Adam Isacson

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. 

July migration appears to be exceeding June

Only twice in this century has migration at the U.S.-Mexico border been greater in the summer than in the spring. On both of those occasions, migration was recovering from a sharp drop earlier in the year: after the January 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump, and after the March 2020 imposition of COVID-19 travel restrictions.

2021 appears to be the first time this century that summer migration may exceed spring without an early-year reduction, despite the harsh heat along most of the border during the season’s height. This was foreseeable, as COVID-19 has devastated economies, border closures had stifled migration, and travel restrictions worldwide are gradually lifting. Still, in the past 22 years for which we have monthly data, we have not seen this pattern before.

Border Patrol’s encounters with migrants in July are “projected to be even higher” than June, according to preliminary data shared with the Washington Post. This past week, reporting about the summer increase has focused on Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Rio Grande Valley sector, the easternmost segment of the border, in south Texas. (CBP divides the U.S.-Mexico border into nine sectors.) There, Border Patrol Sector Chief Brian Hastings tweeted on July 25 that agents had apprehended more than 20,000 “illegally present migrants” during the previous week alone.

As of July 26, Border Patrol was holding about 14,000 migrants in its stations and processing facilities border-wide, the Rio Grande Valley Monitor reported. On the 25th, in the Rio Grande Valley, the agency was holding 7,000 migrants, up from 5,000 on July 19 and 3,500 on July 14. Border Patrol facilities’ capacity in the sector is about 3,000.

As of July 28, 2,246 of those in Border Patrol custody were unaccompanied children, up from 724 on July 12. This number of children in the agency’s rustic, jail-like facilities rarely exceeded 1,000 in June. That month, as the law requires, Border Patrol agents were able to move kids within 72 hours into shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As of June 30, children were spending an average of 28 hours in CBP custody; the stay is almost certainly longer now.

This is due to a steady increase in arrivals of unaccompanied children, to levels not seen since late March. Border Patrol encountered an average of 501 children per day between July 25 and 28, and 547 per day the previous week. We had not seen an average over 500 since March 23-25, the first few days for which CBP and HHS started providing daily numbers of unaccompanied children.

Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol agents are apprehending large groups of kids, adults, and families all at once. On July 27, agents encountered a single group of 509 people, mostly families and unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Venezuela. It was the largest group encountered all year. Along the Rio Grande, where periodic flooding and currents make it impossible to build fencing on the water’s edge, migrants who want U.S. authorities to apprehend them gather on the riverbank south of the border fence. Once on U.S. soil, they have the right to ask for asylum or other protection in the United States. 

Migrant detention and processing duties have strained Border Patrol personnel to the extent that the agency was contemplating shutting down some interior highway checkpoints—a move that requires approval from CBP headquarters in Washington, which has not been forthcoming, the Monitor reported.

The large numbers have also strained capacities at the Rio Grande Valley’s largest humanitarian respite center, the Catholic Charities facility in McAllen, Texas. The respite center gives asylum-seeking migrant families a place to be—instead of out on McAllen’s streets—between their release from CBP custody and their travel to destinations elsewhere in the United States, where immigration courts will adjudicate their cases.

Late on July 26, the respite center had to close its doors to new migrants, as it had hit its 1,200-person capacity. Sister Norma Pimentel, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, said she had to ask Border Patrol “to hold drop-offs to give us a chance to have space.” Still, agents kept dropping new busloads of migrants off on the street outside, and other area churches took in several hundred people. By July 28, Pimentel told the Monitor, the shelter was no longer at capacity.

Richard Cortez, who serves as county judge in Hidalgo—one of the Rio Grande Valley’s three counties, which includes McAllen—called on the federal government to “stop releasing these migrants into our communities” and on the governor of Texas to allow him to reinstate a mask mandate and other COVID-19 measures. “It was manageable last week, we did not have problems at all that I was aware of,” Cortez said on July 27. “Now, my understanding is that the Catholic Charities—who was taking over the responsibility of testing the immigrants, isolated them if they tested positive, they put them in the hospital if they were very sick…reached their capacity. So now there’s no buffer between the federal agencies and us.”

In June, the Rio Grande Valley accounted for one-third of Border Patrol migrant encounters along the border, and 56 percent of all encounters with child and family migrants. We don’t know yet whether Border Patrol’s other eight sectors are seeing a similar July increase in migration, though Tucson, Arizona, the fourth-busiest sector in June, has also begun to register large groups.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose district stretches along the border from Laredo nearly to McAllen, told Axios that, between July 19 and July 26, Border Patrol had released 7,300 migrants in the Rio Grande Valley sector without specific dates to appear in immigration court. In order to cut processing time, agents are issuing a document that instructs migrants to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office within 60 days, at which point their asylum or protection processes will begin. Officials told the New York Times that about 50,000 of these “notice to report” documents have been issued to migrants since March 19. Axios noted that just 6,700 have reported to ICE offices so far, while 16,000 have not shown up within the 60-day reporting window. About 27,000 more haven’t hit the deadline yet. In many cases, no-shows may owe to migrants’ confusion about the process.

Republican senators raised this “notice to report” issue to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who testified at a July 27 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. The Secretary’s testimony coincided with the White House’s release of a fact sheet laying out a “Blueprint for a Fair, Orderly and Humane Immigration System.” That document, which contained little new information, declares, t “We will always be a nation of borders, and we will enforce our immigration laws in a way that is fair and just. We will continue to work to fortify an orderly immigration system.”

With an increase in migration, and the “Title 42” pandemic border policy (discussed below) making it harder to seek asylum, more migrants are traveling through dangerous sections of the border zone where, by Border Patrol’s conservative estimates, 8,258 people have been found dead of dehydration, exposure, and other causes since 1998. (See our July 16 update for a fuller discussion of migrant deaths.) In the Big Bend sector wilderness of west Texas, Border Patrol has found 32 remains of migrants so far in fiscal 2021, way up from 15 in all of 2020 and far more than the sector’s prior high of 10 (2018).

More migrants appear to be on their way, as COVID-19 travel restrictions begin to relax worldwide. Right now, at least 9,000 northbound migrants from Haiti and several other countries are stranded in the town of Necoclí, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. They aren’t being blocked: it’s just that their numbers have overwhelmed the ferry service that takes them to the opposite shore of the Gulf of Urabá, where they cross into Panama. Colombia lifted its pandemic border closures in May, and migration numbers jumped soon afterward.

Title 42 is not being lifted for families

Our July 6 update, which reflected media reporting at the time, noted that the “Title 42” pandemic measure “may be in its last days,” at least for migrant families. While no official had confirmed it, reporting indicated that Title 42 would stop applying to families by the end of July. That is not going to happen: the administration, citing concern over new COVID-19 variants and rising overall numbers, will continue to expel protection-seeking families.

Title 42 is the name given to an old law that the Trump administration’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) invoked, in March 2020, to rapidly expel nearly all migrants encountered at the border back to Mexico or their home countries, usually without a chance to ask for asylum. Most citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras get expelled into Mexico, as do migrants from other countries who have tourist visas or other migratory status in Mexico.

The Biden administration kept Title 42 in place, though it has not applied it to unaccompanied children and rarely applies it to those who can’t easily be expelled to Mexico. Fewer family members have been expelled in recent months—16 percent of all who were encountered in June—in part because Mexico’s border state of Tamaulipas is refusing expulsions of families with small children, and in part because since May, nearly half of families have come from countries other than Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras.

While the COVID-19 virus’s Delta variant is a key factor leading the CDC to prolong Title 42, two U.S. officials told NBC News that the Biden administration is also “concerned about funding, facilities and staffing issues associated with lifting the restrictions.” Six months in, the administration still lacks capacity to process large numbers of asylum seekers, enroll them in alternatives-to-detention programs, and adjudicate their protection claims.

“If CDC is going to continue with Title 42, they need to be prepared for a lawsuit and to answer very specific questions in a deposition about whether they genuinely believed there was no way to process asylum seekers safely,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has led an ongoing lawsuit against Title 42’s application to families, told the Washington Post.

A July 28 report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) disputes CDC claims that there is any public-health justification for expelling migrants. “Every aspect of the expulsion process, such as holding people in crowded conditions for days without testing and then transporting them in crowded vehicles, increases the risk of spreading and being exposed to COVID-19,” it reads. PHR researchers’ interviews with 28 expelled asylum seekers told of suffering “gratuitously cruel” treatment and family separations at the hands of Border Patrol agents, and assault, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual violence, along with shakedowns from Mexican authorities, after being expelled into Mexico.

On the night of July 26, DHS announced that it would resume applying “expedited removal” to migrant families who are not expelled under Title 42. As many family members as possible who don’t express fear of returning will be flown back to their home countries very quickly. Those who do express fear, in many cases, may be held in CBP custody until they can get fast-tracked “credible fear” interviews with asylum officers. (According to the 1997 Flores Settlement agreement, as revised, families with children cannot be held in custody for more than three weeks.)

Those who pass these interviews will likely be released with dates to appear in immigration court. Those who do not will be deported. A current and a former official told the Washington Post that deported families will be flown “back to Central America using the Electronic Nationality Verification program, which relies on biometric data to identify migrants who lack identification or travel documents.”

The expedited removal decision caused an outcry among rights advocates. “Jamming desperate families through an expedited asylum process would deny them the most basic due process protections and can hardly be called humane,” the ACLU’s Gelernt told the New York Times.

In an agreement with ACLU and plaintiffs in the ongoing suit against Title 42’s application to families, DHS had been permitting about 250-300 expelled family members considered “most vulnerable” to re-enter the United States from Mexican border towns to pursue their asylum petitions. However, CBP officials in San Diego started cancelling these appointments late during the week of July 18, citing capacity issues at the port of entry. Attorneys at Al Otro Lado, an organization that assists migrants in Tijuana and San Diego, said that several of their clients ended up homeless in Tijuana after CBP abruptly canceled their appointments.

Texas governor’s crackdown threatens to snare humanitarian workers

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who has already declared an “emergency” in some counties, hosted Donald Trump at the border, and sought to build segments of state border wall, continues to push back hard against migration.

As of July 29, his state was jailing 55 migrants, arrested on trespassing charges, in the Briscoe prison in the town of Dilley, between Laredo and San Antonio. That’s up from three on July 20. The Briscoe facility can hold more than 950 people; all of those jailed so far have been single adult men.

On July 27 Abbott expanded powers of Texas National Guard personnel whom he has deployed to the border, giving them the ability to arrest civilians. It is very unusual in the United States for military personnel to be empowered to carry out arrests on U.S. soil, a circumstance usually limited only to riots and insurrections, and then only for a brief time.

(Other states with Republican governors have sent small contingents of guardsmen or police to the border in response to a call from Abbott. On July 26 South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), who controversially is paying for her state’s Guard deployment with a private donor’s money, gave remarks in front of a section of border wall behind a Whataburger fast-food restaurant near the Hidalgo-Reynosa border bridge. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) defended a two-week deployment of state police as “the right thing to do” and said she wanted to renew it. Elsewhere, Nebraska state troopers returned from a 24-day tour affected by the desperate conditions of the children and families they encountered.)

On July 28 Gov. Abbott upped the ante, issuing an order prohibiting anyone except law enforcement personnel from transporting migrants who “pose a risk of carrying COVID-19 into Texas communities.” As a result of this order, if personnel from Texas’s Department of Public Safety (presumably through profiling) suspect that a civilian vehicle is transporting migrants released from CBP custody, they may reroute the vehicle to its place of origin and impound it. 

This order falls heaviest on humanitarian workers: those, like volunteers at Sister Norma Pimentel’s Catholic Charities respite center, who need to transport asylum seekers to airports, overflow facilities, or quarantine hotels. It is unclear whether Abbott’s order would apply to Greyhound and other bus companies that transport migrants from border towns to their destinations elsewhere in the United States. “I assume, if you’re Greyhound or somebody that’s transporting people from the respite center on behalf of Sister Norma, (they’re) going to be prohibited from doing that,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told the Rio Grande Valley Monitor.

Abbot issued his order as Rio Grande Valley counties are recording some of their worst infection numbers in months, as the Delta variant spreads. Still, as of mid-July the COVID-19 test positivity rate for migrants was below that of Texans as a whole, and more than 85 percent of migrants are reportedly getting vaccinated upon release. In one example of how humanitarian organizations are screening migrants for COVID-19, the Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen  performs COVID-19 tests on all migrants whom CBP drops off at its doors, at the expense of the McAllen city government. Additionally, Catholic Charities is paying more than 10 area hotels to house migrants who must be quarantined if they test positive. The respite center’s executive director has said that about 1,000 people are currently being housed in hotels—not all are COVID-positive, but some members of their family groups are—where they are required to stay, with volunteers delivering food and other needs, until they test negative.

On July 29 Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a letter to Gov. Abbott demanding that he reverse his transportation order, calling it “both dangerous and unlawful.” It notes, “The Order violates federal law in numerous respects, and Texas cannot lawfully enforce the Executive Order against any federal official or private parties working with the United States.” Garland promises that the Justice Department will “pursue all appropriate legal remedies to ensure that Texas does not interfere with the functions of the federal government.”

Links

• A Mexican federal court has temporarily stayed municipal authorities’ order to evict the 14-year-old Senda de Vida shelter, the largest in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Citing Rio Grande waterway requirements, the mayor’s office had given the shelter and its 600 occupants days to vacate the site, in one of Mexico’s most dangerous border cities.
• A Mexican man died of head injuries after falling from a new 30-foot segment of border wall in Otay Mesa, just east of San Diego, on July 25.
• A second Government Accountability Project whistleblower complaint includes new revelations of deplorable conditions at the private contractor-managed HHS emergency child migrant shelter at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, Texas. Conditions included “riots” in boys’ tents, children cutting themselves, hundreds of COVID cases, and severe shortages of basic goods like face masks and underwear. One mental health clinician reportedly told a boy “he had nothing to complain about and that, in fact, he should feel grateful for all he was being given.”
• Another report from the DHS Inspector General finds serious deficiencies in border and migration agencies’ attention to detainees’ medical needs. “Once an individual is in custody,” it finds, “CBP agents and officers are required to conduct health interviews and ‘regular and frequent’ welfare checks to identify individuals who may be experiencing serious medical conditions. However, CBP could not always demonstrate staff conducted required medical screenings or consistent welfare checks for all 98 individuals whose medical cases we reviewed.“
• DHS announced it is canceling contracts to use 2020 Homeland Security appropriations money to build about 31 miles of border wall in and near downtown Laredo, Texas. The Trump administration’s wall-building project had been bitterly opposed by local leaders. A year ago, the city council had unanimously approved the painting of a giant “Defund the Wall” mural on a main street.
• The White House issued a document outlining its strategy for addressing the root causes of migration in Central America, as foreseen in a February 2 presidential executive order. It covers cooperation on economic issues, corruption and governance, human rights, preventing criminal violence, and preventing domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence.
• The Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff profiles Eriberto Pop, a Guatemalan lawyer working to track down parents whom the Trump administration separated from about children. About 275 parents remain to be located. This involves a lot of riding a motorcycle around remote areas of Guatemala’s rural highlands.
• El Diario de Juárez documents the experience of migrants from Ecuador, about half of whom have been encountered across from Ciudad Juárez in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector. “According to the Ecuadorian migrants themselves, the ‘coyoteros,’ as they call human smugglers in that country, fly them as tourists to Mexico City or Cancun, from where they are taken to Ciudad Juarez.”
• ProPublica’s Dara Lind finds that ICEprosecutors are still seeking maximum deportations in immigration court, ignoring Biden administration guidance “to postpone or drop cases against immigrants judged to pose little threat to public safety.”
• House of Representatives Republican leadership introduced legislation that would restore much of the Trump administration’s border and migration policies, including a restart of border wall construction.

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. 

Key trends from June migration data

On July 16, just after we posted last week’s update, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published statistics detailing its encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during the month of June 2021. The agency reported a 4.5 percent increase in migrant “encounters” from May to June. As we noted last week, this is only the third time this century that migration in the scorching-hot month of June has increased over May.

In all, 188,829 migrants were “encountered” in June: 10,413 at the official land ports of entry, and 178,416 between the ports of entry where Border Patrol operates. This would appear to be the fifth-largest monthly total this century, and the most since 2000.

However, pandemic border measures in effect since the Trump administration have complicated comparisons. The “Title 42” policy, under which most undocumented migrants are swiftly expelled, usually into Mexico (104,907 times in June), has greatly eased repeat attempts to cross the border, so there is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple-counting. “Being expelled carries no legal consequences, so many people try to cross multiple times,” the Associated Press explains.

A large number of “encountered” migrants—34 percent of them in June—are so-called “recidivists”: individuals whom CBP has already encountered in fiscal 2021. (This is a very high recidivism rate: according to CBP’s 2022 budget request, this rate was 12 percent in 2016, 11 percent in 2017 and 2018, 7 percent in 2019, then jumped to 26 percent in 2020.)

With so many repeat crossers, the actual number of people crossing the border is far smaller—in fact, much smaller than we had expected. CBP’s release accompanying the June migration numbers explains, “The number of unique new encounters in June 2021 was 123,838. [That is far less than 188,829.] The number of unique individuals encountered to date during the fiscal year is 454,944 compared to 489,760 during the same time period in 2019.”

If that last sentence is truly accurate, then the number of individual migrants so far this year is less than half the number of encounters (1,119,204), and fewer than it was at this point in 2019. Here is that remarkable data point expressed as a graphic:

When Border Patrol encountered migrants between the ports of entry, it used Title 42 authority to expel them 58 percent of the time, the lowest percentage since the pandemic measures went into place.

When those migrants were single adults, Title 42 expulsions happened 84 percent of the time, down from over 90 percent during the Trump years. As most “recidivist” border crossers are single adults, this population has grown nearly fivefold since Title 42 went into place. June 2021 was, however, the first time since the pandemic began that the monthly number of single adult encounters declined.

After two months of declines in April and May, the number of encounters with families and unaccompanied children increased in June, though not to the high levels experienced in March. The Biden administration is not expelling children who arrive unaccompanied, and has gradually reduced expulsions of the number of family members: 16 percent of encountered family members were expelled in June, down from 40 percent in March.

Some of the reduction in expulsions may have to do with migrants’ unusual nationalities. Recent months have seen notable increases in migrants from neither Mexico nor the Northern Triangle: 26 percent of all Border Patrol encounters in June, and 44 percent of encounters with families, were with citizens of these “other” countries. For the second straight month, Ecuador was the number-four country of origin of migrants encountered at the border, edging out El Salvador. Migration from Nicaragua and Haiti continued to increase rapidly in June, while Mexico declined.

Migrants continued to arrive in greater numbers in unusual, remote sectors of the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, a very rural area that is roughly the geographic center of Texas’s border with Mexico, was the June destination for more than half of Cubans, more than two-thirds of Haitians, about a fifth of Hondurans, and two-thirds of Venezuelans. The Yuma sector, in southwest Arizona, was the June destination of three in five Brazilians and a third of Cubans.

In these remote sectors and elsewhere, Border Patrol continued to report encountering large groups of migrants during the past week. About 300-400 migrants, mostly Haitian citizens, arrived at a gate in the border wall near Del Rio, Texas on July 19. These are not people fleeing Haiti after the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse: sources tell us that most are Haitians who emigrated some time ago to South America, where the pandemic has caused employment opportunities to dry up.

Unaccompanied child arrivals are increasing again

CBP’s June data showed an 8 percent increase in arrivals of unaccompanied migrant children at the border from May to June, from 13,892 to 15,018—which is still significantly less than the 18,723 kids encountered in March. But the upward trend of unaccompanied child encounters is continuing—and perhaps accelerating—into July.

The “Unaccompanied Children Daily Reports” produced each weekday by CBP and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) showed an average of 480 children newly arriving each day during the week of July 11, the highest weekly average since the week of April 18. The first four weekdays of this week (of July 18) have averaged 552 new children per day, which if sustained would be the largest weekly average since late March, when CBP and HHS began furnishing daily records.

Once in CBP custody, the children are processed and handed over as quickly as possible to the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement, which manages a shelter network around the country that is currently augmented with some rustic emergency facilities. As of June 30, CBP reports, children were being handed off to HHS within 28 hours. Once in HHS shelters, children are to be placed with relatives or other sponsors residing in the United States, with whom they will stay while their asylum or protection cases are adjudicated.

HHS has had difficulty in 2021 discharging children fast enough to keep up with arrivals of new children. As of July 21, 14,278 children were in its shelter network, nearly identical to the 14,661 in HHS custody on June 21. The agency has not been able to increase the pace of its discharges since late May.

As a result, comparing weekly averages using available CBP and HHS reports, it appears that, since the week of July 11, the population of children in U.S. government custody has begun to grow again, after 11 weeks of consecutive decreases.

Pandemic border controls remain in place

July 21 was the latest monthly deadline for the Department of Homeland Security to decide whether to extend restrictions on “non-essential” travel at the United States’ land borders with Mexico and Canada. That day, a Federal Register notice informed that U.S. ports of entry will remain closed to most travel and traffic for a 17th straight month, through August 21. U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents will be able to enter the United States from Mexico, but Mexican citizens—including those with tourist visas—remain prohibited (unless they arrive via air).

The decision comes despite frequent negotiations between the U.S. and neighboring governments, and pleas from border-area political leaders. It is based largely on concerns about spread of the COVID-19 delta variant, which has caused a sharp increase in U.S. coronavirus cases, mainly among the unvaccinated population. “Officials on both sides have talked about the importance of bringing vaccination rates into parity,” the El Paso Times reported. According to Border Report, “The U.S. is reportedly demanding at least a 75-percent vaccination rate in Mexican border cities such as Tijuana. There are also reports the U.S. will not allow people from Mexico who have been vaccinated with the Chinese or Russian versions of the vaccine.”

Media reporting, noted in earlier updates, had indicated that the Biden administration might begin lifting some Title 42 restrictions, perhaps ending expulsions of asylum-seeking families, by the end of July. This is not happening: due to concerns about COVID-19 variants, plans to end expulsions are “in flux.” Although the administration faces ACLU-led litigation to halt expulsions of asylum-seeking families, and although the UNHCR has publicly criticized the practice, and despite a July 21 Capitol press event at which Democratic House members called for its end, Title 42 will remain in place, even for families.

DHS remains uncommunicative about plans for the future of the expulsions policy. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who represents a Texas border district, told the New York Times that “he had called the C.D.C. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] about it, and the agency told him he should call the Department of Homeland Security, which then sent him back to the C.D.C. He said he recently spoke with agents on the border, and they said they still had not heard anything about when the rule will be lifted.”

Some political speculation contends that the Biden administration, despite strong denials insisting that Title 42 is a public health measure, is maintaining the policy in order to avert the political fallout of an even greater increase in migration. An unnamed “former U.S. official who worked on Biden’s transition team” told the Washington Post that President Joe Biden himself is “‘super concerned’ about the political ramifications of the tumult at the border. ‘He knows the damage this can do and what a gift this is to Republicans.’”

Texas is now arresting migrants on its own

In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has declared a state of emergency citing increased migrant arrivals, state law enforcement agencies have begun arresting migrants. While state police cannot enforce federal immigration law, Texas’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) and some county sheriff’s offices have started to arrest and jail migrants on charges of “trespassing” or “criminal mischief,” misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in prison in Texas.

In Val Verde County, the border county that includes Del Rio, police arrested three migrants for trespassing on July 20. They were sent to the Briscoe Unit state jail in Dilley, a town between San Antonio and Laredo where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) established a family detention facility during the Obama administration. “The number of detainees is expected to grow rapidly,” the Texas Tribune reports. “The Val Verde county attorney predicted about 50 arrests of immigrants a day, ramping up to as many as 200 daily by August.”

The use of trespassing charges is complicated, the Wall Street Journal explains: “District attorneys and county lawyers in border counties said trespass arrests must be based on complaints from landowners and must be arraigned by local judges and justices of the peace, who typically release the arrestee on a personal-recognizance bond.” Nonetheless, Texas has set up a tent facility at the Val Verde county fairgrounds, where officials plan to process the migrants whom they arrest. Val Verde County Attorney David Martínez told the Texas Tribune that he would seek a “time served” sentence for most of those arrested, probably after each spends about 10 days in the Dilley jail awaiting trial.

Migrants would then be handed off to ICE, which would deport or expel them. It is not clear whether this process would afford arrested migrants any opportunity to ask for asylum or protection in the United States.

Texas counties that see large amounts of migration, like El Paso and those in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region, are not participating in Gov. Abbott’s emergency plan. Local leaders say that they have seen similar recent increases in migration, for instance in 2014, 2018, and 2019, and that they do not regard the current increase to be an emergency.

Nonetheless, Gov. Abbott has sent about 1,000 Texas DPS personnel—about a quarter of all state police—to the border. He has also ordered construction of a state “border wall.” Fox News reported on the first 1.5 mile stretch of “wall,” built near the Rio Grande in Del Rio; it is an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

“Unless this chain link fence is built exactly along the US-Mexico boundary, it is highly likely that it stands feet, yards or even miles away from the border,” tweeted Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso. “If that’s the case then migrants arriving at the fence are already on American soil and have the right to request asylum.”

Links

• Federal district court judge Andrew Hanen ruled that then-president Barack Obama exceeded his authority with a 2012 executive action that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA halts deportation and provides work authorization for undocumented young people who were brought to the United States as children. The decision by Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, does not change the status of 800,000 current DACA beneficiaries, pending the Biden administration’s appeals to higher courts—for now at least—but it halts all new DACA applications. It is the outcome of a lawsuit brought by Texas’s Republican Attorney-General. “Unless Congress steps in with a legislative remedy, the ultimate legality of DACA is almost certain to be decided by the Supreme Court,” according to the New York Times.
• The mayor of border town Reynosa, in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, has given the town’s largest migrant shelter, the evangelical-run Senda de Vida, until the weekend of July 24 to shut down. The municipal government says it is complying with an order from the binational International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which has found that the shelter, after 14 years of existence, is built too close to the Rio Grande. The immediate deadline for the shelter’s demolition comes from the mayor’s office. If it is met, the fate of 600 migrants—most of them expelled by Title 42—is far from clear.
• “We identified one case in which the medical unit examined a sick detainee but did not send the detainee to the hospital for urgent medical treatment, and the detainee died,” reads an alarming DHS Inspector-General report about an unannounced inspection visit to ICE’s Adams detention facility in Natchez, Mississippi.
• Maritime migration from Cuba mysteriously stopped after the historic protests that began on the island on July 11, Coast Guard and other federal sources tell the Miami Herald.
• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is holding up the confirmation hearing for Chris Magnus, the Biden administration’s nominee to be CBP commissioner. Wyden is demanding that DHS first provide detailed information about the Trump administration’s controversial deployment of border and other federal personnel to Portland, Oregon to put down protests in mid-2020.
• The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its contractors began “remediation” or cleanup work at Trump-era border wall construction sites in Arizona. This work did not involve the addition of any new fencing. Workers “would instead focus on activities such as filling open trenches, cleaning up debris, grading unfinished maintenance roads and cutting and capping conduit,” the Arizona Republic reported.
• A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that ICE “arrested 674, detained 121, and removed 70 potential U.S. citizens from fiscal year 2015 through the second quarter of fiscal year 2020.”
• Long read: Bloomberg’s Simon Van Zuylen-Wood meets Tommy Fisher, the North Dakota-based builder whose company received several of the Trump administration’s border wall construction contracts. Fisher spent $30 million building a private 3-mile stretch of fencing on the bank of the Rio Grande in south Texas, hoping to sell it to a federal government that, since Joe Biden’s inauguration, is not interested in buying it.
• Long read: “Migration—including the record number of unaccompanied children—is on the rise in rural areas, as an increasing portion of the country’s land and population faces the fallout from climate change,” reports Sabrina Rodríguez from Guatemala in Politico.
• President Biden at a July 21 CNN “Town Hall” meeting, apparently conflating asylum with refugee admissions: “What we’re trying to set up is, in the countries like in—and particularly in the Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, et cetera—we are setting up in those countries: If you seek asylum in the United States, you can seek it from the country, from your—in place. You can seek it from an American embassy. You can go in and seek and see whether or not you qualify. We’ve significantly increased the number of officers who can hear cases as to whether or not you qualify under the law for being here as a refugee.”

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. 

In U.S. borderlands, 2021 may be the most lethal year for migrants in nearly a decade

A San Antonio television station obtained from Border Patrol the agency’s most recent count of migrant remains encountered on U.S. soil. Since 1998, Border Patrol has found the bodies of 8,258 individuals who perished of dehydration, exposure, drownings, animal attacks, and other causes while traveling through wilderness areas in an effort to avoid being apprehended. It is an enormous death toll for a phenomenon that receives such scarce attention.

So far in fiscal year 2021 (October 2020 through May 2021), Border Patrol reported finding 203 bodies. This is quite high given that the hottest and deadliest months of the year—June through September—remain to be counted, and that the U.S. southwest has been recording higher-than-normal temperatures. By the time fiscal 2021 ends, on September 30, this could end up being the deadliest year in Border Patrol’s data since at least 2013.

Since 1998, the sectors where Border Patrol has found the most remains have shifted geographically, from California to Arizona to southeast Texas, and now, increasingly, to south-central Texas. So far this year, Border Patrol has found the most bodies in its Del Rio sector, a vast unpopulated region between Big Bend National Park and Laredo. Border Patrol’s record for migrant apprehensions in Del Rio is 157,178, set in 2000. With four months left to report for fiscal 2021, the agency has already apprehended 118,314, including more than 20,000 each in March, April, and May. Many are from “unusual” countries like Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador, and Cuba.

Border Patrol is the only entity keeping a national count of migrant deaths, but it “only counts those it handles in the course of its work,” the Guardian explains. Local organizations tend to find much larger numbers of dead in their home regions.

The Arizona-based group Humane Borders, mapping data from the Pima County medical examiner’s office, reported 43 bodies found in the state’s deserts in June. Not all necessarily died in June, “but at least 16 had been dead for just a day and another 13 for less than a week when they were found,” Humane Borders’ mapping coordinator, Mike Kreyche, told the Associated Press. During the first half of the 2021 calendar year, Humane Borders reports 127 sets of remains, way up from 96 during the first half of 2020. By contrast, Border Patrol reports finding only 22 remains in its Arizona sectors (Tucson and Yuma) since October 2020.

In Brooks County, Texas, about 80 miles north of where Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region borders Mexico, large numbers of migrants die while trying to circumvent a longstanding Border Patrol highway checkpoint. There, the county sheriff reports finding 50 bodies in calendar year 2021, more than in any full year since 2017. (Border Patrol reports finding 37 in the entire Rio Grande Valley sector since October 2020.) The Sheriff’s Office found 16 just in June, making this the worst June in Brooks County since 2012.

“We’re constantly having people dying,” Sheriff Benny Martinez told San Antonio’s KENS 5 TV station. “Do I sound a bit frustrated? Absolutely. Because I go through this all the time, every day, and people don’t seem to understand what’s occurring and it’s happening.”

A State Department spokesperson told CNN that the U.S. government is now running more than 30,000 radio advertisements per month in Central America, in Spanish and five Indigenous languages, in an effort to dissuade people from making the journey to the United States. This is up from 28,000 ads per month in the spring. The campaign is costing about $600,000 per month.

June border numbers increase over May

As of the morning of July 16, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not yet reported its encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during the month of June. This is many days later than usual. However, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official shared some numbers with CNN’s Geneva Sands.

They show a modest overall increase over May in the agency’s encounters with undocumented migrants at the border. That is unusual: migration usually drops off a bit in June, the first of the peak hot summer months. In fact, migrant encounters have only increased from May to June twice before in this century: in 2017, as numbers recovered from a sharp drop after Donald Trump’s inauguration; and in 2020 after the initial shock of March 2020 COVID border closures.

According to CNN:

• CBP’s encounters with migrants at the border—combining those apprehended by Border Patrol and the much smaller number who showed up at ports of entry—increased overall from 180,034 in May to 188,800 in June.
• Family members increased from 44,639 in May to 55,805 in June.
• Unaccompanied children increased from 14,158 in May to 15,253 in June.
• Single adults decreased, from 121,237 in May to 117,742 in June.

These numbers represent encounters—the number of times U.S. border authorities came across an undocumented migrant—and not people. 34 percent of those apprehended in June had already been encountered once before during fiscal 2021, CNN reports. So the actual number of people apprehended in June was roughly one third lower than the “encounters” number would indicate.

This 34 percent “recidivism rate” shot upward during the pandemic, as the Trump and Biden administrations began using an old public health law to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants very quickly, with minimal processing (including asylum processing). While this “Title 42” policy has been a great hardship for asylum seekers, it has eased the process for those who seek to avoid being apprehended, as they can try to cross again quickly after being expelled.

Numbers of children and family members had been dropping in April and May, but now are up slightly. On July 13, Border Patrol reported apprehending 672 unaccompanied children—far higher than the previous 30 days’ average (436). As the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has failed to increase the pace of its placements of children with relatives or sponsors in the United States, the population in the agency’s shelters has begun to grow again, exceeding 15,000 this week for the first time since mid-June.

In south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley (RGV) region, which is first in migrant “encounters” among Border Patrol’s nine sectors, numbers are increasing, the RGV Monitor reports:

The number of migrant families dropped off at the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley Humanitarian Respite Center, located in McAllen, is reaching record highs.

“The numbers have been up, they’ve been a little higher,” said McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos.

City records indicate the number of migrants released at the shelter is exceeding the capacity of 600 more consistently since the end of May.

During the week of June 24 through June 30, U.S. Border Patrol dropped off a record number of 6,238 individuals seeking asylum at the respite center.

On June 25, alone, Border Patrol dropped off 1,202 people at the center.

McAllen, Texas officials cited in the article voiced concern about whether U.S. authorities and the region’s shelters are prepared for an increase in asylum-seeking migrants that may result from an imminent lifting of the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy. As reported in last week’s update, the Biden administration may soon stop expelling asylum-seeking families. “If they just come drop off individuals there and the respite center can’t take care of them, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Mayor Villalobos told the Monitor. “I think it’s going to be chaotic and I think we’re going to start having issues with people in the downtown area.”

The Catholic Charities shelter continues to test all migrants for COVID, which CBP does not do before dropping them off. Those who test positive are placed in 10-day quarantine in area hotels. “Over 900 migrants were placed in quarantine at area hotels on July 5,” the Monitor reported. Sr. Norma Pimentel, who manages the Catholic Charities shelter, said that the positive test rate among migrants has crept up from 4 percent to “maybe 6 percent or 7 percent.”

Despite the low positivity rate and the quarantines policy, in very controversial July 14 comments Sen. Ted Cruz (R) blamed migrants for rising positivity rates in south Texas. (The state abandoned mask mandates and other distancing measures a long time ago, and more than half of its population remains unvaccinated.)

Sen. Cruz was one of 28 Republican senators who sent President Joe Biden a July 14 letter asking him to keep the Title 42 policy in place until “the threat of COVID-19 variants is significantly reduced,” the administration has consulted with local authorities, and “policies have been implemented to bring the situation along the southwest land border under control.” The letter was led by Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso (R).

All Cubans and Haitians at sea will be turned back

“Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a July 13 warning to Cuban and Haitian people considering fleeing both countries’ political turmoil. The Secretary, who was born in Cuba and brought to the United States as an infant when his family fled the island in 1960, gave comments at U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.

Migrants normally must be on U.S. soil to request asylum, and the Biden administration, like its predecessors during past so-called “rafter” events, is determined to deny those interdicted at sea the chance to do so. Even those who do get an initial asylum screening—which in the past has occurred after being brought to an offshore location like the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba—will be “referred to third countries for resettlement.” Historically, CBS News reported, asylum seekers who have passed this credible fear screening “have been referred for resettlement in third countries like Australia.”

“It is disappointing to hear this from @SecMayorkas,” tweeted Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Asylum is asylum is asylum. Anyone who faces persecution should be allowed to apply for asylum in the United States.”

Since October, the U.S. Coast Guard has encountered 470 Cuban and 313 Haitian migrants at sea, Mayorkas said. In all of 2020, the Coast Guard encountered 49 Cubans and 430 Haitians.

Republican governors’ border deployments continue

In a series of small deployments discussed in last week’s update, at least seven Republican governors are sending National Guard or law enforcement personnel to Texas and Arizona border zones, at those Republican governors’ request.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said on July 12 that 29 state troopers had arrived in Del Rio, Texas “a couple of days ago” and would remain for 16 days. “State officials have shared few details about the deployment, citing safety concerns,” the Des Moines Register reported. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R) told reporters that Gov. Reynolds should provide information about what the troopers are doing. “I do support the governor’s efforts there, but since our taxpayer dollars are being spent on that, yes, we should have some accountability.”

Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) held a roundtable with state law enforcement leaders “to discuss Idaho’s growing drug threat and the connection to the United States-Mexico border.” Little had sent five Idaho State Police investigators to Arizona in early July. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) visited Texas to meet National Guard troops from his state stationed there, mainly for a federal deployment that began in 2018.

At The Atlantic, Eric Schnurer worries that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s use of a private donor’s money to pay for her state’s National Guard border deployment is a glimpse into “America’s future” of increasingly privatized security.

Twelve Texas county sheriffs met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott on July 10. Sheriff Ray Del Bosque of Zapata County, which borders Mexico just west of the Rio Grande Valley region, said his department needs state resources as migrant numbers increase. Meanwhile, Gov. Abbott has transferred 1,000 inmates out of a South Texas prison so he can convert it “into a state-run jail for immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally,” the Texas Tribune reports.

While the National Guard has been sent to the border before, “their troops have essentially done busy work,” writes Jack Herrera at Politico. “In 2018, Arizona National Guard members deployed on the border were literally tasked with mucking out manure from the stables that held Border Patrol’s horses.” Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrete, Jr. observes, “In 30 years of writing about immigration, I’ve interviewed many of these [Border Patrol] agents firsthand. Not once have I heard any of them ask for backup from state troopers or the National Guard.”

Links

• The full House Appropriations Committee approved its 2022 Homeland Security budget appropriation by a party-line 33-24 vote. Last week’s update summarized what is in the bill, which reflects Democratic Party priorities.
• More than 10,000 people requested asylum in Mexico in June. Six months into calendar year 2021, this is already Mexico’s second-largest year ever for asylum applications. In its largest year, 2019, Mexico had 31,481 asylum requests through June. This year it is already up to 51,654. At Telemundo, Albinson Linares talks to the director of Mexico’s refugee agency COMAR, who notes that current law forces most asylum applicants to await the backlogged system’s decisions in the southern state of Chiapas, one of Mexico’s poorest.
• Texas-based Border Patrol agent Rodney Tolson Jr. signed a plea deal admitting that he took $400-per-person bribes to allow smugglers to bring undocumented migrants into the United States. Tolson would advise those who paid “which lane and time window to use for crossing through the checkpoint” in Laredo.
• “Nearly everyone interviewed by the San Diego Union-Tribune shortly after being expelled to Tijuana said that they had tried crossing the border three or more times in recent weeks in hopes of getting in,” writes reporter Kate Morrissey. “One man, who declined to be identified, said he’d lost count of how many times he tried. He tossed out a guess—30.” (See the discussion above of how the Title 42 policy eases repeat crossings.)  The Pew Research Center meanwhile reported findings that between 2013 and 2018, the late-2000s trend of more Mexican migrants leaving than entering the United States had already begun to reverse: “An estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the U.S. between 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the U.S. for Mexico.”
• The Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff revealed that the Trump administration had actually started separating migrant families during its first months in office, many months before previously known. A secret CBP program began prosecuting asylum-seeking parents and taking their children from them in Arizona’s Yuma sector, starting in July 2017. “Some of the parents separated under the Yuma program still remain apart from their children four years later.”
• The Biden administration is allowing a handful of the 945 asylum-seekers who got sent to Guatemala to seek asylum there, under the Trump administration’s now-defunct “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala, to apply for protection within the United States.
• A JAMA Network Open (Journal of the American Medical Association-affiliated) analysis finds that “death investigation records identified violations of ICE’s [Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] internal standards for delivery of health care in most of” 55 cases of detainees’ deaths in ICE custody between 2011 and 2018. “Unlike the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which received a federal allocation of vaccines, ICE has relied on states to provide doses to its network of more than 200 detention facilities,” reports Camilo Montoya-Galvez at CBS News. “Since each state sets distinct allocation priorities, the vaccination of ICE detainees has been inconsistent across the country.”
• At Slate, Felipe de la Hoz characterizes the Biden administration’s immigration policy as a “dual approach of liberalizing the asylum system at home while making it more difficult for anyone to actually enter it.” This “reflects the longtime moderate Democratic id on immigration, which views humanitarian migration as a problem that can be solved humanely, but a problem nonetheless.”

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.

Biden administration extends military deployment into 2022

The Department of Defense has approved a request from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to keep military personnel deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2022 fiscal year (October 1, 2021-September 30, 2022). With this decision, the Biden administration continues a military mission that was part of Donald Trump’s approach to the border.

In April 2018, in response to media reports of a “migrant caravan” making its way through Mexico, Donald Trump ordered National Guard troops to the border. It was the fourth time since 2002 that a president had ordered the National Guard to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In October of that year, as a new caravan formed in the run-up to midterm legislative elections, Trump augmented that with a highly unusual deployment of active-duty army and marine personnel, a rarity on U.S. soil. At its height in November 2018, up to 2,579 National Guardsmen and 5,815 active-duty troops were involved.

4,000 troops, a mix of National Guardsmen and active-duty military, were approved to serve at the border during fiscal 2021. Right now, according to Stars and Stripes, 3,800 are there. (A June 24 Defense Department release cites “more than 2,600.”)

Their duties are mostly helping to maintain CBP equipment and watching over segments of the border and alerting Border Patrol if they see illicit crossings. Between April 2018 and May 2020, the Defense Department obligated at least $841 million to pay for this deployment, according to a February U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report covered in a past weekly update.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved the DHS request to extend the military mission on June 23, but reduced the troop strength to 3,000. As before, most personnel will be National Guard members from several states, under federal command.

“Invasion” narrative making a dent in U.S. public opinion

Right now, about 23 states contribute National Guard personnel to the Defense Department’s border mission. Troops usually rotate to the border on two-week tours of duty. States that recently announced new deployments for this federal mission through 2022 include Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

Other states, though, are sending police and some troops for a different mission, called by the Republican governors of Arizona and Texas. Those governors are invoking the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a 1996 agreement in which states may assist each other in emergencies, usually with the requesting state reimbursing the costs.

Greg Abbott (R-Texas) and Doug Ducey (R-Arizona) have asked states to contribute security personnel, with a preference for civilian law enforcement personnel who may be empowered to arrest people for crimes like trespassing (not specifically to enforce federal immigration law). Abbott sent Texas police and military forces to the border in March, calling it “Operation Lone Star.”

The list of states responding to Abbott and Ducey includes the following so far. All have Republican governors.

• Arkansas is sending 40 National Guard troops for about 90 days; they will mostly perform vehicle maintenance and repairs.
• Florida is sending over 50 law enforcement officers for 16-day deployments.
• Iowa has not confirmed a number, but may be sending 25-30 Iowa State Patrol troopers between July 8 and 23.
• Nebraska will send “more than two dozen” State Patrol officers for about 16 days.
• Ohio is sending 14 Ohio State Highway Patrol officers.
• South Dakota is sending up to 50 National Guard troops for one or two months.
• Wyoming is in negotiations about what assets to send. It had offered aerial coverage, but “it was determined that these particular assets may not precisely match the needs of the requested border mission.”

In an unusual move that raises strong civil-military relations concerns, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is using an approximately $1 million donation from a Tennessee billionaire to cover the cost of her state’s National Guard response to Abbott and Ducey’s call. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (R) called this a “bad precedent.” (During the George W. Bush administration, Hutchinson headed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and served as the first DHS assistant secretary for Border and Transportation Security.)

This state deployment has “been criticized as political theater,” Stars and Stripes notes, as Abbott and Ducey seek to portray the Biden administration as leaving them vulnerable to an “invasion” of migrants. “Carnage is being caused by the people coming across the border,” Abbott told a press conference. “Homes are being invaded. Neighborhoods are dangerous, and people are being threatened on a daily basis with guns.” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick added, “This is a fight for our survival.”

Reality doesn’t match this rhetoric. An Austin American-Statesman fact check found that it is exceedingly rare for undocumented migrants to carry out violent crimes as they pass through border counties. Reported offenses tend to be nuisance crimes and petty theft, like cutting farms’ fences and water supply hoses, stealing clothes, food, and other travel needs, or setting fires. In fact, instead of killing, migrants are dying—in alarmingly high numbers this year—of dehydration and exposure as they get lost in border-area wilderness zones.

Still, the “invasion” narrative seems to be impacting U.S. public opinion, as U.S. authorities encounter large numbers of migrants at the border this year. Though it gives President Joe Biden a 50 percent approval rating, a Washington Post-ABC News poll released July 4 finds only 33 percent of U.S. respondents approving of his handling of immigration at the border; 51 percent disapprove. A mid-June Harvard CAPS/Harris poll gives Biden a 59 percent overall approval rating, but only 36 percent say Biden should continue his current border security policies and 64 percent want him to pursue a stricter approach. A Republican-commissioned poll cited in Politico finds that “53 percent of voters say they are less likely to support Democrats for Congress because of the increase in migrants at the border.”

Opinion articles by former Bush White House official Karl Rove and former El Paso Representative and Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, two individuals who share very few views, coincide in noting an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment among Latino residents of Texas border counties. This voting bloc has long gone Democratic but gave Biden a narrower victory margin in 2020. Rove sees these voters shifting Republican “because their border communities are the first to bear the costs of rising illegal immigration.” O’Rourke says his get-out-the-vote organization’s “deep canvassing efforts” in border areas “reveal that fears of immigrants bringing crime over the border rank as a top concern for residents.”

House Subcommittee Passes Homeland Security Appropriations Bill

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security met on June 30 to mark up (amend and approve) its draft of the 2022 DHS appropriations bill. The Subcommittee approved the draft by a voice vote. The bill, which funds the DHS budget for fiscal 2022, now goes on to the full Appropriations Committee, which is to mark up the bill on July 13. It then goes to the full House of Representatives, likely before the August congressional recess.

The bill reflects the priorities of the House’s Democratic majority. Though the Senate has a bare Democratic majority, we can expect that chamber’s Appropriations Committee—which is split between 15 Democrats and 15 Republicans—to come up with a more conservative bill when it meets, probably in September.

The House bill provides DHS with $52.81 billion in funding for fiscal 2022, a $934 million increase over 2021:

• CBP would get $14.11 billion in net discretionary appropriations. This would be a cut: “$927 million below the fiscal year 2021 enacted level and $456 million below the [Biden administration’s] request.”
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would get $7.97 billion in discretionary appropriations, almost identical to 2021 and to the administration’s request. However, ICE would see its detention and deportation budget (Civil Immigration Enforcement Operations) cut by $331.6 million from 2021 levels, to $3.79 billion. ICE’s investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), would increase $124.2 million over 2021, to $2.26 billion.

Some of the most significant adjustments in the House appropriators’ bill include the following.

• Border wall: the bill provides no funding for additional border barriers. It would rescind $2.06 billion from prior years’ appropriations for wall-building. It authorizes up to $100 million of prior years’ money for environmental mitigation activities, authorizing their transfer to the Department of Interior for that purpose.
• CBP’s technology budget would increase by $132 million, with emphases on “non-intrusive imaging technology,” “border technology,” “innovative technology,” “port of entry technology,” body-worn cameras, and video recording tech inside Border Patrol stations.
• Ports of entry: $655 million would go for “construction and modernization of land port of entry facilities.”
• No money would go toward increasing Border Patrol’s authorized staffing level.
• ICE detention: The bill would give ICE enough funding ($2.46 billion) to detain an average of 28,500 single adults per day. ICE’s current population is 27,000. It would require DHS “to provide detained migrants access to legal counsel, including prospective pro bono counsel.”
• Alternatives to detention (ATD) are a big focus of the bill. Subcommittee Chair Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-California) cites “a commitment to the humane treatment of migrants through increased funding for Alternatives to Detention with case management services and reduced lengths of stay in detention for asylum seekers who don’t pose a flight risk and are not a threat to public safety or national security.” ICE’s ATD budget would increase by $34.5 million, to $475 million. The bill would increase, from $5 million to $15 million, an Alternatives to Detention Case Management Pilot Program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
• Processing of newly arrived migrants is also a big priority. “I continue to have serious concerns regarding the physical and mental wellbeing of individuals, particularly children, at border facilities,” reads a quote from Appropriations Committee Chair Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut). “I am proud that this bill respects their dignity by improving conditions in CPB [sic.] short-term holding facilities, investing in alternatives to detention, making processing quicker and more efficient, and reducing backlogs of immigration, refugee, and asylum applications.” The bill would allocate $170 million to build Integrated Migrant Processing Centers at the border, and would give ICE $100 million, to be administered by FEMA, for “a non-custodial, community-based shelter grant program for immigration processing, ATD enrollment, and provision of case management services for migrants.”
• Internal controls of border and migration enforcement agencies would be strengthened by a one-quarter increase over 2021 levels, to $42.2 million, in the budget of DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). The Immigration Detention Ombudsman’s Office would get a $304,000 increase over 2021, to $20.3 million.
• The bill authorizes the use of CBP and ICE funds to support reunification of migrant families separated during the Trump administration. It would prohibit funding to detain or remove an undocumented person, usually a relative, applying to sponsor a child who arrived at the border unaccompanied.

Links

• Human Rights First and the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute collaborated on a report about the Biden administration’s use of the “Title 42” pandemic border closure and rapid migrant expulsion policy, in place since March 2020, in the El Paso area. It finds that expelled asylum seekers have been exposed to danger on the Mexican side of the border, and that recent humanitarian exceptions for some of the most vulnerable asylum seekers do “not comply with U.S. asylum law or treaty obligations.” These exceptions appear to favor migrants who are Spanish-speaking and are neither Black nor Indigenous. “Faith-led organizations, humanitarian groups, legal services organizations, and other volunteers stand ready in the El Paso region to welcome these asylum seekers and help them reach their destinations in the United States,” the report concludes.
• Reuters, CNN, and Politico covered the Title 42 policy’s likely imminent end. The pandemic provision got used to expel undocumented migrants at the border over 900,000 times since March 2020, over 500,000 of those times during Joe Biden’s presidency. The Biden administration may soon stop applying Title 42 to asylum-seeking families. “It doesn’t make sense to keep it in place if it’s not actually deterring migration,” Andrew Selee of the Migration Policy Institute told Reuters. “My hope was that they would buy some time to build a real functioning system at the border. But that didn’t quite happen.” Officials at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told CNN that they “are bracing for the eventual lifting of border restrictions” and “some are concerned about staffing and whether there are enough agents and officers to process an increased number of individuals.” Politico warns that “Republicans plan to highlight any increase in migrants or delays in processing them in campaign ads, mailers and debates in races all over the country as part of a long-planned strategy to use immigration to try to retake Congress in the midterm elections next year.”
• At Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, where the agency and its contractors have given at least one vaccine dose to only 20 percent of detainees, the New York Times reports “major surges in coronavirus infections.”
• As migrants from countries other than Mexico and Central America arrive at the border in greater numbers (as noted in two of our last three updates), a Washington Post visualization shows the different parts of the border where different nationalities are tending to arrive. The concentration of people from different countries in different regions is “a migration pattern that U.S. officials say they have never seen to this degree.”
• The Supreme Court agreed with a Biden administration request to vacate previous district and circuit court decisions in favor of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition, which had sued to challenge the Trump administration’s 2019 border wall “emergency” declaration. The Biden administration asked that the Supreme Court not hear the challenge due to “changed circumstances,” and the case now goes back to district court.
• “My message to the Biden administration is this,” writes former WOLA director Joy Olson, who is just back from a trip to sites along the Texas-Mexico border. “Stop pretending that you control things that you don’t and start opening more legal pathways for migration and protection that you do control.”

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, which may be in its last days, exacts a humanitarian toll

Between March 2020 and May 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) expelled 867,673 migrants whom the agency encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border. Often, this has meant sending them back to Mexico within an hour or two, even if they are not Mexican, with little or no opportunity to ask for asylum or protection in the United States.

This is due to a Trump-era order citing the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to expel migrants with minimal processing. The process is called “Title 42” after the section of the U.S. Code containing an old border quarantine authority. The Biden administration has kept Title 42 in place, though it has not expelled unaccompanied children and it has expelled a declining number of migrants who arrive as family units. (8,986 family members expelled in May, down from 17,795 in April and 21,423 in March.)

Citing “administration officials and others familiar with the discussions,” the Wall Street Journal got further confirmation that the Biden administration is moving toward lifting Title 42. Families requesting asylum at the border may be able to do so without expulsion by the end of July. Title 42 will continue, however, to expel single adults “for the next few months.” (This was first reported by Axios and the New York Times during the week of June 20.) The Journal notes that the change “is expected to come in conjunction with a phased reopening this summer of nonessential travel at ports of entry along the Mexican and Canadian borders.”

Some officials are concerned that lifting Title 42 will lead to a sharp increase in arrivals of migrant families at the border; the Journal reports that the administration is considering options to speed migrants’ asylum processes in order to minimize the length of their stay in the United States pending decisions. Measures may include allowing asylum officers—not just immigration judges—to rule on cases, and allowing asylum seekers to make appointments at border ports of entry using a CBP app.

Large numbers of expelled migrants, meanwhile, continue to accumulate in Mexican border cities, often in strikingly miserable conditions. In Tijuana, 2,000 mostly Mexican, Central American, and Haitian migrants are encamped outside the Chaparral pedestrian port of entry into the United States. (Many there were not expelled under Title 42, but believe they need to be near the border crossing before it reopens.) Mexico’s government human rights ombudsman (CNDH) is warning of numerous health risks at a site that lacks basic sanitation, and city authorities say they plan to clear the encampment soon.

Across from south Texas, in the notoriously organized crime-ridden city of Reynosa, over 1,000 asylum seekers are encamped at a plaza not far from the port of entry. Humanitarian workers from the Sidewalk School for Children Asylum Seekers told Border Report of an outbreak of COVID-19 among those in the plaza. Those who test positive for the coronavirus are being quarantined in one part of the park, while workers are racing to move many of those who test negative to an expanded area of Senda de Vida, an evangelical-run shelter not far from the port of entry.

More migrants arriving from “other” countries

As a recent weekly update noted, a sharply rising portion of migrants encountered at the U.S-Mexico border are neither from Mexico nor from Central America. Citizens of these “other” countries made up 23 percent of Border Patrol’s encounters with undocumented migrants in May, and 45 percent of Border Patrol’s encounters with migrant family members. The “other” countries whose citizens were most frequently encountered were Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and Romania.

The Associated Press reported on June 28 from Del Rio, Texas, a small border town that has seen a jump in arrivals of migrants from Venezuela. Though about 5.4 million Venezuelans have fled their country in recent years, very few have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico land border until recently. 7,484 were apprehended or showed up at ports of entry in May. That monthly number is nearly triple the 2,787 Venezuelans apprehended in all of 2020 and more than triple the 2,202 apprehended in all of 2019. Of those 7,484, 5,465 (73 percent) showed up in Del Rio. Nearly all are turning themselves in and seeking asylum in the United States.

The AP notes that the Venezuelans wading across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, to Del Rio tend to be more highly educated (“bankers, doctors, and engineers”), and many had first emigrated to elsewhere in South America, where they were living and working until COVID-19 collapsed the region’s economies. Most fly to Mexico City or Cancún, then contract with smugglers who take them to Ciudad Acuña. Their trip takes “as little as four days.”

The sharply increasing numbers of migrants from Venezuela and other unusual countries at the border, the AP notes, are “a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.”

Republican politicians focus on the border

Five days after Vice President Kamala Harris’s quick June 25 visit to El Paso, former President Donald Trump was in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region for a meeting with border authorities, a speech, and a Fox News “town hall” event. The visit was one of several ongoing efforts by Republican political leaders to challenge the Biden administration on border security and rising migration numbers.

From a lectern placed at a point where a section of border wall ends, Trump attacked Joe Biden for undoing his policies. “Biden is destroying our country,” he told the assembled crowd, which included former officials from his Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from Texas’s Department of Public Security (DPS), Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), and 31 Republican members of Congress.

“I used to go around in speeches and say, two things that will never get old are a wheel and a wall… The wall worked, really worked,” Trump said. “Within two months everything could have been completed. It would have been painted.”

Valerie González of the Rio Grande Valley Monitor noted that of 28 officials participating in a briefing with the former president, only three  were from the local area: “Javier Villalobos, McAllen mayor; Benny Martinez, Brooks County sheriff; and Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council RGV 3307.” The only one who spoke was Martínez, whose county hosts a Border Patrol highway checkpoint around which migrants walk. A large number get lost in the surrounding ranch land and die of dehydration or exposure. The Sheriff said that this year has seen a 185 percent increase in migrant apprehensions in Brooks County, and a 490 percent increase in 911 emergency calls.

Brooks is one of about 28 Texas counties that agreed to be included in a disaster declaration that Gov. Abbott issued in late May to respond to a “border emergency.” The original declaration covered 34 border-area counties, but several—including those in the majority-Democratic Rio Grande Valley area—objected, citing a lack of evidence. On April 26, Abbott had sent letters to all 254 of Texas’s counties requesting estimates of their financial needs resulting from the border “disaster.” Only eight counties had responded as of June 18, the Monitor reported, and only two had provided monetary amounts, which totaled less than $25,000.

In Brooks County, Martínez said the disaster declaration would help authorities deal with grass fires set by lost migrants seeking to alert rescuers. In Culberson County, in west Texas near the border, Sheriff Oscar Carrillo told the Dallas Morning News’s Alfredo Corchado that authorities had signed the disaster declaration, “but not for political reasons. I’m just practical. We need to be reimbursed for the $30,000 we spent on the migrants who’ve died so far.”

Sheriff Carrillo called “just a show” another of Gov. Abbott’s initiatives: a request, issued with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) for other state governors to send law enforcement personnel to help secure the border. Abbott’s request appears to have attracted short-term visits of small contingents of state police or National Guardsmen from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee. All of these states have Republican governors.

“It’s unclear what these out-of-state forces will be empowered to do, and some states aren’t offering much detail,” a PolitiFact investigation finds. “Based on what we’ve gathered, they will be limited to investigative work and backing up highway patrols.” Lt. Col (Ret.) Geoffrey Corn, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, told the New York Times that National Guard troops’ role would be largely “ceremonial duties, though they will have the authority to make citizens’ arrests.”

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said it would cost his state $575,000 to send 30 guardsmen for 90 days. Idaho said its deployment would cost about $53,000.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) would not divulge how much it would cost to send 50 of her state’s 3,100 National Guard members to the border for 30 to 60 days—her office cited “security reasons” for the silence—but she came up with a controversial way to pay for it. The deployment’s price tag will be paid by a private donor: Willis Johnson, the Tennessee-based billionaire chairman of Copart, an automobile auction company, who describes himself as a “hardcore Republican.”

While the governor’s office insists that paying soldiers with private funds is legal in South Dakota while the guardsmen remain under the governor’s command, the New York Times described it as “a fuzzy area of the law that officials in the state said had never before been contemplated.” Roger Tellinghuisen, a former Republican attorney-general of South Dakota, told the Times, “I don’t have a clue if it’s legal. It’s a question in my own mind.”

“The military is supposed to be used to further our national security interests and ensure the safety of all citizens, not just the whims of a few private individuals with the means to pay for its services,” Dan Grazier, a military fellow at the Center for Defense Information’s Straus Military Reform Project, told the Guardian. “It’s basically money laundering, and it’s turning the state National Guard into a mercenary force,” Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer who teaches at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, told the New York Times.

Beyond hosting Trump, declaring a disaster, and inviting other states’ law enforcement, Texas Gov. Abbott—who is up for re-election in 2022 and may be eyeing a 2024 presidential bid—is active on other fronts. He continues to move toward stripping licenses for Texas childcare facilities that are housing migrant children who arrive unaccompanied. This would force the Biden administration to scramble to find shelter space for these kids, who have been arriving in record numbers since March.

Five Texas sheriff’s departments, meanwhile, have sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), citing a Biden policy that requires the agency to take into custody only migrants considered national security or public safety threats, when they are released from criminal custody. Nationally, ICE’s detained migrant population has risen this year from 14,000 to nearly 27,000; 80 percent of those adding to the population are single adults apprehended at the border, BuzzFeed notes. 4,000 of those in custody are asylum seekers who, for some reason, ICE has determined to be flight risks and required to be detained.

Republicans’ efforts to raise the border and migration and issue do not appear to be resonating beyond the party’s base, according to a June 11-17 Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 10 percent of 4,420 adult respondents ranked immigration as the United States’ top priority, down from 15 percent in April. Republicans who ranked immigration number one totaled 19 percent, down 10 points from April. President Biden, though, maintains a low approval rating for his handling of immigration: 40 percent of Reuters/Ipsos respondents approved and 47 percent disapproved.

Links

• The Biden administration is formalizing a process to allow U.S. resident military veterans who were later deported, often because they committed minor crimes, to return to the United States.
• In rural Culberson county, between El Paso and Texas’s Big Bend region, the sheriff’s office has already handled 13 migrant deaths so far in 2021, reports Alfredo Corchado at the Dallas Morning News.
• Between now and August 2, the Biden administration will be closing six of the large emergency shelter facilities it has set up to house migrant children who arrive at the border unaccompanied. Children stay in the austere shelters while awaiting placement with relatives or sponsors in the United States, with whom they stay while immigration courts rule on their protection needs. Facilities set to close include one at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas; a former oil worker camp in Midland, Texas; tent-based facilities in Carrizo Springs and Donna, Texas; and convention centers in Long Beach and San Diego, California. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said that the population of children at the largest and most notorious of these shelters, Fort Bliss, Texas, has dropped to 790 from around 4,800 two months ago. An average of 401 unaccompanied children arrived at the border every day in June. As of July 1, 14,416 were in shelters, approximately 6,100 of them temporary emergency shelters.
• At a July 1 hearing before the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, 32 organizations and the Mexico office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights argued that Mexico’s use of security forces for migration enforcement, including “pushbacks” of migrants, has exacerbated illegitimate use of force against migrants.
• Mexico’s human rights ombudsman (CNDH) found migrants being held in crowded conditions at a detention center run by the country’s National Migration Institute (INM) in the remote border town of Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, Texas. About 13 more migrants were being held in the Piedras Negras municipal jail in very unsanitary conditions, while unable to contact relatives, the CNDH reported. A coalition of mostly southern Mexican human rights groups (Colectivo de Observación y Monitoreo de Derechos Humanos en el Sureste Mexicano, Comdhse) denounced cases of torture by immigration and National Guard personnel in INM’s migrant detention centers nationwide, including “violence, beatings, threats, lack of food or rotten food.” The worst situation, the group claims, is at Siglo XXI, the INM’s largest detention facility, in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula.