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.

This week:

• A horrific tragedy at a Ciudad Juárez migrant detention center, in which 39 (so far) perished in a fire while locked inside, drew attention to the treatment that migrants in Mexican border cities are receiving as they remain stranded by new blocks on access to asylum.
• Organizations and individuals submitted over 50,000 public comments on the Biden administration’s draft rule banning asylum for most non-Mexican migrants who do not seek it in other countries along the way, or who do not opt for other narrow pathways. Below are links to dozens of organizational comments.

Tragic fire in Ciudad Juárez detention facility

As of mid-day on March 30, the death toll from a fire at a Ciudad Juárez, Mexico migrant detention facility stands at 39 or more people, with about 29 more injured.

The fire started at about 10:00 PM on March 27 at the Mexican federal government’s National Migration Institute (INM) provisional detention center, which sits along the U.S.-Mexico border at the foot of the Stanton Street bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

Mexico’s National Prosecutor’s Office reported on March 28 that the dead and injured included 28 people from Guatemala, 13 from Honduras, 12 from Venezuela, 12 from El Salvador, and 1 each from Colombia and Ecuador. Citizens of all of these countries, except for Colombia and Ecuador, are currently subject to rapid expulsion into Mexico, under the still-in-force Title 42 pandemic authority, if U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or Border Patrol encounter them in the United States.

At a March 28 news conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the detained migrants themselves started the fire, in protest after being told of their probable deportation back to their home countries. “At the door of the shelter, they put mattresses and set them on fire, and they did not imagine that this was going to cause a terrible misfortune,” the President said.

Later on the 28th, very troubling security camera footage from the detention center began circulating on social media. It depicts flames and smoke engulfing an area behind bars and doors, while guards exit the facility without unlocking or opening the doors. Mexican authorities confirmed the video’s authenticity.

The Associated Press reported that Jorge Vázquez Campbell, an attorney representing some of the victims, filed a complaint with Mexican federal investigators making an explosive allegation: that the INM’s delegate for the state of Chihuahua ordered subordinates to prohibit the detainees from leaving. The delegate, Salvador González Guerrero, is a retired Mexican Navy rear admiral.

The AP account further cited the attorney:

Campbell said his clients told him that one of the detained migrants asked a guard for a cigarette and a lighter and then five migrants who had been detained that day began to protest.

“The officials made fun of them, they got irritated, and two of them (migrants) set a mattress on fire,” Campbell said.

That was the moment, Campbell said, that immigration agents at the facility notified González of the fire and he “told them not to do anything and under no circumstances should they let them leave.”

The INM facility was already overcrowded. “A Mexican federal official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity” told the Los Angeles Times that “68 men were packed into a cell meant for no more than 50 people — with no access to drinking water.”

Mexican authorities had detained most or all of the migrants earlier on the 27th, on the streets of Ciudad Juárez. After a March 12 incident when hundreds of migrants massed at one of the border bridges between the city and El Paso (see WOLA’s March 17 Border Update), security and migration forces began taking a more aggressive stance toward the growing population of migrants stranded in the city by Title 42 and other policies.

After that incident, Ciudad Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar said, “the truth is that our level of patience is running out. We’re going to have a stronger posture.” Operations intensified against migrants—many of them Venezuelan—who have become a greater presence on the city’s streets, often begging or trying to earn cash selling food or washing windshields.

Even before that, on March 9, more than 30 local migrant shelters and advocacy organizations had written an open letter accusing authorities of “criminalizing” migrants and asylum seekers, using excessive force and carrying out sweeps to detain migrants off of the streets.

After the tragedy, Mayor Pérez Cuéllar denied that migrants had been rounded up. But migrants’ testimonies signaled otherwise.

• “I was at a stoplight with a piece of cardboard asking for what I needed for my children, and people were helping me with food” on the 27th, a woman migrant told the Associated Press, when “suddenly agents came and detained everyone.”
• Another, who told the El Paso Times that her family had legal permission to be in Mexico, said, “They didn’t ask if we were legal, if we had papers. They just said, ‘Are you Venezuelan? Let’s go.’”
• A Venezuelan man told AFP that agents tricked him into accompanying them to the facility with a false promise of a work permit.

Several dozen were brought to the INM detention facility, but women and children were later released. All of the fire’s victims were men.

In a statement, Mexico’s INM pledged to cooperate with official investigations and support the victims and their families. On March 30, a federal prosecutor issued arrest warrants for three INM officials, two private security guards contracted by INM, and the person accused of starting the fire.

International responses came from many quarters. UN Secretary General António Guterres stated that he was “deeply saddened” and called for a “thorough investigation.” Pope Francis called on people to pray for the victims. “The extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this,” said Felipe Gonzalez Morales, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants.

“Civil society organizations have repeatedly called for an end to the institutional harassment that the population in mobility contexts is suffering in Ciudad Juárez,” a statement from more than 200 Mexican organizations read, recalling that a September 2022 visit to the detention facility where the tragedy occurred found miserable conditions for those held within. The groups called for the resignation of INM Commissioner Francisco Garduño, who has a career in politics, including in Mexico’s prison system.

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.

This week:

• As the Department of Homeland Security announced a new initiative against cross-border fentanyl trafficking, the synthetic opioid appears now to be transiting more through Arizona than through California. Mexico’s production of the drug has become a thorny issue in the bilateral relationship.
• Asylum seekers used the CBP One smartphone app 742 times per day in February to secure appointments at ports of entry, only a fraction of demand. Issues with the app remain so widespread that humanitarian workers in Mexican border cities are spending much of their time offering “tech support.”
• A rally, with strong words from one of San Diego’s congressional representatives, rejected CBP’s plans to build taller segments of border wall through “Friendship Park,” the only federally sanctioned place where friends and relatives on both sides of the fence can meet in person.

Cross-border fentanyl trafficking shifting from California to Arizona

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Mariposa port of entry in Nogales, Arizona on March 21 to commemorate the launch of “Operation Blue Lotus,” a “surge operation” targeting cross-border fentanyl smuggling, which is now increasingly happening in Arizona.

With an increase in targeted inspections and recent installation of a “multi-energy portal (non-intrusive inspection technology or NII)” scanner at the Mariposa port, Mayorkas said that the operation had led to 18 drug seizures during its first week (March 13-19), including “over 900 pounds of fentanyl, over 700 pounds of methamphetamines, and over 100 pounds of cocaine.” The “portal” is the first of two that DHS expects to install at the Nogales border crossing.

The 900 pounds of fentanyl seized in a week is equal to about 19 days’ worth of CBP’s Arizona seizures in February, when the agency confiscated 1,300 pounds of the potent opioid.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement administration considers 2 milligrams of fentanyl to be a “potentially lethal dose;” if the 900 pounds seized were one-half pure, then they would be about 100 million such doses. That traffickers ( reportedly dominated by Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels) are willing to risk losing so much product indicates how cheap fentanyl is to produce, and how compact and easy to smuggle it is.

Since October 2022 (the start of the government’s 2023 fiscal year, which is on pace to break past years’ records), 92 percent of U.S. border authorities’ fentanyl seizures have occurred at ports of entry, the official border crossings. The remaining 8 percent was seized by Border Patrol agents between the ports of entry.

Breaking down this seizure data by month and sector shows a significant shift, starting in the summer and fall of 2022. San Diego (blue and brown on the below chart) had long made up the overwhelming majority of border fentanyl seizures. Rather suddenly, Arizona (green, plus the small red bits) is now where more than half of the drug appears to be crossing.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, caused a stir over the past two weeks by repeatedly claiming, without evidence, that Mexico does not produce fentanyl. His own presidential security briefings, most recently on March 7, along with military press releases, document large-scale seizures of the drug. While López Obrador sought to clarify that Mexican organized crime only has pill presses and does not manufacture the drug itself, the Wall Street Journal was able to visit a fentanyl lab in Sinaloa in 2022.

CBP One’s bumpy adoption continues

The Biden administration’s most recent court filing (dated March 16), the result of a Republican states-led lawsuit to preserve Title 42, includes statistics about asylum-seeking migrants who were able to secure appointments at border ports of entry using the “CBP One” smartphone app in February.

20,778 asylum seekers, 742 per day, were able to secure appointments under a system of Title 42 exemptions. That is up from 706 per day in January (21,881 total), when DHS switched—on January 18—from a less-formal Title 42 exemptions system to full use of the CBP One app.

As noted in several past Border Updates, migrants seeking appointments continue to experience problems with the app, including lack of internet access while fleeing, frequent crashes, limited languages (error messages are in English), and a facial capture feature that is widely reported as not responding to people with darker skin. The largest issue, though, continues to be the small number of daily appointments available, a fraction of current levels of protection-seeking migration.

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.

This week:

• U.S. data from February point to a sustained reduction in recorded levels of migration since January. This is likely a short-term result of the Biden administration’s expanded use of the Title 42 pandemic authority, which has put asylum out of reach for more nationalities of migrants. Migration from Cuba and Nicaragua plummeted 99+ percent from December to February.
• The Biden administration’s 2024 budget request would fund small increases in Border Patrol agents, CBP officers, and processing coordinators, along with scanning equipment for ports of entry, a border “contingency fund,” and more immigration judges. One budget document notes a 2022 jump in the number of what Border Patrol calls “got-aways”: migrants who evaded apprehension.
• Several hundred mostly Venezuelan migrants stranded in Ciudad Juárez, motivated by a false rumor, massed at a border bridge, leading CBP to close the route to El Paso for five hours. The episode underlined the desperation of migrants marooned in the Mexican border city and unable to secure asylum appointments via CBP’s smartphone app.

February migration remains near lowest levels of the Biden administration

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published data on March 15 showing that, after declining 40 percent from December to January, the number of migrants whom U.S. authorities encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border remained similar in February. (See WOLA’s February 17 Border Update for a discussion of the January decline.)

Border Patrol encountered 128,877 undocumented migrants in border zones between ports of entry in February, almost identical to the 128,913 migrants the agency encountered in January (a month that, of course, is 3 days longer). Another 26,121 undocumented migrants came to land-border ports of entry, most of them with appointments to seek asylum, adding up to a border-wide total of 154,998 migrants.

Of that total, 39,206—25 percent—were what U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) calls “repeat encounters”: individuals whom the agency or its Border Patrol component had encountered at least once in the past 12 months. The agency actually encountered 94,124 unique individuals in February, a 13 percent drop from January.

The drop made February 2023 the second-lightest month of migration since the Biden administration’s first full month, February 2021. In El Paso, CBS News reported, shelters are “no longer severely overcrowded.”

The likely reason for the lower numbers continues to be the near-impossibility of gaining access to asylum for citizens of Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. All of these eight countries’ citizens are subject to rapid expulsion back into Mexico—whose government accepts them—using the Title 42 pandemic authority.

That authority, which will be three years old on March 20, is set to expire on May 11. The Biden administration convinced Mexico to add Venezuelan citizens to the list of “expellable” nationalities in October 2022; Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua were added in early January 2023. The difficulty of accessing asylum appears to have discouraged numerous asylum seekers, regardless of the threats they may be fleeing.

CBP applied Title 42 to migrants 72,591 times in February, the most since October 2022. That means 47 percent of migrant encounters ended in expulsions, the largest percentage since March 2022. Since its inception in March 2020, CBP has used Title 42 to expel migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border 2,687,315 times.

Between the ports of entry where Border Patrol operates, migration plummeted from the four countries most recently subject to Title 42 expulsion into Mexico (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). Border Patrol encounters with citizens of Cuba fell 99.6 percent from December to February, from 42,616 to 176 (although maritime encounters saw a dramatic increase, as discussed below). Encounters with Nicaraguan citizens dropped 99 percent from December (35,361 to 402).

Venezuelan and Haitian citizens have arrived in increasing numbers at ports of entry, where most presumably have secured appointments to seek asylum. Since January 18, they have sought to do so using a feature in CBP’s smartphone app, CBP One.

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.

This week:

• The Biden administration is considering a new measure to harden the border against asylum seekers: a revival of family detention facilities, which the administration shuttered last year.
• Four U.S. citizens were kidnapped, and two killed, in the Mexican border city of Matamoros. The tragedy highlighted crisis-level security conditions in Mexico’s state of Tamaulipas, a frequent site of U.S. deportations and expulsions of migrants.
• The Matamoros incident fed calls in Washington to add Mexican criminal organizations to the U.S. “terrorist list,” or even to intervene militarily. Neither proposal is likely either to be enacted, or to yield lasting results against organized crime or illicit drug supplies.

Biden Administration considering reviving family detention

The New York Times revealed on March 6 that the Biden administration is once again considering reviving a mechanism to harden the border against asylum seekers. Five “current and former administration officials with knowledge” of internal discussions said that “the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] is outlining what it would need to do to restart temporary family detention by May 11,” the day that the Title 42 pandemic expulsion policy is slated to end.

Apart from 2 pre-existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) family detention centers, the Obama administration opened three facilities, later closing one,  to detain asylum-seekers who arrived as families (parents with children). The Trump administration maintained the two large facilities in Texas. Families spent up to 20 days at the Dilley and Karnes centers, a maximum set by a federal judge overseeing the Flores settlement agreement, which mandates that migrant children be kept in the “least restrictive setting available.”

While in detention, families—under a procedure called expedited removal—underwent preliminary “credible fear” interviews with asylum officers to determine the validity of their protection claims. In the vast majority of cases, these interviews occurred without counsel present, as detention made access to attorneys difficult.

By 2019, the Trump administration was paying nearly $320 per family bed per night to detain up to 2,500 family members at a time at Dilley and Karnes. (Because of family configurations, ICE said, the actual number was usually closer to 1,500.) This was—and remains—a tiny percentage of the total family migrant population. Those not selected for detention were generally released into the U.S. interior, usually with devices or other methods of monitoring them, with dates to appear in immigration court.

The family facilities were harmful and controversial. One, in Artesia, New Mexico, was closed in 2014 “after complaints about the conditions there,” the Times recalled. In 2018 two experts contracted by the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties blew the whistle on detention conditions that they described as posing “substantial harm to children.” (Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson, now represented by the Government Accountability Project, issued a March 8 statement opposing renewed family detention.)

During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden tweeted, “Children should be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately. This is pretty simple, and I can’t believe I have to say it: Families belong together.” A February 2022 memo ordered that the Dilley and Karnes facilities be reconfigured to hold only adults.

Numbers of migrants arriving as families have averaged about 52,000 per month during Biden’s presidential tenure. As his administration prepares for a likely end of Title 42, a reversal of the President’s past positions is a distinct possibility.

Asked about it by PBS’s Christiane Amanpour, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas replied, “One thing that I promote in this department is to put all options on the table. Great, good, bad, terrible, let us discuss them, and many will be left on the cutting room floor… We haven’t made a decision yet.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answered a reporter’s question: “I’m not saying it’s being considered… I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it is not. I’m saying that I’m not going to speak to rumors.”

“One leading option under consideration,” the Washington Post reported, would be to reopen the larger Dilley facility, though another Post source disputed that Dilley was being considered. “The facilities also would need to be set up to provide educational programs and playgrounds,” the New York Times noted.

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.

This week:

• The Biden administration’s proposed new asylum transit ban rule has divided opinions among Democratic lawmakers and could be related to two senior White House officials’ exit.
• The rule is leading Mexico’s refugee agency, which received 13,000 asylum requests in January, to rethink a plan for express asylum denials.
• The “CBP One” smartphone app’s rollout for asylum seekers remains troubled, amid glitches and a scarcity of appointments so acute that it is causing families to separate.
• A consequence of the Biden administration’s haste to place unaccompanied migrant children with U.S.-based sponsors is a “new economy of exploitation,” a New York Times investigation revealed.
• Onerous new rules that could force migrant shelters to close are among factors making Guatemala a difficult transit country for migrants, especially those from Venezuela who report widespread extortion by corrupt police.
• Migration is increasing again in Panama’s Darién Gap. The country temporarily suspended a troubled bus service that whisks migrants from the jungle region to the Costa Rica border.

Political fallout over the Biden administration’s new asylum transit ban rule

Analyses at CNN and the Washington Post highlighted divisions within the Democratic Party over the Biden administration’s proposed ban on asylum for migrants who passed through another country en route to the U.S.-Mexico border. (The administration calls the ban, discussed in WOLA’s February 23 update, a “rebuttable presumption of ineligibility” for asylum.)

“This is a racist policy,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) told the Post. On the other side, “If a person thinks that the immigration activists are the only part of the Democratic base, then they’re wrong,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told National Public Radio.

Two White House immigration policy advisors, Lise Clavel and Leidy Perez-Davis, are resigning, Politico reported. The article noted, “news of the impending exits comes days after the Biden administration announced its most restrictive border control measure to date.”

CNN and CBS News reported that administration officials considered an asylum transit ban in 2021, after migration levels at the border began a rapid increase. At the time, they ended up rejecting the idea because, the White House counsel argued, courts would be likely to block it.

The asylum ban rule is still officially a draft. People and organizations with views about it can submit comments—a key part of the federal government rulemaking process—until March 27. A coalition of migrants’ rights groups has published a guide and template for comments.

Transit ban’s impact on asylum in Mexico

In Mexico, the transit ban is causing the government’s refugee agency (Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, COMAR) to rethink a pilot project that had sought to speed up asylum denials for applicants who appeared likely to use their status in Mexico to travel to the U.S. border and seek asylum there.

The Biden administration’s proposed rule would not disqualify those who had their asylum applications rejected by other countries en route. COMAR director Andrés Ramírez told CNN that he “now worries that accelerating asylum denials could actually increase Mexico’s attractiveness as a pit stop for those ultimately aiming to request asylum in the US,” using their Mexican denials.

According to the agency’s February 16 release of statistics, COMAR received nearly 13,000 requests for asylum in January, a pace that, if sustained for the entire year, would bring a record 154,000 asylum applications in Mexico’s system in 2023. The number-one nationality of asylum applicants in January was Haiti, the nation that was also number one in 2021. Honduras was COMAR’s number-one asylum-seeking nationality in 2022 and prior years.

Afghanistan, for the first time, made COMAR’s “top ten” in January with 430 asylum requests. Afghanistan was the number-nine nationality of migrants passing through Panama’s Darién Gap region in January (291 migrants reported by Panamanian authorities).