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.
The Trump administration assembles an ultra-hardline border and migration team. A possible rush to the border before January 20? Migration dips modestly in October in the Darién Gap. Senate committee produces text of 2025 Homeland Security Appropriations bill.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
In the days following his election to the presidency, Donald Trump has named three officials with direct border and migration responsibilities. All of them represent the Republican Party’s hard line on border security crackdowns and restriction of immigration. Stephen Miller will be Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the White House. Tom Homan will be in the White House as a “border czar.” Kristi Noem is the nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security. They will manage a planned “mass deportation” campaign while seeking to do away with legal migration pathways that the Biden administration preserved or established. Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio will lead a foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere, especially Mexico, for which migration will be a dominant issue.
Analysts and border-security planners continue to expect the number of migrants approaching the U.S.-Mexico border to increase ahead of Inauguration Day as people race to reach U.S. soil before a crackdown. So far, though, this has not materialized: Border Patrol apprehensions have actually dropped since Election Day.
22,914 people migrated in October through the treacherous Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama. That is a modest drop from 25,111 in September, which may be due at least in part to weather conditions. The number of migrants from Venezuela (19,522) barely dropped from September.
The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Democrats until the chamber switches to Republican control, published the text of its version of the 2025 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security. It includes more money for CBP, especially for ports of entry, and more funding for shelters and local jurisdictions receiving and integrating released migrants. It does not include additional money to hire Border Patrol agents or to build new border barriers. It is unclear whether this bill will move forward. Republicans may seek to write their own bill after they assume the Senate majority in January, though that would require keeping the U.S. government open after December 20, the deadline for passing a 2025 budget.
Border communities and migrants brace for another Trump administration; Possibility of a jump in migration ahead of Inauguration Day; Soldiers kill migrants, again, in Mexico; Darién Gap notes
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Donald Trump’s election points to a return, and likely intensification, of ultra-hardline border and migration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere. We can expect a suspension or curtailment of most legal migration pathways, from CBP One to asylum access to humanitarian parole. We can expect a “mass deportation” campaign in the U.S. interior. This section lists and explains some of the president-elect’s promised and likely initiatives, and what they mean for U.S.-Mexico relations.
Trump’s victory creates an incentive for some migrants to try to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day, January 20, rather than await CBP One appointments. In Mexico, “caravans” are already forming, while migrants in shelters along the route voice anxiety about their future.
Members of Mexico’s National Guard, a recently created force made up mostly of transferred soldiers, opened fire on a vehicle carrying migrants along the border east of Tijuana. Two Colombian people were killed. It is the second such incident since October 1, when Mexican Army soldiers killed six migrants in Chiapas. In both incidents, military leadership claims that the soldiers were returning fire, or thought that they were; witnesses dispute that.
Migration through the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama appears to have dropped modestly from September to October. However, reports are pointing to an increase in people entering Colombia from Venezuela. Since August, Panama has operated 25 deportation flights, with U.S. support, to Colombia, Ecuador, and India.
While border security and migration have been top issues in the too-close-to-call U.S. presidential campaign, its last full week was not dominated by a single theme, narrative, or developing story. This section presents a series of links to coverage of incremental developments and links to substantial analyses of both candidates’ positions, likely outcomes if each is elected, views from swing states and border states, and how policy debates have shifted in 2024.
Along with the Biden administration’s June restrictions on asylum, a key reason why migration has declined during the 2024 election year is an unstated but vigorous Mexican government strategy of stepped-up interceptions of migrants, many of whom Mexican authorities then transfer to the country’s far south. This section presents links to several accounts of the impact this policy is having on people along the route through Mexico.
Panama’s recently inaugurated president issued a decree requiring migrants to pay fines for unlawful entry after they emerge from the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route. These fines may be waived or adjusted according to migrants’ “vulnerability.” President Raúl Mulino said he hopes to expand an ongoing program of deportation flights to include citizens of Venezuela. After rising sharply from August to September, the number of migrants transiting the Darién appears to have leveled off or increased slightly during the first half of October.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released information about migration in September, the final month of the U.S. federal government’s fiscal year. It showed a 25 percent year-on-year drop in Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions, with most of the reduction happening since January and more sharply since June. That is the result of a Mexican government crackdown on migration transiting the country, along with the Biden administration’s new restrictions on asylum access. Data also show a 26 percent drop in seizures of the drug fentanyl, the first decline since fentanyl began appearing in the mid-2010s.
The federal judiciary’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier district court verdict finding that the practice of “metering”–posting CBP officers on the borderline to turn asylum seekers back from border ports of entry—is illegal. The decision caps seven years of litigation from migrant rights advocates. It does not directly affect the Biden administration’s current policy of turning back asylum seekers who have not made appointments at ports of entry using the CBP One app; legal challenges continue in that case.
“Caravans” of migrants, some saying they fear losing access to asylum and CBP One pathways after the U.S. election, have been forming in Mexico’s far south. Darién Gap migration appears to be leveling off in October after a sharp increase in September. Insecurity is worsening in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas, where many migrants are blocked or awaiting CBP One appointments.
2024 campaign notes; Migration increased in the Darién Gap, led by more Venezuelan citizens, in September; Possible early indicators of increased migration, fentanyl smuggling into Texas; Texas notes
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.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump used a visit to Aurora, Colorado—site of recent claims of Venezuelan gang activity—to call for a large-scale deportation campaign, probably using the U.S. military and relying on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. In Arizona, Trump proposed adding 10,000 agents to Border Patrol, a force that is struggling to hire enough agents to rise above 20,000. In a FOX News interview and other campaign appearances, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has continued to avoid positions on the border and migration that could be considered progressive.
After two months of sharp declines, data from Panama showed a 51 percent increase, from August to September, in migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region. This included a 69 percent jump in migration of citizens of Venezuela, where the government has ratcheted up repression after rejecting a very probable opposition victory in July 28 elections. Reports from Refugees International and Colombian groups point to vastly unmet humanitarian needs, and high vulnerability to organized crime, among the population transiting the Darién.
Three and a half years into the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown, Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector (mid-Texas) is experiencing an increase in large groups of asylum seekers trying to turn themselves in. Although 96 percent of fentanyl seizures have been happening in California and Arizona, Mexican authorities raided a lab and seized 130,000 pills in recent days in Ciudad Juárez, across from the El Paso, Texas metropolitan area.
A collection of links to other news about the situation along the Texas-Mexico border, noting the state’s dependence on undocumented migrant labor, the state’s security forces’ misuse of force on the borderline, and an ongoing legal offensive against nonprofits that assist migrants.
September Border Patrol apprehensions remained in the mid-50,000s; Notes about the 2024 campaign and the border; Humanitarian parole recipients will not be able to renew their status; Mexico’s new government is indicating no break with its predecessor’s migration policies
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Border Patrol apprehended 53,881 migrants in September between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry, according to preliminary data. That would be the lowest monthly total since August 2020 and the third straight month of apprehensions in the mid-50,000s. A crackdown in Mexico, followed months later by a Biden administration rule restricting asylum access, substantially explains the reduction from record levels in late 2023. Numbers have ceased going down, however, indicating that the drop may not be long-lasting..
A collection of links to news coverage of border and migration issues in the campaign. They include Donald Trump’s false linking of disaster assistance and migrant assistance, Trump’s comments indicating that migrants have brought “bad genes,” Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, and polls showing contradictory points of view.
The Biden administration will not renew a two-year humanitarian parole status granted to up to 30,000 citizens per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In order to avoid falling into a legal limbo, parole beneficiaries will have to adjust their status, applying for Temporary Protected Status, asylum, or other options if they exist.
Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has named a new head of the Mexican government’s migration agency (INM). Sergio Salomón Céspedes will not take office until December, when he finishes his term as governor of Puebla, and the current INM director, Francisco Garduño, will stay on. This may point to some continuity in the new government’s approach to migration. Civilian prosecutors have meanwhile begun investigating an October 1 incident in Chiapas in which Army personnel fired on a vehicle carrying migrants, killing six of them.
Harris visits the border in Arizona, Administration tightens its asylum rule, The border in the vice-presidential debate, Mexican soldiers kill migrants in Chiapas, Texas updates
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.
Vice President Kamala Harris paid her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic presidential candidate. She was in Douglas, Arizona, on September 27. While there, she praised the contributions that immigrants have made to the United States, but also promised to maintain or strengthen curbs on access to asylum at the border.
With a September 30 proclamation and final rule, the Biden administration tightened curbs on migrants’ access to the U.S. asylum system if they cross the border without securing one of a limited number of appointments at land-border ports of entry. The rule’s original version, issued June 4, halts most asylum access when Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions average 2,500 per day, and would restore asylum access when apprehensions average less than 1,500 per day over 7 days. The revised rule would require that average be maintained for 28 days, further cementing the asylum ban.
Candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz argued over migration in an October 1 vice-presidential debate. Walz incorrectly claimed that Donald Trump built “less than 2 percent” of border wall. Vance incorrectly claimed that there are “20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country,” that “we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” that the CBP One program is illegal, and that migrants are a cause of the fentanyl crisis. Walz, like Harris in Arizona, attacked Donald Trump for torpedoing compromise legislation that would have hired more border agents, built more border wall, and placed curbs on asylum.
In Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas, Mexican Army soldiers chased, then fired on, a pickup truck carrying 33 migrants on the evening of October 1, killing 6 of them and wounding 12. A military statement contended that soldiers fired at the vehicle after hearing “detonations.” The deceased victims were reportedly from Nepal, Egypt, and Pakistan. The incident heightens concerns about the Mexican government’s expanding placement of combat-trained soldiers in internal law-enforcement roles.
Recovered migrant remains totaled a record-breaking 175 in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector as fiscal 2024 drew to a close. More reports of Texas National Guard soldiers firing projectiles at migrant families who pose no threat. Texas’s Attorney-General opened a fifth investigation into a group assisting migrants in the border region. FBI data show violent crime rates in Texas border cities are lower than all cities’ average.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions increased in August—slightly, but for the first time in six months; 2024 campaign and the border; Notes on recent oversight of Border Patrol; Texas updates
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.
Migration at the border remains at its lowest level since the fall of 2020, according to new CBP data released in August, following a crackdown on migratory movements that Mexico launched in early 2024 and a June Biden administration ban on most asylum access between border ports of entry. The August total, however, was 3 percent greater than July—the first month-to-month increase in six months—which may indicate that these crackdowns’ deterrent impact is flattening or even eroding.
Kamala Harris called out the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation” plans. Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance doubled down on false and racist claims about Haitian immigrants living and working legally in Ohio. A national poll revealed immigration and the border remains among voters’ top concerns.
A report from Arizona attorneys revealed a high portion of unaccompanied children reporting verbal and physical abuse while in Border Patrol custody. A FOIA result points to more than 200 CBP personnel under investigation for serious misconduct. Reports on the Uvalde, Texas school shooting response and complications in prosecuting migrant smugglers in Arizona.
Border Patrol’s recoveries of migrant remains in its El Paso Sector now stand at a record 171 since October. Investigations from the ACLU, NPR, and the Border Network for Human Rights and Texas Civil Rights Project reveal troubling aspects of the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star.”
The border and migration in the presidential debate. Darién Gap migration plummeted in August, may be up in September. As Mexico rolls out CBP One transportation, alarms sound about the trauma of transiting the country. Texas notes.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Migration and the border were principal topics at the September 10 presidential campaign debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Harris avoided specifics and pledged to support compromise legislation, which failed in the Senate in February, that would restrict asylum access. Trump made vitriolic and racist comments about migrants, some of which debate moderators had to fact-check on the spot.
The number of migrants transiting the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama, fell in August to the fewest since June 2022. Some of the drop may be a “wait and see” effect as migrants evaluate the actions of a new president in Panama who has promised increased deportation flights with U.S. support. Data from the first eight days of September, however, seem to point to a 41 percent increase in per-day Darién Gap migration over August’s average.
Mexico has begun having security force personnel accompany buses transporting migrants who have CBP One appointments at the U.S. border. Some press coverage last week covered the kidnappings, extortions, and other trauma suffered by migrants who seek to transit Mexico on their own.
Texas’s state government is persisting in a legal offensive against charities that assist migrants released from CBP custody at the border, and refusing a federal order to dismantle security-related construction on an island in the Rio Grande.
The Biden administration’s June rule keeps asylum out of reach for most people who cross between ports of entry, but would restore asylum access if migrant encounters average 1,500 per day for a week. With encounters averaging over 1,800 per day, the administration is now reportedly considering moving the goalposts, requiring the average to remain below the 1,500 threshold for a month and including unaccompanied children in the count.
Though migrant encounters have dropped in recent months in the United States, Panama, and Honduras, Mexico recorded its fifth-largest-ever number in July as a crackdown on in-transit migration continues. In July, for the first time, Mexico’s migrant encounters exceeded U.S. authorities’ southern-border encounters.
Mexico announced that it will provide security to buses transporting migrants who have secured a limited number of appointments at U.S. ports of entry using the CBP One smartphone app. Escorted buses will depart the southernmost states of Chiapas and Tabasco. The measure raises hope for a reduction in organized crime groups’ ransom kidnappings of northbound migrants.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, continues to voice strong support for the “Border Act,” a bill that failed in the U.S. Senate in February 2024 following negotiations that led to a bipartisan compromise. The bill includes measures, conceded to Republican legislators, that the Democratic Party did not support during the Trump years, like asylum restrictions, more migrant detention, and some wall-building.
Links to updates and analyses about Border Patrol’s flawed missing migrant program, humanitarian groups’ efforts to rescue migrants and locate remains, a tragic train derailment near Ciudad Juárez, and other items.
2024 campaign notes; Signs of slight increase in migration exiting post-election debacle Venezuela; Mayorkas meets with Colombia and Panama counterparts as Darién Gap deportation flights continue; CBP refuses to share nationalities of migrants suspected of terrorist ties
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Some campaign coverage considered Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s support for a February 2024 “border deal” legislative compromise to be a “flip-flop” on the border wall, since that bill required spending past years’ wall-building funds. Other analysis looked at the obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations if elected.
Amid turmoil and repression following the government’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 presidential elections, there is no massive wave of people fleeing Venezuela, at least not yet. However, numbers do appear to have risen slightly.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met in Colombia with the foreign ministers of Colombia and Panama; the officials signed commitments to collaborate further on territorial control and migration management in the Darién Gap region. Panama is proceeding with U.S.-funded deportation flights, the expected tempo appears to be about three or four planes per week.
CBP turned down a Fox News Freedom of Information Act request to identify the nationalities of migrants encountered at the border who appeared in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Dataset. Republicans have cited a recent increase in such encounters in criticism of the Biden administration, but we do not know where the people showing up in the database of people with alleged terror ties are coming from. Colombia, where two groups on the U.S. list have demobilized this century, is a strong possibility.
Data released on August 16 show that Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions fell in July to their lowest level since September 2020. This is largely the result of dual crackdowns: Mexico’s interceptions of migrants and the Biden administration’s June rule curbing asylum access between ports of entry. Border Patrol’s interior releases of asylum seekers were way down, and it placed its largest-ever share into expedited removal. The Texas state government’s border security crackdown has not been a significant factor.
Panama’s new president, who ran on a promise to crack down on migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region, announced a deportation flight of Colombian citizens, which flew to Medellín on August 20. José Raúl Mulino’s inauguration has been followed by a drop in migration through the Darién Gap to just over 400 people per day in August, down from over 1,100 during the first half of 2024. As with most lulls in migration following policy changes, the current decline is likely to be temporary.
The Democratic Party Convention, taking place this week, includes a platform calling for a law making permanent bans on asylum access between ports of entry during busy periods—a position that the party would have been unlikely to adopt in the past. President Biden, nominee Kamala Harris, and other speakers attacked Donald Trump for urging Republican senators to torpedo a bill that would have imposed that asylum bar. Trump paid a campaign visit to the border in southeast Arizona.
The U.S.-Mexico border is at the lowest point for migration since the Biden administration began, because of a crackdown in Mexico and sharp new limits on asylum access. As shelters report lower capacity, reports of kidnappings and deaths are up, especially around El Paso. Numbers are down in the Darién Gap as well. The drop is most likely a temporary phenomenon.
CBP reached a $45 million settlement with over 1,000 female employees of its Office of Field Operations, who claimed in a lawsuit that the agency systematically penalized those who disclosed pregnancies. The settlement drew fresh attention to the male-dominated culture at an agency that has made only very slow progress increasing the number of women in its workforce.
A collection of links points to the Kamala Harris campaign’s efforts to “flip the script” and attack Donald Trump on border and migration policy, including pledges to hire more agents, along with new analyses of the Vice President’s border and migration policy record and other electoral developments.
Texas’s Republican governor is requiring hospitals to inquire about patients’ migration status, while laying down fresh razor wire amid mounting questions about state National Guard and police use of force along the borderline. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops defended Catholic migrant shelters that Texas’s attorney general has targeted for legal action.
Tim Walz’s record on the border and migration. Asylum restrictions reduce migration, increase reports of endangerment. Panama carries out Darién Gap deportations with U.S. backing.
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.
On border and immigration issues, the record of Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is not lengthy but diverges little from positions associated with liberal members of the Democratic Party. Walz condemned Trump-era policies that harmed migrants’ rights and, as governor, championed efforts to integrate refugees and the undocumented population.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, along with Walz, is seeking to “lean into” the border and migration issue during the campaign, seeking a line of attack against Republican nominee Donald Trump for Trump’s February effort to kill “border deal” legislation in the Senate. By doing so, the candidates are endorsing that legislation’s limits on asylum access at the border, as well as a June 5 Biden administration rule that bans most asylum access between border ports of entry. That rule has driven migration to lows not seen since 2020, but comes with a sharp cost in denials of protection to people who may need it, according to a new report from several U.S. groups.
The Atlantic published a deeply reported look at migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region, concluding that cracking down on migration, while failing to reduce it, makes it more costly and benefits criminal groups who dominate smuggling. Panama deported 28 people from the Darién aboard a commercial flight to Colombia, the first big deportation within the framework of a deal with the United States to facilitate more repatriations. Darién Gap migration was a key subject as the commander of U.S. Southern Command paid a visit to Panama.
Amid crackdowns, border sees the fewest migrant apprehensions since September 2020. Remembering Eddie Canales of the South Texas Human Rights Center. Updates on the border and the U.S. election.
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.
Preliminary reports indicate that Border Patrol apprehended 57,000-60,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2024. That is the smallest monthly total of the Biden administration and the fewest since September 2020. The drop illustrates the short-term impact of Mexico’s crackdown on migration in transit and the Biden administration’s June 5 rule restricting asylum access. Numbers are also down further south along the U.S.-bound migration route, in Panama and Honduras.
Eduardo (Eddie) Canales (1948-2024), founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, died on July 31 following a bout with pancreatic cancer. A pillar of the humanitarian and advocacy communities, Canales saved many lives by placing water stations throughout Brooks County, Texas, where dozens of migrants die each year of dehydration. Canales helped many relatives of missing migrants achieve closure by helping locate and identify remains.
The border was the subject of attack ads and campaign rhetoric as the U.S. general election campaign moved into full gear. Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris sought to attack Donald Trump from the right, blaming him for the February failure of legislation that would have restricted asylum access. Harris’s campaign manager pledged that if elected, the Vice President would keep in place the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions, which rights defense organizations are currently challenging in court. The Trump campaign meanwhile sought to portray Harris as a “border czar” (a title she did not hold) who has been “soft” on border security.
With Asylum Out of Reach, Daily Border Patrol Apprehensions Near 1,500 Threshold; Death in the Darién Gap; Kamala Harris’s Border and Migration Record Under Scrutiny; Texas Updates
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
A double crackdown—Mexico’s stepped-up blocking of migrants and the Biden administration’s June 5 asylum-restriction rule—has brought a sharp short-term downturn in the number of migrants seeking to cross the border between ports of entry. Border Patrol apprehensions dipped below 1,500 on July 22, nearing the threshold under which the June 5 rule could be suspended.
Ten migrants drowned to death in a rain-swollen river while attempting to cross the treacherous Darién Gap in Panama. The country’s new president, who had pledged to stop Darién migration through stepped-up deportations, said that U.S.-backed repatriation flights would be voluntary.
Shortly after Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential campaign, opponents took aim at the border and migration record of his virtually certain successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, widely referring to her as the Biden administration’s “border czar.” No such position existed, and Harris’s role encompassed only “root causes” of migration from Central America. Nonetheless, a resolution that passed the Republican-majority House of Representatives on July 25 “strongly condemns” Harris’s performance in the putative “border czar” role.
For the second time, a state judge ruled against a Texas state government attempt to prosecute a border-area migrant shelter. State government jailings of migrants under “Operation Lone Star” are costing counties like El Paso millions of dollars. The National Guard Bureau’s chief says that “Lone Star” deployments are hurting the force’s military readiness. And despite the “Lone Star” crackdown, Border Patrol apprehensions have dropped only slightly more in Texas than they have in Democratic Party-governed Arizona.
I've been reading a lot of Wendell Berry's and Barbara Kingsolver's views of Appalachia, which sharpened my personal disdain for J.D. Vance.
(As with everything I post here without mentioning WOLA, this is my personal view expressed while writing at home and not during work hours. It does not necessarily reflect my organization’s point of view.)
Political writers are devoting a lot of pixels right now to J.D. Vance’s opportunism, digging into how his ambitions led him to ditch his former views and fully embrace white rage and Trumpism, riding that wave to the Republican vice presidential nomination.
Beyond that, I’m more concerned with a position that Vance hasn’t changed, but has only intensified: whose side he is on in the region he calls home, one of the poorest corners of America.
My view is colored by some reading I did over my two-month work sabbatical, which ends in a few days. More by circumstance than design, I dug into the work of two authors who come from Appalachia, not far from where Vance’s branch of his family lived before they moved to Ohio.
For many Americans—and to some degree for Vance, whose memoir Hillbilly Elegy I read in 2017—the mountainous, deeply rural, coal-and-tobacco region stretching from north Georgia into Pennsylvania is notable for high unemployment, family breakdown, drug addiction, and severe environmental degradation. Popular culture often ridicules its residents as “rednecks” or “hillbillies.”
The essays of Wendell Berry, the 90-year-old farmer and author from Port Royal, Kentucky, lament this condition, but place the blame far away. In his collected essays, which I re-read over my break (don’t miss the audiobook read by Nick Offerman), Berry’s Appalachia is a colony of the United States’ more prosperous areas, especially its cosmopolitan cities and big corporations.
[O]ur once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.
…At present, in fact, both the nation and the national economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities – as all small-town and country people have reason to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as the nation, most of us have experienced the losses that I have been talking about: the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless present, in which the past is forgotten and the future, even in our most optimistic ‘projections,’ is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?
A blighted area stripped clean of its natural assets, where a small-farmer economy is no longer viable, and from where people need to migrate elsewhere, to cities? That sounds like many regions I’ve known during my work in Latin America, where levels of economic inequality still generally exceed those in the United States, but by less than they used to. One could switch out “campesino” for “farmer” in much of Wendell Berry’s writing, and the argument would be identical. From a 2017 New York Review of Booksessay:
Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value—minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and “labor”—has been taken at the lowest possible price. As apparently none of the enlightened ones has seen in flying over or bypassing on the interstate highways, its too-large fields are toxic and eroding, its streams and rivers poisoned, its forests mangled, its towns dying or dead along with their locally owned small businesses, its children leaving after high school and not coming back. Too many of the children are not working at anything, too many are transfixed by the various screens, too many are on drugs, too many are dying.
…The rural small owners sentenced to dispensability in the 1950s are the grandparents of the “blue-collar workers” of rural America who now feel themselves to be under the same sentence, and with reason.
I also read a work of fiction set in Lee County, the westernmost county in Virginia: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I recommended it unreservedly.
Kingsolver, who lives in that area, reminds us that while the people of Appalachia seem defeated now, it was not always so. Two centuries ago, the population of these areas of rural Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia were smallholding farmers. Few owned slaves, and many supported the Union in the Civil War against their states’ plantation owners.
Their farms struggled to get beyond subsistence, then were bought up by coal barons (and much of the Black population migrated north, to industrial centers). They carried out some of the most militant union organizing in U.S. history to improve conditions in the coal mines.
“Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.
…Anyway, it was all in the past, nobody in class had parents working in the mines now. We’d heard all our lives about the layoffs. The companies swapped out humans for machines in every job: deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces. ”
The labor struggle cost many lives but earned some important gains in living standards—until mechanization, market forces, and captured politicians (of both parties) caused coal labor demand to dry up. Governments under-funded basic services, schools were not competitive enough to prepare students for a life of something better than coal mining. Then, in this century, came prescription opioids, ushered in by pharmaceutical companies’ lies, and then heroin and fentanyl.
Kingsolver, like Berry, paints a portrait of communities devastated by outside political and economic forces.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he [the main character’s teacher] asked us, “the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?”
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.
Kingsolver’s lament about the state of the region closely echoes Berry’s:
“Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.”
This brings us back to J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy notes the same misery, but blames the people themselves, especially their “culture,” instead of predatory outside forces. Instead of corporations, globalization, and government siding with the economic winners and discarding the losers, Vance’s book blames government welfare programs for creating a culture of dependence and “laziness.”
We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
…As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”
Why would people vote for a politician who, like Vance, believes that they are lazy and that they only have themselves to blame for their problems? Because, the book explains, even the region’s most shiftless laggards insist that they have a strong work ethic.
People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [Ohio, where Vance grew up, a town featured in Dreamland, Sam Quiñones’s study of the opioid epidemic]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. … Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, because the Armcos of the world are going out of business and their skill sets don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground.
While Vance passingly refers to economic realities besetting the region, he insists that its residents, and their culture, are more to blame: “It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”
J.D. Vance became a corporate lawyer who worked in Silicon Valley venture capital, getting to know donors like hard-right billionaire Peter Thiel. He published his memoir and, despite once being a harsh Trump critic, ran for Senate as one of the most unabashedly pro-Trump candidates of the 2022 election cycle. In so doing, he cast his lot with the coal barons, agribusiness enterprises, and corporations that, Berry and Kingsolver forcefully argue, have done such harm to Appalachia’s beleaguered population.
Appalachia’s rural population, though, has voted overwhelmingly for Vance and Trump—not for people who, like Berry or Kingsolver, lean leftward. Even though they enable pollution, oppose wage hikes, under-invest in education, and de-prioritize access to drug treatment, pro-big-business conservatives win by huge margins in the region today.
They do so, usually, by whipping up anger about social issues like immigration, religion, and culture-war rage, often by repeating utter lies including about the 2020 election result. J.D. Vance’s 2022 campaign was a master class in this.
Reading what Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and others have written about the damage done to Appalachia makes J.D. Vance’s political success one of the most extreme existing cases of “the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.” It’s a cycle that the Democratic Party is far from figuring out how to break.
A big part of the blame lies with the Democrats themselves. When I was young, this region voted solidly Democratic, a legacy of the New Deal era when the federal government invested in infrastructure and jobs, and supported labor unions. That investment and labor support ebbed badly during the past 50 years, as leading Democrats turned away from the region’s population, in some cases even embracing business elites just as Republicans have. From Bill Clinton to Joe Manchin, Democratic politicians have backed big energy companies and advanced free-trade deals and farm policies that harmed small producers.
That opened up a political space that opportunists like J.D. Vance leapt into. And now, like impoverished Colombian campesinos who back the large landowner-aligned candidate promising the harshest security crackdown, the colonized line up behind their most outspoken colonizers.
It’s going to take a lot of work, and a long look in the mirror, to break out of this.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Due to an extended period of staff travel and commitments, this will be the last Weekly Border Update until July 26; we look forward to resuming a regular publication schedule on that date.
As of 12:01 AM on June 5, migrants who enter U.S. custody between U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, with few exceptions, may no longer apply for asylum. The Biden administration made this long-signaled change with a proclamation and an “interim final rule” on June 4. Asylum access is “shut down” until daily migrant encounters at the border drop to a very low average of less than 1,500 per day. The ACLU, which challenged a similar asylum ban during the Trump era, plans to sue. It is not clear whether, with its current resources, the administration will be able to deport or detain a significantly larger number of asylum seekers than it already is.
Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, reported receiving 36,860 requests for asylum during the first five months of 2024. That is 42 percent fewer than during the same period in 2023. As in recent years, Honduras, Cuba, and Haiti are the top three nationalities of asylum seekers in Mexico’s system, and most applications are filed in Tapachula and Mexico City. This year’s drop in applications is unexpected, as Mexico’s government reports stopping or encountering over 480,000 migrants between January and April alone.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Due to an extended period of staff travel and commitments, we will produce Weekly Border Updates irregularly for the next two and a half months. We will resume a regular weekly schedule on July 26.
After failing twice to enact such a measure through legislation, the Biden administration appears poised to issue an executive order that would allow U.S. border authorities to turn back or deport asylum seekers whenever the number of arriving migrants exceeds a specific threshold. The legal authority on which such an executive order would be based appears shaky, and there is a significant probability that it would not withstand challenges in the judicial system.
Mexico’s government reported encountering or stopping 120,879 migrants during the month of April, a record that only slightly exceeds similar numbers reported every month since January. Well over half of April’s total were citizens of South American nations. Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to block migrants, which appear to involve aggressive busing into the country’s interior more than deportations or detentions, have left large numbers of migrants stranded there amid a notable drop in U.S. authorities’ migrant encounters.
The U.S. Border Patrol was founded 100 years ago this week. Some analyses of the milestone have focused on the agency’s checkered human rights record. The Southern Border Communities Coalition and congressional Democrats, drawing attention to a recent GAO report’s findings, voiced concern that reforms aimed at more impartial oversight of use-of-force cases aren’t going far enough.
Colombia voices skepticism about Panama’s new president’s promise to shut down Darién Gap migration. UNHCR data continue to show that many Venezuelan migrants in the Darién first sought to settle elsewhere in South America. Ecuadorians are skipping the Darién route by flying to El Salvador.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Due to an extended period of staff travel and commitments, we will produce Weekly Border Updates irregularly for the next two and a half months. We will resume a regular weekly schedule on July 26.
For the second time this year, the U.S. Senate’s Democratic majority sought to bring to a vote a package of border legislation that would, among other provisions, implement Title 42-style suspensions of the right to seek asylum at the border when the number of migrants at the border exceeds certain thresholds. The “Border Act” failed by a 43-50 vote in the face of opposition from some Democrats uncomfortable with the asylum suspension, and nearly all Republicans, who argued that it was not aggressive enough. Media are reporting that the Biden administration plans to issue an executive order in June to enable a similar asylum “shutdown” mechanism at the border.
Although May is normally a peak month for migration, the daily average of Border Patrol migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border had dropped to 3,700 so far in May, one of the lowest points of the entire Biden administration. Weekly data indicate that even border sectors that had seen migration increases in the first months of the year, like Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California, are now experiencing reductions.
Migrants allege that Texas National Guard personnel beat a Honduran migrant so badly that he later died on the Rio Grande riverbank in Ciudad Juárez. Arizona, not Texas, has seen the sharpest migration declines in 2024 despite Gov. Abbott’s claims that his policies have shifted migrants westward. Those policies,some of which Pope Francis called “madness,” have included striking levels of racial profiling, according to an ACLU Texas report. State authorities’ razor wire in Eagle Pass has caused “an unusually high number” of hospitalizations in Eagle Pass, “including young children,” USA Today reported.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Due to an extended period of staff travel and commitments, we will produce Weekly Border Updates irregularly for the next two and a half months. We cannot publish Updates during the next two weeks; sporadic posting will begin in late May. We will resume a regular weekly schedule on July 26.
Preliminary numbers published by CBS News and the Washington Post indicate that Border Patrol agents apprehended 129,000 or 130,000 migrants in April, a slight decline from February and March. U.S. officials continue to credit Mexican efforts to block migrants, which were the subject of a phone conversation between Presidents Biden and López Obrador. Migration through Panama’s Darién Gap also appears to have declined in April.
With fiscal year 2024 half over, CBP’s border drug seizure data points to notable declines in opioids, including the first-ever drop in fentanyl seizures. Cocaine and methamphetamine are increasing compared to 2023, while seizures of cannabis—which decreased precipitously after U.S. states started regulating its use—remain at a low level. Except for cannabis, at least 82 percent of border drug seizures occur at land-border ports of entry.
Human Rights Watch published a report on how the CBP One app denies access to asylum through “digital metering” at the U.S.-Mexico border. ProPublica and the Texas Tribune examined the relationship between U.S. border policies, including encouraging Mexico to interdict migrants, and tragedies like the March 2023 detention facility fire that killed 40 people in Ciudad Juárez. A consortium of journalists published a series on how organized crime, with corrupt officials’ collusion, transports migrants across Mexico in tractor-trailer containers.
Mexican forces’ migration controls intensify; Ukraine aid passes Congress without border provisions attached; Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico report migrant removals; DHS shares more detail about migrants’ nationalities
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
Mexican security and migration forces’ stepped-up operations to interdict migrants, especially in the northern border state of Chihuahua, have been suppressing the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, these have come with human rights complaints, and reductions are unlikely to last long as large numbers of people continue to migrate across Mexico’s southern border.
The House of Representatives’ April 20 passage of a Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan aid bill formally ended Republican legislators’ monthslong effort to tie strict border and migration controls to any aid outlay. That effort had foundered after a negotiated deal in the Senate failed in February. House Republican leaders allowed consideration of a separate hardline border bill on April 20; it failed but attracted five votes from centrist Democrats.
Panama reported removing 864 migrants, much of them with U.S. assistance, since April 2023. Guatemala has expelled over 7,900 migrants from other countries into Honduras and El Salvador so far this year. And Mexico has deported over 7,500 Guatemalans back to their country since January.
An upgrade to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report includes a list of the top 100 nationalities of migrants whom Border Patrol has apprehended since 2014. The data reveal that the apprehended migrant population was 97 percent Mexican and Central American a decade ago, but only 52 percent Mexican and Central American today.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed in an April 12 data release that migration at the border declined from February to March for only the second time this century. The drop owes largely to the Mexican government’s stepped-up efforts to interdict migrants so far this year. San Diego may be surpassing Tucson as migrants’ number-one destination along the border.
On a party-line vote, the Democratic-majority U.S. Senate dismissed impeachment charges that the House’s Republican majority brought against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Republicans had alleged that Mayorkas’s management of the border and migration merited the first impeachment of a cabinet secretary since 1876. The House may meanwhile consider a hardline border and migration bill, echoing provisions in H.R. 2, in coming days.
José Raúl Mulino, a conservative populist leading polls for Panama’s May presidential election, is promising to “close” the Darién Gap and repatriate migrants. This week a UNHCR survey (with a small sample), found one in five Darién migrants intending to settle somewhere other than the United States.
An Indiana National Guardsman serving under the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star” fired his weapon at an individual in El Paso who allegedly stabbed two people on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande riverbank. It was the third known event since January 2023 in which a National Guardsman working under Texas state authority has fired a weapon at, or in the presence of, migrants at the border.
Migration continues to experience an unusual springtime lull across the U.S.-Mexico border, with numbers appearing to decline below January-March levels. San Diego, California, where migration is level, might soon become the border’s busiest sector, a change that has exceeded federal and local capacities there. Some of the drop in migration is a result of a Mexican government crackdown that began with the new year. Numbers of migrants are higher in Panama and Honduras than they were last year, but are not increasing.
President Biden told a Univisión interviewer that he is still considering taking executive action to “shut down” access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border when daily migrant encounters cross a certain threshold. A possible legal justification for doing so, which courts have not upheld, is a broad presidential authority to block migrants whose entry is considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appeared separately before House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees on April 10. He called for 2025 budget increases for the Department, including a flexible $4.7 billion border contingency fund that Republicans have opposed. The Senate still awaits the Republican-majority House of Representatives’ transmittal of impeachment articles against Mayorkas, alleging mismanagement of the border. Those articles narrowly passed the House in February; an actual Senate trial is unlikely.
Migration appears to have slowed in March, likely because of a Mexican government crackdown; In San Diego: border wall falls and open-air encampments persist; Texas’s S.B. 4 has a day in court; Darién Gap migration clears 100,000; Human Rights Watch faults governments’ response
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.
The number of migrants entering Border Patrol custody declined from February to March, by about 2 percent, according to preliminary data. Migration usually increases in spring: this is only the second time this century that Border Patrol has recorded a February-to-March decline. Increased enforcement in Mexico may be a cause. Weekly data show Border Patrol apprehensions declining in Arizona and California from the beginning of March to the end of March.
A 24-year-old Guatemalan woman’s fatal March 21 fall from the border wall in San Diego drew new attention to the region’s sharply increased numbers of wall-related deaths and injuries. Elsewhere in San Diego, a federal judge ruled that outdoor encampments where Border Patrol makes asylum seekers wait to be processed violate a 1997 agreement governing the treatment of children in the agency’s custody.
“Now, to be fair, maybe Texas went too far,” said Texas’s solicitor general in arguments before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering the constitutionality of the state’s harsh new law, S.B. 4. The law, if allowed to go into effect, would permit Texas law enforcement to arrest, imprison, and even deport people for the crime of illegal entry from Mexico. However the appeals court rules, the law is almost certainly headed for the Supreme Court.
Panamanian authorities report that an average of 1,200 people per day migrated through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region during the first quarter of 2024, well ahead of 2023’s record-setting pace. Human Rights Watch published a big report finding fault with the Colombian and Panamanian government’s responses to Darién Gap migration, and calling for the U.S. and other governments to expand legal migration pathways. The New York Times documented the alarming recent increase in cases of sexual assault committed against migrants in the Darién.
Mexico’s intensified enforcement delays the United States’ expected spring migration increase; Insights from CBP’s February reporting about the border; Is Texas’s crackdown pushing migrants to other states?; Migration on the agenda of Guatemalan President’s visit to Washington
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
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.
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.
A busy start to the year in the Darién Gap. Biden administration submits 2025 Homeland Security budget request. Texas litigation updates. State of the Union Address fallout.
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updateshere.
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.
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