November data showed migration levels at the border continuing to decline following Donald Trump’s election, to such an extent that, for the first time, port-of-entry arrivals exceeded Border Patrol apprehensions. Still, some reports from Texas point to an increase in mid-December as some people try to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day. Rumors sent some migrants to attempt to turn themselves in at a border wall gate in El Paso, where state forces repelled them violently. Caravans continue to form in southern Mexico, but none remain intact beyond Mexico’s southernmost states.
As Trump administration officials ramp up plans to deport undocumented migrants on a massive scale likely requiring the use of military aircraft, concern is sweeping throughout communities where many families are “blended”: citizens living with non-citizens. Fear is spreading in south Texas, while council members and law enforcement in San Diego disagree on cooperation.
Conservative media and Donald Trump complained bitterly about the Biden administration’s auctioning off of border wall parts left over when construction halted after Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. In fact, the selloff was mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It may be the last update I’ll send until the weekend of January 11-12. Next week, the last full week before Christmas, is a slow one, and I hope to hunker down and finish a big project (coding, not writing) that I’ve had on the shelf for months. I’ll unveil it at some point next year. So I don’t plan to produce much next week, other than a Border Update. If I do send another message next weekend, it will be thin.
This one is reasonably thick, though: in addition to the Border Update, below you’ll find a great podcast about Colombia, an exploration of the myth that Joe Biden was “soft” on border security and migration, a dig into migration data from the Darién Gap, links to some good readings, and links to three Latin America-related events that I know of during this last working week of 2024.
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.
An update on Colombia's peace processes, confusing political dynamics, and inspiring civil society struggles in a podcast interview with Gimena Sánchez, WOLA's Colombia program director, who just returned from a visit there.
I appreciated this opportunity to catch up on Colombia’s peace processes, confusing political dynamics, and inspiring civil society struggles in a podcast interview with Gimena Sánchez, WOLA’s Colombia program director, who just returned from a visit there with a congressional delegation. Here’s the text of the landing page at WOLA’s website:
WOLA’s director for Colombia, Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, is just back from taking a U.S. congressional delegation to Colombia. In addition to Bogotá, the group visited Cali and the Pacific Coast port of Buenaventura.
The latter two cities are in the department of Valle del Cauca, Colombia’s third most populous. Much of the population is Afro-descendant, and Buenaventura, on the coast, is majority Black.
Buenaventura has a vibrant and resilient collection of community organizations, which have played a greater role in local governance since a 2017 general strike. The government of Gustavo Petro, which took office in 2022, has fostered a negotiation between gangs operating in the city, part of its nationwide “total peace” policy.
As at the national level, the results are mixed. The Petro government has sought to move forward many negotiations at once, and some are stalled. Implementation of the 2016 peace accord with the FARC suffers from bureaucratization and lack of organization more than from lack of political will—but it remains behind schedule. Rural areas are especially challenged: armed groups are strengthening in some areas, and the humanitarian situation has hit emergency levels all along Colombia’s Pacific coast. The election of Donald Trump may presage a U.S. administration urging a return to failed hardline approaches of the past.
Still, Gimena sees hope in urban, participatory peacebuilding efforts in places like Buenaventura, Medellín, and in Quibdó, the capital of Chocó. The remarkable resilience and persistence of Colombia’s civil society, including Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in and near Valle del Cauca, continue to be a source of inspiration and innovation.
3 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.)
Tuesday, December 17
11:30 at migrationpolicy.org: The Biden Legacy on Immigration: A Complex Picture (RSVP required).
Wednesday, December 18
2:00 on Border Network for Human Rights Zoom: Report from the Border: What to expect from the Trump’s Administration on Border Militarization and Immigration Enforcement (RSVP required).
Thursday, December 19
10:00-11:30 at csis.org: The Future of Democracy and Human Rights in American Foreign Policy (RSVP required).
We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever.
If the text below reads like a Twitter thread, that’s where it comes from. It’s a response to arguments from New York Times columnist David Leonhardt making some sweeping mischaracterizations of what happened at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years.
Leonhardt’s words go a long way toward cementing in place a growing view in elite opinion that Democrats lost the election because Joe Biden’s administration was “too soft” on migrants. According to this view, the administration failed to crack down out of fear of offending “the groups”—in this case, migrants’ rights defenders.
In fact, Biden was never “soft” and the groups were disillusioned from the get-go. His revocation of a few of the most severely anti-migrant Trump policies does not explain why migration increased during his term. Leonhardt’s inaccurate claims risk pushing moderate Democrats—who read and cite him—into adopting much of Trump’s approach to the border and migration.
Here’s the thread, which is getting massive numbers on Twitter because of a boost from New Republic writer Greg Sargent.
We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever: Title 42. It just didn’t deter a migrant population that changed dramatically.
During Donald Trump’s term, 90+ percent of migrants were from Mexico and Central America (blue, green, brown, yellow in the chart below). If you were a migrant from those countries, your probability of being released into the United States after apprehension didn’t change much after Biden’s inauguration.
(An exception is unaccompanied children from Central America: Biden stopped Trump’s practice of expelling them, alone, back into their countries regardless of protection needs. The moral argument for doing that is self-evident, and it didn’t move the needle much overall.)
Migrants may have found Biden’s initial moves and rhetoric encouraging? But Biden kept in place Stephen Miller’s Title 42 expulsions policy, which shut down asylum for everyone who could be deported easily. Ending “Remain in Mexico” didn’t matter, Title 42 had eclipsed it.
This chart shows that the Biden administration continued applying Title 42, expelling people as vigorously as possible (orange). But yes, the chart shows a decline in the _percentage_ of people being expelled in 2021.
That is not Biden being soft-hearted toward migrants. Instead, it reflects a historic change in the migrant population: new nationalities began arriving in ways unimaginable before 2021.
Just as Joe Biden was being inaugurated, the world’s borders were opening up post-pandemic. So did new migration routes like the Darién Gap.
The U.S.-Mexico border became accessible to people from very distant countries. South America and beyond. This had never happened before. By 2023, Mexico and Central America were just 55 percent of migrants at the border. By early 2024, one in nine were from Europe, Asia, or Africa.
You may have noticed that these countries are far away. It’s costly to deport people to them—if it’s even possible diplomatically—because you have to fly them. More had to be released into the U.S. interior to seek asylum.
Expulsions across a land border are way cheaper than by air. Under Trump, Mexico agreed to take back Title 42 expulsions from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Biden admin worked on Mexico to agree to take expelled people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Biden expanded Title 42! It was a huge crackdown, especially on Mexicans and Central Americans (blue). But the overall flow of people from distant countries (green) was even larger, more than Mexico could absorb on its own.
When Title 42 ended, Biden placed a ban on asylum access on everyone who passed through a third country and didn’t get an asylum denial there. But the same challenge remained: people from distant countries who are hard to return. Numbers kept growing.
In late 2023, in yet another Biden crackdown, the admin leaned on Mexico to intensify its own efforts to block migrants crossing the country. It is unprecedented for Mexico to have sustained a migration crackdown for this long; they usually erode after a few months.
And then in June, Biden put in place an overall ban on asylum access between ports of entry, which lowered numbers further.
A common media question is “why did Biden wait so long” to ban asylum, a right enshrined in U.S. law. Because it’s probably illegal to do so? Because blanket bans on entry don’t apply to people who are already on U.S. soil, as courts told Trump?
In sum, it’s hard to argue that Biden did much to make the border more open for migrants. Those from Mexico and CentAm faced similar low odds of avoiding expulsion, compared to Trump. Those from elsewhere are harder to remove—but they are a new phenomenon Trump never faced.
This thread is already too long, so it doesn’t discuss the enormous human cost of these asylum denial policies, which WOLA and others have documented at length. That whole vital line of argument doesn’t seem to have much sway with the “Biden wasn’t harsh enough” crowd.
Congressional Republicans’ hardline early-2025 border agenda coming into focus. Setting the stage for mass deportation. The impact in Mexico and elsewhere along the migration route. Personnel changes at border and migration agencies.
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.
Following likely confirmation of the incoming Trump administration’s choice for Homeland Security secretary, the 119th Congress will move by late January on a package of hardline border and immigration measures whose total cost could be more than $100 billion. As it will move under a special Senate rule called “reconciliation,” it could pass the chamber, where Republicans lead by a 53-47 margin, by a simple majority.
Without offering much detail, President-Elect Trump and other White House officials have been previewing plans to carry out a promised campaign of mass deportations of undocumented migrants in the United States. They are exhibiting a willingness to deport U.S. citizen children together with their undocumented parents, and are preparing aggressive tactics against Democratic state and local officials who do not cooperate.
Many migrants cannot be deported quickly or inexpensively because they come from distant countries, or countries whose governments do not allow deportation flights. The incoming Trump administration is seeking third countries to accept some deportees, including a reluctant Mexico that may already find itself receiving large numbers of its own citizens across the land border. Impacts of imminent policy changes are evident all along the U.S.-bound migration route, including the Darién Gap which saw, in November, the lightest migration flow since April 2022.
The incoming administration announced nominees to head CBP and ICE, along with White House and ambassadorial choices. CBP nominee Rodney Scott, a former Border Patrol chief, is an outspoken critic of the Biden administration whose past activities raise concerns among rights defenders. A former Border Patrol union chief is the nominee to head the U.S. embassy in Chile.
Migration in the treacherous Darién Gap fell in November to its lowest level since April 2022. The weather, and a possible "Trump effect," are likely to blame.
Panama’s government published data on Friday about migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling the country’s border with Colombia that until recently was considered too dangerous to walk through. People who attempt the 70-mile route frequently perish of drownings and attacks by animals and—more often—by criminals. Robberies and sexual violence are terribly common.
Despite that, the Darién Gap has become a heavily transited migration route since the COVID-19 pandemic began to ease. 1.2 million people have migrated through the Darién Gap between 2021 and 2024, more than 10 times the 115,758 people who made the journey in the 11 years between 2010 and 2020.
During the first 11 months of 2024, 277,354 people, 70 percent of them citizens of Venezuela, traversed the Darién route. That is down 44 percent from the 495,459 people who crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, the record year.
The most intense months of Darién Gap migration were August and September of 2023, when more than 2,500 people per day crossed the jungle. Migration dropped with the heaviest months of the rainy season (note October and especially November dropping every year on the chart below), and recovered only modestly at the beginning of 2024.
It’s not clear why Darién Gap migration didn’t climb all the way back up to August-September levels in early January 2024. Likely explanations could be word getting out about Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to block migrants, which began in January, and perhaps some Venezuelans postponing plans pending the outcome of July’s presidential elections, whose result the Nicolás Maduro regime ended up ignoring.
Migration fell further in July, after Panama inaugurated a president, Raúl Mulino, who took office promising to crack down on Darién Gap migration. Some migrants may have paused their plans amid news of stepped-up, U.S.-backed deportation flights from Panama. Panama’s government operated 34 deportation flights between August and November, removing about 1,370 people who had migrated through the region. While that is equal to about 1.8 percent of the total Darién Gap migration, the flights may have deterred some, at least for now.
Panama’s data show that November 2024 saw the fewest Darién Gap migrants of any month since April 2022. That is somewhat surprising, since one would expect the waves of repression following Venezuela’s failed election to have spurred more people to abandon Venezuela and head north. That appeared to be happening in September and October, when Venezuelan migration increased.
A key reason for November’s drop may be the weather. November is the height of the rainy season in southern Central America: the Darién paths are especially treacherous, and maritime routes can be dangerous. A report published Friday by Colombia’s migration agency shows that on at least three days last month, the boats leading to the Darién route’s starting point from the ports of Necoclí and Turbo, Colombia, were shut down completely by climate conditions.
There could also be a “Trump effect.” The November 5 election of a virulently anti-immigrant president in the United States may also be causing would-be migrants to change their plans, for now, until they have better information about what may await them.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; an “explainer” and a podcast about Trump already starting to threaten Mexico; some notes on Trump’s troubling nominee to head Customs and Border Protection; two pieces about remarkable border and migration data; a CNN Español interview about Colombia; links to some good readings; and links to 10 upcoming Latin America-related events.
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.
10 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, December 9
11:00 at the Atlantic Council and atlanticcouncil.com: Driving smart cities in Latin America and the Caribbean (RSVP required).
Tuesday, December 10
9:00-10:30 at the Inter-American Dialogue and thedialogue.org: Political Imprisonment and Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean (RSVP required).
3:00-4:00 at the Wilson Center and wilsoncenter.org: A Latin America Agenda for a New White House and Congress (RSVP required).
Wednesday, December 11
9:15-10:30 at the Inter-American Dialogue and thedialogue.org: Women, Financial Inclusion, and Family Remittances in Guatemala (RSVP required).
1:00-2:00 at WOLA and wola.org: La Paz Total, El Capitulo Étnico y la Hermandad Afro Americana (RSVP required).
2:00 in Room 2200, Rayburn House Office Building and online: Hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations entitled The Communist Cuban Regime’s Disregard for Human Rights.
We expect senators to ask tough questions about troubling allegations surrounding Trump's pick to head CBP.
President-Elect Trump has nominated Rodney Scott as the next commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. government’s leading border security agency, which includes Border Patrol and runs official border crossings from the Mexico border to ports and airports. Scott, a career Border Patrol agent, was chief of the Patrol during the last year of the Trump administration and the first few months of the Biden administration, which dismissed him.
In 2023, I launched a website that tracks allegations of abuse, corruption, and misconduct at U.S. border agencies through an online database. (This project has fallen out of date because it lacks funding—a grant ran out in early 2024. I’m working to convince philanthropic organizations to back the 10-12 expert person-hours per week that its upkeep would require, but I’ve had no luck so far.)
Rodney Scott comes up four times in this database. The often troubling events and allegations are below.
Late November 2021: Rodney Scott, the Trump administration’s last Border Patrol chief who exited his position in August, faced a San Diego Superior Court judge for a September tweet in which he advised former Border Patrol agent turned activist Jenn Budd, who has recounted being raped at the Border Patrol academy, to “lean back, close your eyes, and just enjoy the show.” [On December 6, 2024 Budd wrote on BlueSky, “The judge found that he did make the rape threat, he admitted to hav[ing] CBP open an investigation on me, & I still lost the case.”] Budd also posted screenshots on Twitter showing Scott among those on private CBP and Border Patrol agents’ Facebook groups sharing images of Border Patrol shoulder patches reading “Let’s Go Brandon,” a right-wing euphemism for “F— Joe Biden.”
October 25, 2021: A strongly (and explicitly) worded report from the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform, issued on October 25, detailed the disciplinary process following 2019 revelations of a secret Facebook page at which CBP personnel posted racist, violent, and lewd content (original link). The Committee discovered that for most involved, consequences were light: they “had their discipline significantly reduced and continued to work with migrants” (original link)… “CBP knew about Border Patrol agents’ inappropriate posts on ‘I’m 10-15’ since 2016, three years before it was reported publicly,” the House Committee found. Among the Facebook group’s members were Border Patrol’s last two chiefs, Carla Provost (2018-2020) and Rodney Scott (2020-August 2021). Both indicated that they followed the group in order to monitor agents’ attitudes and complaints.
September 29, 2021: A letter to Justice Department leadership and the DHS Inspector-General from Alliance San Diego alleged that former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who left his post in August 2021, had violated the Ethics in Government Act. Scott established a consulting firm in July 2021, while still working for Border Patrol. On September 18, he issued a Facebook request for active-duty CBP and ICE personnel to provide information, possibly including restricted information, “to counter the lies and missinformation [sic.] that the DHS Secretary and Biden officials spew everytime they speak about the border.”
January 27, 2021: Relatives of Anastasio Hernández Rojas filed a brief before the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, contending that Border Patrol covered up, and improperly interfered with the investigation of, agents’ role in Hernández’s 2010 death. Video showed numerous Border Patrol agents and CBP officers beating and tasing a hogtied and handcuffed Hernández to death. The brief contended that the acting deputy chief patrol agent in Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector at the time, Rodney Scott, signed a potentially illegal subpoena to obtain Hernández’s autopsy. (Scott went on to be Border Patrol chief from 2020 to 2021.)
In a thread on BlueSky, the CBP Watch coalition posted links to news coverage of additional allegations:
In June 2018, during the height of the uproar over the Trump administration’s separations of migrant parents and children, Scott toldPolitico, “I would like to remind people too, when we look at a child in the United States and say, ‘Oh, that 14-year-old young man,’ or, ‘That’s an adult in a lot of other countries. That kid’s been working for years, may or may not have been associated with gangs.’ A lot of times, especially if there’s any kind of a use of force or a violent encounter with law enforcement, and the person’s under 18, people get this picture in their head that it’s like the kid that lives next door to you, and it’s not. Some of these kids are hardened adults, and I’m not going to say that that’s all of them. But look into it, pull the layers of the onion back a little bit more, and you’ll find out most of these stories just are not true. They’re exaggerations.”
“Scott was chief of Border Patrol when the agency deployed BORTAC”—the agency’s elite, SWAT team-like force—“against protestors in Portland” after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
“Scott was also directly implicated in expelling 13,000 unaccompanied children during title 42”—the 2020-2023 policy of removing asylum seekers without an opportunity to seek protection, in the name of pandemic response—“a policy that never got the press scrutiny it deserved (with some honorable exceptions).”
There was no reason not to expect Donald Trump to nominate someone with extremely hardline views to head CBP, someone who may worsen the climate for human rights abuse at an agency that already exhibits serious institutional culture problems. That’s what has happened—and as a career official and a known quantity among the Republican senators who will hold a majority next year, Rodney Scott will probably win confirmation.
I’ll be watching the confirmation closely, along with others in the human rights and government oversight communities. We’ll note how senators vote, and expect at least some to take their oversight role seriously by raising these allegations during the confirmation process. That’s why I’m gathering them all here, to make them available in one place.
This is just Border Patrol apprehensions: migrants caught out in the open areas between the official border crossings (ports of entry). I only have CBP port of entry data by country (which is smaller until very recently), for just 21 countries and a big “other” category, going back to October 2019.
Note how 10 months of the Trump administration (2017-2020) saw more migration than October 2024 (56,530 migrant apprehensions).
Note how the migrant population was almost completely Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran before the pandemic, and far more diverse after it.
You can see the early 2024 drop resulting from Mexico’s ongoing crackdown on migrants trying to transit its territory, and then a further mid-2024 drop resulting from the Biden administration’s ban on nearly all asylum access for people who cross between the border’s ports of entry.
I wrote the part about migration. An excerpt is below, but I recommend reading the whole thing here.
Mexico’s 2024 crackdown has been its most intense ever. Since January, Mexico has averaged 115,636 blocked or encountered migrants per month—11 times the monthly average during Trump’s first administration. For the first time ever, Mexico’s number has equaled or even exceeded Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) and Border Patrol’s count of migrants encountered at the border. Mexico cracked down so swiftly that Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions plummeted 50 percent in a single month, from December 2023 to January 2024: the sharpest month-to-month drop of the 21st century so far. This happened without a mention of tariffs or other punishments.
Donald Trump's crude tariff threat against Mexico and Canada last week tells a lot about what we'll be dealing with over the next few years.
Here’s a WOLA podcast episode recorded Wednesday (December 4) with my WOLA colleagues Stephanie Brewer (Mexico) and John Walsh (Drug Policy). Donald Trump’s crude tariff threat against Mexico and Canada last week tells a lot about what we’ll be dealing with over the next few years. It also showed a possible new side to Mexico’s responses to this sort of bullying. And meanwhile, we need never to lose sight of the absurdity and cruelty of the migration and drug policies that Trump is trying to force on the United States’ closest neighbors.
On November 25, President-Elect Donald Trump announced via social media that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada unless migration and fentanyl trafficking ceased entirely. The announcement caused widespread alarm, spurring a flurry of responses and an unclear conversation between Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The event was instructive about what we might expect after Trump assumes the presidency in January, WOLA Director for Mexico Stephanie Brewer and Director for Drug Policy John Walsh observe in this episode.
Brewer explained the “tariff threat” incident, how it plays into the political agendas of both Trump and Sheinbaum, and the danger of doing serious damage to a multifaceted, interdependent bilateral relationship.
Host Adam Isacson, who covers border and migration policy at WOLA, joined the discussion to point out that Trump seeks to bully Mexico into carrying out a crackdown on migration that has, in fact, already been underway for some time—with serious human rights implications.
Walsh observed that demands on Mexico to crack down on fentanyl threaten a reversion to supply-side, prohibitionist approaches to a complex drug problem that not only haven’t worked over the past 50 years, but may in fact have ceded much control to armed and criminal groups.
The U.S.-Mexico border, and the bilateral relationship, may be marked by these episodes of threat and bluster for much of the next few years. Weathering this period will require civil society in both the United States and Mexico to play an aggressive role, demanding “steadiness, focus on facts, keeping things grounded in reality,” and never losing sight of what better migration and drug policies would look like.
Migration is reduced at the border, but may be activating in southern Mexico. Relations with Mexico following Trump’s tariff threat. Notes on the incoming Trump administration’s border and migration plans.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Preliminary data indicate that Border Patrol apprehended fewer migrants at the border in November than any month since July 2020. An expected post-election rush, with migrants seeking to get to the United States before Donald Trump’s inauguration, has not happened. In southern Mexico, though, people appear to be arriving in larger numbers and seeking to migrate in large groups.
President-Elect Trump appeared to pull down his November 25 threat to slap tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods until they stop the entry of migrants and drugs, following a reportedly cordial phone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. However, Sheinbaum showed a willingness to push back, disputing Trump’s characterization of what was agreed. A future area of disagreement may be Mexico’s willingness to accept deportations of migrants from third countries.
This section lists several analyses and reports about the incoming administration’s hardline approach to the border and migration. Topics include potential use of the U.S. military, the Texas state government’s crackdown serving as a model or template, the shaky future of alternative migration pathways, and signs that at least some Democrats are moving rightward.
Preliminatry numbers show the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic.
“U.S. authorities made about 46,700 arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico in November, down about 17% from October to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency,” reported the Associated Press’s Elliot Spagat.
That is the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic. Here’s what it looks like:
Migration rising in the final months of the Trump administration, as the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy ceased to deter people from coming to the border.
A big jump in migration in early 2021, after Trump left office and the world’s borders reopened several months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
A drop in January 2024 as Mexico’s government, at the Biden administration’s behest, started cracking down harder on migrants transiting the country.
A further drop in June 2024 as the Biden administration, in a questionably legal move, banned most asylum access between border ports of entry.
Many observers, including me, expected more migrants stranded in Mexico to rush to the border after Donald Trump won the November 5 election, seeking to get to U.S. soil before Inauguration Day on January 20. That is not happening, at least not yet. It may still happen, and activity is increasing in southern Mexico. Still, as the end-of-year holidays usually bring a lull in migration, it might not happen at all.
8 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, December 2
10:00 at acleddata.com: Is ‘Total Peace’ still possible? A conversation on Colombia’s armed groups under Petro (RSVP required).
Tuesday, December 3
10:00-11:00 at CSIS and csis.org: Addressing Maduro’s Oil Lifeline in the Wake of a Stolen Election (RSVP required).
8:00pm at NACLA Zoom: Venezuela in the New Trump Era (RSVP required).
Wednesday, December 4
9:00-12:30 at the Brookings Institution and brookings.edu: The fentanyl epidemic in North America and the global reach of synthetic opioids (RSVP required).
10:30 at atlanticcouncil.org: El Salvador’s economic evolution: Investment insights and opportunities (RSVP required).
11:00-12:30 at insightcrime.org: Behind Bars, Beyond Control: The Fall of Ecuador’s Prisons and the Rise of Its Mafias (RSVP required).
10:30-12:00 at the Wilson Center and wilsoncenter.org: The Next President of the United States: Challenges and Recommendations for the US-Mexico Relationship (RSVP required).
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