Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

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Adam Isacson

Daily Border Links: March 19, 2024

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Developments

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.”

Daily Border Links: March 18, 2024

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Developments

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.

Analyses and Feature Stories

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.

Latin America-Related Events in Washington and Online This Week

(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)

Monday, March 18, 2024

  • 9:00-10:30 at csis.org: USAID/MujerProspera: Advancing Gender Equality in Northern Central America (RSVP required).
  • 2:00-5:00 at CSIS and csis.org: From Terrestrial to Celestial: Unlocking the Potential to Enhance U.S.-Latin American B2B Collaboration (RSVP required).

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Thursday, March 21, 2024

A New Tool for Migration Data

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.

Search result: Monthly Migration at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Presented by “Whether Encountered At or Between Ports of Entry” at “Big Bend Sector, Del Rio Sector, El Paso Sector, Laredo Sector, and Rio Grande Valley Sector” at “El Paso Field Office and Laredo Field Office” for migrants from “Cuba and Haiti” who are “Accompanied Minors, Family Unit Members, and Unaccompanied Children / Single Minors” Between 2023 and 2024
Whether Encountered At or Between Ports of Entry	Oct 2022	Nov 2022	Dec 2022	Jan 2023	Feb 2023	Mar 2023	Apr 2023	May 2023	Jun 2023	Jul 2023	Aug 2023	Sep 2023	Oct 2023	Nov 2023	Dec 2023	Jan 2024	Total
At the Ports of Entry (CBP Office of Field Operations)	2,085	1,699	1,845	1,055	1,551	1,804	2,288	2,110	3,413	4,366	3,607	2,806	2,943	3,372	3,979	4,627	43,550
Between the Ports of Entry (Border Patrol)	4,085	6,001	7,786	1,351	17	109	180	408	79	122	124	174	220	397	1,464	314	22,831
Total	6,170	7,700	9,631	2,406	1,568	1,913	2,468	2,518	3,492	4,488	3,731	2,980	3,163	3,769	5,443	4,941	66,381

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.

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: March 15, 2024

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.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

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.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Read More

Daily Border Links: March 15, 2024

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Developments

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.

Analyses and Feature Stories

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.

Daily Border Links: March 14, 2024

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Developments

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.

Analyses and Feature Stories

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.

On the Right

A bit of construction

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.

Daily Border Links: March 12, 2024

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Developments

The Biden administration sent its 2025 budget request to Congress yesterday. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) submission repeats many items that appeared in a supplemental funding request that failed to pass the Senate in early February. These include the hiring of 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP officers, 1,600 USCIS asylum officers, and 375 new immigration judge teams, along with “$849 million for cutting-edge [fentanyl and other contraband] detection technology at ports of entry.”

The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) request foresees a reduction in the agency’s overall budget, from an enacted level of $20,968,070 in 2023 to a requested level of $19,764,120 in 2025.

As in the 2024 budget request—which Congress still has not passed, with the next deadline coming up on March 22—the administration is seeking a flexible $4.7 billion “emergency fund” to deal with migration surges. Republican legislators refused to support the idea last year, calling it a “slush fund.”

A close read of the CBP request finds some notable performance metrics:

  • 11.8 percent of Border Patrol’s apprehended migrants made “at least a second attempt” to enter in fiscal 2023, down from 16.6 percent in 2022. The decline owes mainly to the end of the Title 42 policy, when re-entries followed large numbers of rapid, consequence-free expulsions.
  • Border Patrol estimated that agents interdicted 75.6 percent of illegal entries in 2023, similar to 75.9 percent in 2022 but down from 82.6 percent in 2021 and 86.3 percent in 2019.
  • Border Patrol carried out 26 joint operations with Mexican “law enforcement partners” in 2023, up from 23 in 2022 but down from 39 in 2019.

President Biden told reporters that he is no longer considering executive action on migration at the border, like a legally dubious order to expel asylum seekers when daily migration exceeds a particular amount. On February 21, several media outlets had reported that the White House was considering such an action. Yesterday, Biden instead called on Congress to change the law.

If the Supreme Court does not act, a controversial Texas state law will go into effect tomorrow (March 13). S.B. 4 would allow authorities to imprison and deport people who cross the border irregularly, which may imply authorities in Texas’s interior demanding that people they encounter prove that they did not enter the United States that way. A federal judge blocked S.B. 4 on February 29, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals un-blocked it while deliberations continue.

Texas and other Republican states will appeal a federal judge’s March 8 ruling throwing out their effort to end the Biden administration’s use of humanitarian parole authority to permit the entry of some citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

In El Paso, a Texas state judge blocked the conservative state government’s legal attacks on Annunciation House, a decades-old shelter that receives migrants released from CBP custody. In early February Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R) demanded that the shelter turn over a large amount of records on very short notice or risk revocation of its operating license. In a hearing last week, State District Court Judge Francisco Dominguez’s written opinion called out “the Attorney General’s efforts to run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play,” alleging politicized motives.

“When an organization leaves there is always a concern for the organizations to be able to meet those needs,” said Panama-based UNICEF official Margarita Sánchez, about Doctors Without Borders’ (MSF) forced departure from the Darién Gap. ” So, in this case, we hope that, surely, the Panamanian state can respond to that need.” Last week, MSF revealed that Panama’s government had revoked the organization’s permission to provide medical care to migrants arriving at posts where the dangerous Darién trail ends.

MSF had been denouncing a sharp recent rise in cases of sexual abuse, which raises questions about the motives and timing of the Panamanian government’s decision to suspend the group’s activities. “Blocking the operations of MSF sends a chilling message to the international aid community to censor their communications,” International Crisis Group investigator Bram Ebus told the New Humanitarian. There is no word yet on whether Panama might be persuaded to reconsider.

The State Department announced that it has begun denying visas of executives of charter airline companies that offer flights to Nicaragua, which requires visas of few arriving nationalities, to people who intend to migrate from there to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Deaths of migrants by drowning are worsening in the Rio Grande, which is swollen by recent rains, Aaron Nelsen reported at Texas Monthly. “No U.S. or Mexican agency, however, keeps a comprehensive count of migrant deaths,” and there is little coordination between local and national agencies on either side of the border.

Though the actual policy is “murky,” Mexico is busing apprehended people to the country’s south at an increased pace in order to slow U.S.-bound migration, the Guardian reported. The PBS NewsHour spoke to migrants stranded in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula.

President Biden’s off-the-cuff State of the Union remark referring to a migrant as an “illegal,” Jose Antonio Vargas wrote at CNN, “does underscore the political reality that, in the Trump era, the country has veered right on immigration, and the language that shapes the anti-immigrant policies being pushed at almost all governmental levels reflects it.”

At the New Republic, a lengthy analysis by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa looked at recent Republican gains in south Texas’s Latino-majority Rio Grande Valley border region.

Daily Border Links: March 11, 2024

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Developments

A helicopter crash near Rio Grande City, Texas claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent and two members of the New York National Guard. A third New York National Guardsman is seriously injured. The cause of the UH-72 Lakota crash, while on a routine flight, is as yet unknown. The Guard personnel were working with Joint Task Force-North, a decades-old Defense Department Northern Command component that supports Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—not the state National Guard mission within Texas’s separate, state-funded “Operation Lone Star.”

In the televised Republican response to President Joe Biden’s Thursday State of the Union address, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) told a harrowing story about migration and the border. Further coverage revealed that Britt left out key context and manipulated the narrative.

Speaking from her kitchen, the senator told of meeting a woman in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, who told of being a victim of human trafficking and suffering thousands of rapes from the age of 12.

Sen. Britt used the story as an example of the failure of Joe Biden’s border policies, but closer scrutiny—led by a TikTok video from former AP reporter Jonathan Katz—revealed that the crimes happened more than 15 years ago, during the Bush administration. The victim, activist Karla Jacinto Romero, has spoken publicly about what was done to her, including in U.S. congressional testimony, and the crimes happened in Mexico, not the United States.

President Biden voiced regret about using the word “illegal” to refer to a migrant who allegedly killed a Georgia nursing student in February, in an off-the-cuff response to Republican heckling during the State of the Union address.

A federal district court judge in Texas threw out a lawsuit from Texas and 20 other Republican-led state governments that sought to block President Biden’s use of a 1950s humanitarian parole authority to give a temporary documented status in the United States to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with passports and U.S.-based sponsors. (The “CHNV” program has allowed 365,000 citizens of those countries—up to 30,000 per month permitted—to fly to the United States since late 2022.)

Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump nominee, ruled that Texas lacks legal standing to stop Biden’s use of the policy because the state government failed to demonstrate that it “suffered an injury,” particularly since the parole program is linked to a drop in arrivals of those countries’ citizens at the border. Texas can still appeal.

In a separate decision on a suit brought by Texas and other Republican-led state governments, Tipton temporarily blocked the Biden administration from stopping Trump-era border wall construction and redirecting money to environmental remediation. The administration can still appeal.

A March 9 video from Samira Gozaine, the director of Panama’s Migration Service, said that more than 82,000 people have migrated through the Darién Gap so far this year. That is nearly equal to the total Panama measured for the entire first three months of 2023 (87,390). During all of 2023, Panama counted over 520,000 migrants, a previously unthinkable sum for a route that rarely exceeded 1,000 before the mid-2010s.

Of 2,600 migrants put on buses to Costa Rica on March 8, Gozaine said that about 2,100 were citizens of Venezuela, followed in number by citizens of Ecuador, China, Colombia, and Haiti.

Panama has not yet posted February data about Darién Gap migration.

There is no new word on Panama’s controversial decision last week to ban Doctors Without Borders, which has been providing essential health services at reception posts where the Darién Gap jungle trail ends. The organization has been the only source about many hundreds of reports of sexual violence committed against migrants on this route.

Migration has begun to rise in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico. CBP is averaging 1,113 migrant “encounters” per day, up from less than 700 in January, according to the El Paso municipal government’s migration dashboard. Migrant shelter occupancy across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juárez has increased by 30 percent in the past few days as more people arrive in the region, EFE reported.

The Spanish news agency indicated that word-of-mouth spread about federal courts delaying Texas’s implementation, originally scheduled for March 5, of a draconian state law that would imprison or deport migrants who cross the border irregularly. That law, S.B. 4, will go into effect on Wednesday March 13, unless the Supreme Court decides to keep it on hold while appeals proceed.

Mexico’s government is about to open a new migrant detention facility about 50 miles south of Ciudad Juárez, nearly a year after a March 2023 fire that destroyed a facility in the city, taking the lives of 40 migrants whom guards left locked inside.

At a March 9 party convention in Oklahoma City, 225 state-level Republican leaders voted by a wide margin to censure their senior U.S. senator, James Lankford, for having negotiated the bipartisan “border deal” that failed a month ago in the face of Republican opposition.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A Los Angeles Times column from Brown University’s Ieva Jusionyte links the heavy southbound flow of illegal U.S. weapons into Mexico and Latin America with the northbound flow of migrants. The link between arms trafficking and migration is the subject a forthcoming book by the column’s author.

On the Right

Latin America-Related Events in Washington and Online This Week

(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)

Monday, March 11, 2024

  • 10:00-11:15 at the Wilson Center and wilsoncenter.org: China’s Voice in Latin American Media (RSVP required).
  • 2:30 in Room 216, Hart Senate Office Building: Hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Worldwide Threats.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Weekly Border Update Promo Video

In this week’s WOLA Border Update:

  • The spring migration increase is underway
  • Boats stop, then resume, at the entrance to the Darién Gap
  • Drug seizure data through January shows drop in fentanyl

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: March 8, 2024

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.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

Leaked data points to a 13 percent increase in Border Patrol migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border from January to February. Last month’s unofficial total is high for a typical February, but lower than most months during the past three years. The top two sectors for migrant arrivals were in Arizona and California. Mexico broke its single-month migrant apprehensions record in January, capturing nearly as many people that month as the U.S. Border Patrol did. Migration through Honduras illustrates many migrants’ use of a route that involves flights to Nicaragua.

Boats ferrying people to the beginning of the Darién Gap migration trail halted for five days at the end of February. The transport companies called a strike to protest the Colombian Navy’s seizure of two vessels. Ferries restarted after an agreement with the Colombian government, at a meeting that included the presence of a U.S. embassy official. The Darién route into Panama is growing more treacherous, as Doctors Without Borders is reporting an alarming increase in sexual assaults committed against migrants in the jungle so far this year.

As Democratic senators call on the Biden administration to increase funding for fentanyl interdiction at the border, CBP is reporting fewer seizures so far in fiscal year 2024. The agency is on pace to seize 25 percent less of the synthetic opioid than it did in 2023. This would be the first year-on-year decline after several years of very rapid growth. WOLA charts also depict a reduced pace of heroin and marijuana seizures, and an increased pace of cocaine and (less sharply) methamphetamine seizures.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Read More

Daily Border Links: March 8, 2024

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Developments

As expected, President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last night referred to the situation of elevated migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Biden repeated his call on Congress to pass a border bill based on a bipartisan Senate compromise, that was defeated amid Republican opposition in early February. Among its provisions was an authority to expel asylum-seeking migrants when daily encounters reach 4,000 or 5,000 per day, which migrants’ rights defenders vehemently oppose.

Less expected was Biden’s unscripted exchange with Republican House members heckling his remarks. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called on the President to say the name of Laken Riley, a nursing student murdered in February, allegedly by a Venezuelan migrant who had been released into the United States after turning himself in to Border Patrol in El Paso in 2022, when the Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect.

Biden complied, referring to the victim as an “innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” using a pejorative term to describe undocumented migrants that his administration has discouraged.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), who left the Democratic Party in 2022 and helped negotiate the Senate border compromise, invited the head of Border Patrol’s union, an outspoken Biden critic, to be her guest at the State of the Union address. Brandon Judd had appeared alongside Donald Trump during his February 29 visit to the border in Eagle Pass, Texas. Sinema announced this week that she will not seek re-election in November.

Earlier in the day, the Republican-majority House passed a bill called the “Laken Riley Act,” mandating the detention of migrants who enter the country irregularly and are charged with committing theft, as Riley’s alleged killer was. Though this bill will not move in the Democratic-majority Senate, 37 House Democrats voted for it despite language sharply criticizing the Biden administration’s border and migration policies.

The government of Panama has suspended that activities of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which operates health posts at sites where migrants emerge from the days-long journey through the Darién Gap. The ostensible reason for the suspension is the lack of “a collaboration agreement in force” with Panama’s Ministry of Health. MSF stated that it “has been trying in vain to obtain such a renewal since October 2023.”

The suspension comes just a few days after MSF put out a statement denouncing a sharp increase in their encounters with victims of sexual violence along the Darién route: 233 cases in the first two months after 676 cases in 2023, of which a majority occurred during the final 3 months of last year.

A Journal of the American Medical Association article, covered in the Washington Post, found a sharp increase in drowning deaths of migrants in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego after the Trump administration replaced existing border barriers with taller wall segments.

A Wall Street Journal poll found majority support for tougher border security, including the Senate border compromise, and strong support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants who have been in the United States for many years.

A CBP statement provided more information about a Border Patrol agent’s fatal March 3 shooting of a man it identified as part of a gang robbing migrants at gunpoint along the borderline east of San Diego. A sniper killed an individual who “demanded money from the group, racked his pistol to chamber a round, and pointed the weapon at one of the migrants.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

A survey study by the UN Refugee Agency and non-governmental groups found that 56 percent of migrants who crossed Mexico in 2023 suffered some kind of abuse. Of 207 surveyed who had been deported by the United States, 139 were people “who may require international protection after “fleeing violence” in their countries.”

At Arizona Luminaria, John Washington reported on the long wait for CBP One appointments in Nogales, Sonora, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) makes only 100 appointments available each day at the port of entry. The nearest ports of entry offering appointments are hundreds of miles away in Calexico and El Paso. As a result, many migrants are tempted to cross in the desert and turn themselves in to Border Patrol.

Also reporting from Nogales, Todd Miller visited a garden tended by migrants at the city’s Casa de la Misericordia de Todas las Naciones shelter.

New York featured a collection of images from Alex Hodor-Lee, a photographer with a background in crafting images of luxury fashion goods, depicting objects that migrants abandoned after Border Patrol agents told them to throw away any “non-essential” belongings.

On the Right

WOLA Podcast: Flooding the Zone—the “Bukele Model,” Security and Democracy in El Salvador

It’s been too long since I’ve done a podcast focused on El Salvador. Nayib Bukele’s re-election made it even more timely. Here’s a fast-moving and hard-hitting conversation with Douglas Farah, a veteran journalist and consultant who has been following the situation closely and gives us a lot to worry about. Not just about El Salvador, but about what the so-called “Bukele Model” means for democracy region-wide.

Here’s the text from the podcast landing page at wola.org:

It has been almost a month since Nayib Bukele was reelected as President of El Salvador by a very wide margin, despite a constitutional prohibition on reelection. While security gains and a constant communications blitz have made Bukele popular, our guest, Douglas Farah of IBI Consultants, highlights some grave concerns about the “Bukele Model” and where it is headed.

Among these: pursuit of an “authoritarian playbook” common to many 21st century political movements, with eroding checks and balances; vastly weakened transparency over government activities; a complicated relationship with gangs and their integration into the political structure; an unsustainable reliance on mass incarceration; and erosion of the independence and professionalism of the police, military, and judiciary.

In this episode, Farah argues:

  • The success of Bukele’s security model may not be as pronounced as is publicly accepted.
  • The human rights cost is very high, with about 75,000 people arrested, far more than earlier estimates of gang membership.
  • Bukele’s model uses elements from the “authoritarian playbook,” including undoing public access laws, eliminating accountability for government spending, consolidating media control, threatening independent media, and relying on armies of social media accounts and traditional media outlets to dominate the political conversation.
  • Toleration of human rights abuse and corruption have undone a police reform that was a key element of the country’s 1992 peace accords.
  • MS-13 is not defeated: its leaders avoid extradition while maintaining close relationships with authorities, while some of its affiliates serve as legislative “alternates.”
  • The influence of China is real but probably overstated, as the country offers few resources and little overall strategic value.
  • While it does not make strategic sense to criticize the popular president frontally, the Biden administration needs to be more consistent and less timid in its critique of specific policies and anti-democratic trends.

Douglas Farah is President of IBI Consultants, a research consultancy that offers many of its products online. He was formerly bureau chief of United Press International in El Salvador, a staff correspondent for The Washington Post, and a senior visiting fellow at the National Defense University’s Center for Strategic Research. He is a 1995 recipient of the Columbia Journalism School’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding coverage of Latin America.

Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

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