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After passing through the Darién Gap, Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, some U.S.-bound migrants get stranded en route as they struggle to raise money to pay bus fares.
At the beginning of this century, Venezuela was one of Latin America’s wealthier countries. Back then, the idea of its citizens using an image of their flag to evoke pity in Honduras—the 2nd or 3rd poorest nation in the hemisphere—would’ve been ludicrous.
I’m flying first thing Wednesday morning for a research trip to Honduras, a country where I have to admit I’ve done little work in recent years. The last time I was there was 2005 or 2006. I look forward to working again in Central America, where I started my career in the 1990s.
I’m sorry, of course, that it’s necessary to do so. Honduras is one of several countries on the route between the Darién Gap and Mexico, a route being transited by something like 1,000 people per day. (Honduras measured an average of 689 “irregular” migrants transiting the country during each of the first 112 days of 2023—mostly from Venezuela, Haiti, and Ecuador—but hundreds more per day probably evaded detection.)
With a few WOLA colleagues, I’ll be in the country’s two largest cities, and in zones along the Nicaraguan and Guatemalan borders. I’ve got a long list of research questions, which will form the backbone of a report I hope to publish as quickly as possible after our return. The outline’s “Roman numerals” so far are:
I will post photos and impressions (for security reasons, after I leave a region) both here and at my Mastodon account.
I’m grateful to all who have agreed to meet with us in the coming days, and to those who’ve offered me some extremely useful advice as I prepared the trip.
This is the first time in many years that I’ve organized a trip to a place where I don’t already have a lot of relationships with people. In Honduras, I only have a few. But I expect to change that over the next several days.
Addendum added 8pm on April 25: Here’s the nationalities of migrants encountered by authorities in Honduras since January 2022. You can see a notable recent drop in Cuban migrants and increase in Venezuelan migrants. Both are subject to Title 42 expulsion into Mexico, but Venezuelans have become at least somewhat adept at using the “CBP One” app to make appointments for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Biden administration officials might view this chart as evidence of “policy success.”
Combining Title 42 expulsions, “CBP One” appointments, and humanitarian parole brought a 95% decrease in Border Patrol’s encounters with Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants since December, and a 50% increase in the much smaller number of those able to come to ports of entry.
But a lot of the people who were in those tall green columns—many of whom may have valid asylum claims—remain in Mexican border cities. Stranded. More are coming, but since they’re not crossing the border from Mexico, this chart doesn’t show them.
Forty of these stranded people died in a fire a month ago in Ciudad Juárez. Now, in the past couple of days, 2,000 living in miserable tents in Matamoros have come under attack. The Associated Press reports:
About two dozen makeshift tents were set ablaze and destroyed at a migrant camp across the border from Texas this week, witnesses said Friday, a sign of the extreme risk that comes with being stuck in Mexico as the Biden administration increasingly relies on that country to host people fleeing poverty and violence.
The fires were set Wednesday and Thursday at the sprawling camp of about 2,000 people, most of them from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico, in Matamoros, a city near Brownsville, Texas. An advocate for migrants said they had been doused with gasoline.
The entire Western Hemisphere is in a moment of mass migration, as the Migration Policy Institute reminded us in a feature published last week. “The number of migrants living in the region nearly doubled from 8.3 million in 2010 to 16.3 million in 2022… Notably, much of the migration has been between countries within the region,” not to the United States.
A region-wide crisis demands that the Biden administration further expand its ability to process and fairly adjudicate this increased number of protection claims. At a time of historically low unemployment, it also requires creating more legal pathways to migration.
Right now, that can mean adjusting policies that are already in place.
Without changes like these, Mexican border cities are going to continue filling up. We’ll see more tragedies, more attacks, more bridge closures as large groups of people gather after being misled by misinformation.
The people in this chart’s tall green columns aren’t going anywhere. Most have nowhere else to go. The pressure is going to keep building.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Due to upcoming staff field research travel, WOLA will not produce Border Updates on April 28 and May 5. Updates will resume on May 12.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data on April 17 about its “encounters” (regular apprehensions and Title 42 expulsions) with undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during March 2023. It revealed that CBP and its Border Patrol component encountered migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border 23 percent more often in March than in February.
Combining migrants taken into Border Patrol custody between land ports of entry (POEs, or border crossings), with migrants who came to the POEs, CBP counted 191,900 encounters with migrants in March, up from 156,138 in February. “Of these,” CBP reported, “single adult encounters increased by 19 percent compared to February, unaccompanied children increased 14 percent, and family unit individuals increased by 38 percent.”
Migrants whom Border Patrol itself encountered, between the POEs, totaled 162,317, up 25 percent from 130,024 in February. CBP pointed out that, though this is an increase, the March total was 23 percent smaller than in March 2022 (211,181) and 4 percent smaller than March 2021 (169,216).
This was the first month-to-month increase in migration since December. In January, the Biden administration and Mexico’s government expanded the number of nationalities whose citizens could be expelled into Mexico under the Title 42 pandemic authority; this caused a sharp drop in migration that month, which is now reversing.
U.S. border authorities used the Title 42 authority 87,661 times in March to expel migrants, usually into Mexico. That was the largest expulsion total, and the second-largest expulsion percentage (46 percent), since June 2022.
Much of the monthly increase owed to seasonal patterns, as March is usually a busier month at the border due to milder weather. The number of migrants increased for most nationalities from February to March, with Mexico, Colombia, India, Venezuela, and Peru all measuring increases of 2,500 or more.
For the first time, Colombia was the number two nationality of migrants encountered at the border. Citizens of Peru, who like Colombians are not subject to Title 42 expulsion into Mexico, rose to fifth place.
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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data this evening about its “encounters” (regular apprehensions and Title 42 expulsions) with undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during March. Here are a few graphics illustrating key trends.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Due to staff travel, we are publishing this week’s Border Update in an abbreviated format.
The top 10 nationalities of migrants in the Darién Gap in March 2023 were:
The top 10 nationalities of migrants in the Darién Gap since January 2022 were:
Pleased to share a new WOLA Podcast episode with Geoff Ramsey, who until very recently—before making a move to the Atlantic Council—was WOLA’s director for Venezuela. I haven’t been paying close enough attention to the ongoing political negotiations between the Maduro government and the opposition, and this was an eye-opening overview.
Here’s the blurb from WOLA’s podcast landing page:
About a quarter of Venezuela’s population has fled the country after years of economic crisis, corruption, and authoritarianism. Efforts to bring a return to accountable, democratic rule continue, most notably through a negotiated process facilitated by Norway.
There is little reason to expect a short-term outcome, says Geoff Ramsey, who until recently directed WOLA’s Venezuela Program. Ramsey is now a senior fellow for Venezuela and Colombia at the Atlantic Council.
In this episode of WOLA’s Podcast, Ramsey calls for patient support for the ongoing negotiations, implementation of a 2022 humanitarian agreement, a more strategically unified opposition, more engaged neighbors, and a clearer U.S. policy at a time when Venezuela is getting “less bandwidth” in Washington.
Above all, Geoff Ramsey cautions against expecting dramatic change anytime soon, as many did during the Trump administration. Bringing Venezuela back to rights-respecting democracy is a “long game,” with 2024 elections just one milestone along the way.
Follow Geoff Ramsey on Twitter at @GRamsey_LatAm.
Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.
In March, 55% of migrants toiling through Panama’s Darién Gap—671 people per day—were citizens of Venezuela.
This is so, even though since October, the Biden administration has used Title 42 to expel Venezuelans back to Mexico.
Top 10 nationalities in the Darién Gap in March:
Top 10 nationalities in the Darién Gap since January 2022:
The source for this is the Panamanian government’s “Tránsito Irregular por Darién” tables.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Due to staff travel, we will publish next week’s Border Update in an abbreviated format.
WOLA’s March 31 Border Update reported a death toll of “39 or more people” from a March 27 fire in a Mexican government provisional migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas. On April 3, Mexico’s public security department increased the count to 40 deaths: one of the men injured in the fire died while being flown to a hospital in Mexico City.
Not including this 40th individual, whose nationality was not reported, the fatal victims include 18 Guatemalan migrants (most from the country’s Indigenous-majority highlands), 7 Venezuelans, 6 Hondurans, 6 Salvadorans, 1 Colombian, and 1 Ecuadorian.
As of March 30, 24 migrants were hospitalized in serious or critical condition: 10 Guatemalans, 7 Hondurans, 4 Salvadorans, and 3 Venezuelans. Mexico turned down a U.S. government offer to provide medical treatment to some of the injured in the United States, arguing that they were “too ill to be moved,” the Associated Press reported. Still, Mexico has since sought to fly some to specialized treatment in Mexico City.
Troubling details about the tragedy continue to emerge. “Multiple testimonies” indicate that the facility had no emergency exits or fire extinguishers in its detention area, the daily Milenio reported. Some of the detainees had been there for several days, or even since February, though the legal maximum is 36 hours. In the United States, relatives of the victims are complaining that the Mexican government is not responding to inquiries or helping with the complicated repatriation of remains.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, paid a visit to Ciudad Juárez on March 31, where he said that the tragedy “hurt me a lot, it damaged me.” As the President’s white van, with him in the passenger seat, drove through Ciudad Juárez’s central square, it was detained for several minutes as mostly Venezuelan migrants surrounded the vehicle. López Obrador “opened the window and took the hand of a woman who pleaded with him as others pushed letters into his hand and cried for justicia, or justice, for the migrants,” the El Paso Times reported. One migrant reportedly said to him, “Don’t do what the United States does,” to which he replied, “we are not the same, my love, don’t confuse us.”
A Mexican federal judge ordered the indictment, for homicide and intentional injury, of five people accused of involvement in the tragedy: three employees of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), one private security guard, and a Venezuelan migrant, Jeison Daniel Catarí Rivas, accused of setting fire to mattresses in protest, after guards allegedly said that the men in custody would be deported. “None of the public servants, nor the private security guards, took any action to open the door for the migrants who were inside where the fire was,” said a federal human rights prosecutor cited by the New York Times.
The INM has come under fire for the tragedy, especially after security camera footage showed personnel leaving the facility without opening the doors of a detention area filling with flames and smoke. While no source appears to have a current count, Pie de Página reported that in 2019, INM was managing 30 detention centers throughout Mexico, plus an unknown number of provisional facilities like the one in Ciudad Juárez.
Read MoreNow that it’s April, it seems like Twitter is determined to start downgrading those of us who don’t pay for blue checkmarks, making it harder for people to see our posts.
If you’re on Twitter, doing similar work, and looking for alternatives: I’m having a fine time with Mastodon, with uses a free and open protocol. However, it could use more people. I follow 127 people and can read an entire day’s posts in less than half an hour.
One thing that stops new people from joining is that they don’t know which server to sign up with. It’s a big stumbling block.
I had that problem. I was on the original “mastodon.social” server, which was absolutely fine, but when you clicked on “local timeline”—the combined posts of all mastodon.social members—you saw posts from thousands of people about infinite topics. Not useful.
So I started a server a couple of months ago, hosted at masto.host, which I called elefanti.co.
(“Little Mastodon,” get it? “mastodi.to” sounded too much like mastoditis, which a nasty infection. “Little elephant” worked better.)
So far, I’ve been the only one on elefanti.co, as I get used to running it. Now, I’m pretty used to it. But when I click on “local timeline,” I only see my own posts.
The ideal would be to click on “local timeline” and see updates from many people working on or interested in similar things: human rights, arms control, peacebuilding, democracy, migration, environmental justice, racial justice, gender justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and similar work.
I’d enjoy that. If you’re a reader here, you’re welcome to apply to join. One advantage of a new server is that you can choose any username you want (“@[email protected]”), since “@adam” is the only one that’s taken so far.
If you decide to switch servers later, you can take your followers and follows with you. But you can’t take your past posts. (You can’t expect a new server administrator to host your history, some of which could include posts that violate their guidelines.)
I’ll accept anyone whom I know—or know of—and who I believe shares similar interests/values.
I can’t let just any stranger join, though, because I don’t know if a stranger might post of harmful or abusive things. Keeping it to “people in the community or adjacent” minimizes the likelihood that I’ll have to spend too much time moderating.
Here’s what the signup form looks like. the “why I want to join” field is optional, but helpful if we don’t know each other.
Hosting this costs me $10/month right now, apparently for capacity to host 20 people. I can pay for that easily enough. But if a lot of people join and I have to upgrade to a more expensive plan, I might hit you up for a few bucks.
Just something to consider.
Here’s the list of people I follow right now on Mastodon whose work involves “migration.” Not a lot of voices yet, but some good ones.
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