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In this week’s WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
Visiting Brazil, French President Emmanuel Macron highlighted binational cooperation on submarines, which began in 2008. Brazil has used French technical assistance to build three of four planned diesel attack subs. While Brazil is cooperating with France’s Naval Group corporation on a Brazilian-built nuclear submarine, France is reluctant to transfer the most advanced technologies.
The U.S. government delivered to Ecuador a C-130H cargo aircraft and a mobile police barracks. The latter is a series of shipping containers converted into sleeping areas, food service, and other facilities for police operating along Ecuador’s border with Colombia. According to U.S. Ambassador Michael Fitzpatrick, the cargo plane, built in 1974 and part of Afghanistan’s Air Force between 1988 and 2021, is valued at $12 million.
At the aircraft handover event, Amb. Fitzpatrick also “highlighted an investment of US$10 million to rehabilitate the FAE’s fleet of Super Tucanos [Brazilian-made attack aircraft] and the delivery of night vision tools and weapons for the Ecuadorian military,” according to the Ecuadorian daily Primicias.
Faced with a possible Russian embargo on Ecuadorian bananas, the government in Quito abandoned a plan to send used “junk” Russian-made equipment to the United States in exchange for a shipment of U.S.-made items. The plan apparently had been to hand over Ecuador’s Russian-made equipment to the government of Ukraine.
Bolivia’s minister of government announced that the European Union (EU) had provided 20 million Bolivianos’ (about US$2.9 million) worth of “weapons, equipment, clothing, and reconditioned aircraft” to the Bolivian police force’s Special Force for the Fight against Drug Trafficking (FELCN). An EU communiqué sought to clarify, however, that its counter-drug aid to Bolivia “includes or can be used for the purchase of armaments.” The Ministry of Government, in response, specified that the aid included “night vision devices and portable equipment for the identification of controlled substances.”
Chile’s national police force (Carabineros) took delivery of four Hunter TR-12 armored vehicles built in Colombia by Armor International.
In protest of Israel’s human rights abuses in Gaza, Chile’s government banned Israeli companies from its annual International Air and Space Fair (FIDAE), one of Latin America’s largest air shows.
For the same reason, Colombia’s government has suspended all military trade with Israel. Major Israeli defense items in Colombia’s arsenal include the Atmos artillery system, the Barax air defense system, about 300,000 Galil rifles, and some aging Kfir fighter jets.
Colombia is discussing with the United States a possible purchase of F-16 fighter planes, which cost roughly US$160 million apiece, to replace the Kfirs.
Colombia is also discussing with the United States a possible purchase of more UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. That helicopter model was a central item in the United States’ “Plan Colombia” arms transfers of the 2000s; combining grants and purchases, Colombia has the world’s sixth-largest Black Hawk fleet.
The U.S. State Department blocked the export of all U.S.-originated defense articles to Nicaragua’s authoritarian government. While the United States has not been transferring such articles to Nicaragua, the measure seeks to stop third countries from transferring to Nicaragua any items with U.S.-made components.
Venezuela obtained a “Hunter SHH100” anti-drone system from Skyfend, a Chinese company.
Some of the F-16 jets that Venezuela purchased from the United States in the years before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 election are still operable. Three of them took part in an early March military exercise.
“Uruguay is negotiating the purchase of weapons, radars, and military trucks with the United States,” noted Southern Command’s Diálogo website.
In late 2023, Honduras purchased 10 South African-built “Black Mamba” armored police vehicles and has already begun using the two that have been delivered on operations in urban neighborhoods.
Peru has almost completed a $25.5 million overhaul of four Russian-made Mi-8MTV-1 Hip H transport helicopters belonging to its army. Defensa.com reported that Peru has renovated more than 15 Russian helicopters in its arsenal in the past 5 years; many of them sustained bullet impacts on operations in the VRAEM region, where Shining Path remnants continue to operate.
Much of Peru’s army equipment is Russian-made, the result of a changeover made when Peru was ruled by a left-leaning military dictatorship that came to power in 1968.
Catching up on what was said at a House Homeland hearing last week about the CBP One app, which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using to allow 1,450 asylum seekers per day inside Mexico use to make appointments at U.S. land border ports of entry.
An official from CBP’s Office of Field Operations told the Committee that:
There is clearly a need for more appointments, as the number of asylum seekers crossing illegally to turn themselves in to Border Patrol is still a multiple of those who manage to get appointments at ports of entry using the app. And in some parts of the border, investigators from the University of Texas Strauss Center have documented, the wait is now as much as six months.
See also:
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.
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Migration at the U.S.-Mexico border usually increases in springtime. That is not happening in 2024, although numbers are up in Mexico and further south. Increased Mexican government operations to block or hinder migrants are a central reason. Especially striking is migration from Venezuela, which has plummeted at the U.S. border and moved largely to ports of entry. It is unclear why Venezuelan migration has dropped more steeply than that from other nations.
Migration at the U.S.-Mexico border increased by 8 percent from January to February; the portion that is Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants grew by 13 percent. February’s levels were still on the low end for the Biden administration. Preliminary March data indicate no further increases this month.
Texas’s governor, an immigration hardliner, is claiming credit for a westward shift of migration toward Arizona and California. Uncertainty over a harsh new law—currently blocked in the courts—could be leading some migrants to avoid Texas, but the overall picture is more complex. Migration declined slightly in Arizona in February and is still dropping there in March, while four out of five Texas border sectors saw some growth in February.
President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala, in his third month in office, paid his first official visit to Washington, meeting separately with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The White House touted $170 million in new assistance to Guatemala and the operations of a U.S.-backed “Safe Mobility Office” that seeks to steer would-be migrants toward legal pathways. In 2023, Guatemala’s previous government expelled more than 23,000 U.S.-bound migrants, most of them from Venezuela, back across its border into Honduras.
The New York Times reported from an open air holding site in the mountains east of San Diego, California, where asylum seekers often must wait outdoors for days for the opportunity to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Agents provide no shelter, food, water, and medical care; that is up to volunteers. The situation threatens the migrants’ health, and “a Federal District Court judge in California could rule as early as Friday on whether the government is legally required to shelter and feed the children as they wait.”
Ten humanitarian organizations in Mexico City warned of the increasingly precarious situation of migrants from many countries stranded in Mexico’s capital. Most are attempting to secure online CBP One appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry.
Nicaragua Investiga covered the Migrant Via Crucis march and protest in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. At least 2,000 migrants stranded near Mexico’s southern border began walking through the state on Monday, though their numbers have since dwindled. “Some of the participants in the mobilization claim that their goal is to reach Mexico City, but these marches generally disintegrate as they become too strenuous and as the authorities hand out [travel] permits while they are en route.”
The House of Representatives’ Republican leadership will send the Senate articles of impeachment for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on April 10. The move comes nearly two full months after the House impeached Mayorkas, by a one-vote party-line margin on their second try. Republican leaders allege that Mayorkas has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by not carrying out border and migration law to its fullest extent (which would cost far more than the amount of money that Congress appropriates). The Democratic-majority Senate could dismiss the case without going to a trial.
Jonathan Blitzer’s recent book about Central America, U.S. policy, and migration “effectively illustrates the timidity and opportunism of the US political class, which has repeatedly blocked reforms that would allow an orderly and safe flow of workers and their families across the border,” reads a lengthy review by Hector Tobar in the New York Review of Books.
Jacobin published an adapted excerpt of Petra Molnar’s book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The deployment of military-grade surveillance technologies along the border, Molnar argues, treats a humanitarian issue like a security crisis and ends up diverting migrants to more remote and dangerous areas, inflating an already high death toll.
Ecuador took delivery of two big U.S. military and police aid items this week. The U.S. government’s security assistance program has been ramping up following a January 9 outbreak of organized-crime violence around the country and subsequent state-of-emergency declaration from President Daniel Noboa.
Ecuador is now almost certainly the number-two recipient of U.S. security assistance in the Western Hemisphere after Colombia, surpassing Mexico.
A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel decided, by a two-to-one margin, to maintain a stay on Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law, preventing it from going into effect while the Court considers legal challenges. The law would empower Texas law enforcement to arrest people anywhere in the state on suspicion of having crossed the border improperly; if found guilty, defendants would have the choice of prison or deportation into Mexico. (Mexico’s government has declared that it will not permit state-government deportations.)
The court will hear arguments on S.B. 4’s constitutionality on April 3. At stake is whether states can devise and implement their own independent immigration policies, and whether there is any validity to the claims of politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) that asylum seekers and other migrants meet the constitutional definition of an “invasion.”
In Ciudad Juárez, the Casa del Migrante, one of the city’s principal migrant shelters, “has been filling up in recent days as families and single adults looking for an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States are again arriving in Juarez in large numbers,” according to Border Report. Rev. Francisco Bueno Guillen, the shelter’s director, said it “went from being 20 percent full a couple of weeks ago to 75 percent capacity as of Monday.” The city’s municipal shelter is also three-quarters full.
The Los Angeles Times reported from “Gate 36” in the border wall south of El Paso, across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez, where Texas national guardsmen have been confronting asylum seekers hoping to turn themselves in to the federal Border Patrol.
481 organizations sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants in the United States, to halt deportation flights and maritime returns to Haiti, and to increase the monthly cap on access to Humanitarian Parole for people still in the country, where governance is near collapse.
Participants in a “Migrant Via Crucis” march through Mexico’s southernmost state, Chiapas, told EFE that they reject Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s offer of $110 per month, six-month stipends for citizens of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela who return home.
Asked during his visit to Washington whether he believes that border walls work, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo told CBS News, “I think that history shows they don’t. What we need to look for is integrated solutions to a problem that is far more complex than just putting a wall to try to contain.”
The six construction workers presumed dead in the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge were people who had migrated from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
A jump in Mexican encounters with Venezuelan migrants contrasts with low numbers of Venezuelan migrants on the U.S. side of the border, indicating that many Venezuelan citizens are stuck in Mexico right now. The Associated Press confirms that Mexico’s increased operations to block migrants have many Venezuelan citizens stranded in the country’s south, including in Mexico City, which is within the geographic range of the CBP One app and its limited number of available appointments.
NBC News highlighted the dilemma of migrant women who were raped by criminals in Mexico while en route to the United States, and now find themselves in states like Texas where, following the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision, it is illegal to obtain an abortion. Often, the rapes occur while migrants are stranded—usually for months—in Mexican border cities as they await CBP One appointments.
At the London Review of Books, Pooja Bhatia combined a narrative of Haiti’s deteriorating security situation with an account of the challenges that Haitian asylum seekers face at the U.S.-Mexico border. Bhatia reported from the dangerous border in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and highlighted the role of humanitarian workers and service providers, including staff of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh and Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute explained that many of today’s proposals to restrict asylum access and otherwise crack down on migration will not work because the U.S. government can no longer “go it alone.” Reasons include the diversity of countries migrants are coming from, as well as the policies of other governments, such as varying visa requirements, refusals to accept repatriations, and the Mexican government’s unwillingness to receive expelled migrants from third countries.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, revealed some U.S. data from March about migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) probably won’t share March data until the second half of April.)
Slides posted at López Obrador’s March 26 morning press conference indicated that CBP encountered 6,307 migrants per day during the first 21 days of March. Removing the approximately 1,450 per day who get CBP One appointments at ports of entry shows Border Patrol apprehending less than 5,000 people per day during the month’s first 3 weeks.
Though migration usually increases in springtime, these revealed numbers show that is not happening this year. In February, CBP averaged 6,549 migrant encounters per day (4,890 per day in Border Patrol custody). In other words, it appears that slightly more migrants per day came to the border in February than so far in March. If the trend continues, this would be only the second time that March migration is less than February migration in the 25 years for which we have data (since 2000).
The March data show that U.S. encounters with migrants from Venezuela continue to be far fewer than the past two years’ average. The United States’ encounters with Venezuelan migrants dropped sharply in January and have not recovered: they totaled 20,364 in January and February. On March 25 Mexico updated its own migrant encounter numbers, which show 56,312 encounters with Venezuelan citizens in January and February—almost 3 times more than the U.S. figure. That points to a strong likelihood that the Venezuelan population in Mexico is increasing sharply right now.
Mexico’s data show that its migration authorities encountered almost exactly 120,000 migrants in February, for the second straight month. Before January, Mexico’s monthly record for migrant encounters was about 98,000. This is evidence that Mexico’s government has stepped up efforts to interdict migrants in its territory so far in 2024.
At his press conference, López Obrador added that he is seeking to expand to citizens of Colombia and Ecuador a program that would pay US$110-per-month stipends to citizens of Venezuela who agree to return to their home countries. The program would depend on the cooperation of Mexican corporations with a presence in South America.
Mexico’s National Guard has increased patrols in an area of Tijuana, not far from the Pacific, where smugglers frequently help migrants climb the border wall to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
An annual Easter week march of migrants near Mexico’s southern border—not exactly a “caravan,” but an organized “Migrant Via Crucis”—has walked over 10 miles through Chiapas, the country’s southernmost state, and plans to cover a similar distance today. Its numbers have reportedly dwindled to about half of the approximately 3,000 participants with which it began.
Texas’s state government deployed about 200 members of its National Guard’s “Texas Tactical Border Force” to El Paso. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said, “It’s something that we didn’t request, and we won’t request from the state of Texas.”
The head of Guatemala’s migration agency, who worked in the government that left power in January, resigned yesterday. While the reason for Stuard Rodríguez’s departure is not known, it is notable that it takes place while the new president, Bernardo Arévalo, is in Washington and discussing migration with U.S. officials.
“Rodriguez made several reports during his administration of the increase of migrant expulsions, especially of Cubans and Venezuelans,” noted the Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre.
In Tucson, Arizona, local authorities now believe that federal funds—made possible by Congress passing a budget over the weekend—will arrive in time to prevent closure of shelters that receive migrants released from CBP custody. The prospect of “street releases” in Tucson and other Arizona border towns is now unlikely.
Conservative politicians and media outlets are going after the non-profit shelters that receive migrants released from CBP custody in U.S. border cities, along with other humanitarian groups, noted Miriam Davidson at The Progressive. Tucson’s Casa Alitas and El Paso’s Annunciation House have been subject to aggressive misinformation and legal attacks so far this year.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update after an eventful week; a few charts showing what appears to be an unusual spring migration slowdown at the U.S.-Mexico border (but not on the migrant route further south); some links from the past month about civil-military relations; and some other interesting odds and ends. Also, links to some really good readings, and to six Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week
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 rightist government of President Javier Milei is sending Argentina’s Congress a package of laws that would return the armed forces to internal security roles for the first time since the years following the country’s return to democracy. The government seeks to deploy combat soldiers—not just logistical support units, as now—to the crime-plagued city of Rosario. Soldiers would be empowered to carry out patrols, checkpoints, and arrests.
The armed forces are complying with the order to help fight organized crime in Rosario, but are uneasy with the new mission. Several generals communicated to Defense Ministry leadership “that they do not want any of their uniformed men touching ‘a single civilian’ in Rosario.”
Many Argentine analysts worry that expanding military roles to include public security and counternarcotics would be a grave mistake. “You have the armed forces as insurance, as if they were your car insurance,” Rut Diamint of Buenos Aires’s Torcuato di Tella Institute tells her students. “You hope never to use them, but when you have to use them, the fact that they have been working as policemen does not help you.”
“Countries that have used the Armed Forces to fight drug trafficking had negative results, there was no success,” said former Argentine Army commander Martín Balza. “The results were lethal, demoralizing for the forces, and seriously affected their essence and professionalism.”
The Milei government has prohibited the use of gendered names for officer ranks held by women (“generala”, “sargenta”, “soldada” or “caba”).
The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, will pay a visit to Argentina on April 3.
The former chiefs of Brazil’s army and Air Force told police investigators that then-president Jair Bolsonaro presented them with a plan to remain in power after he lost the country’s October 2022 elections. They refused to participate, though the chief of Brazil’s Navy “said he would put his troops at Jair Bolsonaro’s disposal,” one testified.
“It is said that, of the sixteen members of the high command, between four and six were in on the coup,” wrote Veja columnist Ricardo Rangel.
Faced with concern over urban crime, leftist President Gabriel Boric is voicing willingness to send the military into some neighborhoods using a legal authority to “protect critical infrastructure.” Presidential spokeswoman Camila Vallejo said, “Let’s not believe this is a silver bullet. There is a tone in public opinion or debate that makes people think that this is going to be the solution to fight crime, and the truth is that it is going to be one tool among many.”
Guatemala’s Constitutional Court officially closed the “CREOMPAZ case,” a years-long effort to prosecute a group of former high-ranking military officers accused of forcibly disappearing 565 people between 1982 and 1988, during the country’s long armed conflict. The victims were found in a mass grave at a peacekeeping training base in Alta Verapaz that the Army had used as a clandestine torture center. Among those questionably exonerated is Gen. Benedicto Lucas García, brother of dictator Romeo Lucas García (1978-1982).
Generals who testified in a U.S. court in favor of ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty of narcotrafficking on March 8, had careers deeply intertwined with that of the disgraced leader, Contra Corriente reported. Gen. Tulio Romero Palacios, who served as Hernández’s aide-de-camp, attended military school with Hernández since they were 13.
The deaths of three alleged gang members in a prison cell on February 18 raised to eleven the death toll in Honduras’s prison system since the armed forces took control of it in June 2023.
A report from Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD), a non-governmental research and advocacy group, documented a sharp growth in the Mexican armed forces’ economic power during the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which began at the end of 2018. The military had no participation in state-owned companies before then, now it is involved in or managing 30. “Today, the Armed Forces are in charge of exercising, administering and strategically managing a large part of public money and the profits of state-owned companies with opacity, high discretion, and no accountability,” it concludes.
Migration control has become a key area of military involvement in domestic non-defense functions, contends a report from the Mexico City-based Universidad Ibero. The country’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) now has retired officers in several high positions and works closely with the military on migrant control operations.
An August rescission of arrest orders against Army personnel allegedly involved in the 2014 Ayotzinapa disappearances “was a startling indication of the power of the Mexican military,” noted Alma Guillermoprieto in a thorough narrative of this high-profile case, which remains in impunity nearly 10 years after it happened.
Alma Guillermoprieto, “Forty-Three Mexican Students Went Missing. What Really Happened to Them?” (The New Yorker, March 4, 2024).
Mexico has 37,478 National Guardsmen assigned to policing tasks under the command of the federal government’s Public Security Secretariat (SSPC), wrote Lilian Chapa Koloffon at Nexos. That is a drop from the 43,724 civilian Federal Police that existed when the Andrés Manuel López Obrador government began in 2018. (López Obrador abolished the Federal Police and set up the National Guard, a militarized force that for now is nominally under civilian command.) Meanwhile, the number of military police in Mexico’s army grew from 14,822 to 69,461 from 2020 to 2024.
The Mexican military’s Cyberspace Operations Center carries out activities including the use of Israeli-made software to monitor citizens’ social media accounts, and “influence operations” to defend the armed forces’ public image, reported the Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales.
The newsmagazine Proceso recalled that Venezuelan civil-military relations expert and activist Rocío San Miguel, whom the Maduro regime imprisoned and has been holding almost totally incommunicado since early February, was a frequent critic of Mexican President López Obrador’s policies that increased his country’s armed forces’ power.
As dictator Daniel Ortega ages and the power of his wife, Rosario Murillo, grows, Manuel Orozco wrote an analysis wondering whether the country’s generals will remain loyal to her, and if so which ones. It notes that the armed forces or retired officers control several entities, from civil aeronautics to tax collection to counternarcotics, that offer potential for enrichment.
See also:
Mexico just posted its February migration numbers… there must be a huge number of people from Venezuela bottled up in Mexico right now.
2024 numbers from Panama – Honduras (change the dates in search) – Mexico (click on “Personas en situación migratoria irregular” then Table 3.1.1) – U.S. (CBP / my search of CBP numbers for 2024)
Guatemala’s reformist new president, Bernardo Arévalo, visited the White House yesterday, where he met separately with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Migration was a central topic in both of Arévalo’s conversations.
Arévalo and Harris reportedly discussed “providing lawful pathways to migrants, increasing cooperation on border enforcement, and… U.S. support for Guatemala’s migration management efforts.” A White House release stated that the Biden administration plans to provide Guatemala with an additional $170 million in security and development assistance, pending congressional notification.
Vice President Harris touted the administration’s “Root Causes Strategy,” which she claimed has created 70,000 new jobs, helped up to 63,000 farmers, supported 3 million student’ education, and trained more than 18,000 police officers and 27,000 judicial operators in Central America.
The leaders announced no changes to the U.S.-backed “Safe Mobility Office” (SMO) in Guatemala that links some would-be migrants to legal pathways. The prior administration of President Alejandro Giammattei (whose U.S. visa has since been revoked amid corruption allegations) had reduced the SMO’s scope to serve only citizens of Guatemala.
Despite a crushing backlog of cases, the number of U.S. immigration judges actually declined in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, from 734 to 725. That means “each judge has 3,836 cases on average,” pointed out Kathleen Bush-Joseph of the Migration Policy Institute. (That number is greater if one uses TRAC Immigration’s higher estimate of the immigration court backlog.)
In less than three years, Texas state law enforcement has arrested 13,000 migrants under the framework of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) so-called “Operation Lone Star.” About three quarters of the arrests are for misdemeanor trespassing. Texas has carried out these arrests and imprisonments even without S.B. 4, a pending law that—if courts allow it to proceed—would empower Texas law enforcement to arrest, jail, and deport people on suspicion of crossing the border improperly.
Now that Congress has approved a 2024 federal budget, Arizona community leaders are wondering when funds will arrive to help non-profits receiving migrants released from CBP custody at the border. Those funds are about to run out, which could lead to CBP leaving released migrants on the streets of Tucson and other Arizona border-zone cities.
As Easter week begins, about 2,000 migrants participated in a “Migrant Via Crucis” march, what has become an annual event in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula.
In a Twitter response to comments that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made in a 60 Minutes interview, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) accused Mexico’s president of “coddling cartels and demanding the United States bankroll even more mass migration into our country.” Johnson called for a revival of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Mexico’s government’s ability and willingness to help control migration flows make it a key player on an issue with the potential to sway the election,” a New York Times analysis found. However, “behind closed doors, some senior Biden officials have come to see [Mexican President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador as an unpredictable partner, who they say isn’t doing enough to consistently control his own southern border or police routes being used by smugglers.”
At Lawfare, Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute dismantled an argument that has become increasingly mainstream among Republican politicians: that asylum seekers and other migrants crossing the border constitute an “invasion” and that states have a constitutional right to confront them with their own security forces. Somin warns that the “invasion” idea, if upheld, could allow border states “to initiate war anytime they want,” and permit the federal government to suspend habeas corpus rights.
In the March 22, 2024 WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provided updated data late on Friday about migration through February at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Search this data at cbpdata.adamisacson.com.)
Some key points:
In late February, press reported that the Biden administration was considering new executive actions at the border, like limits on access to asylum or a ban on crossings between ports of entry. But then nothing happened: Politico reported that the White House has stood down “in part, to the downtick in migration numbers” so far this year.
Executive actions are not off the table, however. Axios reported that “President Biden is still considering harsh executive actions at the border before November’s election.” These actions, which may involve expelling migrants regardless of asylum needs, would stand on shaky legal foundations and be difficult to apply to migrants of many nationalities.
Officials in Panama reported that the number of migrants crossing the Darién Gap so far in 2024 has now exceeded 101,000. At the end of February, the number stood at 73,167; this means that the March pace remains, as in January and February, at a bit over 1,200 people per day. Of this year’s migrants, nearly two thirds (64,307) are citizens of Venezuela.
Texas police have begun firing rubber bullets at migrants, a Ciudad Juárez human rights activist told EFE. Texas authorities fired tear gas canisters at migrants camped on the El Paso bank of the Rio Grande, after they began pulling on the concertina wire that Texas has laid between the river and the border wall.
The Houston Chronicle reported that Texas state National Guardsmen threatened migrants on the Eagle Pass riverbank with deportation under Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law—even though the law is not in effect while judicial challenges continue.
Authorities in El Paso say they will not prosecute migrants arrested under S.B. 4 if their arrests are found to have resulted from profiling. In the Rio Grande Valley, sheriffs say they do not expect to arrest many people under S.B. 4 because they don’t expect to witness many illegal border crossings.
Guatemala’s government added its voice to international opposition to Texas’s S.B. 4 law.
“I think the migrants that we encounter, that are turning themselves in, yes, I think they absolutely are, by and large, good people,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CBS News’s Face the Nation. But “what’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known got-aways” so far this fiscal year.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has loudly complained about asylum seekers arriving in his city, canceled a trip to Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, citing unspecified “safety concerns” about the Mexico segment of his visit. Adams was responding to an invitation from Sr. Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a large respite center in McAllen.
The New York Times reported on the recent movement of migration away from the Texas border, with more people coming to California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Though the picture is complex, the Texas state government’s crackdown, especially the unknown consequences of the currently on-hold S.B. 4 law, is a factor. (However, migration has also been declining all year, even during the spring, in Border Patrol’s busy Tucson, Arizona sector.)
Ransom kidnappings and other attacks on migrants are worsening at the Mexico-Guatemala border, especially the central region where the Pan-American Highway crosses into Chiapas, reported Milenio.
At the New York Review of Books, Caroline Tracey documented an abandoned, unpopular plan to construct a massive Border Patrol checkpoint on I-19, the highway between Tucson and the border at Nogales, Arizona. The case highlighted the tension between security concerns and economic and human rights considerations.
As Mexican farmworkers migrate to the United States, often on temporary work visas, Mexico is facing its own farm labor shortages and is considering setting up its own guest-worker program for citizens of countries to Mexico’s south, the Washington Post reported.
(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)
If you have a paid ChatGPT subscription, here’s a “GPT” I’ve made that gives you a bullet-pointed summary of an article or report, in Markdown format (plain text with simple formatting notation, which is easy to archive and share).
These are the instructions I’ve given it (which I think I’m done tweaking, but maybe not yet):
Summarizer and Archiver is designed to assist with summarizing lengthy articles and reports on topics such as security, defense, human rights, and migration in Latin America and the Caribbean. Summaries follow a structured format, beginning with the principal argument, including supporting findings, conclusions, and recommendations, and formatted as bullet points with boldfaced phrases. An approximate guideline is five bullet points for the supporting findings and conclusions section, though the number could be greater or fewer as warranted. Additionally, up to 10 consistent tags are suggested for archiving. The communication style is formal, ensuring consistency in language for ease of future search and archival. Responses are provided in blocks of Markdown code for ease of sharing.
I just ask the GPT to summarize an article or report, which is either an uploaded PDF attachment or copy-pasted text. (For added clarity, I put the pasted text between <article></article> tags.)
Here’s the result when I fed it a March 10 El País interview, in Spanish, with Chilean President Gabriel Boric:
RSS - Posts- **Principal Argument**: Chilean President Gabriel Boric reflects on his tenure, emphasizing his commitment to addressing the country's pressing issues, such as improving pensions, stimulating economic growth, and tackling crime, despite facing challenges such as low approval ratings and the failure of constitutional reform attempts.
- **Supporting Findings and Conclusions**:
- **Constitutional Reform Efforts**: Boric acknowledges the failure of two constitutional reform attempts but views them as learning opportunities rather than losses, underscoring the importance of updating the constitution eventually.
- **Economic and Social Priorities**: He outlines his administration's focus on economic recovery, reducing poverty and inequality, improving public education, and addressing security as top priorities, with significant legislation passed to enhance security and police forces.
- **Political Landscape**: Despite challenges, including high disapproval rates and the impact of political scandals, Boric remains optimistic about his government's progress and the tangible improvements in Chile's social and economic indicators since taking office.
- **International Relations and Political Ideology**: Boric distances himself from authoritarian regimes and emphasizes the importance of a progressive government working in unity with the center-left to improve citizens' quality of life, contrasting his administration with right-wing movements in Latin America and globally.
- **Future Outlook and Legacy**: He discusses his hopes for Chile's future, including the continuation of progressive policies and the development of a long-term coalition for progressive governance, while personally not aspiring for a second presidential term.
- **Recommendations**: Boric suggests that continued efforts to improve economic conditions, enhance security, and address social issues will be crucial in countering the rise of the far-right and maintaining democratic stability. He also emphasizes the need for political unity and the adaptation of progressive principles to meet current challenges.
- **Tags**: #Chile, #GabrielBoric, #Presidency, #ConstitutionalReform, #EconomicGrowth, #Security, #PoliticalChallenges, #ProgressiveGovernance, #InternationalRelations, #FutureOutlookI now add long articles and reports to my personal archive with these summaries first. I’ve done this dozens of times in the past few weeks, and it’s working well. Hope you find it useful.
At the end of the day Friday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration and drug seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border through February. Within minutes, I added the migration data to my online tool that helps you search it, cbpdata.adamisacson.com. I’m glad this is so easy to do now.
Here’s what you get when you search for border authorities’ encounters with migrants during the first five months of the U.S. government’s 2024 fiscal year, listed by nationality. (This is everything: both migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between the ports of entry, and migrants—mostly “CBP One” appointments—who arrived at the ports of entry.) You can see an increase over January, but still well below late last year.
Visit the “cpbdata” tool to view migration data by country, by demographic category, by geographic area, and to see years going back to 2020. I’ll be updating our collection of infographics over the next several days.
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.
Support ad-free, paywall-free Weekly Border Updates. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to sustain this effort. Please contribute now and support our work.
A report and database from No More Deaths document a rapid increase in the number of migrant remains recovered in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which covers far west Texas and New Mexico. A preponderance of deaths occur in or near the El Paso metropolitan area, within range of humanitarian assistance. CBP meanwhile released a count of migrant deaths through 2022, a year that saw the agency count a record 895 human remains recovered on the U.S. side of the border. Heat and drowning were the most frequent causes of death.
Nearly six months into the fiscal year, Congress on March 21 published text of its 2024 Homeland Security appropriation. As it is one of six bills that must pass by March 22 to avert a partial government shutdown, the current draft is likely to become law with few if any changes. Congressional negotiators approved double-digit-percentage increases in budgets for border security agencies, including new CBP and Border Patrol hires, as well as for migrant detention. The bill has no money for border wall construction, and cuts grants to shelters receiving people released from Border Patrol custody.
Texas’s state government planned to start implementing S.B. 4, a law effectively enabling it to carry out its own harsh immigration policy, on March 5. While appeals from the Biden administration and rights defense litigators have so far prevented that, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court have gone back and forth about whether Texas may implement the controversial law while appeals proceed. As of the morning of March 22, S.B. 4 is on hold. Mexico’s government has made clear it will not accept deportations even of its own citizens if carried out by Texas.
Mexico filed an amicus curiae brief in federal court in support of the ongoing challenge to Texas’s state immigration law, S.B. 4. The brief argues that the law, which would allow state law enforcement to arrest, imprison, or deport people suspected of crossing the border improperly, would do significant harm to Mexican citizens living in Texas.
Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena told the Washington Post that her government would place “increased vigilance and controls” along the Texas border to prevent Texas state authorities from carrying out their own deportations without Mexico’s permission.
Across Texas’s 254 counties, sheriffs are unclear about how they are meant to enforce S.B. 4 if courts give the strict law a green light, the Associated Press reported. “If we start going and talking to everybody and asking for papers, where do we stop?” asked the president of the Texas Sheriff’s Association.
In El Paso, a group of migrants on the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande pushed their way past Texas state National Guard personnel blocking access to the border wall, where they hoped to turn themselves in to federal Border Patrol agents. Video showed a chaotic scene.
S.B. 4 is “not going to stop us from doing our job,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said in a CBS News interview, adding that there is “no better partner for the Border Patrol than the Texas Department of Public Safety.” Owens called for “jail time” for more migrants who cross the border between ports of entry, and cited a “need to take a look at the asylum laws and make it where only people that have a legitimate claim can claim asylum.”
CBP released body-worn camera footage of the February 17 death, apparently by suicide, of a man in a holding cell at a Laredo, Texas checkpoint. The footage does not show the exact circumstances of how the man died because “the video recording system at the Border Patrol checkpoint was not fully functioning at the time of the incident.”
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was in Guatemala. With President Bernardo Arévalo, the Secretary reviewed nine topics including migration. The migration talks focused on information sharing and “coordinated operational plans” against smugglers.
Arévalo will be in Washington Monday, where he will meet Vice President Kamala Harris. Mayorkas noted that the “Safe Mobility Office” established in Guatemala in mid-2023 has “already helped more than 1,500 Guatemalans safely and lawfully enter the United States” via legal pathways.
Speaking to Guatemala’s Prensa Libre, Assistant DHS Secretary for Border Policy and Migration Blas Nunez-Neto said that organized crime has taken over the migrant smuggling business all along the U.S.-bound route: “The cartels that previously had no direct participation in the movement of people in an irregular manner are increasingly controlling these flows.”
So far in 2024, the U.S. and Mexican governments have deported 20,018 citizens of Guatemala back to their country by air, more than 5,000 above the total at the same time in 2023. The United States has returned 18,437 people on 154 flights, while Mexico has returned 1,632 on 15 flights.
Mexico’s government reached an agreement with Venezuela’s government to facilitate aerial deportations of Venezuelan citizens back to Caracas. As part of the deal, some of Mexico’s largest corporations, would employ Venezuelan deportees, paying them a “stipend” of US$110 per month for a six-month period. “We’re sending Venezuelans back to their country because we really cannot handle these quantities,” said Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena.
Criminals have kidnapped a group of 95 Ecuadorian migrants in the Pacific coastal region of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.
Federal authorities arrested a historic leader of the MS-13 gang at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego on March 7.
This morning the congressional appropriations committees made public the text of the 2024 Homeland Security appropriations bill, one of six budget bills that Congress needs to pass by Friday to avert a government shutdown.
The legislation provides the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with $61.8 billion for fiscal year 2024, which is nearly half over—DHS has been operating at 2023 funding levels. Provisions include:
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing to consider whether to maintain a stay on Texas’s controversial migration restriction law, S.B. 4, which is currently on hold as appeals of legal challenges continue (see yesterday’s border links). The three judges in yesterday’s proceedings were a Biden nominee, a Trump nominee, and a George W. Bush nominee.
It is unclear how the panel will decide on whether to allow Texas to implement S.B. 4 while appeals proceed, or when that decision might come. Judges’ comments during the hearing indicated clear disagreements.
The law would allow state law enforcement to arrest people suspected of migrating from Mexico into Texas without authorization, and to imprison them if they do not agree to allow Texas authorities to deport them into Mexico. Texas state lawyers said that the state does not plan to carry out its own deportations—Mexico refuses to accept non-federal deportees—but instead to turn captured migrants over to CBP personnel at ports of entry. But the Biden administration’s DHS has declared that it would not cooperate with enforcement of S.B. 4, a law that it is challenging in court.
Texas lawyers sought to argue that S.B. 4 aims to work within the framework of a 2012 Supreme Court decision striking down an Arizona immigration-restriction law. While the hearing was ongoing, though, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) gave remarks arguing that the law instead reflects the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in that 2012 ruling.
The appeals court will hold another hearing on April 3 about S.B. 4’s overall legality (not just the question of whether it can be implemented during appeals).
Immigration judges have thrown out about 200,000 deportation cases during the Biden administration “because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hadn’t filed the required Notice to Appear (NTA) with the Court by the time of the scheduled hearing,” according to documentary evidence obtained by TRAC Immigration. “In three-quarters of these 200,000 cases the immigrant was effectively left in legal limbo without any way to pursue asylum or other means of relief,” TRAC’s analysis notes.
The DHS Inspector-General reported on unannounced July 2023 inspection visits to CBP holding facilities in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Though this was a moment of relatively less migration—the post-Title 42 lull—the agency’s investigators found Border Patrol routinely holding migrants at processing centers for more than the 72-hour limit set by policy.
With its migration policies—its cooperation on blocking northbound migrants, its response to Texas’s S.B. 4 law—the government of Mexico has leverage over U.S. election outcomes, argue analyses by Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter and Los Angeles Times reporter Patrick McDonnell.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador condemned S.B. 4 as “dehumanizing” during his morning press conference yesterday. Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said that the law could cause “phenomenal chaos.”
At the Darién Gap, the New York Times covered visits from right-wing social media influencers, who interview migrants at posts on the Panamanian end of the trail, often taking their statements out of context in order to make them appear more threatening. Their videos focus on single male, Muslim, and Chinese migrants.
At the Los Angeles Times, Andrea Castillo reported on vulnerable Democratic legislators’ recent tendency to vote for harder-line Republican border and migration legislation in order to stave off conservative attacks.
The Republican governors of Texas and California were far more moderate on immigration issues twenty years ago, noted an analysis at Time from University of Houston Professor Brandon Rottinghaus, which narrates the party’s rightward lurch.
Sector chiefs’ weekly Twitter updates point to a mid-March drop in migration in Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California, the two Border Patrol U.S.-Mexico border sectors that have been encountering the most migrants so far this year.
This is not the usual trend. March—and spring in general—is usually a time of steadily increasing migration, until temperatures get too high. In recent years, though, this has become less predictable, as policy changes, internet-driven rumors, and smuggling patterns have had more effect on the numbers of arriving people.
Texas’s strict new immigration law, S.B. 4, is currently on hold after a roller-coster day of judicial proceedings that defies description. The main question at issue has been whether Texas can begin implementing the law while federal courts consider appeals.
| Between December 18 and March 17 | Between March 18 and the morning of March 20 |
| – December 18, 2023: Texas governor Greg Abbott (R) signs S.B. 4 into law. It would go into force on March 5. – December 19: The ACLU, El Paso County, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and American Gateways sue to challenge the law. – January 3, 2024: the Biden administration Justice Department sues to challenge S.B. 4. This suit and the ACLU suit are later combined. – February 29: U.S. District Court Judge David Ezra, a Reagan appointee, blocks S.B. 4’s implementation. Texas appeals. – March 3: The federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals allows Texas to implement S.B. 4 while it considers Texas’s appeal. However, it delays implementation until March 10, to allow the Biden administration to ask the Supreme Court to rule whether the law may go into effect while appeals continue. – March 4: The Supreme Court keeps S.B. 4 on hold until March 13 while it decides how to proceed. – March 12: The Supreme Court extends its stay until 5:00PM Eastern on March 18. | – March 18: just after 5:00PM, the Supreme Court keeps in place its hold on S.B. 4, without an end date. – March 19: by a 6-3 decision, with its Republican-appointed majority of justices voting together, the Supreme Court allows S.B. 4 to go into effect while appeals continue. – March 19: with a late-night order on a 2-1 vote, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals suspends implementation of S.B. 4 while deliberations continue. – March 20: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is to hear arguments about the stay of S.B. 4’s implementation. – April 3: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is to hear arguments about the challenges to S.B. 4 that Judge Ezra upheld on February 29. |
If it goes into effect, S.B. 4 would allow Texas state police and National Guard personnel to arrest people on suspicion of having migrated without authorization. Courts could then imprison defendants or deport them to Mexico. Rights advocates worry that this would allow Texas to carry out its own immigration enforcement—a federal responsibility—while upholding spurious claims that asylum seekers constitute an “invasion” and creating incentives for racial profiling throughout the state.
A dissent yesterday from Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the law “will disrupt sensitive foreign relations, frustrate the protection of individuals fleeing persecution, hamper active federal enforcement efforts, undermine federal agencies’ ability to detect and monitor imminent security threats, and deter noncitizens from reporting abuse or trafficking.”
After the Supreme Court’s decision allowing S.B. 4 to go ahead, Mexico’s government issued a strongly worded statement refusing to receive migrants deported by Texas state authorities. “We fundamentally disagree with the Supreme Court’s order allowing Texas’ harmful and unconstitutional law to go into effect,” read a White House statement.
Lighthouse Media, El Paso Matters, and La Verdad de Juárez published a detailed investigation and a 16-minute video about the March 2023 Ciudad Juárez migrant detention facility fire that killed 40 people whom migration authorities had locked inside. The report highlighted glaring safety failures and Mexican authorities’ likely criminal behavior. It is based on newly revealed security footage, court documents, and survivor interviews. The report notes that a year later, Francisco Garduño, the commissioner of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), remains in his post.
A “handshake agreement” between congressional leaders and the White House appears to have resolved differences over the 2024 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriation, the largest federal budget sticking point that negotiators needed to overcome to avoid a partial government shutdown after Friday (March 22).
Details of the Homeland Security budget compromise are not yet available, but should be coming shortly. It will be an actual appropriations bill for 2024, instead of—as some reporting had indicated was likely—a “continuing resolution” freezing the Department at 2023 levels through the end of the year.
A group of 41 ultraconservative House Republicans wrote a letter urging their colleagues to reject a bill that doesn’t include “core elements” of H.R. 2, a bill approved on party lines last May that would, among other things, all but end the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. It is unclear (but unlikely) whether hardliners in either congressional chamber will have opportunities to offer amendments this week.
Minutes after a 5:00 deadline expired, the Supreme Court indefinitely suspended application of Texas’s draconian new state immigration law, S.B. 4, while lower-court appeals continue. S.B. 4 would allow Texas law enforcement, anywhere in the state, to imprison or deport non-citizens who cross the border improperly—allowing the state to enforce federal immigration law and possibly enabling “show me your papers” scenarios statewide.
S.B. 4 was to go into effect on March 5. The Biden administration Department of Justice, the ACLU, and other organizations sued to challenge the law, and on February 29 a federal district judge blocked its implementation. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals “un-blocked” the law, staying the lower-court judge’s decision while considering Texas’s appeal, but gave time for the Supreme Court to decide whether to keep it blocked. Justice Samuel Alito temporarily suspended S.B. 4’s implementation twice—through March 13 and through March 18—but this latest stay is open-ended.
A new report and database from No More Deaths, an organization that has mainly worked in Arizona, provided the first documentation of migrant deaths in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico. Its mapping finds that a majority of deaths are happening not in remote areas of the Chihuahuan Desert, but in the immediate environs of El Paso and neighboring Sunland Park, New Mexico. This means many migrants are dying painful and preventable deaths within a short distance of help.
The report confirms local organizations’ longstanding contention that Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) estimates of migrant deaths on U.S. soil, which total over 9,500 between 1998 and 2022, under-report the true number.
Yesterday, Border Patrol agents found the remains of a migrant not far from Sunland Park.
CBP yesterday released its own reporting on migrant deaths—for fiscal year 2022, which ended nearly 18 months ago. The agency’s Border Rescues and Mortality Data document reported the recovery of 895 migrants’ remains in 2022, a record by far.
Of remains whose gender could be identified, 79 percent were men. Where cause of death could be identified, 43 percent were heat-related and 20 percent were water-related (mainly drowning). The deadliest of Border Patrol’s nine sectors was Del Rio, Texas (29 percent), where drownings in the Rio Grande are frequent, followed by the Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and Arizona’s Tucson. Of the 23 nationalities that could be identified, 64 percent were citizens of Mexico.
Migration will be on the agenda next Monday (March 25) when Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, meets with Vice President Kamala Harris. Arévalo plans to host a regional ministerial meeting on migration in April.
Texas state national guardsmen prevented a large group of asylum-seeking family migrants from turning themselves in to federal agents at the border wall’s Gate 36 in El Paso.
An internal Border Patrol memo recounted the apprehension of a Lebanese man in El Paso on March 9 who told agents he had come to “try to make a bomb.”
Friday is the deadline Congress has set to approve the 2024 Homeland Security appropriations bill, among other long-delayed budget legislation for a fiscal year that is nearly halfway over. Congressional negotiators have yet to publicize the text of any agreed legislation.
Failure to pass this and five other budget bills could cause a partial government shutdown unless Congress passes another “continuing resolution” keeping federal departments running at 2023 levels for a fixed period of time.
A shutdown would not immediately impact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), most of whose employees are considered “essential” or are funded by fees.
Congress may decide to fund DHS with a continuing resolution all the way to the end of fiscal year 2024, as border programs are proving too controversial to permit bipartisan agreement during an election year. A full-year continuing resolution could fund DHS at levels approved at the end of 2022, by what was then a Democratic-majority Congress.
The Supreme Court is to decide today whether to allow Texas to start implementing a controversial migration-restriction law while appeals continue in lower courts. The law, S.B. 4, allows Texas state law enforcement anywhere in the state to arrest migrants whom they believe crossed the border irregularly, then jail them or deport them to Mexico. Critics “have said the law could lead to racial profiling and family separation,” the Associated Press observed. The Supreme Court stayed the law until March 18. It is currently before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals after a district court judge struck it down.
The Biden administration’s Family Expedited Removal Management program, a very strict “alternatives to detention” program that closely monitors some family asylum seekers after release into the United States, has been applied to 19,000 people since May, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data obtained by the New York Times. “More than 1,500 of them have been deported and around 1,000 have absconded by prying off their ankle monitors.”
Pima County, Arizona, which includes Tucson, is running out of federal funds to provide short-term shelter for asylum-seeking migrants released from CBP custody. As is already happening in San Diego, where funds ran out last month, this could mean daily drop-offs of hundreds of homeless migrants on Tucson’s streets, Reuters reported.
Al Otro Lado and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS), groups based in California and Baja California, have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to get information about Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP)’s policies for “open-air detention sites.” The term refers to the austere outdoor encampments on the borderline where Border Patrol agents have been making asylum seekers wait to turn themselves in, often for days.
An upsurge in organized crime violence along the border between Mexico’s violent northern-border state of Tamaulipas and adjacent Nuevo León, south of southern Texas, is displacing thousands of people, some of whom are seeking to cross the U.S. border. Some towns in the area have lost 80 percent of their population.
Kidnappers in Tamaulipas released a Russian migrant without forcing her to pay ransom, handing her over at a police station in Reynosa, the city across the river from McAllen, Texas.
Though violence in Haiti has reached emergency levels, the U.S. Coast Guard continues to return Haitians encountered at sea to the island. “There is a specific disdain when it comes to Haitian asylum-seekers,” Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance told NBC News. “The first [U.S.] act is not ‘How do we protect the people?’ it is ‘How do we deter them and how do we make sure they don’t make it to our shores?’”
U.S. diplomats met with counterparts from Ecuador on March 13-14. Ecuador committed to extend the “Safe Mobility Office” operating in its territory through the end of 2024, and U.S. diplomats agreed to “facilitate access to lawful pathways, such as H2 visas, for Ecuadorian citizens.” The State Department “confirmed receipt” of an Ecuadorian request for Temporary Protected Status for citizens of Ecuador who have migrated to the United States.
The government of Honduras has done away with a seven-day “pre-check” requirement for visiting Nicaraguans, a policy that had been in place since 2017. That eases travel through Central America for Nicaraguan citizens; under a 33-year-old arrangement, citizens of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua may visit each others’ countries without use of passports.
The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported that the Biden administration has doubled last year’s pace of the credible fear screening interviews that asylum officers administer to some protection-seeking migrants at the border. However, as the DHS workforce includes only about 1,000 asylum officers, “the number of people screened remains a small fraction of the number who cross the border illegally. And the government does not have the detention capacity to hold others long enough to interview them.”
Of those subjected to the interviews—about 24,500 in January—59 percent are passing, Miroff reported. This is down from about 85 percent between 2014 and 2019, before the Biden administration raised the “fear” standard that interviewees must meet.
A new memo from Human Rights First cited several cases of migrants, from China, Venezuela, Egypt, and Ecuador, who faced strong examples of persecution but, now that credible fear standards have been raised, failed to clear the screening and were ordered deported.
Smuggler use among migrants in Latin America and the Caribbean is not as common as perceived, with two out of every five respondents hiring smugglers, according to a new report from the Mixed Migration Center, based on over 3,000 surveys of migrants in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico. It found that use of smugglers declined from 49 percent of respondents in 2022 to 34 percent in 2023.
The San Diego Union-Tribune covered muralists’ work on newly rebuilt, taller segments of border wall near the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana.
(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)
I’ve been posting a bit less this week because I’ve moved my site and domain to a new service provider. (You may have noticed that this page loaded a few milliseconds faster? Probably not.)
I’m now using a virtual server that can host not just this site, but other little projects as sub-domains of adamisacson.com.
One of those little projects is live now: cbpdata.adamisacson.com. It’s a tool that lets you search Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) migration data since 2020.
Every month, CBP updates and publishes a dataset of its encounters with migrants since fiscal year 2020 (October 2019). We may get February’s data any moment now.
But that data is basically a table that right now has 58,866 rows. This site makes it usable.
(CBP has a “dashboard” that shows this data since 2021, and unlike mine, it includes encounters beyond the U.S.-Mexico border, including the Canada border and airports. But it doesn’t let you, for instance, just see how many people came from every country—you have to select each country one by one—and it’s really hard to get data out of it.)
I think the page is self-explanatory. If you visit it, do nothing, and click “Show the Data,” you’ll get a table showing how many migrants CBP encountered—both Border Patrol and ports of entry combined—by country for each year since 2020.
Hover your mouse over any number in the table, and a pop-up will show you the percentage of the total (so in the picture, 27% of 2024’s migrants so far have come from Mexico).
Click the “select table” button, and the entire thing is selected, letting you copy-and-paste it into a spreadsheet or anywhere else.
I encourage you to play around with the options on the main page letting you refine your search. Checking the various boxes lets you see, for instance, “How many family members and accompanied/unaccompanied children from Cuba and Haiti arrived in Texas’s five Border Patrol sectors and two CBP field offices, by month since 2023, listed by whether they came to ports of entry or to areas between them.” Just to give an idea of all the variables.
Also, every search result, including a really long one like that example, has its own unique link.
I hope you find it useful. I’m using it constantly. When CBP releases its February data, I’ll be able to update this within about 10 minutes of obtaining it.
And finally: all the source code is on GitHub if you want to see how it works or have the skills to improve it.
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.
Support ad-free, paywall-free Weekly Border Updates. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to sustain this effort. Please contribute now and support our work.
73,167 people made the treacherous northbound journey through the Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama during the first two months of 2024. That is 47 percent ahead of the same period in 2023, a year that ended with over 520,000 people migrating through. Panama’s government suspended Doctors Without Borders’ permission to provide health services at posts where the Darién trail ends; the announcement’s timing is curious because the organization had been denouncing rapidly increasing cases of sexual violence committed against the people whom their personnel were treating.
The White House sent Congress a $62 billion budget request to fund the Department of Homeland Security in 2025. The base budget for Customs and Border Protection would decrease slightly, though the agency would share in a $4.7 billion contingency fund for responding to surges in migration. The administration proposes to hire 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP officers, 1,600 USCIS asylum officers, and 375 new immigration judge teams. The budget request stands almost no chance of passing this year, as Congress has not even passed the Department’s 2024 budget.
For at least a few more days, the Supreme Court has kept on hold Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law, which allows state authorities to jail and deport migrants, while lower-court appeals continue. A federal judge threw out Texas’s and other Republican states’ challenge to the Biden administration program offering humanitarian parole to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A state judge blocked Texas’s legal offensive against El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter.
The Republican response to President Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address included a graphic, harrowing story of a woman being subjected to years of sexual violence at the border. Further scrutiny revealed that Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Alabama) account described crimes committed in Mexico during the Bush administration. President Biden voiced regret for using the term “an illegal” to refer to a migrant who allegedly killed a Georgia nursing student in February, in an off-the-cuff response to Republican hecklers during his address.
Posting to Twitter while on a visit to Panama’s side of the Darién Gap, human rights lawyer Julia Neusner reported that Panamanian police used force to put down a peaceful protest staged by migrants stranded at a government-run reception center. At least 12 migrants who had participated in the protest were detained, and their relatives do not know where they are.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told Politico that he expects to pass a “stand-alone” Ukraine and Israel aid bill, with Democratic votes. If accurate, this would be a significant about-face, because it could mean dropping Republican legislators’ insistence that such a bill include border and migration language, like new limits on access to asylum.
The Speaker has been blocking consideration of a foreign aid bill that the Senate passed in February, because it had no border language attached to it. The Senate had failed to pass an earlier version with negotiated “border deal” language, which would have allowed some expulsions of asylum seekers at the border.
The number of cross-border incursions of drones, apparently operated by Mexican organized crime groups, “was something that was alarming to me as I took command last month,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 14. “We could probably have over a thousand” drones crossing over the border each month, Guillot added. “I haven’t seen any of them manifest in a threat to the level of national defense, but I see the potential only growing.” Organized crime uses drones for surveillance—what Guillot called “spotters trying to find gaps”—or to move small amounts of high-value drugs.
“The number of Chinese [citizens] that are coming across the border is a big concern of mine,” Gen. Guillot added, in response to a question from Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri). Among Guillot’s concerns: “while many may be political refugees and other explanations, the ability for counter intelligence to hide in plain sight in those numbers.”
Asylum seekers released from CBP custody, and seeking to board commercial flights from border cities to their U.S. interior destinations, must now submit to facial recognition technology when passing through airport security if they lack passports. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) abruptly rolled out the new policy this week, apparently without informing airlines or other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies. As a result, dozens of migrants ended up stranded in Texas border towns, the Associated Press reported, after being unable to board flights for which they had purchased non-refundable tickets.
With federal funds for migrant shelters running out, raising the likelihood that CBP may start releasing asylum seekers on the street, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) wrote a letter to congressional leaders asking for $752 million to pay for migrant services and shelters.
Analysts at Mexico City’s Universidad Ibero published a 250-page report on the militarization of Mexico’s civilian migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM). It points to the agency’s increasing portrayal of migrants as “internal enemies”; the use of military-grade weapons in migrant detention operations (by Mexican National Guard personnel accompanying INM agents); placement of retired officers in INM managerial positions; and use of surveillance technologies, among other indicators. The report sees a U.S. government role in encouraging some of these changes.
Coyotes bringing a group of migrants over the border wall will sometimes “intentionally push [a] person off the wall so that Border Patrol has to provide healthcare, so the remaining individuals can scramble and get away more freely,” Rajiv Rajani, chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) in El Paso, told Newsweek.
“The CBP One app is plagued with technical problems and privacy concerns, and it raises troubling issues of inequitable asylum access, including facial recognition software that misidentifies people of color,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) told NextGov in a statement.
Panama’s government reported data through February about migration in the treacherous Darién Gap region. During the first two months of 2024, 73,167 people made the journey, much more than the 49,291 who did so during January-February 2023. By the end of 2023, a once-unthinkable total of 520,085 people had transited the Darién jungles.
Of this year’s migrant population, 64 percent are citizens of Venezuela—similar to 2023 (63 percent). The next four most frequent nationalities are Ecuador, Haiti, Colombia, and China—also similar to 2023. (View graphics and data of Darién Gap migration by year and month.)
In 2023, U.C. San Diego Health “saw 500 head injuries” from migrants who had fallen from the 30-foot-high Trump-era border wall between San Diego and Tijuana, “with many patients needing surgery,” a local television station reported. The per-patient cost for surgery got treat traumatic head injuries is about $250,000; UCSD Health neurosurgeon Joseph Ciacci said that “taxpayers are footing the bill.”
A Mexican National Guard and National Migration Institute (INM) deployment has brought a sharp drop in the number of asylum-seeking migrants coming to Jacumba Springs, California, just over an hour’s drive east of San Diego. Daily crossings, which were so frequent that people were stuck in encampments on the borderline waiting for Border Patrol to process them, have dropped from 800 to 70, said the INM delegate to Baja California. The official added that the agency expects people to seek to cross elsewhere as a result. (Border Report noted last week that crossings have increased sharply in nearby Campo, California.)
As the political and security situation in Haiti devolves further into a humanitarian emergency, CNN revealed that the Biden administration is considering reactivating a facility to process Haitians interdicted at sea, at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Those processed will be returned to Haiti or a third country.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), an opponent of protection-seeking migration from Latin America, has sent 250 national guardsmen and state police, and over a dozen air and sea craft, to the state’s southern coast to “combat illegal vessels” carrying “a potential influx of illegal immigrants” from Haiti, in DeSantis’s words.
WOLA’s Adam Isacson (this update’s author) made public a tool (cbpdata.adamisacson.com) that improves public access to CBP’s 2020-24 migration dataset. It generates custom tables of numbers revealing migrants’ nationalities, demographic characteristics, geographic areas of arrival, and whether they came to ports of entry or areas in between.
This site may look goofy or outdated for a couple of days as I move to a new server. Thanks for your patience!
In the meantime, I’ll keep posting daily border updates at our Border Oversight site.