still in Havana, toldEl Tiempo that Colombia’s government has been a reluctant participant in the exploratory talks, giving most credit to the Church and the international community.
FARC dissidents still fighting Venezuelan forces, and each other, in Apure, Venezuela
Venezuelan officials say that 16 soldiers and at least 9 FARC dissident fighters have been killed since fighting broke out March 21 across the border from Arauca, Colombia, in the Venezuelan state of Apure. Sporadic fighting continues on Venezuelan soil between Venezuelan forces and a FARC dissident group, which announced this week that it is holding about eight Venezuelan soldiers captive. Though information is spotty, an NGO reports that fighting is also now occurring in Venezuela between the two FARC dissident groups active in the zone.
The panorama in Apure is confusing. In addition to the ELN guerrillas, which are very present but appear uninvolved in the current combat, are “dissidents” led by ex-guerrillas who rejected the FARC peace process. Their rank-and-file includes many new recruits with no FARC background.
The dissidents are affiliated with two national networks. The first, the 10th Front, is part of the “1st Front” structure headed by alias Gentil Duarte, a mid-level FARC leader who rejected the 2016 peace accord and never demobilized. The Gentil Duarte network is the largest FARC dissident organization in the country. The second is the “Segunda Marquetalia” (Marquetalia is the site of the 1964 army attack that led to the FARC’s origin), headed by alias Iván Márquez, who was the FARC’s chief negotiator in Havana and destined for a Senate seat. Márquez rearmed, along with several other hardline FARC members, in 2019.
Numerous analysts cited in past updates have alleged that the Venezuelan regime is targeting the 10th Front—for unclear reasons—and favoring the Segunda Marquetalia.
The Venezuelan NGO FundaRedes reported on May 8 that 10 Venezuelan soldiers had gone missing in Apure following combat with the 10th Front. On May 11 the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that it had received a communication from the 10th Front indicating that it was holding eight Venezuelan soldiers who had been captured during fighting on April 23, and was looking for a way to hand them over. Tarazona posted this letter to his Twitter account, as well as proof-of-life video of some of the captives.
“In addition to a military defeat on April 23, the government today has [suffered] a communications defeat due to its determination to manage the situation in Apure without transparency before the families of the military and the country,” tweeted Marino Alvarado of the Venezuelan human rights group Provea. “Maduro, [Minister of Defense Gen.] Vladimir Padrino, and Adm. Remigio Ceballos [strategic operational commander of the armed forces] owe the country an explanation. A serious minister in the face of such a military and communications disaster would resign.”
FundaRedes also reported that 10th Front and Segunda Marquetalia fighters engaged in combat on May 12 in the town of Bruzual, more than 100 miles inside Venezuelan territory in northwestern Apure. Fundaredes claims that the fighting killed four and wounded several others. Combat between the 10th Front and Segunda Marquetalia has been rare in both Colombia and Venezuela, but appears to be growing more frequent.
Links
Citing a failure to provide prior advance consultation, a court in Nariño suspended all forced coca eradication in Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities’ lands in Tumaco and nine other municipalities along Nariño’s Pacific coast. (Tumaco was sixth among Colombia’s largest coca-producing municipalities in 2019.) The ruling prohibits the on-the-ground manual forced eradication that security forces and eradicators have been carrying out. Colombia’s Constitutional Court will soon rule on two other legal challenges (tutelas) to the Duque government’s imminent restart of glyphosate fumigation from aircraft. Those challenges, too, argue insufficient consultation with ethnic communities.
On May 11 the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution adding to the mandate of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia. The Mission is now charged also with verifying the sentences handed down by the transitional justice tribunal (Special Jurisdiction for Peace, or JEP). These sentences, up to eight years in duration, are likely to be “restrictions of rights and liberties” and/or “works and tasks with restorative and restorative content,” referred by the Spanish acronym TOAR. The Security Council resolution came several days after seven top FARC leaders took the historic step of pleading guilty to the JEP’s charges of masterminding thousands of kidnappings.
In testimony before the JEP, retired Army captain Adolfo Guevara told how he collaborated with the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary network’s Northern Bloc while serving in active duty in 2002. “He not only narrated how he executed people to ‘legalize’ them as ‘positives’ in the Gaula [anti-kidnapping unit in] Magdalena in 2002,” El Tiemporeports, “but also assured that his actions were known and required by other military units.” Guevara alleged that Gen. Mario Montoya, who went on to head Colombia’s army in the mid-2000s, collaborated with the paramilitaries.
Colombia’s navy reported seizing nine semi-submersible drug trafficking vessels along its coasts and waters so far this year.
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.
Migration at the border flattened out in April
Despite spring normally being a time of greater migration, Border Patrol’s “encounters” with undocumented migrants crept up by only 2.5 percent from March to April. The surprisingly slow growth comes after encounters increased 30 percent in February and 73 percent in March.
With 173,460 migrants encountered, April 2021 was still Border Patrol’s heaviest month in 21 years (180,050 in April 2000). That number, though, counts “encounters” and not individual “people.” There is much double-counting: “CBP has reported that about 40 percent of the adults it arrests are ‘recidivists’ or repeat offenders,” according to the Washington Post.
That is a far higher recidivism rate than in recent years: it ranged from 7 to 16 percent between 2013 and 2019. Border Patrol first started reporting this rate in 2005, when it estimated 25 percent; the highest total before now was 29 percent recidivism in 2007.
Repeat crossings are more frequent now because of the pandemic border closure measure, known as “Title 42,” that the Trump administration put in place in March 2020 and the Biden administration has continued (public health experts have strongly criticized the “Title 42” measures as having no basis in protecting public health). In the name of preventing the spread of COVID-19, Border Patrol has been quickly expelling most migrants, usually with no opportunity to ask for asylum. This means most migrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are expelled across the border into Mexico.
Border Patrol expelled 63 percent of migrants it encountered in April, the same proportion as March. In December 2020, the Trump administration’s last full month in office, expulsions stood at 85 percent.
Expulsion is a hardship for protection-seeking migrants, who normally seek to turn themselves in to CBP or Border Patrol. For migrants who wish to avoid being apprehended, though, expulsion has made the process easier: if they are caught, they get taken back across the border within hours, usually without even seeing the inside of a Border Patrol station, and in many cases try to cross again.
Single adult migrants are more likely than children or families to attempt to avoid apprehension, and thus to try crossing again after being expelled. Border Patrol’s encounters with single adults increased by 12 percent from March to April, to 108,301. Trying to avoid apprehension often means taking dangerous routes, such as through remote desert areas or by sea, and it appears that more migrants are dying on U.S. soil or in U.S. waters, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Encounters with unaccompanied children and members of family units, though, plummeted 10 percent—a result that almost nobody foresaw in March, when children and families increased by 102 percent and 177 percent, respectively.
Border Patrol encountered 48,226 family members, down 5,000 from March. The sharpest one-month decrease was in families from Guatemala (-29 percent) and Honduras (-22 percent), while families from “other countries”—neither Mexico nor Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region—jumped by 34 percent, to 14,448.
This appears to be an outcome of the Title 42 expulsions into Mexico. 48 percent of family members from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were expelled, similar to 47 percent in March (we reported a smaller percentage a month ago, but CBP radically revised its family expulsion data). With a roughly 50-50 chance of being expelled or being allowed to petition for asylum or protection inside the United States, Central American families face a confusing set of outcomes that smugglers are exploiting, reports Lomi Kriel at ProPublica / Texas Tribune. By contrast, Border Patrol expelled just 5 percent of family members from “other countries”—often places like Cuba or Venezuela where sending expulsion flights is not currently possible.
As noted in past updates, numbers of unaccompanied children continue to drop, even though the Biden administration is not expelling non-Mexican children who arrive. Border Patrol encountered an average of 268 non-Mexican children per day between May 9-12. This is a sharp drop from the 387 average of May 2-6, and the high 400s logged in late March and the first three weeks of April.
The agency encountered 2,268 Mexican children in April, almost identical to March (2,277). While almost none were expelled under Title 42, most were quickly repatriated back to Mexico, as was the norm before the pandemic, because the 2008 law requiring that unaccompanied children go into the asylum system only applies to kids from non-contiguous countries.
Only a daily average of 493 children were being processed in Border Patrol facilities during May 9-12, down from well over 5,000 in late March and early April. Nearly all were handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) network of shelters within about 24 hours. The population of unaccompanied children in ORR shelters has also dropped to 20,397, the fewest since April 19 and down from an April 29 high of 22,557.
These shelters, which include convention centers, tent facilities, and a military base, face serious challenges of crowding, living conditions, and logistics, the New York Times reported, sharing an internal “senior leader brief” showing a thorough level of data collection. This week, the Dallas Morning News found that ORR had been keeping unaccompanied children for days at a time on buses parked outside a Dallas convention center that it is using as an emergency shelter. Politico reported that the White House has been leaning hard on Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, whose department oversees ORR, to speed the pace at which the agency releases children to relatives or sponsors in the United States.
Late March predictions that ORR would need bed space for 34,000 or more children are now looking too pessimistic. With the drop in child and family migration has come a notable drop in press coverage of events at the border.
Family expulsions have generated a quiet crisis of family separation in Mexican border cities, as expelled parents, aware that unaccompanied children don’t get expelled, make the painful decision to send their children back into the United States alone. “Between January 20 and April 5, Border Patrol agents came across at least 2,121 unaccompanied migrant children who had been previously expelled,” CBS News reported. That is 24 family separations per day—one per hour.
Title 42 is easing, slightly
In April CBP expelled people 111,714 times under the Title 42 pandemic authority. On May 13 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that he did not have a timetable for lifting Title 42. Recent weeks, though, have seen some modest changes to the policy’s application to asylum seekers.
On May 12 CBS News got confirmation from CBP that the agency, citing “operational needs,” has stopped flying families from south Texas, where the bordering Mexican state of Tamaulipas has been limiting expulsions of families with small children, to other parts of the border where expulsions are easier. Since March 8, near-daily planeloads of people had been taking Central American families from McAllen, Texas to El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California. Witness at the Border, which monitors ICE flights, detected 60 of these “lateral” flights in April and 108 between March 8 and April 30, enough to expel about 10,000 people.
Once in El Paso and San Diego, DHS personnel were taking families to the borderline and leaving them in Mexico, often without telling them where they were or what was happening to them. Human Rights First discussed some of the families’ treatment at the hands of Border Patrol and other DHS personnel in a May 13 memo. U.S. media outlets have reported on tearful, disoriented families who had just been flown thousands of miles to be expelled.
The lateral expulsion flights have now stopped, although DHS is still busing some families from south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region about four hours west to Laredo, in order to expel them into the organized crime-dominated border town of Nuevo Laredo. At a May 13 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) accused DHS Secretary Mayorkas of canceling the expulsion flights in response to “left-wing groups.”
Another tiny erosion into Title 42 is a small but growing number of humanitarian exceptions for some of the most vulnerable expelled migrants who wish to seek asylum in the United States. “The latest plan is kicking off on a pilot basis,” a source told CNN, “adding that families will be put in immigration proceedings” in the United States. In recent weeks, about 35 vulnerable families a day have been exempted from expulsions, at the recommendation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is the plaintiff in a lawsuit against DHS seeking to overturn Title 42. It is not clear to what extent that number may expand. On May 13 the ACLU agreed to the latest in a series of delays to that lawsuit; the next deadline is May 25.
Border drug seizure data
Seven months into fiscal year 2021, CBP’s reporting on drugs detected at the U.S.-Mexico border points to big increases in fentanyl and cocaine seizures, a big drop in cannabis seizures, and little change in heroin and methamphetamine seizures. As in past years, nearly all drugs are seized by CBP agents at ports of entry, with the exception of marijuana:
Fentanyl: 6,103 pounds seized October-April, 89 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 10,462 pounds of fentanyl in FY 2021, a 130 percent increase over FY 2020.
Cocaine: 17,407 pounds seized October-April, 86 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 29,841 pounds of cocaine in FY 2021, a 57 percent increase over FY 2020.
Heroin: 3,061 pounds seized October-April, 91 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 5,247 pounds of heroin in FY 2021, a 2 percent increase over FY 2020.
Methamphetamine: 99,681 pounds seized October-April, 93 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 170,882 pounds of meth in FY 2021, almost identical to FY 2020.
Marijuana: 162,073 pounds seized October-April, 39 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 277,839 pounds of marijuana in FY 2021, a 45 percent decrease from FY 2020.
Links
The Senate Homeland Security Committee held a March 13 hearing on the situation of unaccompanied minors, with DHS Secretary Mayorkas the lone witness. Committee Chairman Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan) noted the recent decline in arrivals of unaccompanied children and praised Border Patrol agents who were paying for toys out of their own pockets. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) voiced strong concerns about Title 42 expulsions, including the growing number of family separations discussed above.
On the Republican side, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) lamented that, once in the United States, unaccompanied children are infrequently returned to their home countries, calling that an incentive for more children to come. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and Rick Scott (R-Florida) relied heavily on a prop: a chart of weekly apprehensions that appeared to show a sharp jump in migration after Joe Biden’s inauguration, but was simply wrong—based on a basic conflation of “apprehensions” and “encounters.” Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) said that overwhelmed Border Patrol agents had released 19,000 asylum-seeking family members into the United States without “notices to appear” in immigration court.
Disgruntled with the Biden administration’s modest walk-back of the Trump administration’s hardline migration policies, some Border Patrol agents “are considering early retirement” or “are buying unofficial coins that say ‘U.S. Welcome Patrol,’” Reuters reports.
A U.S. delegation led by National Security Council Western Hemisphere Director Juan González paid an in-person visit to Mexico on May 13. According to the Mexican Foreign Relations Secretariat’s release, topics covered included arms and narcotics trafficking, organized crime violence and financial flows, and “addiction as a public health problem.” The words “migration” or “border” do not appear.
Reuters reports on how as many as 2,000 migrants, apparently misinformed about the Biden administration’s migration policies, have set up an encampment outside the busy El Chaparral pedestrian port of entry in Tijuana, across from San Ysidro, San Diego County, California. “The camp is growing increasingly dangerous, migrants and activists told Reuters, with unsanitary conditions, drug use, and gangs entering the area.”
At Rest of World, Jeff Ernst reports on how migrant caravans—which haven’t successfully reached the United States since late 2018—are increasingly being organized by scammers trying to shake down desperate people over social media, especially in Honduras.
El Paso Matters reports on the unique challenges faced by Indigenous migrants from Central America, many of whom speak little Spanish. “On a phone call with El Paso Matters, West Texas CBP spokesperson Landon Hutchens said that after hundreds of years since the Spanish colonization of the Americas, ‘you’d think (Indigenous immigrants) would have learned Spanish by now.’”
A memo from Mijente and Just Futures Law warns of the civil liberties and migrant safety dangers of deploying surveillance and other technologies along the border—a measure that many border wall opponents in the Biden administration and Congress propose instead of a barrier. The memo lists some of the “Tech-Border-Industrial-Complex” corporations that would stand to gain from a big investment in drone and other surveillance technology.
Tijuana municipal police found a cross-border “narco-tunnel” leading under the border wall into San Diego County’s Otay Mesa area. The tunnel began in a building located across the street from a Mexican National Guard barracks.
USA Today published a long profile of Rep. Henry Cuéllar (D-Texas), whose district includes a large portion of the Texas border including Laredo. One of the most conservative Democrats in the House, Cuéllar has been a critic of the Biden administration.
A Pew Research Center study of news coverage during the Biden administration’s first 60 days found that immigration was the subject of 11 percent of stories: 8 percent of stories in outlets with a “left-leaning audience,” and 20 percent of stories in outlets with a “right-leaning audience.”
I recorded a very good conversation with my colleague Gimena Sánchez, who I don’t think has slept since Colombia’s protests—and the government’s crackdown—began on April 28. She does a masterful job explaining what’s going on. Here’s the text of the podcast landing page at wola.org.
Protests that began April 28 in Colombia are maintaining momentum and a broad base of support, despite a heavy-handed government response. Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, WOLA’s Director for the Andes, sees a movement coalescing—and a need for a more decisive U.S. approach.
This conversation, recorded on May 13, explains the different factors contributing to the crisis at the country enters its third week of protests and the number of dead or missing—almost entirely protestors—continues to increase. It also touches on the larger context of protests that were already taking place in Colombia’s more rural/indigenous area, paramilitary responses to the protestors, and contextualizes indigenous frustration in Colombia. The discussion ends with the prospect for change in Colombia, and how the Biden administration has responded so far.
We’re recording a podcast on Colombia this morning, which I’d like to post a transcription and a translation of, so it will take most of the morning. Then there’s a meeting of a coalition of border groups, a conversation with a House committee staffer, and another with a few colleagues in Colombia. And I want to write up a new weekly border update, which will require me to finish processing the April numbers CBP released late Tuesday.
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