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🟧Early November: I’m in Washington with a moderate meeting schedule but some writing deadlines. I’m mostly reachable, but replies may not be immediate.
Investigations from ProPublica and InsightCrime, citing DEA information, allege that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s unsuccessful 2006 campaign took money from narcotraffickers in exchange for assurances that, if elected, López Obrador would not impede their illicit business.
In an excerpt from his upcoming book, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells the story of Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, a Honduran migrant mother whom Border Patrol separated from her sons in 2017, when the Trump administration was still just piloting its family separation policy. “The cruelty she suffered in the United States was matched only by what she was forced to flee in Honduras.”
In Guatemala’s southwestern department of San Marcos, “poppy crops left more Mexico border trade and better living conditions. But also violence, weapons, and displaced people.”
A graphics-heavy survey of the drug trade, violence, and politics in Colombia’s south-central department of Caquetá, much of which is under the influence of a FARC dissident network currently negotiating with the Petro government.
This Migration Policy Institute report is a goldmine of data and hard-to-find information about border infrastructure, processing capacity, and other needs at a time of record arrivals of protection-seeking migrants.
What do we know about what’s coming out of the Senate asylum-restrictions-for-Ukraine-aid negotiations? What's the human cost? Would it actually deter migration? What do Republican hardliners want? What would a better policy look like?
Last October, the Biden administration asked Congress for a package of funding for Ukraine, Israel, border security, and other priorities. In the Democratic-majority Senate, where it takes 60 votes to move legislation forward, Republicans refused to support this request unless it included changes to U.S. law that would restrict the right to asylum, and perhaps other migration pathways, at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A small group of senators has been negotiating those changes since November. A bill may now be forthcoming.
Prospects for an asylum-limits-for-Ukraine-aid deal grow dimmer in Congress. Mayorkas impeachment moves out of committee. Venezuela to halt deportation flights.
After more than two months of talks and an agreement nearly finished, prospects are dimming for a Senate deal that might restrict the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, a Republican demand for allowing a package of Ukraine, Israel, border, and other spending to go forward.
The leadership of the House of Representatives Republican majority continues to dig in against it because they feel it doesn’t go far enough and because Donald Trump is attacking it.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) tweeted yesterday a new Republican talking point: that President Biden could limit migration through executive action, using existing legal authorities like detaining all asylum seekers (for which no budget exists), or issuing highly controversial blanket bans on classes of people, like Donald Trump’s 2017 “Muslim Ban” executive order (which do not supersede the right to seek asylum at the border).
Many Senate Republicans, too, are either attacking the deal or appearing to back away. A senior Republican, John Cornyn (Texas), told Politico that “it certainly doesn’t seem like” the deal can pass the Senate. “There are a number of our members who say, ‘Well, I’ll join a majority of the Republicans but if it doesn’t enjoy that sort of support, then count me out.’”
The “decision as to whether to proceed to a floor vote, which would involve releasing the [deal’s] text, is largely a decision being made by Republicans,” said lead Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut).
Following a nearly 15-hour hearing, the Republican majority on the House Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15, on strict party lines, to advance the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Republicans have not yet offered clear evidence that Mayorkas committed any high crimes and misdemeanors,” a Washington Post analysis noted. It is not clear whether Republicans have enough votes in their caucus to gain the majority of the full House necessary to send the impeachment to the Democratic-majority Senate, where Mayorkas’s acquittal is certain.
“I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me,” Mayorkas wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tennessee).
While the Mayorkas impeachment proceeded, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the House’s foremost border hardliners and a defender of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) state-led crackdown, held a hearing about state versus federal jurisdiction in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, which he chairs.
As the Biden administration moves to reinstate sanctions on Venezuela—a response to the Caracas regime’s disqualification of the main opposition candidate in elections scheduled this year—the country’s vice president announced that Venezuela would prohibit U.S. flights deporting Venezuelan migrants as of February 13.
Between the October 5, 2023 reinstatement of deportation flights and January 21, 2024, ICE had sent 14 deportation planes to Venezuela.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract plane flew deported Mexican migrants to Mexico’s central Pacific state of Michoacán yesterday. It was the first “interior removal” flight of Mexican citizenssince May 2022.
Colombia’s migration authority released its first-ever estimate of migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region in 2023: 539,949 people. This is slightly higher than Panama’s estimate of 520,085, which the Panamanian government updates monthly.
Three New York Times reporters examined the evolution of President Biden’s border policies since 2021, portraying it as a turn toward favoring harder-line measures as migration at the border increased.
By moving to the right on border and migration as the 2024 campaign gets underway, President Biden “is trying to strip Republicans of one of their most effective wedge issues,” reads a USA Today analysis.
Centrist strategist Ruy Teixeira told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall that he doubted Biden has “the stomach to turn a ‘red meat’ conservative stance on immigration into a wedge issue.”
Tonatiuh Guillén, a migration expert who headed the Mexican government’s immigration authority during the first months of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency, accused the López Obrador of apparent “passivity” in the face of a possible new U.S. authority to expel migrants, which would require Mexico’s cooperation.
Similarly, a Current History article by the New School’s Alexandra Delano Alonso found that the López Obrador government is mirroring the U.S. focus on deterrence, abandoning a more humane migration policy.
USA Today, Washington Post, and Slate reporters visited Eagle Pass, the epicenter of Gov. Abbott’s standoff with the federal government, placing local residents’ views at the center of their reporting.
As a convoy of right-wing protesters heads to Eagle Pass this weekend, Wired found much confusion and paranoia within the group’s exchanges on the Telegram platform.
At CalMatters, Wendy Fry examined Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) plans to construct more high-tech surveillance towers along California’s southern border.
At his Americas Migration Brief newsletter, Jordi Amaral expected Ecuador’s organized-crime violence to trigger an even greater outflow of migration. (Ecuador was the number-seven nationality of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023.)
The Senate is nearing a deal that would bring back Title 42-style expulsions of asylum seekers at the border. But Title 42 didn't reduce migration. Instead, it grew sharply.
A Senate deal on Ukraine, Israel, and border funding might include new restrictions on the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, satisfying Republican legislators’ demand. Of what we know, the most radical of these would be a new legal authority shutting the border to asylum seekers when the daily average of migrant apprehensions exceeds 5,000.
That would trigger a new “Title 42” authority expelling people out of the United States (if Mexico agrees to take them), regardless of protection needs.
On January 27, President Biden described this as an “emergency authority to shut down the border until it can get back under control.” He added, “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.“
We keep hearing this notion that more expelled asylum seekers equals fewer migrants at the border. But that’s not what happened during the Title 42 period (March 2020 to May 2023).
True, there was a decline in arrivals of would-be asylum-seekers from nationalities whose expulsions Mexico would accept. But the number of people from other countries, and of all people seeking to evade Border Patrol, grew sharply.
Migration ballooned during the Title 42 “expulsions” period. Title 42 was in place:
In the last 9 full months of the Trump administration, when migrant encounters shot upward, from 17,106 in April 2020 (the pandemic lockdown’s first full month) to 73,994 in December 2020.
in early 2021, when south Texas Border Patrol processing facilities were overwhelmed with child and family arrivals;
in September 2021, when more than 10,000 Haitian asylum seekers came to Del Rio, Texas all at once;
in September-December 2022, when more than 200,000 people—more than half of them from Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—crossed into Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector.
This was not a time when the border was “fixed.”
If the Senate deal results in a new expulsion authority, it might bring the numbers down at the border for a few months, as all “get-tough” strategies against migration tend to do. But as we saw in 2020-2023, migration will recover despite the expulsions, after a period of adjustment—perhaps by Election Day.
With Congress back in session today, we continue to await legislative language from Senate negotiators who have been working since November on a deal that might restrict access to asylum at the border, a Republican demand for allowing a package of Ukraine aid and other spending priorities to move forward.
Prospects for the deal’s passage in the Republican-majority House of Representatives remain poor. “Any border ‘shutdown’ authority that ALLOWS even one illegal crossing is a non-starter. Thousands each day is outrageous. The number must be ZERO,” tweeted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). (The number has never been close to zero.)
“Thousands each day” refers to an apparent agreement among Senate negotiators to start expelling asylum seekers if the daily average of migrant apprehensions at the border rises above 5,000.
The Oklahoma Republican Party issued a statement clarifying that it did not, in fact, vote to censure Senate Republicans’ chief negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, for his talks with Democrats, as was reported over the weekend.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador responded to President Joe Biden’s January 27 pledge to “shut down the border right now” (an apparent reference to a Title 42-style expulsion authority that is part of the Senate agreement), calling it “a very demagogic position.”
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said that his state is putting up concertina wire “everywhere we can… If they cut it, we will replace it.” The Hill reported, “Patrick threatened a ‘confrontation’ with state authorities if the Biden administration sent Border Patrol to remove barriers.”
Twenty-six Republican state attorneys-general, including those from “purple” states like New Hampshire and Virginia, signed a statement backing Texas’s border security efforts and confrontation with federal authorities, citing the state’s “duty to defend against invasion.”
A state records request revealed that Texas’s state government paid $135,000, or $1,100 per passenger, to fly 120 migrants on a chartered plane from El Paso to Chicago in December.
A migrant “caravan” that started near the Mexico-Guatemala border with about 6,000 people at Christmas is now 400 people, walking through Mexico’s southern state of Veracruz.
A Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee aide who had accompanied a recent four-person delegation to Mexico “said Mexican officials were ‘very keen’ about touting their work removing Venezuelans,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“Perhaps it’s chaos, not immigration per se, that upsets voters, and Mr. Biden can curb the chaos by letting more immigrants come to the United States legally,” wrote the Cato Institute’s David Bier at the New York Times. In the increasingly likely event that Congress fails to reach a border deal, Bier suggests that Biden expand use of humanitarian parole authority.
U.S. media have published a series of analyses from legal scholars about the “extremely dangerous” constitutional implications of Texas’s challenge to federal authority to enforce immigration policy at the border, especially its exclusion of Border Patrol from part of the border in Eagle Pass.
Honduran authorities registered 545,043 citizens of other countries (not counting neighboring Nicaragua) transiting its territory irregularly in 2023. UNHCR estimated “that more than 850,000 people transited Honduras” last year when including those whom the government did not count.
This week's edition is as jam-packed as you'd expect from someone working on border and migration policy at this moment. There's a weekly Border Update, a podcast, nine charts explaining December migration data, links about organized crime-tied corruption in the Americas, and a Spanish podcast about the U.S. elections. And of course, upcoming events and some recommended readings.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This week’s edition is as jam-packed as you’d expect from someone working on border and migration policy at this moment. There’s a weekly Border Update, a podcast, nine charts explaining December migration data, links about organized crime-tied corruption in the Americas, and a Spanish podcast about the U.S. elections. And of course, upcoming events and some recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
The Senate could see a compromise asylum-restrictions-for-Ukraine-aid bill this week, even as Trump and House Republicans prepare to kill it. Record migrant encounters reported for December. House Republicans prepare to impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas.
This appears to be the week in which Senate negotiators will issue compromise legislation that provides new funding for Ukraine, Israel, the border, and other priorities—while meeting Republican demands that it change U.S. law to restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We do have a bipartisan deal. We’re finishing the text right now,” lead Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) told CNN. “We are sort of finalizing the last pieces of text right now. This bill could be ready to be on the floor of the United States Senate next week.”
Media accounts say that the negotiators have agreed to:
Automatic Title 42-style expulsions of would-be asylum seekers, a “shutdown of the border,” when a day’s migrant apprehensions between ports of entry exceed a seven-day average of 5,000 or 8,500 on a single day, as often happens; there would be discretionary authority to suspend asylum when the average hits 4,000. Once that threshold is crossed, “migrants would be expelled indefinitely until crossings dipped below 3,750 per day, which would end the expulsion authority period,” the Washington Post explained.
As with Title 42, exceptions would only be for people who can prove fear of torture if returned, under the Convention Against Torture. There is no word on whether Mexico would agree to accept expelled individuals.
A higher “credible fear” standard that asylum seekers would have to meet in screening interviews with asylum officers, if they are among the segment of migrants placed in expedited removal proceedings (roughly 25,000 per month in recent months, but likely to increase).
Those who pass these screenings would have greater access to work permits inside the United States.
Unspecified changes to the asylum process “with the goal of reducing the average time for an asylum claim to be resolved from several years to 6 months,” according to the Washington Post—a goal that would require either drastic curbs on due process or significant new investment in the asylum system.
According to CBS News, the deal includes Democratic priorities like “50,000 new family and employment-based immigrant visas, offer[ing] permanent residency to tens of thousands of Afghans brought to the U.S. following the fall of Kabul in 2021, and provid[ing] immigration status to the children of H-1B visa holders.”
The agreement does not appear to include Republican demands for limits on the presidential authority to grant humanitarian parole to migrants at the border. The agreement would not touch the CBP One program allowing 1,450 asylum seekers per day to make appointments at ports of entry.
In a White House statement and in remarks given in South Carolina, President Joe Biden voiced enthusiasm for the Senate deal. Of the Title 42-style expulsion authority, he said “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.”
“There’s just one thing” about the Senate’s legislative deal, wrote Stef Kight at Axios: “Their plan is all but dead.” The House of Representatives’ Republican majority, prodded by Donald Trump, is lining up to oppose the deal because they claim it doesn’t go far enough to restrict migration. Trump called it a “horrible open borders betrayal of America” and said he’d be happy to take the blame if it fails.
Even before the language is public, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has called the Senate’s bill “dead on arrival” in his chamber. “According to reports, the Senate’s pending proposal would expressly allow as many as 150,000 illegal crossings each month (1.8 million per year) before any new ‘shutdown’ authority could be used. At that point, America will have already been surrendered,” Johnson said.
Oklahoma’s Republican party voted Saturday to censure the Senate Republicans’ chief negotiator, James Lankford (R-Oklahoma).
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border through December, showing a record 302,034 migrant encounters border-wide in December. 52,249 encounters took place at ports of entry, and 249,785 people ended up in Border Patrol custody after crossing between ports of entry. The top nationalities were Mexico (23%), Venezuela (19%), Guatemala (12%), Honduras (7%) and Colombia (6%). WOLA’s Adam Isacson posted nine charts illustrating the data.
During January, migrant arrivals have dropped to about half of December’s rate.
The House Homeland Security Committee’s Republican majority is moving ahead with the impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on two counts, the second-ever impeachment of a Cabinet official and the first since 1876. House Republicans accuse Mayorkas of willfully refusing to secure the border and control migration.
The Committee is to meet on Tuesday to launch impeachment proceedings; while they certainly lack the votes to remove Mayorkas in the Democratic-majority Senate, it is not even clear whether they have the necessary bare majority in the House.
A Wall Street Journal column by Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s second Homeland Security secretary, urged House Republicans not to pursue impeachment.
About 8,000 people migrating through Mexico each month pay smugglers up to $40,000 for an “amparo package” that promises that they can cross the country, and reach the U.S. border, with “free transit” and no concern about deportation—a guarantee that relies on a green light from corrupt migration officials.
The New Yorker published an excerpt from an upcoming book about migration from reporter Jonathan Blitzer, telling the story of a Honduran woman whom the Trump administration separated from her sons in 2017, when agents in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector were carrying out family separations on a trial basis.
University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck explained to CNN that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is not defying the Supreme Court’s January 22 decision requiring him to allow Border Patrol agents to cut through concertina wire that state officials have laid along the Rio Grande. However, Abbott “is interfering with federal authority to a degree we haven’t seen from state officials since the desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Texas is seeking to have today’s more conservative Supreme Court undo earlier rulings giving the federal government control over immigration policy, wrote Ian Millhiser at Vox.
Amid the state-federal dispute in Texas, “Republicans and conservative media have alluded to the prospect of the situation forcing soldiers to choose between loyalty to their state and loyalty to their country—even proposing that matters could turn confrontational and violent. Some have invoked another civil war,” noted Aaron Blake at the Washington Post.
The ACLU voiced concern that the Biden administration’s request for additional border spending would expand ICE’s Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) program, a high-tech alternative-to-detention program applied to asylum-seeking families placed in a fast track adjudication process. FERM “normalizes 24-hour suspicionless surveillance,” the organization contended.
Links to recent coverage of official corruption involving Latin America's violent organized crime groups, with examples from Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.
A key detonating factor in Ecuador‘s January outbreak of violence was “Operation Metastasis,” a December 2023 campaign by the national prosecutor’s office targeting government and judicial officials tied to the country’s organized crime groups. Among 30 people charged, the New York Times reported, “were judges accused of granting gang leaders favorable rulings, police officials who were said to have altered evidence and delivered weapons to prisons, and the former director of the prison authority himself.”
This corruption worsened after a 2018 shakeup and reduction of the central government’s security administration, forced by economic austerity measures, that reduced some agencies and eliminated others.
“The state and law enforcement entities cannot control the situation of criminality and violence,” Felipe Botero of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime told Vox, because “they are involved with organized crime in the country.”
Recent attacks on members of Tijuana‘s municipal police, following an alleged November theft of drugs from a Sinaloa Cartel structure, “arise from the need of drug traffickers to buy police officers in order to remain in power” and this is because “the judiciary is rotten,” said Jesús Alejandro Ruiz Uribe, the Mexican federal government’s delegate for the state of Baja California. “The judicial power is currently a revolving door, the good police put the criminals in jail and the bad judges take them out again.”
To the east of Tijuana, surveillance videos taken on January 12 showed Mexican soldiers allegedly assisting a theft of synthetic drugs from a Sinaloa Cartel-run laboratory on a ranch in Tecate, Baja California, not far from the U.S. border.
SinEmbargo columnist Adela Navarro Bello wrote about this case, concluding, “Although these cases are isolated, they are increasingly frequent. Elements of the Mexican Army, the Armed Forces, and the National Guard collaborate with organized crime and drug trafficking cells in different parts of the country.”
In south-central Chiapas, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, rural communities are forcibly displacing after confronting Mexican Army soldiers who they say were working with the Jalisco Cartel. Violence has flared up in parts of Chiapas in the past year as Jalisco and Sinaloa have entered into a bitter fight over trafficking routes, aggressively pushing out rural residents.
Hugo Aguilar, the governor of Santander, Colombia‘s fifth-most-populous department, from 2004 to 2007, admitted that he received support from the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group during his election campaign. Aguilar, a former police colonel who commanded the unit that killed Pablo Escobar in 1993, told the post-conflict transitional justice system (the Special Jurisdiction for Peace or JEP) that he did not receive money from the AUC. “They told the people that they should vote for Colonel Aguilar” in the zones they controlled, he said.
Colombia‘s Supreme Court has opened an investigation of the president of Colombia’s Senate, Green Party Senator Iván Name Vásquez. A former head of Los Rastrojos Costeños, a splinter group of Colombia’s North Valle Cartel active in the 1990s and early 2000s, alleged that Sen. Name was linked to his group.
“Alliances between criminal networks and individuals who hold positions within state institutions have even created hybrid economies, such as scrap metal trafficking or fuel smuggling, where legal and illegal business intersect,” reported InsightCrime’sVenezuela Investigative Unit. “With corrupt state elements continuing to profit from informal mining,” the security forces’ raids on illicit precious-metals mines “may work to guarantee those elements a more favorable share of those profits, rather than stamping out the practice.”
“Organized crime can’t grow without state protection, and Latin American mafias have long made it a mission to capture parts of the state,” wrote the Council on Foreign Relations’ Will Freeman at the Los Angeles Times. “They have had at least as much success amassing political power as any of the region’s political parties.”
Nine charts explaining the state of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border at the end of 2023.
Late on Friday the 26th, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border through December. Here are some highlights, expressed as nine charts.
Migrants apprehended by Border Patrol (in border areas between ports of entry)
Between ports of entry, CBP’s Border Patrol component apprehended 249,785 people last month. That is probably a monthly record. It is at least the largest amount measured since October 1999, the earliest month for which Border Patrol makes monthly data available.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions jumped 31 percent from November (191,112). Increased migration from Venezuela, which more than doubled, accounted for 41 percent of the border-wide month-to-month increase.
December also saw big increases in migration between ports of entry from the other three nationalities (in addition to Venezuela) whose citizens the Biden administration allows to apply for its humanitarian parole program: Cuba (+192 percent from November to December), Haiti (+1,266 percent), and Nicaragua (+91 percent). This may mean that the humanitarian parole program is saturated by demand and insufficient supply.
It was the first month since May 2022 that more than 1,000 Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry and ended up in Border Patrol custody.
At the official border crossings, CBP’s Office of Field Operations encountered 52,249 migrants. This is a record—though not by a wide margin, as CBP tightly controls who gets to step on U.S. soil and approach its ports of entry. Since July 2023, port-of-entry encounters have been within a narrow band: between 50,837 and 52,249. Of December’s encounters, CBP’s release indicates, 45,770 (88 percent, 1,476 per day) had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app.
Combine the Border Patrol and port-of-entry totals, and U.S. border authorities encountered 302,034 people at the U.S.-Mexico border last month. That is a record.
Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied children, or parents and children
46 percent of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between ports of entry in December were members of family units (41 percent) or minors who arrived unaccompanied (5 percent). That is the 24th-highest child-and-family share of Border Patrol’s last 147 months, and probably ever: high, but nowhere near a record.
The overall number of children and families (114,192), however, was the second-most ever, nearly matching the record set in September 2023.
CBP encounters with family units (parents with children)
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw the second-highest-ever monthly total of family unit-member encounters: 123,512, just short of September 2023’s record total of 123,815.
Family-unit encounters rose 19 percent from November to December. Citizens of Venezuela arriving as families accounted for 38 percent of the month-to-month increase, and citizens of Mexico accounted for 28 percent.
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 12,467 children arrive at the border unaccompanied. That was the 17th-highest monthly total ever, and a 5 percent increase over November 2023.
The nationalities that contributed most to the increase in unaccompanied child arrivals were Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Arrivals from El Salvador and Honduras both declined.
When the pandemic-area Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect, Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults skyrocketed. The reasoning was that (a) a large portion of adult migrants were seeking to evade apprehension, not turn themselves in to seek asylum; and (b) when Title 42 caused them to be expelled to Mexico after a very brief time in Border Patrol custody, many attempted to migrate again, leading to many more repeat apprehensions.
That was borne out in the months after Title 42 ended, when single adult apprehensions dropped sharply. However, even without a quick expulsions policy in place, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of single adult migrants between the ports of entry jumped 41 percent from November to December, from 96,478 to 135,593. This was the 8th largest monthly total of single adult migrant apprehensions of the past 147 months.
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 164,907 migrants arrive as single adults, a 32 percent increase over November (125,332). Single adult migrants from Venezuela and Guatemala accounted for nearly two-thirds of the increase, while citizens of Mexico declined slightly.
Eleven events about Latin America this week, that I know about, that can be attended in person in Washington or online anywhere.
(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)
Monday, January 29, 2024
10:00-11:00 at csis.org: El Salvador’s 2024 Elections: Voting in a One-Party State? (RSVP required).
3:00-4:00 at the Atlantic Council and atlanticcouncil.org: Industry Minister Víctor Bisonó on the Dominican Republic’s economic growth and resilience (RSVP required).
5:30-7:00 at Georgetown University and YouTube: Religious and Academic Freedom in Nicaragua (RSVP required).
11:00-1:00 at UNAM Zoom: Tensiones Constitucionales: Libertad de Expresión y Derechos de Autor en la Era Digital (RSVP required).
1:00-6:00 at Rutgers University and online: “La Marea Feminista”: Feminist Movements for Reproductive Justice and Against Gender -Based Violence and Exclusion (RSVP required).
Thursday, February 1, 2024
12:15 at the Atlantic Council and atlanticcouncil.org: Unlocking opportunities for the US-Suriname relationship (RSVP required).
I joined Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán and former U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley on the latest episode of Duzán's popular Spanish-language podcast. The episode was a scene-setter for the 2024 U.S. election campaign
I joined Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán and former U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley on the latest episode of Duzán’s popular Spanish-language podcast.
The episode was a scene-setter for the 2024 U.S. election campaign. Neither John nor I get called on to do a lot of this “election horserace” sort of punditry, but that may have made this a more engaging attempt to explain the current U.S. political moment to a non-U.S. audience.
Today, The American Conservative carried a piece just flat-out calling for sinking boats carrying refugees
A January 2018 Washington Post feature on “The Golden Age of Conservative Magazines” hailed The American Conservative as “an unheeded voice in the face of indifferent or hostile elite opinion.” In 2012, New York Times columnist David Brooks called the publication “one of the more dynamic spots on the political Web.”
And now? Today, The American Conservativecarried a piece just flat-out calling for sinking boats carrying refugees.
There’s even more, but you get the idea. The American right is on a hell of a journey.
Republican divisions may undo spending deal that would have restricted asylum access; Texas state government fumes after Supreme Court allows federal agents to cut razor wire; Migration remains lower in January, though there are some upticks
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Republicans’ efforts to tie migration restrictions to Ukraine aid are sputtering in the Senate, as former president and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump has been calling conservative Republican senators and urging them to reject a deal. This is happening even after Democrats appear to have agreed to major curbs on asylum access, and after negotiators were voicing cautious optimism that legislative text might appear this week.
In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and granted the federal Border Patrol permission to cut through razor-sharp concertina wire that Texas’s Republican-led state government has placed along the Rio Grande. The decision is limited in scope, not compelling Texas to do more than allow agents to cut or move wire. However, the state’s governor and some Republican legislators have invoked “invasion” rhetoric and even counseled ignoring the Supreme Court’s order.
Border Patrol appears to be apprehending 3,000 to 4,000 migrants per day border-wide, a sharp drop from an average of more than 8,000 per day in December. However, sector chiefs in Tucson and San Diego have reported increases following post-holiday lows. Migration levels in Honduras and Panama remain at their lowest in several months.
Republican divisions continue to generate confusion around a possible migration-restrictions-for-Ukraine-aid deal. Doctors Without Borders counted 676 victims of sexual violence last year in the Darién Gap.
Ex-president and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump is opposing a possible Senate deal that might restrict the right to asylum and other migration pathways in exchange for Republican assent to a package of spending for Ukraine aid and other priorities. Trump says the senators’ agreed migration restrictions—which remain undisclosed—are “another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats” because they don’t go far enough, and that he would handle the border after his election.
While this casts a cloud over their prospects of passing a deal, Senate negotiators and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) are pledging to forge ahead with negotiations despite Trump’s objections. As has been the case in several past weeks, they say that legislative language may emerge “next week.”
That language may include a new Title 42-style authority to expel asylum seekers from the United States when daily migrant encounters exceed a number, along with a higher standard that asylum seekers would have to meet to pass credible-fear screening interviews.
Negotiators don’t seem to have agreed on Republican demands to limit the presidential humanitarian parole authority. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News tweeted that proposals under discussion “have included numerical caps on parole grants, barring migrants with parole status from asylum and limiting the use of the authority at land borders.”
On January 24 McConnell had made comments casting doubt about whether, given Trump’s opposition, it made sense to keep pushing for the migration-restrictions deal. Yesterday, the Minority Leader—who has a poor relationship with Trump—adjusted his tone and threw support behind his party’s chief negotiator, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma).
“Trump’s push to kill the border deal to deny President Biden a legislative win is upsetting members on both sides of the aisle as negotiators hope to wrap up work on an agreement within days,” The Hill noted. Its reporting adds, though: “A senior aide to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told a group of Senate Republican chiefs of staff Thursday that the Senate border security pact has no chance of passing the House,” where the Republican majority may, like Trump, insist on harder-line migration restrictions.
Lead Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said Republicans are “going to make a decision in the next 24 hours as to whether they actually want to get something done, or whether they want to leave the border a mess for political reasons.”
“Giving up on a border security bill would be a self-inflicted GOP wound,” read an editorial from the Wall Street Journal’s very conservative editorial board. “President Biden would claim, with cause, that Republicans want border chaos as an election issue rather than solving the problem. Voter anger may over time move from Mr. Biden to the GOP, and the public will have a point.”
The Senate is out of session until Tuesday; negotiators expect to meet through the weekend.
Doctors without Borders, which operates two humanitarian facilities in the part of Panama where migrants emerge from the treacherous Darién Gap migration route, revealed that it “treated 676 survivors” of sexual violence in 2023—214 of them alone in December. “One act of sexual violence every three and a half hours in the Darién jungle” perpetrated by criminals against migrants in this lawless zone.
In Mexico’s southern-border city of Tapachula, about 1,500 migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other countries formed a new “caravan.” No caravan has succeeded in reaching the U.S. border since late 2018: the mass marches are now attempts to pressure the Mexican government to provide documentation. A much larger caravan that departed Tapachula over Christmas is much reduced and moving slowly through Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca.
“We are trying to seek the possibility of people staying in the southern part of Mexico, because the travel is dangerous,” Mexico’s foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, told PBS NewsHour.
A Honduran migrant who had arrived in Chihuahua city by train told Raíchali that “the National Guard asked them to ‘get off by force.’ When they refused, the agents climbed into the train cars and beat them to make them get off the train.”
25 Republican governors signed a statement backing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in his dispute with the Biden administration over Border Patrol agents’ access to border sites, cutting of state forces’ concertina wire, and other state efforts to block and arrest migrants and asylum seekers.
Representatives of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Panama met on January 24 and signed a “Panama City Declaration” committing to improved cooperation on protecting migrants in 2024.
At ICE’s detention centers, the DHS Inspector-General looked at 6 cases of hysterectomies performed on detained migrant women—and found that 2 of the hysterectomies were medically unnecessary, according to a new report.
A FWD.us survey of recent humanitarian parole recipients shows that nearly all are participating in the U.S. economy and “an extremely low share (3%)” is depending on private or government assistance.
A report from the Migration Policy Institute “examines the history of the federal government’s efforts to improve southwest border security in the modern era” and concludes that the response includes better interagency coordination and international partnerships.
“Far from developing a climate refugee status (not mentioned in the DHS plan), U.S. border policy for climate migrants is to deter people with walls, armed agents, technological surveillance, arrests, detention, deportation, and mind-boggling, slow-moving bureaucracy,” wrote Todd Miller at the Border Chronicle.
A Senate deal for asylum restrictions and Ukraine aid is on life support. Texas and DHS send letters as the federal-state dispute over border access hardens. Migration continues to be perhaps half of December's level.
In the Senate, Republican efforts to tie migration restrictions to Ukraine aid are sputtering, as former president and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump has been calling conservative Republican Senators and urging them to reject a deal.
The Biden administration has asked Congress for a $110.5 billion package of Ukraine and Israel aid, border spending, and other priorities. Republicans have refused to support the spending measure unless Democrats agree to include stricter border and migration measures; a small group of senators has been negotiating these demands since November.
Rights defenders and some Democratic legislators have sounded alarms about concessions that the negotiators may have already agreed on, including a new Title 42-like authority to expel asylum seekers on days of heavy migration (with a rumored threshold of 5,000 per day to trigger expulsions), tougher criteria for credible fear interviews, more detention, and perhaps some curbs on presidential humanitarian parole authority.
Senators on the Republican Party’s rightmost wing are arguing that the migration-restriction measures don’t go far enough. Hardline Republican senators apparently shouted at their moderate colleagues during a lunch meeting on January 23. They could scuttle a deal even before it goes to the Republican-majority House, where leaders may also take a hard line.
Just a few days ago, negotiators were raising expectations that a deal might be reached this week—that most of what remained was to work with appropriators to gauge the cost of the new restrictions. The change in prospects in the Senate is sharp, and indicates the sway that Donald Trump holds over the Republican Party.
The impasse may leave current asylum laws and standards in place, even as it puts in doubt the administration’s ability to provide Ukraine with new assistance to repel Russia’s invasion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who favors Ukraine aid, hinted yesterday that he might favor standing down and de-linking migration restrictions from the Ukraine package: “The politics on this have changed.”
“In effectively backing away from the border-security-for-Ukraine construct that Hill Republicans clung to for the last few months, McConnell is acknowledging Trump’s continued stranglehold on the GOP,” wrote Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan at Punchbowl News. “Democrats will get to say they made huge concessions on parole and asylum during these talks, and Trump tanked it.“
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) published an open letter asserting his state’s “constitutional right to self-defense” against an “invasion,” a term that conflates asylum seekers and economic migrants with an invading army. The missive follows a January 22 Supreme Court finding allowing the federal Border Patrol to access the Rio Grande riverbank by cutting through razor-sharp concertina wire laid by Texas state police and national guardsmen.
Some Republican politicians are urging Texas to ignore the Supreme Court ruling. This would be unconstitutional—but it’s not clear what “ignoring” means, since Monday’s ruling doesn’t compel Texas to do anything except abstain from confronting Border Patrol agents when they determine that they need to cut through the concertina wire.
The Court did not require Texas to remove any wire or prohibit Texas from adding new wire, as the state has been doing this week in Eagle Pass. The decision was limited to the scope of Texas’s October lawsuit seeking to stop agents from cutting it. That case remains before the federal courts’ 5th Circuit.
DHS sent Texas’s attorney-general a new letter (following one issued January 14) reiterating its demand that federal agents be permitted access to Shelby Park, which occupies 50 acres of riverfront border in Eagle Pass. The letter contends that the Supreme Court’s decision not only allows agents to cut the concertina wire but to be present in the park, and the border area in general.
Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector reported 6,025 migrant apprehensions during the week of January 17-23, a notable increase from 4,606 the previous week. Across the border, Border Patrol apprehended about 4,000 migrants on Tuesday, which remains a bit less than half the reported December average.
CBP sources leaked to Fox News an estimate that 96,000 migrants evaded detection during October-December 2023. If accurate, that would point to Border Patrol apprehending about 85 percent of attempted migrants, which is in line with the past few years and historically high.
“More Border Patrol agents will not stop what’s happening right now, we’re not having a difficulty encountering people,” Border Patrol Tucson Sector Chief John Modlin told Arizona Public Radio, referring to large numbers of asylum seekers turning themselves in to agents in remote Arizona desert. “The difficulty is what’s happening after we’re encountering them. That’s where the system is now overwhelmed.”
TRAC Immigration found a serious shortage of attorneys as the U.S. immigration courts’ backlog inflated to 3,287,058 cases by the end of December. In many cases, the shortage affects both sides: “ICE has adopted the practice of not sending an attorney to many hearings.”
The 42,637 northbound refugees and migrants recorded transiting Honduras in December included fewer Venezuelans, Cubans, and Haitians than in November, but 11 percent more people from Sub-Saharan African countries and 31 percent more from Asian countries, according to a UNHCR monitoring report.
As it has moved to abandon fentanyl smuggling, the Sinaloa Cartel faction controlled by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons is aggressively pursuing migrant smuggling, including ransom kidnappings, reported Milenio.
A letter from prominent Miami Cuban-American leaders, many of them Republican, urged House Republicans to abandon their effort to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is Cuban-American.
The Senate won't act this week on asylum-curbs-for-Ukraine-aid, but we might see legislative language. Texas hardliners are urging the state to defy a Supreme Court ruling on concertina wire.
Senators negotiating a border and migration deal now say that the chamber is unlikely to act this week on legislation that might fund the Biden administration’s request for aid to Ukraine and Israel, border spending, and other priorities, while meeting some Republican demands for new limits on asylum and perhaps other legal migration pathways. Negotiators had voiced mild optimism at the beginning of the week that they would reach agreement on migration measures and begin moving a bill forward.
There will be no bill this week, said chief Republican negotiator Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), but it is still possible that the negotiators might start sharing agreed-upon legislative text.
A major sticking point continues to be a Republican demand for new limits on the 70-year-old presidential authority to grant migrants temporary humanitarian parole, which the Biden administration has employed about 1 million times to reduce disorder at the border for lack of other legal pathways. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), a frequent participant in the negotiations, continues to insist on strong curbs on parole authority, but the Democrats, who have a 51-49 Senate majority, have resisted that.
Whatever is agreed must still go to the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority—at the increasingly vocal urging of former president Trump—is likely to demand even more limits on asylum and migration in exchange for Ukraine aid.
Some Texas Republicans are calling on Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to defy or ignore the Supreme Court’s January 22 finding that allows the federal Border Patrol to cut through razor-sharp concertina wire that the state’s security forces have laid along many miles of the Rio Grande.
“This opinion is unconscionable and Texas should ignore it on behalf of the [Border Patrol] agents who will be put in a worse position by the opinion and the Biden administration’s policies,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted on Twitter. (Roy chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.)
Biden administration officials have not said that they plan to remove Texas’s wire at the border, but agents now have the right to cut or move it in order to access migrants or people in distress along the riverbank. (Texas had filed suit in federal court last October to prohibit federal agents’ wire-cutting.)
Should Gov. Abbott use the Texas National Guard to defy the Court’s ruling or to continue blocking Border Patrol access to parts of the border, Democrats like Rep. Joaquín Castro (Texas) say that President Biden should place the Texas state military force under federal control.
Employees of the U.S. consulate in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, have been placed under curfew all week, as a security precaution following the arrest of “a high-level member of a criminal organization” near Monterrey, in nearby Nuevo León.
Organized crime in Tamaulipas preys heavily on migrants, David Agren wrote at National Catholic Reporter. “Everyone arrives kidnapped at the migrant shelter. People released from captivity arrive at the parish, at the Reynosa migrant shelter, too,” said longtime shelter manager Fr. Francisco Gallardo of the Diocese of Matamoros.
Republican senators contentiously raised border issues several times at an Armed Services Committee nomination hearing for Melissa Dalton, the Biden administration’s choice for Air Force secretary. Dalton has been serving as the assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs. Among much Republican criticism of the Biden administration’s border policy, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) asked Dalton, “Did you ever tell Secretary Mayorkas he was doing a crappy job?” (She had not.)
A January 23 CBP release details the death of a woman from Mexico on November 18 after she fell from the border wall in Clint, Texas, near El Paso. Three women had been “tied together” by their smugglers “about one foot apart as they climbed the barrier. When one woman panicked [upon seeing Border Patrol approaching], all three of them fell from the barrier.”
At Bloomberg Government, Ellen Gilmer analyzed the impact that House Republican efforts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, alleging failure to secure the border, have on morale at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “Homeland security professionals have concerns about impeachment’s long-term impacts on the department. The hearings and headlines further politicize the agency, undermine recruitment, and drive away prospective leaders, said the 20-year DHS career employee.”
At Capital & Main, Kate Morrissey reported on the dire situation of asylum seekers who are released onto U.S. streets after spending time in ICE detention facilities. “ICE, the agency responsible for long-term immigration detention, generally drops off people being released from its custody in San Diego sometime between 7 and 11 p.m. at a trolley station by the San Ysidro Port of Entry.”
“If there is one thing that Republicans have long understood keenly it is that fear drives voters to the polls. It’s why they’re not interested in solving the immigration puzzle,” wrote columnist Marcela García at the Boston Globe.
Because so many migrants now come from places other than Mexico and northern Central America, Amb. Mark Green of the Woodrow Wilson Center wrote, “Some of the policy tools we’ve been using in an attempt to control migration are likely to prove inadequate—such as the Partnership for Prosperity/Remain in Mexico policy.”
Photo: At Washington's 9:30 Club, Karly Hartzman screams through the harrowing final minutes of "Bull Believer," from last year's phenomenal album Rat Saw God.
At Washington’s 9:30 Club, Karly Hartzman screams through the harrowing final minutes of “Bull Believer,” from last year’s phenomenal album Rat Saw God.
A podcast about current migration trends at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the Americas.
Here’s a podcast about current regional migration trends that I recorded last Friday with Maureen and Stephanie from WOLA. They were brilliant. Here’s the text from the podcast landing page at wola.org:
As congressional negotiations place asylum and other legal protection pathways at risk, and as we approach a 2024 election year with migration becoming a higher priority for voters in the United States, we found it important to discuss the current moment’s complexities.
WOLA’s vice president for Programs, Maureen Meyer, former director for WOLA’s Mexico Program and co-founder of WOLA’s migration and border work, is joined by Mexico Program Director Stephanie Brewer, whose work on defense of human rights and demilitarization in Mexico has focused often on the rights of migrants, including a visit to the Arizona-Sonora border at the end of 2023.
This episode highlights some of the main migration trends and issues that we should all keep an eye on this year, including:
Deterrence efforts will never reduce migration as long as the reasons people are fleeing remain unaddressed (the long-standing “root causes” approach). Such policies will only force people into more danger and fuel organized crime. “The question is not, are people going to migrate? The question is, where, how, and with who?”, explains Brewer.
For this reason, maintaining consistent and reliable legal pathways is more important than ever, and the ongoing assaults on these pathways—including the right to seek asylum and humanitarian parole—are harmful and counterproductive.
There can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution for the variety of populations currently in movement, and the focus should no longer be on ineffective policies of deterrence and enforcement. “It’s a long term game that certainly doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker for political campaigns,” Meyer points out.
Organized crime is a huge factor in regional migration—both as a driver of migration and as a facilitator. Official corruption and impunity enable these systems, a point that migration policies often fail to address. Brewer notes that during her trip to Arizona’s southern border in December 2023, the vast majority of migrants she spoke to were Mexican, and among them, the vast majority cited violence and organized crime as the driving factor. In recent months, Mexican families have been the number one nationality coming to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.
It is a regional issue, not just a U.S. issue, as people are seeking asylum and integration in many different countries. Mexico, for instance, received 140,000 asylum applications in 2023. This makes integration efforts extremely important: many people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border had attempted to resettle elsewhere first. “It’s a twofold of the legal status itself, but then real integration efforts that are both economic and educational, but also addressing xenophobia and not creating resentment in local communities,” explains Meyer.
In a brief 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and granted the federal Border Patrol permission to cut through the spools of concertina wire that Texas’s state government has placed along dozens of miles of border along the Rio Grande. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the high court’s three Democratic appointees.
In late October, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had banned federal agents from cutting the razor-sharp wire, as they had been doing in order to access asylum seekers and people in distress along the riverbank. While a federal district court sided with the administration, the 5th Circuit had allowed Texas’s ban to remain in place while appeals proceeded, leading the Department of Justice to seek an emergency action from the Supreme Court. Texas’s appeal is ongoing, with arguments scheduled for February 7.
The January 22 Supreme Court ruling does not affect Texas’s January 10 banning of Border Patrol agents from a 50-acre riverfront park in Eagle Pass. Nor does it affect Texas’s placement of a string of buoys in the river in Eagle Pass, which remains while the 5th Circuit considers an appeal of its own earlier ruling ordering their removal.
“Border Patrol is not planning to use the order as a green light to remove the razor wire barriers if they do not present an immediate hazard,” a “senior agency official” told the Washington Post.
As of last August, Texas state police had treated 133 migrants for injuries caused by the concertina wire.
Since November, a small group of senators has been negotiating a compromise that might allow the Biden administration’s request for $110.5 billion in Ukraine and Israel aid, new border spending, and other priorities to move forward, in exchange for Republican demands for restrictions on asylum and perhaps on other migration pathways. Senators now say they are near agreement on what those restrictions will be, and that legislative language could emerge this week.
“Our work is largely done. The conversation has really moved over to Appropriations. So, there’s no reason why we couldn’t begin consideration this week,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), the Democrats’ chief negotiator and the chairman of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. “We are at the point of drafting and finalizing text.”
“It’s not going to be ready today, to be able to go out. Everybody’s got to have several days to be able to go through it. It’s gonna depend on final timing – it would be quite a push to be able to get it out this week,” said lead Senate negotiator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma).
The deal may include a Title 42-style authority to expel asylum seekers, regardless of protection needs, when daily migrant encounters exceed a certain number at the U.S.-Mexico border. It may also raise the standard of “credible fear” that asylum seekers must meet when placed in screening interviews with asylum officers, a process known as “expedited removal.” The agreement might also increase detention of asylum seekers pending adjudication of their cases.
It is not clear whether senators have resolved Republican demands for limits on the 70-year-old presidential authority to offer temporary “humanitarian parole” to some migrants. The Biden administration has paroled over 1 million migrants, including 422,000 people who came to ports of entry after securing appointments with the CBP One smartphone app; 340,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela permitted to apply online; and 176,000 beneficiaries of the “Uniting for Ukraine” policy.
“The emerging Senate deal seeks to reduce parole numbers by tightening immigration enforcement and speeding up processing,” the New York Times reported. “There are some changes that will be made in parole that I think will get at the abuse and misuse of it,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-South Dakota). CBS News reported that a compromise deal might exclude paroled people from applying for asylum, but official sources consulted by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent denied that.
Another barrier to agreement is appropriations: if Republicans win new limits on asylum and other migration, implementing them will cost money, and legislative language will have to account for that.
If senators do reach a deal this week, “we’d expect the Senate to stay in session for as long as it takes to complete action on the measure,” wrote John Bresnahan at Punchbowl News. “Meaning through the weekend or whatever it takes for a final vote.”
Even if the Senate passes a Ukraine-Israel-border bill, it would then go to the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority, egged on by former president Donald Trump, may demand even stricter limits on migration.
At The Hill, Rafael Bernal highlighted the absence of Congressional Hispanic Caucus members from the Senate negotiations on restricting protection-seeking migration in exchange for Ukraine and other aid.
A statement from Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, revealed that the U.S. government repatriated migrants on 79 flights between January 1 and 21. The planes returned people to Guatemala (36 flights), Honduras (23), El Salvador (6), Colombia (3), Venezuela (3), Ecuador (2), Peru (2), Romania / India (1), Dominican Republic (1), Nicaragua (1), and Haiti (1).
Salazar’s statement credited Mexico with dismantling “at least 10 of the most prolific criminal organizations” engaged in migrant smuggling.
“On December 18 we had a pressure on the border of 12,498 migrants (per day) and we managed to reduce it to 6,751,” Mexico’s foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, said at a presidential press conference on January 22.
Nine Democratic governors sent a letter to the White House and Congress calling for federal aid to help manage arrivals of migrants seeking refuge in their states.
This week's edition has a fair amount of content, including a weekly Border Update, a panel discussion, and a look at Colombia's peace process over the past month.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This week’s edition has a fair amount of content, including a weekly Border Update, a panel discussion, and a look at Colombia’s peace process over the past month. And of course, upcoming events and some recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
U.S. and Mexican officials meet. Eagle Pass federal-state dispute simmers. Caravan dispersed in Guatemala. Migration is mostly down but may be leveling off.
Several cabinet-level officials from the United States and Mexico met in Washington on January 19 “to follow up on migration commitments made on December 27.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Foreign Relations Secretary Alicia Bárcena, and other top officials “discussed the positive impact of efforts to increase migration controls on bus and train routes, crack down on criminal smuggling networks, and scale up repatriations for those who do not have a legal basis to remain in our countries,” according to a State Department readout. U.S. officials are giving Mexico’s actions much credit for January’s reduction in migrant encounters at the border.
Mexico’s Foreign Ministry announced that U.S. and Mexican representatives will soon pay a visit to Panama’s Darién Gap migration corridor. They will also meet soon to discuss migration with the newly inaugurated government in Guatemala.
Texas authorities recovered a body from the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park, the area where Texas’s state government has barred entry of Border Patrol agents. A woman and two children drowned in the area on January 12. “Caught in the middle” of the state-federal dispute in Eagle Pass “are residents of this mostly Mexican American town of 28,000 residents, some who say they feel helpless after the state seized their park,” reads an overview by Uriel García at the Texas Tribune.
Guatemalan police dispersed an attempted caravan of about 500 mostly Venezuelan and Honduran migrants who had crossed into Guatemalan territory on January 20. (As often happens, most of the migrants will instead re-enter through irregular border crossings and seek to avoid detection, often hiring smugglers or bribing officials to do so.)
In Mexico, a “caravan” that left the Mexico-Guatemala border zone at Christmas remains in the southern state of Oaxaca. About 1,400 participants are aiming to get to Mexico City on foot, as Mexico has prohibited vehicles from transporting them.
Migration has declined sharply in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, which from 2013 to 2021 was first in migrant encounters among Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, the Washington Examiner reported. An increase in organized crime violence on the Mexican side of the border, in the conflictive state of Tamaulipas, may be a key reason for the reduction.
Currently, the busiest of the nine Border Patrol sectors is Tucson, Arizona. There, Sector Chief John Modlin tweeted that agents apprehended 11,900 migrants between January 12-18. That is a significant drop from 18,000-19,000 per week during the first 3 weeks of December 2023, but an increase over 9,200 apprehensions the week of January 5-11.
Apprehensions remain low in the El Paso Sector (far west Texas and New Mexico): 470 per day during the week of January 12-18, down from over 1,000 per day in December.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and the ranking Democrat on the chamber’s Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) are part of a four-person delegation to the U.S.-Mexico border and to Mexico City. Rep. McCaul voiced “worry about the mental health of our Border Patrol. The suicide rate is going up. They don’t have the proper resources.”
President Biden told reporters on January 19 that the border is not secure: “I haven’t believed that for the last 10 years, and I’ve said it for the last 10 years. Give me the money.” In prepared remarks, he added, “I’m ready to solve the problem. I really am. Massive changes. And I mean it sincerely.”
A release from the Texas governor’s office broke down a total of 101,800 migrants placed on buses since April 2022, at state expense, to Washington, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and Los Angeles.
A potential deal in the Senate for tighter asylum restrictions for Ukraine aid “is already wobbling, as House Speaker Mike Johnson faces intense pressure from Trump and his House allies to demand more sweeping concessions from Democrats and the White House,” read an Associated Press analysis. “This febrile atmosphere makes the chances of border reform—tricky even under a more productive Congress—look slim,” the Economist observed. “Plenty of Republicans will conclude that this is no bad thing.” A New York Times analysis noted, “Election-year politics is playing a big role.”
60 House of Representatives members in the New Democrat Coalition signed a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) calling on him to negotiate a migration-restrictions-for-Ukraine-aid deal in good faith.
A backgrounder from the International Refugee Assistance Project explained the Biden administration’s “Safe Mobility Offices” in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. These are a so-far limited effort to make legal immigration pathways available to some migrants in those countries, so that they may avoid traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. The document includes a flowchart laying out the Offices’ complex approval process.
Two conservative media outlets, Fox News and NewsMax, published stories over the weekend reporting on organized crime violence in Mexican border cities. “No one wants to work on anything else right now. Everyone wants to work with the migrants because you can make a lot of money from it these days and it is easy work,” according to a quote from a cartel member in Ciudad Juárez that appeared in both articles.
“President Joe Biden’s third year in office was another letdown” at the border for both immigration restrictionists and immigrant rights advocates, wrote the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli.
A round of talks ended with the largest FARC dissident group, the ELN talks are to resume soon amid kidnapping controversies, the UN performed a quarterly review.
Negotiators from the government and the “Central General Staff” (EMC)—the group of FARC dissidents that rejected the peace accord before its 2016 signing—completed a third, ten-day round of negotiations on January 18. Commitments included a dissident pledge to cease recruiting minors, a government pledge to evaluate the situation of jailed EMC members, and steps toward a negotiating agenda that will include environmental issues. They also ratified earlier agreements to halt EMC kidnappings and to extend a bilateral ceasefire through July 15.
With support from the UN and OAS peace missions, four out of five regional offices for verification of the EMC ceasefire have now been established: in Arauca, Santander, Meta, and Putumayo.
At the UN Security Council’s quarterly review of peace accord implementation in Colombia, on January 11, the U.S. representative withheld—for now—U.S. government support for including EMC ceasefire verification within the UN peace mission’s mandate. “These agreements still lack maturity,” said U.S. Acting Deputy Permanent Representative Elisabeth Millard.
Citing “intelligence reports,” El Tiempo estimated that the EMC “has, counting all its structures, 3,480 people in arms.”
Representatives of the Security Council will visit Colombia in February, the UN body announced during its January 11 quarterly review of Colombia’s peace efforts.
Government and ELN negotiators are to hold a sixth round of talks in Cuba from January 22 to February 6. High Commissioner for Peace Otty Patiño repeated the government’s insistence that the current ceasefire, which must be renewed by January 29, include an end to ELN kidnappings and the release of all remaining guerrilla captives.
The government reportedly gave the ELN a list of 26 kidnapped people whose release it demands. Army Sgt. Libey Danilo Bravo, whose the ELN kidnapped in Arauca for three weeks last February and March, told La Silla Vacía that the guerrillas took him to a makeshift prison across the border in Venezuela that they called “Alcatraz,” where they were holding ten other people.
ELN leader Antonio García said that the group would require government financing to sustain itself if it were to suspend ransom kidnappings while peace talks continue. Patiño said that the government would only seriously consider financing if the ELN committed to the conflict’s end “in a decisive and clear way.”
Between December 4 and January 3, the think-tank CERAC counted three ELN offensive actions considered to be ceasefire violations: a homicide, a kidnapping, and an armed attack on a vehicle.
Otty Patiño expanded his staff at the High Commissioner for Peace office from 13 to 149 people, a number closer to the staffing strength that existed during the government of Iván Duque (2018-2022).
On January 14 in Pitalito, Huila, José Enrique Roa Cruz became the third FARC ex-combatant to be killed in 2024 and at least the 411th since the former guerrilla group’s 2017 demobilization. The UN Verification mission counted 47 killings in 2023, the fewest since 2017.
The Petro government transferred 363 billion pesos (US$93 million) to the Presidency’s Implementation Unit, where it will go toward ex-combatant reintegration programs and the Territorially Focused Development Programs (PDET) foreseen in chapter 1 of the 2016 peace accord.
In addition to moving the ELN and EMC peace processes forward, in 2024 the Petro administration has big decisions to make about the future of talks with regional gangs, with the Segunda Marquetalia FARC dissident group, and with the Gulf Clan paramilitary structure, wrote Camilo Pardo and Cindy Morales at El Espectador. The Catholic Church’s representative to the peace process, Msgr. Héctor Fabio Henao, told El Espectador that no roadmap currently exists for eventual talks with the Segunda Marquetalia and the Gulf Clan.
“Colombia’s quest for ‘total peace’…has become a thorny path, with some progress, but slower than President Gustavo Petro had anticipated,” according to an Associated Press analysis.
On September 10, I decided to make my Twitter account "dormant," posting instead to my own site, along with other spaces. Traffic to my site has multiplied roughly eightfold in four months.
I was a heavy Twitter user, posting a few times per day, with a healthy following. But by last year, months into the Musk reign, I’d had enough. On September 10, I decided to make my Twitter account “dormant,” using it only to post links to resources published elsewhere, like on this site.
The result, measured in visits to this site, has been staggering:
From just over 1,000 visits per month to nearly 10,000, in about 4 months.
I’m regretting not having moved earlier to cut back my social media use, and intensify blogging which, though 25 years old, remains a very vital tool for communicating.
Video: With Elizabeth Oglesby of the University of Arizona and Diego de Sola of Glasswing International, we talked about the causes of migration away from Central America, and the good and bad of U.S. policies, past and present.
(Not sure why I’m making that facial expression.)
Many thanks to New York-based Network 20/20, an organization “that bridges the gap between the private sector and foreign policy worlds,” for inviting me to participate in a virtual panel last Thursday. With Elizabeth Oglesby of the University of Arizona and Diego de Sola of Glasswing International, we talked about the causes of migration away from Central America, and the good and bad of U.S. policies, past and present.
* A tragic drowning in Eagle Pass, two days after Texas bars Border Patrol from riverfront
* Senate continues negotiating a spending compromise that could curtail asylum access
* Migration has declined, at least momentarily
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 the most recent escalation of its hardline border policies, the state government of Texas barred Border Patrol agents from a riverfront park in the border city of Eagle Pass. Two days later, a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande. Texas National Guardsmen prohibited Border Patrol from entering the park even in emergencies. The Biden administration sent Texas a cease-and-desist letter, and the state-federal jurisdictional clash will likely go to federal court.
Following a meeting between President Biden and congressional leadership, top senators said a deal could emerge next week that might allow the President’s request for Ukraine aid and other priorities to move forward. The price would be meeting some Republican demands for restrictions on asylum and perhaps other migration pathways, which a small group of senators continues to negotiate. Even if senators reach a deal, it could fail in the Republican-majority House, where demands for migration curbs are more extreme.
After setting records in December, migration encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped by more than half since the holidays. Biden administration officials claim that Mexico’s government has contributed to the drop with more aggressive migration control efforts. Numbers are also down significantly in the treacherous Darién Gap region between Colombia and Panama.
Mexican officials are in Washington today. Migration is declining in January at the U.S.-Mexico border and the Darién Gap. Senate negotiators on the Ukraine adi bill appear to agree on some degree of asylum-seeker expulstions, but their agreement could fail in the Republican-majority House of Representatives.
A high-level delegation of officials from Mexico is in Washington today to discuss measures to control U.S.-bound migration. “U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall are representing the United States, with Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Alicia Barcena leading the visiting delegation,” Voice of America reported.
In a briefing, U.S. officials said they do not anticipate announcing any major agreement following today’s meetings. They credited Mexican efforts to block migrants, along with seasonal declines, for January’s decrease in migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border. “We were seeing 10- to 12,000 people a day back in December. Now it’s 2,800, 3,100 people a day,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who represents a border district, told the Washington Post.
In preparation for today’s high-level meetings, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Troy Miller and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar met yesterday with the commissioner of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), Francisco Garduño. Garduño is facing criminal charges in Mexico for alleged mismanagement and corruption of INM officials that led to 40 migrants dying in a March 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez detention facility.
Human Rights Watch issued a statement urging the Mexican government to reject any agreement with the Biden administration that would send asylum seekers back to Mexico.
The Title 42-style expulsion of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border appears to be a consensus element of negotiations between a small group of senators seeking a formula that might grant the Biden administration’s request for Ukraine aid and other priorities, while meeting Republican demands for restrictions on asylum and other migration. Reporting points to Senate negotiators agreeing on expelling asylum seekers, regardless of protection needs, if daily migrant encounters at the border exceed a certain number. Such a measure would require Mexico to accept expelled migrants, as it did for citizens of seven countries during the COVID pandemic.
The senators might reveal consensus legislative language as early as next week. Still, the agreement’s prospects for passing the Republican-majority House of Representatives have grown dimmer. While he claims to support Ukraine aid, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has called for tougher limits on asylum and other migration pathways in the funding bill than what are likely to appear in the Democratic-majority Senate’s version. And former president Donald Trump is now vocally opposing the Senate deal, even before its contents are known.
The House and Senate passed legislation keeping the government open at 2023 funding levels through early March. Conservative House Republicans briefly sought to include hard-line border and migration language in this “continuing resolution,” but in the end, the chamber passed a “clean” funding bill.
Panama’s security minister will meet today with Colombian counterparts to discuss efforts to curb organized crime and migrant smuggling in the Darién Gap.
The treacherous jungle region has seen four months of declines in migration, from a record 81,946 people in August to a 12-month low of 24,626 in December. Still, a remarkable 520,085 people migrated through the Darién in 2023, more than double the previous record set in 2022.
Numbers continue to drop: the deputy director of Panama’s National Migration Service said that more than 6,000 people passed through the Darién during the first 12 days of January, a rate that—if sustained—would mean less than 16,000 migrants for the month, the fewest since June 2022.
ICE removed a reported 61 people aboard a plane to Haiti yesterday. “The timing of this removal flight breaks the full-year 2023 pattern of 1 flight each month at the END of the month so I’ll be watching to see if the pattern moves to 2 per month,” tweeted Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border, who closely monitors removal flights.
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is inciting a conflict between Border Patrol and the state’s National Guard that is inching closer and closer toward a violent clash between armed agents of state and federal law enforcement,” warned Mark Joseph Stern at Slate.
Chelsie Kramer and Emma Winger warned at the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact blog, “The stakes are high. If allowed to stand, other states might set up their own immigration enforcement schemes, splintering the already complex immigration system and leading to widespread arrests and deportations without key federal protections.”
“During the Civil Rights Movement, there were three major crises in which Southern governors, refusing orders to desegregate schools, attempted to defy the federal government,” recalled a San Antonio Express-News editorial.
“The Biden administration seems out of ideas. And standing behind a standard-bearer deploying xenophobia as a selling point in a hotly contested bid for reelection, Republican calls to “secure the border” amount to little more than a political bludgeon,” wrote Eduardo Porter at the Washington Post.
“In the past, the majority [of Mexican citizens crossing the border] were migrants of opportunity, largely single men, and some women, looking for work opportunities,” Princeton University migration expert Douglas Massey told James North at the New Republic. “But in recent years, we now see from Mexico migrants of despair—entire families, including children. …What we have on the border now is a humanitarian crisis, and not really an immigration crisis.”
Cuba’s El Toque recalled that Cuban migrants who receive humanitarian parole—those who use the Biden administration’s sponsorship program, and those who seek asylum via CBP One appointments at the border—are not eligible for the Cuban Adjustment Act, which normally allows Cuban citizens to apply for U.S. residency after a year in the United States.
An Associated Press article explained the humanitarian parole authority, a big sticking point in Senate negotiations over adding migration restrictions to the Biden administration’s Ukraine funding request.
The Border Chronicle featured a photo narrative about U.S. surveillance technology along the border, created by Arizona-based geographer Dugan Meyer and photographer Colter Thomas.
Biden and congressional leaders talk about a Ukraine aid for asylum restrictions deal. Mexican officials are coming to Washington to talk migration. Texas is now arresting migrants in the Eagle Pass park where it is banning Border Patrol. Freezing temperatures threaten migrants stuck outdoors.
President Biden hosted top congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday, where senior administration officials urged them to approve a $110.5 billion request for funding for Ukraine, Israel, border efforts, and other priorities. Congressional Republicans are holding up the request with demands for changes to U.S. law that would reduce migrants’ access to asylum and other legal pathways.
Senate leaders said that they are close to a deal that might allow the legislation to move ahead as early as next week. That deal might include a Title 42-like authority to expel asylum seekers, regardless of protection needs, when migrant encounters exceed a daily threshold. It might also require asylum seekers subjected to “credible fear” screening interviews to prove a higher standard of threat.
Democrats continue to resist Republican demands that the deal restrict the 70-year-old presidential authority to grant temporary humanitarian parole to some migrants. Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-South Dakota) said that parole is the chief Republican demand that remains unresolved.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) indicated that his chamber’s Republican majority will demand even stricter measures than what is likely to emerge from Senate negotiations, like a reinstatement of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy. Republican senators are pushing back, insisting that stricter measures cannot pass the Democratic-majority Senate.
On Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told Speaker Johnson that ex-president Donald Trump told her he opposes the likely Senate deal and wants Johnson to oppose it too. As most House Republicans are tightly loyal to Trump, this is a severe blow to the funding package’s prospects.
A delegation of Mexican government officials, led by the secretaries of foreign relations, defense, and navy, will be in Washington on Friday to discuss migration with the U.S. secretaries of state and homeland security.
The House of Representatives passed a brief resolution “denouncing the Biden administration’s open-borders policies.” Fourteen Democrats voted for it, including two representing south Texas border districts.
H. Res. 957 (U.S. House of Representatives, January 17, 2024).
On Thursday the House Homeland Security Committee will hold its second hearing seeking to establish House Republicans’ case for impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on grounds of failing to secure the border and halt migration. House Republicans are working on a fast timetable, though it is not clear whether they have enough votes to impeach within their own caucus. A letter from 26 former senior DHS officials, from both Republican and Democratic administrations, opposed the impeachment proceedings.
Late Wednesday, Texas authorities announced their first arrests of migrants, on state trespassing charges, in a large park along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass where police and national guardsmen have barred Border Patrol from operating for the past seven days.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had given Texas until the end of the day Wednesday to rescind its order and allow Border Patrol to operate in Shelby Park, at which time it would refer the matter to the Department of Justice. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton published a letter on Wednesday rejecting DHS’s demand.
A woman and two children from Mexico drowned in the river near the park last Friday night; Texas’s ban left Border Patrol agents unable to be present to detect or rescue them.
In an unusual move, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to reconsider its December ruling ordering Texas to remove a 1,000-foot string of buoys placed down the middle of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Texas had asked the court for an “en banc” hearing of all 17 of its active judges, a request that gets granted only about 1 percent of the time. That hearing will happen in May; in the meantime, the buoys may remain in the river. Most of the Circuit’s 17 active judges are Republican appointees, though the 3-judge panel that ordered the buoys removed included 2 Democratic appointees.
Very low temperatures are threatening asylum seekers gathered outdoors along the border, especially in southern Arizona and in Matamoros, Mexico across from Brownsville, Texas. As many as 1,000 people await processing in the Tohono O’odham Nation lands along the border in remote desert southwest of Tucson, and others continue to arrive near Sásabe, just west of Nogales.
After a night in crowded shelters in Matamoros, most migrants waiting in an outdoor camp have returned to a precarious tent encampment despite the freezing temperatures. The Sidewalk School, a charity that operates in Matamoros and Reynosa, is appealing for donations to help provide for them.
After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) appeared poised to reject a possible bipartisan Senate deal to restrict access to asylum at the border—arguing that it doesn’t go far enough—Republican senators urged Johnson to reconsider. Senate negotiators have been discussing restrictions on asylum—including a possible Title 42-style expulsion authority—in exchange for Republican support of a White House request for funding for Ukraine, Israel, border operations, and other priorities.
In the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to move legislation forward, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), John Thune (R-South Dakota), and others argued that it will be impossible to get enough moderate Democrats to go along with migration restrictions in the future, if a Republican president is elected. “This is a unique moment in time. It’s an opportunity to get some conservative border policy,” Thune said. Senate Republicans’ lead negotiator, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), had a phone call with Speaker Johnson, who reiterated his support for the hard-line bill (H.R. 2) that passed his chamber on a party-line vote last May.
President Biden will meet with congressional leadership at the White House today to push for passage of his funding request.
“Maybe they [Border Patrol] could have prevented this because they would have seen what was happening” using their “scope trucks,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who was among the first to denounce the death of three migrants in the Rio Grande while Texas national guardsmen barred Border Patrol from accessing a riverfront park in Eagle Pass. Since Cuellar’s January 13 statement, a Border Patrol official clarified that the mother and two children had already drowned when Texas blocked agents from Shelby Park. Still, as a Department of Justice Supreme Court filing noted, it is “impossible to say what might have happened if Border Patrol had had its former access to the area.”
Texas officials granted NewsNation correspondent Jorge Ventura to the park yesterday, where he posted video of Texas guardsmen using riot shields to block a migrant from entering the park to turn himself in.
Texas Democrats held a press call at which some, like Rep. Joaquín Castro of San Antonio, demanded that President Biden federalize Texas’s National Guard. “I want to be very clear what is happening in Texas right now is incredibly dangerous,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso.
One state legislator, Eddie Morales of Eagle Pass, called on Biden to suspend access to asylum temporarily. “I spoke with multiple Reps who clarified that he [Morales] is alone in this position,” tweeted Pablo de la Rosa of Texas Public Radio.
Several Democratic senators, including some facing tough re-election races this year, introduced the “Stop Fentanyl at the Border Act,” which would increase funding for CBP officers, Border Patrol agents, scanners for ports of entry, and similar items.
Mexican authorities arrested in Cancún, and deported to Bogotá, Nelson Enrique Bautista Reatiga alias “Poporro,” who Colombia’s police chief called a “main coordinator” of smuggling Colombian migrants to the United States. He allegedly helped Colombian, Peruvian, and other South American citizens arrive at the U.S. border after flying to Mexico, which citizens of Colombia and Peru can mostly do visa-free.
“Moderate Democratic legislators can tell themselves and their constituents that reaching this type of deal is a way to stop abuse of the asylum system and won’t turn away ‘worthy’ claimants, but that’s simply a lie,” wrote Felipe de la Hoz at the New Republic.
At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque reports of encountering NewsMax reporter Jaeson Jones reporting from an Arizona site where asylum seekers had arrived, while accompanied by several masked, armed men “wearing hats marked with the logo of the Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence and Counterterrorism division.” The men confronted humanitarian volunteers in the area and identified themselves as providers of “intelligence for House committees, including the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.”
A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll finds that 30 percent of California Democratic voters believe that the U.S.-Mexico border is not secure.
I'm in today's edition of Y Esto No Es Todo, the Spanish-language podcast of Georgetown University's Americas Institute, talking with host Juan Carlos Iragorri about the U.S. federal government's movement toward reclassifying marijuana as a lower-risk drug
I’m in today’s edition of Y Esto No Es Todo, the Spanish-language podcast of Georgetown University’s Americas Institute, talking with host Juan Carlos Iragorri about the U.S. federal government’s movement toward reclassifying marijuana as a lower-risk drug. Here are my comments in English:
Well, it’s pretty important that the U.S. federal government is following in the footsteps of the states and softening its standards on marijuana a bit. And it’s happening for a number of reasons.
First, because the boomer generation, those who were born after World War II, almost all of them lived or experimented with marijuana as young people and they know it didn’t do them much harm. And that has really changed attitudes quite a bit in the last 20, 30 years about marijuana laws.
Also the fact that marijuana is less addictive than other drugs that are lower, in fact, in the scheme that the DEA uses to classify drugs, like cocaine. Cocaine is much more addictive. Alcohol is legal and it’s more addictive. Then marijuana is seen as maybe something that carries less social harm, health harm, than some of the others. And now the fact that more and more medicinal uses are being discovered is quite important.
The third is simply that enforcing anti-marijuana laws is draining the resources of police across the country. Instead of having to catch those who are using or selling marijuana, they can focus on drugs and much more serious criminal phenomena. And that’s freeing up a lot more resources. And you see that in states where marijuana has been legalized or regulated, there are no increases in violent crime in recent years.
So all of that is changing attitudes. And finally the federal government is recognizing the reality that several states have already recognized.
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