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🟧Week of February 10: I’m in Washington; my schedule is moderate but I expect to be “generating a lot of content” during free moments. I could be hard to reach at times.
To analyze the role of asylum, the causes of migration, the impact of U.S. policies, and recommendations for a more effective and humane management of the migratory phenomenon, Luz Mely Reyes, director of Efecto Cocuyo, spoke with Adam Isacson
Thank you to Luz Mely Reyes of the independent Venezuelan media outlet Efecto Cocuyo for hosting and sharing this conversation about the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-immigration offensive and the outlines of what a better policy would look like.
It is in Spanish, as is the site’s writeup of the interview. Here’s a quick English translation of that page:
The United States’ immigration policies, now based on a promise from a president who pledged to carry out the largest deportation in history, has generated a devastating impact on the community of migrants living in the United States, whose stay in that country is threatened by a system that makes it difficult for them to apply for asylum and regularize their immigration status through policies that have become obsolete.
To analyze the role of asylum, the causes of migration, the impact of U.S. policies, and recommendations for a more effective and humane management of the migratory phenomenon, Luz Mely Reyes, director of Efecto Cocuyo, spoke with Adam Isacson, director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
From the “stick and the carrot to just the stick”.
According to Isacson, the Biden administration adopted a mixed strategy, combining incentives (the “carrot”) such as humanitarian parole and the use of CBP One to schedule appointments at the border, with restrictive measures (the “stick”) such as the continuation of Title 42 to remove migrants and rules limiting access to asylum for those without prior appointments. “So, Biden chose something of a carrot and stick arrangement for the many migrants who were arriving.”
The Wola executive describes Trump’s policy as exclusively punitive (“stick only”), with the elimination of humanitarian parole, making access to asylum more difficult, and increasing deportations. He highlights the use of deportation flights, including with military aircraft. “In its two weeks, it has chosen only the stick and ended the carrots. CBP One no longer exists,” he explained.
A “broken and rickety immigration system”
Isacson emphasizes that the U.S. immigration system is “broken” and has a “rickety” capacity to receive, process and evaluate asylum claims. This is despite the fact that the majority of migrants are asylum seekers.
The executive explains that, currently, most migrants’ cases are handled by about 700 immigration judges who must hear more than 3 million cases that take years to resolve.
Isacson explains that although many migrants are fleeing insecurity and violence, for the most part their applications do not meet the strict requirements for asylum in the United States. “One cannot flee, no one cannot get asylum statuses in the U.S. just for being a victim of widespread violence or just for not being able to feed their children because of the situation of bad governance.”
WOLA’s recommendations for more effective immigration management
Implement a reform of the 1990 immigration laws to reflect today’s reality, more residency quotas and facilitating application for residency from countries of origin.
Strengthen the refugee program to provide a safe alternative to the dangerous journey to the US.
Streamline asylum processes to be faster (less than a year), fair and efficient, with more judges and avoiding detention of asylum seekers.
Enforce existing laws that grant the right to asylum and protect vulnerable populations.
Isacson also advocates for fair, faster, more efficient, more just decisions with better processing. “There are so many things we have to do right now just to get to common sense and basic legality, that talk of reform is an issue for the future at this point.”
I got in a shouting match with Sen. Josh Hawley in a hearing. Here's evidence backing up my arguments about "migrant crime" and the Laken Riley Act.
Another congressional hearing testimony, another nasty shouting match. These aren’t fun because you don’t have the floor, but you have to stand up to bullies.
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s how the Fox News website covered it:
“Here’s Laken Riley,” said Hawley as her picture was posted behind him. “Her murder, her horrific murder at the hands of this illegal migrant who was also unlawfully paroled in the United States. [Is] her death not an actual issue?”
The activist, Adam Isacson, who works as director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, responded by saying: “Of course it’s an issue, it’s a tragedy.”
“I didn’t say that Laken Riley’s death was not an actual issue, I said that migrant crime is not an actual issue,” said Isacson. “Migrant crime is much less of an issue than U.S. citizen-committed crime.”
To which Hawley answered, “[Riley] is dead because of migrant crime.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) was citing these two sentences from a March 1, 2024 “Border Update” video. (It took me a while even to find it, because things said in videos don’t show up in online searches. That’s good opposition research.)
The horrific murder of a nursing student in Georgia has a lot of people on the right talking about ‘migrant crime’ like it’s an actual issue. But the data, in fact, show that migrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens.
Of course I stand by that. I’m telling the truth. Evidence shows that migrants—undocumented, asylum-seeking, and otherwise—commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens. If you’re governing a community and want to make sure it’s protected from crime, you’re doing it wrong if you divert law enforcement resources to targeting immigrants, who (with tragic exceptions because all humans commit crimes) break laws less often.
Here are some of the sources I was drawing from at the time:
“More recently, there’s been an explosion of research in this area because of public perception and interest. And what’s pretty amazing is, across all this research, by and large, we find that immigrants do not engage in more crime than native-born counterparts, and immigration actually can cause crime to go down, rather than up, so quite contrary to public perception.” — Charis Kurbin of UC Irvine, author of the book Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, on PBS Newshour.
“The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.” — writerAnne Applebaum, author of a few books about democracy and authoritarianism, on Twitter.
In full smarm mode, Sen. Hawley feigned shock that a witness invited by the Democrats might oppose the Laken Riley Act, a bad bill. In fact, more than three-quarters of Senate Democrats voted against it on Friday: it avoided a U.S. Senate filibuster due to just 10 Democratic senators’ votes.
This bill is almost certainly unconstitutional and could harm innocent people, some of them people seeking protection in the United States:
It will require that migrants be detained—including those with documented status like DACA and TPS recipients, and people with pending asylum cases—until an immigration judge resolves their cases, which could take a year or more, if they’re accused of minor crimes like shoplifting. And I mean “accused”: the text of the law reads “is charged with, is arrested for.” They don’t have to be found guilty in court: all it takes is a false accusation that leads to an arrest, even for allegedly stealing a candy bar from a CVS. “Innocent until proven guilty” goes out the window. The potential for abuse is tremendous.
It gives state attorneys-general superpowers to sue to block aspects of U.S. immigration law, disfiguring the federal government’s ability to carry out immigration policies for the greater good. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent pointed out, this could even cause a schism within MAGA. Trump backers who oppose legal immigration, like Steve Bannon, have been in a public fight with Trump’s tech-sector backers, like Elon Musk, over visas for skilled overseas workers. Bannon will need only enlist an attorney-general like Texas’s Ken Paxton to sue to block migrants from countries like India, from where companies like Musk’s hire many immigrants.
The hearing episode got me a wave of insults on social media and in my comms accounts from people who hate migrants or think I somehow don’t care about a tragic murder. Most of the insults are lame and probably written by people in Belarus, but some of them (like “beta-male f*ckstick”) are sheer poetry and I plan to use them.
Overview of my testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on the "Remain in Mexico" program.
It was fun—at times—to engage with senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this morning on Republican-led proposals to revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy. There’s a lot to say about it and I’ll post more later. For now:
Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today.
I did a lot of fieldwork and data work along the U.S.-Mexico border when Remain in Mexico—MPP—was first implemented. The evidence I saw is clear: Remain in Mexico enriched cartels. It failed to meaningfully deter migration. And it soured relations with a key ally. Pursuing it again would harm U.S. interests.
Instead, I urge this Committee to focus on fixing our asylum system. That system saves tens of thousands of lives each year, but we need it to be both fair and efficient. No one supports the idea of five-year waits for asylum decisions: the backlogs create a pull factor of their own. But this is an administrative challenge, and the U.S. government is good at handling administrative challenges. It’s just a question of processing, case management, and adjudication.
People truly did suffer while remaining in Mexico. I personally heard harrowing accounts of torture and abuse. Nearly all of that abuse was the work of organized crime groups, or cartels.
The cartels’ cruelty and sadism wasn’t just a human rights issue, though. These criminals aren’t barbaric just for its own sake. This is their economic model, and that makes it a national security issue.
Organized crime is trying to extract as much money out of migrants and their loved ones as it can while those migrants are present on the “turf” that they control. Cartels fight each other for this business.
“Remain in Mexico” kept migrants on cartels’ turf for very long periods of time: months or even years in Mexican border cities waiting for their hearings. MPP created a new market opportunity for cartels.
That’s a big difference from CBP One. The app also requires months-long waits to come to a U.S. port of entry, but it makes it easier to wait elsewhere, in parts of Mexico that are safer than its northern border zone, where states are under State Department travel warnings because of cartel crime and kidnapping.
When outsiders are waiting for months in Mexico’s border zone, they are sitting ducks for the cartels:
First, there was extortion: foreigners had to pay just to exist for that long in cartel-controlled neighborhoods. If you don’t pay, it’s not safe to go outside your shelter.
Second, if people wanted to give up on the long wait for MPP, cartels offered “coyote” services: the chance to cross the border and try to evade Border Patrol. They charge several thousand dollars for that.
Third was kidnapping for ransom: cartels held people in horrific conditions, raping and torturing them, as their relatives—frequently in the United States—had to wire thousands of dollars to free them.
The financial scale of this exploitation is staggering. Let’s consider it. Take a conservative estimate of $1,000 per migrant in extortions, ransoms, or coyote fees—I ran that figure by some border-area experts and they laughed at how low that estimated amount is. Multiply that by 71,000 people in MPP, and you get $71 million in cartel profits, an amount equal to the annual base salaries of 1,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents.
For all that, Remain in Mexico didn’t really do that much to reduce or control migration.
For more than 10 years now, there’s been a series of crackdowns on asylum seekers. My testimony maps them out in a graphic. These crackdowns follow the same pattern: you get an initial drop in migration numbers, it lasts a few months, and then there’s a rebound.
Title 42 and its expansions? A classic example. So was “Remain in Mexico.”
After it expanded in June 2019, Border Patrol’s apprehensions did fall for four months. Then the migration numbers plateaued—at the same level they were in mid-2018. In fact, at the same level as the Obama administration’s eight-year monthly average. And that’s where the numbers stayed.
And then in the first months of 2020, Border Patrol apprehensions started rising. They were on pace to grow by a double-digit percentage from February to March. But then COVID came, and all but ended March 10 days early.
Title 42 ended up eclipsing Remain in Mexico: no more hearing dates; asylum seekers got expelled. Remain in Mexico became irrelevant and the Trump administration rarely used it again.
MPP also strained relations with Mexico. The Mexican government at first resisted the program, agreeing to it only after very heavy diplomatic pressure. This complicated cooperation on other shared priorities.
There are a lot of those priorities, from trade to fentanyl. Mexico is one of the ten largest countries in the world, with the 14th-largest economy. The border is just one reason why the United States needs good relations with Mexico.
Compelling Mexico to agree to a new Remain in Mexico takes bandwidth away from those priorities. Why do all that for a policy that actually enriches drug cartels? Why do all that for a policy that doesn’t even have a clear and lasting effect on migration?
December 2024 saw the fewest migrants transiting the Darién Gap since March 2022, a likely "Trump effect."
Panama reported 4,849 people migrating through the Darién Gap in December 2024, the fewest since March 2022. It is a likely sign that people have begun delaying their migration plans, for now, after Trump’s election.
Though the number of people transiting the jungle region dropped 42 percent from 2023’s record levels (from 520,085 to 302,203), 2024 was the second heaviest year ever for Darién Gap migration.
Note that the chart above shows that an important increase in Darién Gap migration happened from 2018 to 2019, when Donald Trump was in the White House. This migration flow, mostly citizens of Haiti and Cuba, was curtailed by the pandemic in 2020—but it shows that Trump’s first-administration policies didn’t deter people from trying to migrate after an initial “wait and see” phase.
We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever.
If the text below reads like a Twitter thread, that’s where it comes from. It’s a response to arguments from New York Times columnist David Leonhardt making some sweeping mischaracterizations of what happened at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years.
Leonhardt’s words go a long way toward cementing in place a growing view in elite opinion that Democrats lost the election because Joe Biden’s administration was “too soft” on migrants. According to this view, the administration failed to crack down out of fear of offending “the groups”—in this case, migrants’ rights defenders.
In fact, Biden was never “soft” and the groups were disillusioned from the get-go. His revocation of a few of the most severely anti-migrant Trump policies does not explain why migration increased during his term. Leonhardt’s inaccurate claims risk pushing moderate Democrats—who read and cite him—into adopting much of Trump’s approach to the border and migration.
Here’s the thread, which is getting massive numbers on Twitter because of a boost from New Republic writer Greg Sargent.
We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever: Title 42. It just didn’t deter a migrant population that changed dramatically.
During Donald Trump’s term, 90+ percent of migrants were from Mexico and Central America (blue, green, brown, yellow in the chart below). If you were a migrant from those countries, your probability of being released into the United States after apprehension didn’t change much after Biden’s inauguration.
(An exception is unaccompanied children from Central America: Biden stopped Trump’s practice of expelling them, alone, back into their countries regardless of protection needs. The moral argument for doing that is self-evident, and it didn’t move the needle much overall.)
Migrants may have found Biden’s initial moves and rhetoric encouraging? But Biden kept in place Stephen Miller’s Title 42 expulsions policy, which shut down asylum for everyone who could be deported easily. Ending “Remain in Mexico” didn’t matter, Title 42 had eclipsed it.
This chart shows that the Biden administration continued applying Title 42, expelling people as vigorously as possible (orange). But yes, the chart shows a decline in the _percentage_ of people being expelled in 2021.
That is not Biden being soft-hearted toward migrants. Instead, it reflects a historic change in the migrant population: new nationalities began arriving in ways unimaginable before 2021.
Just as Joe Biden was being inaugurated, the world’s borders were opening up post-pandemic. So did new migration routes like the Darién Gap.
The U.S.-Mexico border became accessible to people from very distant countries. South America and beyond. This had never happened before. By 2023, Mexico and Central America were just 55 percent of migrants at the border. By early 2024, one in nine were from Europe, Asia, or Africa.
You may have noticed that these countries are far away. It’s costly to deport people to them—if it’s even possible diplomatically—because you have to fly them. More had to be released into the U.S. interior to seek asylum.
Expulsions across a land border are way cheaper than by air. Under Trump, Mexico agreed to take back Title 42 expulsions from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Biden admin worked on Mexico to agree to take expelled people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Biden expanded Title 42! It was a huge crackdown, especially on Mexicans and Central Americans (blue). But the overall flow of people from distant countries (green) was even larger, more than Mexico could absorb on its own.
When Title 42 ended, Biden placed a ban on asylum access on everyone who passed through a third country and didn’t get an asylum denial there. But the same challenge remained: people from distant countries who are hard to return. Numbers kept growing.
In late 2023, in yet another Biden crackdown, the admin leaned on Mexico to intensify its own efforts to block migrants crossing the country. It is unprecedented for Mexico to have sustained a migration crackdown for this long; they usually erode after a few months.
And then in June, Biden put in place an overall ban on asylum access between ports of entry, which lowered numbers further.
A common media question is “why did Biden wait so long” to ban asylum, a right enshrined in U.S. law. Because it’s probably illegal to do so? Because blanket bans on entry don’t apply to people who are already on U.S. soil, as courts told Trump?
In sum, it’s hard to argue that Biden did much to make the border more open for migrants. Those from Mexico and CentAm faced similar low odds of avoiding expulsion, compared to Trump. Those from elsewhere are harder to remove—but they are a new phenomenon Trump never faced.
This thread is already too long, so it doesn’t discuss the enormous human cost of these asylum denial policies, which WOLA and others have documented at length. That whole vital line of argument doesn’t seem to have much sway with the “Biden wasn’t harsh enough” crowd.
Migration in the treacherous Darién Gap fell in November to its lowest level since April 2022. The weather, and a possible "Trump effect," are likely to blame.
Panama’s government published data on Friday about migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling the country’s border with Colombia that until recently was considered too dangerous to walk through. People who attempt the 70-mile route frequently perish of drownings and attacks by animals and—more often—by criminals. Robberies and sexual violence are terribly common.
Despite that, the Darién Gap has become a heavily transited migration route since the COVID-19 pandemic began to ease. 1.2 million people have migrated through the Darién Gap between 2021 and 2024, more than 10 times the 115,758 people who made the journey in the 11 years between 2010 and 2020.
During the first 11 months of 2024, 277,354 people, 70 percent of them citizens of Venezuela, traversed the Darién route. That is down 44 percent from the 495,459 people who crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, the record year.
The most intense months of Darién Gap migration were August and September of 2023, when more than 2,500 people per day crossed the jungle. Migration dropped with the heaviest months of the rainy season (note October and especially November dropping every year on the chart below), and recovered only modestly at the beginning of 2024.
It’s not clear why Darién Gap migration didn’t climb all the way back up to August-September levels in early January 2024. Likely explanations could be word getting out about Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to block migrants, which began in January, and perhaps some Venezuelans postponing plans pending the outcome of July’s presidential elections, whose result the Nicolás Maduro regime ended up ignoring.
Migration fell further in July, after Panama inaugurated a president, Raúl Mulino, who took office promising to crack down on Darién Gap migration. Some migrants may have paused their plans amid news of stepped-up, U.S.-backed deportation flights from Panama. Panama’s government operated 34 deportation flights between August and November, removing about 1,370 people who had migrated through the region. While that is equal to about 1.8 percent of the total Darién Gap migration, the flights may have deterred some, at least for now.
Panama’s data show that November 2024 saw the fewest Darién Gap migrants of any month since April 2022. That is somewhat surprising, since one would expect the waves of repression following Venezuela’s failed election to have spurred more people to abandon Venezuela and head north. That appeared to be happening in September and October, when Venezuelan migration increased.
A key reason for November’s drop may be the weather. November is the height of the rainy season in southern Central America: the Darién paths are especially treacherous, and maritime routes can be dangerous. A report published Friday by Colombia’s migration agency shows that on at least three days last month, the boats leading to the Darién route’s starting point from the ports of Necoclí and Turbo, Colombia, were shut down completely by climate conditions.
There could also be a “Trump effect.” The November 5 election of a virulently anti-immigrant president in the United States may also be causing would-be migrants to change their plans, for now, until they have better information about what may await them.
We expect senators to ask tough questions about troubling allegations surrounding Trump's pick to head CBP.
President-Elect Trump has nominated Rodney Scott as the next commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. government’s leading border security agency, which includes Border Patrol and runs official border crossings from the Mexico border to ports and airports. Scott, a career Border Patrol agent, was chief of the Patrol during the last year of the Trump administration and the first few months of the Biden administration, which dismissed him.
In 2023, I launched a website that tracks allegations of abuse, corruption, and misconduct at U.S. border agencies through an online database. (This project has fallen out of date because it lacks funding—a grant ran out in early 2024. I’m working to convince philanthropic organizations to back the 10-12 expert person-hours per week that its upkeep would require, but I’ve had no luck so far.)
Rodney Scott comes up four times in this database. The often troubling events and allegations are below.
Late November 2021: Rodney Scott, the Trump administration’s last Border Patrol chief who exited his position in August, faced a San Diego Superior Court judge for a September tweet in which he advised former Border Patrol agent turned activist Jenn Budd, who has recounted being raped at the Border Patrol academy, to “lean back, close your eyes, and just enjoy the show.” [On December 6, 2024 Budd wrote on BlueSky, “The judge found that he did make the rape threat, he admitted to hav[ing] CBP open an investigation on me, & I still lost the case.”] Budd also posted screenshots on Twitter showing Scott among those on private CBP and Border Patrol agents’ Facebook groups sharing images of Border Patrol shoulder patches reading “Let’s Go Brandon,” a right-wing euphemism for “F— Joe Biden.”
October 25, 2021: A strongly (and explicitly) worded report from the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform, issued on October 25, detailed the disciplinary process following 2019 revelations of a secret Facebook page at which CBP personnel posted racist, violent, and lewd content (original link). The Committee discovered that for most involved, consequences were light: they “had their discipline significantly reduced and continued to work with migrants” (original link)… “CBP knew about Border Patrol agents’ inappropriate posts on ‘I’m 10-15’ since 2016, three years before it was reported publicly,” the House Committee found. Among the Facebook group’s members were Border Patrol’s last two chiefs, Carla Provost (2018-2020) and Rodney Scott (2020-August 2021). Both indicated that they followed the group in order to monitor agents’ attitudes and complaints.
September 29, 2021: A letter to Justice Department leadership and the DHS Inspector-General from Alliance San Diego alleged that former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who left his post in August 2021, had violated the Ethics in Government Act. Scott established a consulting firm in July 2021, while still working for Border Patrol. On September 18, he issued a Facebook request for active-duty CBP and ICE personnel to provide information, possibly including restricted information, “to counter the lies and missinformation [sic.] that the DHS Secretary and Biden officials spew everytime they speak about the border.”
January 27, 2021: Relatives of Anastasio Hernández Rojas filed a brief before the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, contending that Border Patrol covered up, and improperly interfered with the investigation of, agents’ role in Hernández’s 2010 death. Video showed numerous Border Patrol agents and CBP officers beating and tasing a hogtied and handcuffed Hernández to death. The brief contended that the acting deputy chief patrol agent in Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector at the time, Rodney Scott, signed a potentially illegal subpoena to obtain Hernández’s autopsy. (Scott went on to be Border Patrol chief from 2020 to 2021.)
In a thread on BlueSky, the CBP Watch coalition posted links to news coverage of additional allegations:
In June 2018, during the height of the uproar over the Trump administration’s separations of migrant parents and children, Scott toldPolitico, “I would like to remind people too, when we look at a child in the United States and say, ‘Oh, that 14-year-old young man,’ or, ‘That’s an adult in a lot of other countries. That kid’s been working for years, may or may not have been associated with gangs.’ A lot of times, especially if there’s any kind of a use of force or a violent encounter with law enforcement, and the person’s under 18, people get this picture in their head that it’s like the kid that lives next door to you, and it’s not. Some of these kids are hardened adults, and I’m not going to say that that’s all of them. But look into it, pull the layers of the onion back a little bit more, and you’ll find out most of these stories just are not true. They’re exaggerations.”
“Scott was chief of Border Patrol when the agency deployed BORTAC”—the agency’s elite, SWAT team-like force—“against protestors in Portland” after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
“Scott was also directly implicated in expelling 13,000 unaccompanied children during title 42”—the 2020-2023 policy of removing asylum seekers without an opportunity to seek protection, in the name of pandemic response—“a policy that never got the press scrutiny it deserved (with some honorable exceptions).”
There was no reason not to expect Donald Trump to nominate someone with extremely hardline views to head CBP, someone who may worsen the climate for human rights abuse at an agency that already exhibits serious institutional culture problems. That’s what has happened—and as a career official and a known quantity among the Republican senators who will hold a majority next year, Rodney Scott will probably win confirmation.
I’ll be watching the confirmation closely, along with others in the human rights and government oversight communities. We’ll note how senators vote, and expect at least some to take their oversight role seriously by raising these allegations during the confirmation process. That’s why I’m gathering them all here, to make them available in one place.
This is just Border Patrol apprehensions: migrants caught out in the open areas between the official border crossings (ports of entry). I only have CBP port of entry data by country (which is smaller until very recently), for just 21 countries and a big “other” category, going back to October 2019.
Note how 10 months of the Trump administration (2017-2020) saw more migration than October 2024 (56,530 migrant apprehensions).
Note how the migrant population was almost completely Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran before the pandemic, and far more diverse after it.
You can see the early 2024 drop resulting from Mexico’s ongoing crackdown on migrants trying to transit its territory, and then a further mid-2024 drop resulting from the Biden administration’s ban on nearly all asylum access for people who cross between the border’s ports of entry.
Preliminatry numbers show the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic.
“U.S. authorities made about 46,700 arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico in November, down about 17% from October to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency,” reported the Associated Press’s Elliot Spagat.
That is the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic. Here’s what it looks like:
Migration rising in the final months of the Trump administration, as the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy ceased to deter people from coming to the border.
A big jump in migration in early 2021, after Trump left office and the world’s borders reopened several months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
A drop in January 2024 as Mexico’s government, at the Biden administration’s behest, started cracking down harder on migrants transiting the country.
A further drop in June 2024 as the Biden administration, in a questionably legal move, banned most asylum access between border ports of entry.
Many observers, including me, expected more migrants stranded in Mexico to rush to the border after Donald Trump won the November 5 election, seeking to get to U.S. soil before Inauguration Day on January 20. That is not happening, at least not yet. It may still happen, and activity is increasing in southern Mexico. Still, as the end-of-year holidays usually bring a lull in migration, it might not happen at all.
Despite tariff threats, Mexico's security and migration forces are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
<Edit, November 27:> It was great talking to Greg Sargent yesterday for an excellent New Republic piece that embeds the below graphic.
All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them and he’ll start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.
…[W]e may not be prepared for the gale-force agitprop that’s about to hit us.
</Edit>
Yesterday the President-Elect promised to levy tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to stop migration to the U.S. border.
However, Mexico’s security and migration forces (green in the chart) are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
(Mexico hasn’t yet updated its September and October numbers. Underlying numbers are in the image’s alt text.)
Links to 12 stories (7 from Mexico alone) documenting examples of official government collusion with organized crime.
Over the past month, I managed to add 69 stories with the tag “Organized Crime” to my database of Latin American security-related news and reports.
Breaking deep, corrupt links and collusion between governments and criminal organizations must be at the core of any strategy to weaken organized crime and make people feel safer. Despite that, of the 69 articles, just 12 (7 from Mexico alone) documented examples of official collusion with organized crime. They are linked below.
As Chile arrests more gang members, the race is on to stop the prison system from becoming a new command nucleus for organized crime. Preventing corruption is going to be a key part of that effort.
“Criminal organization and state corruption are two sides of the same coin,” said Fernando Guzman, a judge who has made regular visits to Santiago I. “It is impossible to build a powerful criminal enterprise, with significant profitability, without an alliance with some state agencies.”
There have been some isolated cases of corruption among the police force and prison guards.
The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has forwarded copies of investigations to the Prosecutor’s Office, the Supreme Court of Justice and Case 08 of the same JEP so that the respective judicial processes can be carried out against a major general of the Army, six State agents and three civilians, accused by Dairo Antonio Úsuga David, alias ‘Otoniel’, for their alleged collaboration with paramilitary groups.
Among those investigated by the JEP is Major General Carlos Omairo Lemus Pedraza, who was commander of the XVIII Brigade of the National Army between 2000 and 2003. According to the testimony of the former paramilitary chief, Lemus allegedly collaborated with the paramilitaries, allowing the expansion of these groups in the Arauca region. Alongside him are several former governors and officials such as Julio Acosta Bernal, former governor of Arauca, and Helí Cala López, former governor in charge of Casanare, who allegedly facilitated the presence and operation of the paramilitaries in their respective regions.
Other prominent names include Óscar Raúl Iván Flórez Chávez, former governor of Casanare, and Milton Rodríguez Sarmiento, former senator, both accused of alleged participation in the consolidation of paramilitary control in Casanare and their support for the AUC. Also mentioned are businessmen such as Andrés Rueda Gómez, former secretary of infrastructure of Casanare, and Sergio Hernández Gamarra, former rector of the University of Cartagena, who allegedly collaborated financially with the AUC in contracts that favored these groups.
… The collaboration of these state actors with the paramilitaries not only allowed these groups to increase their power in the regions of Casanare and Arauca, but also consolidated territorial control that led to multiple human rights violations. In Casanare, for example, political and business actors facilitated contracts and resources that financed the operations of the Centauros Bloc, while in Arauca, the AUC, with the backing of local authorities and members of the security forces, managed to consolidate their dominance to combat other insurgent groups and control the region.
In Solino, Garry Jean-Joseph, 33, blamed the police for the ongoing violence. “I left with nothing,” he said. “The people of Solino do not understand last night, the conspiracy of the policemen and the Live Together (Viv Ansanm) soldiers.”
The resident described how at 2 a.m., a policeman in an armored car told residents to go home and that they would secure the neighborhood. However, shortly afterward residents could hear gangs invading. “The police delivered Solino,” he added.
Some officers with Haiti’s National Police have been long accused of corruption and working with gangs.
Germán Reyes Reyes, the retired military officer accused of ordering the assassination of Chilpancingo municipal president Alejandro Arcos, served as a prosecutor for serious crimes from 2022 to 2024. In the new municipal administration, he was placed in charge of the Public Security Secretariat. His career in the state capital was cut short on November 12, when he was arrested by the National Guard and the Army. In the initial hearing, the Public Prosecutor accused the official of being part of the criminal group Los Ardillos. The judge evaluated the evidence and ordered preventive detention.
The following day the Army issued a communiqué distancing itself from the accused; however, it had endorsed his appointment as prosecutor when Lieutenant Sandra Luz Valdovinos was appointed attorney general. So far in Evelyn Salgado Pineda’s administration, the investigation of the crimes is in the hands of the Army. The results have been disastrous because most of the investigation files are not prosecuted, and high-impact crimes have increased in the state’s eight regions.
While the kidnapping of [top Sinaloa cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo”] Zambada has broken the order that existed around drug trafficking in Sinaloa, little is said about the conflict between Governor Rocha [Rubén Rocha Moya] and former university president [Héctor] Cuén, the genesis of the de facto state of emergency in Culiacán.
… Then comes 2021. Cuén, more astute than Rocha, sold Morena on the need for an alliance with PAS [a local political party] and agreed that Rocha would be the gubernatorial candidate in exchange for him being appointed Secretary of Government or Senator. Several local media published that the elections had been won with the help of Zambada and the Guzmans, who threaten opposition politicians and move people around. Once the governorship was pocketed, Rocha offered him the Secretary of Health.
The newly elected mayor of Chilpancingo, Mexico, had appointed Germán Reyes as the man who would safeguard his city.
But on Tuesday, the Mexican authorities arrested Mr. Reyes, a retired military officer and former prosecutor, accusing him of ordering the mayor’s brutal killing in southwest Mexico last month in a case that had already shocked a nation reeling from widespread violence against local politicians.
…State prosecutors on Tuesday announced the arrest of Mr. Reyes, 46, the city’s security chief, on a charge of aggravated homicide, saying he colluded with a local criminal group to abduct and assassinate the mayor.
The implication was that Reyes – who was also a former military officer who, according to his official resume, retired with rank of captain in the military justice system – had somehow worked in collusion with the gang.
That would suggest that at least one of the two warring gangs fighting for control of Chilpancingo controls, intimidates or works with officials there.
If Reyes is convicted, it would also be a stinging rebuke for a policy adopted by cities across Mexico of hiring retired military officers for top local police jobs, on the assumption that they are less prone to corruption.
It was also revealing that state detectives had to rely on federal forces—soldiers and the National Guard—to make the arrest, suggesting they may not have trusted state and local police who would normally carry out such tasks.
Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest who works in Ciudad Hidalgo, along the Guatemalan border, said criminal groups in southern Mexico have gone so far as to set up checkpoints along the main highway in an effort to identify migrants. “The authorities are involved,” he said about the kidnappings, adding that there’s a blurry line between the authorities charged with protecting migrants and the cartels exploiting them. “You never know who you’re talking to,” he said.
The Mexican government didn’t respond to requests for comment on allegations that organized crime has set up checkpoints along the highway in southern Mexico or that kidnappers may be collaborating with officials.
Ciudad Hidalgo Mayor Elmer Vázquez claimed to not know anything about migrant safe houses operating in the area and said his town always looks after migrants.
But Rev. Vázquez (no relation to the mayor), who has spent two decades defending migrants, said the prosecutor’s office, National Guard, special prosecutor for crimes against migrants do nothing even when crimes are reported.
“They are colluding with organized crime and, of course, they make it look like they’re doing their jobs,” he said.
In the specific case of Guanajuato, the attacks against police officers have been concentrated in the Laja – Bajío area, which is under the control of the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG) and is disputed by the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel (CSRL).
In an interview with MILENIO, public security consultant David Saucedo said that in the region, also known as the Huachicol Triangle, it is the criminal organization founded by José Antonio Yépez Ortiz – alias El Marro- that is fighting public security corporations.
According to documents from the National Defense Secretariat (Sedena) leaked by Guacamaya Leaks and cited by the consultant, the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel had managed to infiltrate municipal and state security agencies and even the National Guard, from whom they received protection and support to escort tanks of stolen fuel leaving the Salamanca refinery.
With the CJNG’s violent incursion into Guanajuato municipalities and the so-called Industrial Corridor, the criminal organization currently headed by members of El Marro’s family has taken on the task of attacking security corporations that are not aligned with them.
“The Santa Rosa Cartel does control some municipal police in the state of Guanajuato but others do not. Others are out of their control and that is where they have launched a combat strategy, especially in Celaya which is their economic capital and where they carry out kidnapping, extortion, fuel theft and above all drug dealing activities,” explained David Saucedo in an interview with MILENIO.
Thus, the attacks on police officers that have been reported during 2024 in Celaya would be related to the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel since, in the consultant’s words, “it is one of the few police forces in Guanajuato that does carry out this activity of combating organized crime”.
To combat security corporations, the criminal organization headed by José Antonio Yépez Ortiz has assigned deserters from the Colombian Army, as well as members of the Grupo Escorpión of the Gulf Cartel with whom they created alliances to stop the advance of the CJNG.
(For more about ex-Colombian military personnel working with cartels in Guanajuato, Mexico, see this May 2023 report at Mexico’s El Universal from Héctor De Mauleón.)
In a hearing held this afternoon before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Peruvian judge and member of the Latin American Federation of Magistrates Oswaldo Ordóñez alerted the international community about the permanent political attacks against the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary, and made a report on all the laws in favor of organized crime and corruption approved so far by the Peruvian Congress.
… The magistrate recounted all the laws approved so far in Peru in favor of organized crime and corruption by the Congress dominated by Fuerza Popular, Peru Libre, and APP, together with other satellite blocs.
“This parliamentary majority and the Executive Power have enacted laws that modify the statute of limitations; that cut the terms in the processes of effective collaboration; that prevent the seizure of goods or materials used in illegal mining; that exclude all political parties from any criminal responsibility; that promote impunity for terrorists and ex-military; that oblige raids to be carried out with the presence of the raided person’s lawyer, and establish a new typification of the crime of organized crime”, he commented.
The magistrate commented that this new regulatory framework “has generated the exponential growth of crime and insecurity, putting the entire population at serious risk”.
Environmental leaders and activists agree that improving the situation for Venezuelan wildlife requires a fundamental shift in the government’s modus operandi. The government must cut ties with wildlife traffickers and actively prosecute cases of trafficking.
Cristina Burelli, founder of conservation NGO SOS Orinoco, says a lack of institutions and rule of law create favorable conditions for wildlife trafficking in Venezuela. “The only way to combat wildlife trafficking is by strengthening institutions, but that’s not going to happen under the Maduro regime. So unfortunately, until there’s a change of government, I don’t think there’s going to be any change [for wildlife],” she says.
“It has created a situation in Venezuela where nobody really cares,” she adds.
In 2001, Mario Montoya was the "can-do" general whom the U.S. and Colombian governments frequently featured with reporters. Now he's sanctioned by the U.S. government for gross human rights violations. There's a lesson here.
That’s quite a turnabout for Colombian Army Gen. Mario Montoya. In the early years of the “Plan Colombia” security buildup, Montoya was the “can-do” general whom the U.S. and Colombian governments frequently featured when they gave reporters access to military operations supported by big U.S. aid packages starting in 2000.
We now know that Montoya had a darker side of collusion with death squads, tacit backing of right-wing paramilitary groups, and—later, as Army commander—overseeing a spike in murders of civilians through relentless encouragement of high body counts. The State Department sanctions announced today further confirm this.
None of this is news to Colombia’s human rights defenders, who had been warning about Montoya’s record, and the rising number of extrajudicial killings, for years before either government began to respond.
This is yet another reminder of the importance of listening to human rights defenders.
The very rough seven months between George Floyd and January 6 were the endpoint of the last Trump administration. But they are the starting point of the next one. The danger, especially for U.S. civil-military relations, is hard to understate.
Things had been chaotic since January 2017, but Donald Trump’s first administration took a sharply darker turn during and after the June 2020 George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests, all the way to the January 6 Capitol riots.
The Department of Homeland Security had already been captured by Trump loyalists who specifically sought to deter migration through cruelty, most notably during the 2017-2018 family separation crisis. Then, as people took to the streets to protest police killings of Black Americans, the Trump White House sought to involve the U.S. armed forces in internal, politicized missions with few modern historical precedents.
Mercifully, the story ended there: Trump lost the elections five months later, and was dislodged two months after that.
Those very rough seven months were the endpoint of the last Trump administration. But they are the starting point of the next one. The danger, especially for U.S. civil-military relations, is hard to understate.
It was during those last seven and a half months of Trump’s term that the guardrails came down and destructive people gained positions of real power. The generals who had served as brakes on Trump’s wildest urges—McMaster, Mattis, Kelly—were long gone, and Trump was musing about having soldiers shoot protesters in the legs. Things got so bad by the end that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took it upon himself to call his Chinese counterparts to reassure them that nothing destructively reckless was about to happen.
Soldiers got sent out to clear protesters from part of Lafayette Square, by the White House, so that Trump could have his photo taken with a Bible. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley later apologized for accompanying Trump on that stunt.
Acting DHS officials deployed Border Patrol agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the streets of interior cities like Washington and Portland to confront protesters. In Portland, the confrontations were frequent and violent.
Little-known Trump loyalists like Ezra Cohen and Kash Patel, keeping close watch on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, gained effective control of the Pentagon.
Nobody called out the National Guard in time to respond to the January 6 insurrection.
Nearly all of the president-elect’s appointments since Election Day make clear that he wants to pick up exactly where he left off during those final, terrible months.
The United States might scrape by as a democratic republic after four years like January 2017-May 2020. But four years like June 2020-January 2021? That would be extinction-level.
We need institutions to guard against that, if they’re even able. Especially the U.S. armed forces, which have a long tradition of resisting any alignment with a political party or leader. But it’s a tradition: the president is the commander in chief, and though it may take a couple of years to pack the high command with pro-MAGA generals and colonels, it’s not impossible to politicize them.
Citizens of Venezuela made up 85 percent of all people who migrated through the Darién Gap in October 2024. That's Venezuela's largest-ever monthly share of the Darién migrant population.
Panama’s government posted updated data about the number of migrants encountered migrating through the Darién Gap jungles. While the number of people making the dangerous journey declined a bit (to 22,914 in October 2024, from 25,111 in September), the number of citizens of Venezuela barely budged (from 19,800 in September to 19,522 in October).
In fact, citizens of Venezuela (blue in the chart) made up 85 percent of all people who migrated through the Darién Gap in October. That’s Venezuela’s largest-ever monthly share of the Darién migrant population (it was 80% in September 2022).
Migration through the Darién Gap has declined from 2023, when Panama counted 520,085 people all year. 2024 is in second place, though, with 286,210 migrants during the year’s first 10 months.
Since 2022, an incredible 676,981 citizens of Venezuela have migrated through the Darién Gap. If there are about 30-32 million Venezuelan people, that is 1 out of every 47 of them.
Migrant family separation proponent Tom Homan is to be Trump's "border czar," a made-up position that doesn't need Senate approval.
Thomas Homan was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Donald Trump’s last administration. He’s an extreme pro-deportation hardliner and was a key proponent of the 2017-2018 policy of separating migrant families at the border.
In October, CBS’s 60 Minutesasked Homan, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”
He replied, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
“I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country. You better start packing now,” Homan told the Republican National Convention in July.
Donald Trump just announced that Tom Homan will be his administration’s “border czar,” a made-up position, presumably in the White House, that doesn’t require Senate approval. Homan will have responsibilities “including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security” and “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he told a July conference of so-called “National Conservatives,” adding, “They ain’t seen sh*t yet. Wait until 2025.”
For me, the Harris-Walz campaign lost when it succumbed to tight message control and scripting, which included chucking the border and immigration rights community fully under the bus.
Scripted is the kiss of death in modern presidential politics. The vibes and poll numbers for Harris were best preceding and, in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when she and Tim Walz were winging it on messaging and more willing to go off script. No matter what the polls and focus groups may have suggested, “They’re weird” worked better than stumping with Liz Cheney. Trump ran a campaign with almost no discipline, but it didn’t cost him anything. The more disciplined Harris became, the more she struggled. The more carefully Harris sought moderate Republican votes, the less buzz she seemed to receive.
Yes: this nails it. During those heady pre-Convention weeks, before the pricey consultants’ message-massaging took over, I wrote that for those of us fearing what Trump represents, the candidates’ tone offered a chance, finally, to feel “no longer on our own and undefended.”
The best thing about this new tone and energy is the feeling that, at least for now, we’re not on our own anymore. Someone—even if it’s with the same consultants who were writing timidly for Biden before, now unleashed—is finally sticking up for us.
By Labor Day, the Harris-Walz campaign’s pugnacious, crackling-with-edgy-energy messaging was gone. It got washed away by gauzy, vague “moving forward to the future” language and appeals to Dick Cheney-loving border hawks who, except for a narrow educated fringe worried about democracy, were always going to vote for the real version of Trump instead of the “lite” version.
Remember that cool video, shot days after Walz got chosen, of the two candidates just shooting the sh*t, talking about their musical preferences and their backgrounds sticking up for working-class and vulnerable people? It was great! But for some reason, that video, and any similar messaging, got totally memory-holed.
This is from August 15, 2024. In it, Walz made a funny comment about liking “white guy tacos.” Some far-right outlets gnashed their teeth about that, and I guess the campaign got spooked?
I’ll say it: by October, I felt alone and undefended again. And the candidates’ rejection of the human rights priorities I advocate on border and immigration policy—priorities that much of the Democratic Party shares—personally stung.
Nobody likes being thrown under the bus by should-be allies for advocating what they know is right, for trying to protect vulnerable people. But you know what feels worse? Being thrown under the bus for that in the name of a strategy that utterly failed anyway. I don’t recommend this feeling. It feels f***ing bad.
That’s it. I’m done with recriminations and finger-pointing, they’re not productive. We need to build, we need to be constructive.
I just need to scream out my rage this one time, because I don’t want to see this ever happen again.
I produced 185 "daily border links" posts in the past year as part of our election-year rapid-response strategy. It was worthwhile, but not enough to do indefinitely.
On November 27, 2023, with a U.S. presidential election nearly a year away, WOLA’s border and migration program embarked on a “rapid response” strategy to add facts and context to the narrative about one of the upcoming campaign’s main issues.
That day, we published the first of what would be 185 “Daily Border Links” posts totaling over 150,000 words (plus the link citations).
Each one was a summary of that day’s U.S.-Mexico border-related news: breaking developments and deeper analysis pieces, with fully cited links below each item.
Each was just a few hundred words: a quick read, most of the time produced by about 9:00 or 10:00 Eastern each weekday.
I would then share them on WOLA’s Border Oversight microsite, on my own blog, and—as up to four attached images of each page’s text—on seven social media sites (Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tumblr).
I would also share them with three mailing lists: two NGO coalition listservs, and a Google Group open to the public. (You can still sign up for that and get WOLA’s Weekly Border Updates, which we’ve been producing since 2020.)
This was a key part of our “rapid response” strategy because it forced me to do the reading and to be excruciatingly up to date on every development and data point. It was an excellent tool for reaching journalists and fellow activists, experts, and service providers. It helped shape some news coverage, and I know that many people in government were reading it.
The idea was to run the Daily Border Links for a year, through U.S. Election Day, and then shut them down and move on. I would entertain the idea of continuing them if the level of demand and engagement was spectacular.
In the end, the level of demand for the “links” posts was healthy enough to have made it more than a worthwhile effort. But it was not overwhelming enough to merit continuing it beyond the election campaign year.
Here’s an evaluation of the experience:
The good
As a rapid response strategy, the Daily Border Links succeeded in reaching journalists and NGO partners. It appeared to reach U.S. executive branch officials quietly: they knew about it but rarely interacted with them. Legislative staff give much more frequent feedback on our weekly updates, which are actual narratives, rather than on annotated links like the dailies.
Having to write these each weekday kept me super sharp, which made my “post-9:00 AM” border and migration advocacy work far more effective. I know so much about what’s happening, in alarming detail. It made me a good interview, I think.
I didn’t miss a single deeply reported piece, investigation, or NGO or government report. (Though I also see most of those when doing the weekly updates.)
I’m very proud of the archive that will remain on the web for good. The November-to-November story is a journey from the late-2023 Senate negotiations over the “bipartisan border bill” at a time of record migration, to the bill’s failure, Mexico’s crackdown, all the things the candidates were saying as both tacked rightward, the Biden administration’s body blow to asylum access, and the recent decline in migration. All of this interspersed with innumerable fact checks, deeply reported investigations, and tragedies that people forget after a few news cycles.
The not-so-good
As noted, the Daily Links did not set the world on fire, traffic-wise, although it’s hard to tell because—since I wanted to get the information out frictionlessly—I shared them in a way that allowed people to read it without me knowing. I used graphics to put the whole thing on social media platforms, and I mailed it to listservs. My analytics service, Plausible, says that just 2,900 people visited the main news archive page in a year, which is not impressive; 4,600 people when you include visits to individual updates’ pages. But I gave people few reasons to visit the site itself, because the same information appeared in so many other formats and on so many other platforms.
While I created a Google Group mailing list (no cost to me, but not the friendliest format for people without Gmail accounts), I didn’t advertise it except for a link at the top of each post. Still, 158 people signed up between January and now. Between that and listservs, several hundred people got it in their mail every morning. That is good reach for a niche product, but nothing to brag about. (WOLA’s Weekly Updates do a lot better. They’re not as rapid response, and they run long. But Google features them prominently and they often get over 3,000 downloads each. About 1 in 10 exceeds 10,000 downloads.)
I ended up having to wade through a lot of mediocre content in my daily “gatherings” from news sources (a Twitter list of news posters, RSS feeds, Google News searches). There’s a lot of “boiler room,” “shovel,” “press release,” or “police blotter” reporting out there—especially on Google News—that I’m happy not to have to comb through anymore. What a waste of time.
Ultimately, it’s not our goal to be a “news service”: we should be active participants in the movement for a rights-respecting, humane, well-managed border.
During key moments like an election year, furrowing our brow to do rapid-response news-digging and analysis made sense, and I know the links posts inspired some good media reporting, alerted allies to emerging trends and challenges, and improved our audiences’ access to facts (if those matter anymore). But now, I need to spend more time on work that is less shallow, that adds more value, and that doesn’t require racing to put something out by 9:00 AM.
Why stop now? Resources.
So now, 347 days after the first post, the last “Daily Border Links” went up today, and there’s no plan to restart. Some colleagues have contacted me to lament this. They have a point: the Trump transition and the first 100 days are a time when our community could really use daily updates.
But WOLA doesn’t have the resources to maintain this pace right now. Like many NGOs that do human rights advocacy without U.S. government funding, we’re in a lean moment.
I suppose I could be convinced to continue producing them if we had specific philanthropic resources to pay for the big investment in staff time they require. However, institutional funders are less interested in backing national-level “narrative work” about borders and migration right now.
You could see the sector-wide lack of resources in major outlets’ campaign coverage, which tended to cite, repeatedly, a small number of border and migration experts. We’re the handful of people who’ve managed to make a living being credible sources of information and clear explainers, while more current and wide-ranging than our counterparts in academia. (No shade to academia, which rewards deeper specialization and a slower, more deliberate pace, not “rapid response” on a spectrum of issues. Imagine trying to do that while teaching a full courseload.)
Without foundation or big individual donor grant money, could we sustain a continued pace of Daily Links posts by charging people to get them, like a Substack model? Perhaps, but I’m not sure the numbers work for something this niche.
For the number of hours I spent on the daily links—news-gathering, reading, writing, all those mailings and social media cross-posts—plus the WOLA infrastructure that makes it possible, I’d conservatively need $3,500 per month. That’s $4,000-4,500 if you include time spent on the weekly updates, too. That would be 400 people paying $10 per month each, or 800 people paying $5 per month.
Given the traffic indicators I mentioned above, that seems unlikely. If we added a paywall (which many Substacks don’t do, asking for voluntary contributions), we’d be shutting down distribution to those who don’t cough up the money, thus negating the original goal of getting friction-free information to as many people as possible.
So that’s more than you probably wanted to know about our foray into producing daily, rapid-response content during an election year. I’m glad I did it, and I’m proud that I never missed a day without giving advance warning first. I certainly don’t rule out doing it again when the need arises.
People who work with migrants are scared and dejected. Helpers don't deserve this.
If the fascism playbook calls for scapegoating a vulnerable minority, it also means heaping scorn and derision—or worse—on people who serve and defend that vulnerable minority.
I’ve had lots of conversations this week, both one on one and in coalition, with people assisting the migrant population that Donald Trump calls “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” I’ll have more conversations today.
They’re not doing well, and they’re preparing for retrenchment.
Shelter operators, pro bono attorneys, and rights defenders, at the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere, are bracing for the scale of suffering they’re about to see, and desolate about their limited power to do anything about it.
They’re also worried about themselves: Will they be able to operate? Will they be fending off legal challenges? Will their communications and relationships be subject to surveillance? Is their personal safety at stake, threatened by both aggressive security personnel and self-styled vigilantes?
They also feel alone and undefended. And that’s with good reason.
Will anyone in the political establishment defend them? An important sector of the Democratic Party absolutely will defend them, and defend the rights of immigrants in general. But will a majority of the Democratic Party step up? The Party that just spent an election season triangulating itself away from the migrant rights’ defense community and tacking rightward (with absolutely nothing to show for it)?
Will traditional legacy media step up, after hedging their endorsements and issuing incessant “Trump Pursues Ambitious Immigration Agenda” headlines?
It’s really not clear.
Helpers don’t deserve to be made to feel like this. If you know someone who does this work, please send them a message today and let them know you appreciate them and that you’ll stick up for them. They need it now, and they’re really going to need it soon.
After the 2024 election result, you may have made a list of things you'd like to do ahead of January 20 to brace yourself. Here's mine.
Here’s some unsolicited advice for how to go about daily life between now and January 20. You may have drawn up a list of your own today. If not, you may feel better after taking a moment to do so.
I’m absolutely not doing all of these things, though I’d like to start many of them.
Resist the urge to post “outrage” takes on social media. Daniel Hunter calls that “public angsting,” adding, “It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action.” Maybe read more instead. Or better yet, spend the time writing or creating something more thoughtful, something that adds value and context, requiring more “emotional labor” than a hot take. At the very least, say, a blog post at a space you own. Then, when that’s done, go to social media and link to it.
Get off of Elon Musk’s Twitter. And look at Meta’s properties with skepticism, too. The ideal would be Mastodon—decentralized and immune from corporate takeovers, you can even own your own virtual managed server for not too much money, which I do. But very few people are there. More are on BlueSky, which is also run by a corporation that could change its behavior anytime, but at least for now it feels like “old Twitter.” The fact is, if you do communications, you still need a Twitter and Meta presence because so many audiences are still there: even though those audiences probably hate it, “network lock-in” is real. I’m limiting my own Twitter presence to posting links to items hosted elsewhere, and the very occasional quote-tweet. No original content.
Read a lot. Read about the civil-rights era struggles that led to the social gains that this administration threatens to dismantle. Read about anti-authoritarian struggles worldwide. Read about what has worked. Read guides from people who have advised social movements, from Gene Sharp and Saul Alinsky to Srdja Popovic and adrienne maree brown, among many others. See also science fiction, from Octavia Butler to Cory Doctorow and many, many others.
Learn best practices for interacting with aggressive security personnel. Know your rights regarding what you are and are absolutely not required to say and what you are not required to allow to be searched. Also, learn best practices for dealing with violent people and people who threaten others. Learn at least some basics of de-escalation and self-defense.
Make more time for neighbors and co-workers as well as for family and friends. When you do, listen more than you talk.
Turn up your computer’s security settings, even if they’re less convenient. Ditch spying browsers like Chrome. Change passwords. Use a password manager if you don’t already. Cancel accounts for digital services you don’t use. Delete little-used apps that may be leaking location and other data. Consider using a VPN. Encrypt all of your drives and devices. Add more digits to the PIN you use to unlock your phone. Look at more secure communications services like Signal and ProtonMail. Read more tips from the EFF. If your security needs are extreme, use a locked-down Linux distribution like Debian with privacy enhancements, Fedora with security modules, or even Qubes OS.
Be gentler on yourself. Sleep 8 hours. Get exercise, but don’t overtrain; in fact, don’t even “train,” just take it slow, but get outside and see the sky. Cut back on—but don’t necessarily cut out completely—items that dull your alertness or weaken your body’s ability to deal with stress, such as booze, caffeine, drugs, refined sugars and carbohydrates, processed foods, and animal products.
Be kind. Even to people who don’t seem to deserve it. Just err on the side of kindness. Lots of folks aren’t doing well right now.
Working through my 2024 election anxiety with a look at the early vote in a few states.
Ahead of Tuesday’s election, most states have early voting. A few states report the party registrations of those who vote early.
Even though this is almost certainly not a useful indicator of the final result, I have a spreadsheet of those states. (If you click on that link, choose “USE TEMPLATE” at the top, which makes your own copy so you can change the orange numbers yourself, which are my assumptions about how each party’s voters might actually vote).
OK, let’s assume that 96 percent of Democratic-registered early voters chose Harris, and 2 percent of all voters chose third parties. What would Harris need in these states to get over 50% of the early vote so far?
(As of 3:20 PM Eastern on November 1)
Alaska: 8,962 more Republicans than Democrats have voted (15%). To get over 50%, Harris would need:
25% of Rs plus 50% of independents, or
18% of Rs plus 55% of independents, or
8% of Rs plus 62% of independents, or
4% of Rs plus 65% of independents.
Seems barely attainable, probably out of reach, for Harris.
Arizona: 175,951 more Republicans than Democrats have voted (8.1%). To get over 50%, Harris would need:
A series of 12 videos, about 2 minutes each, about border and migration trends.
Every week between August 7 and October 30—that is, 12 times—I threw together a script and some visuals on Tuesday afternoon, and then on Wednesday morning WOLA’s terrific communications team would set me up with a camera and a microphone to record, then edit and distribute, a 2-minute video about the U.S.-Mexico border and migration.
It was a good experience as we “learned by doing.” While they never went viral, we got much more sophisticated over those three months in communicating the message. They still look thrown together quickly, but the more recent ones look far less like “hostage proof-of-life” videos than the earlier ones.
Mexico has stepped up its migrant interdiction efforts so much that its "encounters" with migrants now rival those of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In July, absolutely for the first time ever, Mexico reported “encountering” (apprehending, blocking, turning back, detaining) more migrants in its territory than U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which includes Border Patrol) reported encountering at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Citing a “restructuring process,” Mexico’s authorities say their reporting of September data will be delayed, but at least through August, the two countries’ migrant encounters remain nearly equal for the first time in history. And, of course, the U.S. figure includes Mexican citizens, and Mexico’s does not.
Much has been written about Mexico’s undeclared but vigorous policy of redirecting other nations’ migrants to the country’s south and cutting way back on humanitarian visas, even as detention and deportation have grown less frequent. It’s been called the “chutes and ladders” or “merry-go-round” policy, shipping people south when they try to come north.
In 2024, appropriations to FEMA's Shelter and Services Program, which prevents migrants from being dumped on U.S. streets upon release, totaled less than 2 percent of appropriations to FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund.
Donald Trump and others are pushing a completely false story that response to Hurricane Helene has been hobbled because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has had funds “stolen” to help shelter migrants recently released from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody at the border.
As many have pointed out, there is exactly zero truth to this. But even if that happened, it wouldn’t have amounted to much. In 2024, appropriations to FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which prevents migrants from being dumped on U.S. streets upon release, totaled less than 2 percent of appropriations to FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.
Weekly data from the three busiest Border Patrol sectors show migrant apprehensions dropping sharply for two or three weeks after June 5, when the Biden administration imposed a strict new asylum restriction rule. After that, the reductions have stopped and apprehensions have plateaued.
Weekly data from the three busiest Border Patrol sectors show migrant apprehensions dropping sharply for two or three weeks after June 5, when the Biden administration imposed a strict new asylum restriction rule.
After that, the reductions have stopped and apprehensions have plateaued through July and August.
I’m personally pleased by the choice of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate. In a July 27 post, I wrote about Democrats’ need to stop triangulating and calibrating, and to stand up aggressively for core values when they’re under threat as never before in our lifetimes. Walz will do that.
But how is he on human rights and democracy in Latin America?
The record is thin: this is not Tim Walz’s domain. As governor of Minnesota, his most pressing foreign policy concern has probably been relations with Ontario and Manitoba. Before that, during 12 years in the House of Representatives, Walz did not serve on committees with foreign policy responsibilities.
However, we can get a sense from the legislation he voted for and co-sponsored. And here, the outlook is very good for his view of human rights and democracy in the Americas.
Due to labor rights concerns, Walz was a “no” vote on free-trade deals with Colombia (2011) and Peru (2007).
On human rights and democracy, Walz was one of 51 co-sponsors of a 2009 resolution condemning the military coup in Honduras, and one of 103 co-sponsors of the Latin America Military Training Review Act, a bill spearheaded by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) in 2009.
As a representative of a farm district, Walz supported opening economic relations with Cuba, a market for agricultural products. The Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect notes that he voted in the Agriculture Committee for a 2010 bill that would have ended travel restrictions and allowed direct farm sales to the island. He was one of 32 co-sponsors, in 2015, of the “Free Trade With Cuba Act”—a misnomer, as it eased the embargo on Cuba but was far from a free trade deal.
On immigration, both in the House and as a governor Walz has adopted standard liberal positions without making it a signature issue. In 2018, at the lowest point of the Trump administration’s family separations policy, he was one of 195 House members who co-sponsored the “Keep Families Together Act.”
In 2015 he supported legislation backing stricter screening of refugees, but the New York Timesreported that he has since changed this position. In 2008, following a visit to El Paso, he called “on Congress to increase funding for more Border Patrol agents, security cameras, technology and K-9 training,” MPR Newsreported; these are also common positions among Democratic legislators.
All in all, Walz has a solid record on Latin American human rights and democracy issues, though not one of leadership or deep engagement.
Note the shift in tone here from the Biden campaign verbiage on the left to the Harris campaign statement on the right.
The messaging is way sharper. It is also coming more frequently, with rapid-fire, in-the-moment responses to whatever Trump and Vance are saying. They’re not letting dangerous nonsense go unresponded-to, and they’re willing to use plain, aggressive language that probes the Trump-Vance campaign’s weaknesses.
Many atop the Democratic Party hierarchy (probably including an ex-president who delayed endorsing Kamala Harris for days) may now be tenting their fingers and intoning “this is inappropriate to the dignity of the office and the need to reach across the aisle” or whatever.
I disagree. I’m here for this. As one of millions alarmed by the threat to rights and institutions that Donald Trump and his movement represent, I’m very tired of feeling undefended by the cautious, triangulating current that dominates the Democratic Party, especially in the Senate and at the presidential level.
The key word for me is “undefended.” As the MAGA onslaught has worsened this year, the feeling that “nobody is sticking up for us” has been a daily source of dread and stress.
The party and the President were exuding centrism and competence, yes, but also a sense of slowness, constant calibration, and fear of seeming off-putting to imagined swing voters. The result was tired, infrequent, and often boring responses to Trumpist outrages and even occasional embraces (with asylum-seekers at the border, for instance) of “Trump-lite” policies.
The implicit message to people scared for the future of our democracy has been “you’re on your own: the hard work of defense is up to you.” That’s a terrible feeling.
And yes, civil society often is on its own. That’s why it exists: because democratic institutions and parties often do get captured or gridlocked, and people have to organize in order to have their demands listened to, channeled, and met.
But with Trump and the extreme right appearing (until a week ago) to be cruising toward a coronation, the “you’re on your own” feeling was suffocating.
The worst moment was the June 27 debate. President Biden was on the same stage as Donald Trump, the defender of January 6 and the executioner of Roe v. Wade, as Trump spouted a torrent of lies. And Biden failed to respond. He utterly, devastatingly failed. This may have been for reasons of infirmity, but the fact remained: we were on our own.
The best thing about this new tone and energy is the feeling that, at least for now, we’re not on our own anymore. Someone—even if it’s with the same consultants who were writing timidly for Biden before, now unleashed—is finally sticking up for us.
It’s a great start, and I think it explains the surge of energy that we’ve seen over the past few days.
Promising to continue Biden-era asylum restrictions may make short-term electoral sense, but a better answer would commit to fixing the asylum system to guarantee due process while making those restrictions unnecessary.
Kamala Harris’s campaign manager told CBS News that the candidate will continue Joe Biden’s administration’s 2023 and 2024 bans on access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I think at this point, you know, the policies that are, you know, having a real impact on ensuring that we have security and order at our border are policies that will continue,” Chávez Rodríguez responded.
Chávez Rodríguez’s comments inside a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona are the first indication that U.S. border policy may not change significantly if Harris succeeds Mr. Biden as president, despite pressure from progressive activists angry with the Biden administration’s pivot on asylum.
It’s unrealistic to expect a Vice President to break publicly with the President just days after he abandoned his campaign. It also makes tactical sense to send an “order at the border” message on an issue that polls show is a likely vulnerability for the Harris campaign.
Still, it would be far better for Chávez Rodríguez and other surrogates to follow up with something along the lines of: “…and we will fund and expand the U.S. asylum system so that it can hand down fair decisions with due process, in a matter of months instead of years, which will make these asylum restrictions unnecessary.”
Funding and expanding asylum processing and adjudication doesn’t require passage of new laws. It just requires some modest shifts in allocations in the annual Homeland Security budget appropriation.
Instead of proposing fixes to the badly broken asylum system, though, Chávez Rodríguez shifted to a longtime Biden and centrist Democrat talking point.
“We know at the end of the day the only way to really modernize our immigration system and secure our border is for Congress to pass common-sense immigration legislation,” Chávez Rodríguez added.
While this is true, immigration reform is not going to happen soon—not as long as you’ve got a near-50-50 Senate and the filibuster still in place. So this is “just empty words” at best, or “shifting blame elsewhere” at worst. Neither motivates voters. The campaign will need to do better.
The numbers show that "Operation Lone Star" hasn't caused declines in migration to Texas much greater than declines elsewhere. We should be relieved that cruelty hasn't paid dividends.
Here are Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants, by U.S. border state, since the record-setting month of December 2023.
Since December, unauthorized migration has declined by two thirds. Since January—after Mexico started cracking down hard on migrants crossing its territory—migration declined by one third. From May to June, after the Biden administration issued a rule severely limiting asylum access between ports of entry, migration dropped by 29 percent. (This effect is likely to be short-term, but may keep numbers down through Election Day—even as it sends many would-be asylum seekers back to danger.)
Texas’s hardline governor, Greg Abbott (R), likes to claim that his state government’s “Operation Lone Star,” a $10 billion-plus series of security-force deployments, imprisonments, and wall-building, is responsible for the drop in migrants coming to Texas. Abbott even alleges that Texas has pushed migrants to other states.
But did Texas see the largest drop in migration?
Since December, the answer is “yes, though not dramatically more.” Migrant apprehensions in Texas declined by 82 percent from December to June. But in Arizona, where Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has not implemented any “Operation Lone Star”-like policies, apprehensions dropped by 70 percent. Both states, with their very different approaches, experienced declines greater than the border-wide average.
If one takes January—after Mexico’s crackdown began—as the baseline date, Arizona in fact declined more sharply than Texas. (52 percent to 40 percent.)
From May to June, Texas dropped 36 percent and Arizona 33 percent, a near tie.
From this, It’s really hard to conclude that Greg Abbott’s policies made a big difference. Arizona experienced similar declines without the hardline policies. The 2024 migration decline is a border-wide trend, not a Texas phenomenon.
We should be relieved that cruelty hasn’t paid any dividends.
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.