Mayorkas's impeachment gets delivered to the Senate, where a trial is unlikely. Panama's leading presidential candidate thinks he can "close" the Darién Gap.

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Developments

The populist candidate leading polls for Panama’s May 5 presidential elections is promising to block migration through the Darién Gap. “We are going to close Darien and we are going to repatriate all these people as appropriate, respecting human rights,” José Raúl Mulino told reporters. Mulino did not specify how he would manage to close to migrants a 2,200-square-mile region of dense jungle.

Leaders of the Republican-majority House of Representatives formally delivered articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Democratic-majority Senate, more than two months after approving them by a single vote on their second attempt. The Republican legislators contend that Mayorkas’s management of the border and migration is grounds for impeachment; Senate Democratic leaders are likely to introduce a motion to dismiss the case without going to trial, and they appear to have the votes.

Mayorkas testified yesterday in the House Homeland Security Committee, which originated his impeachment process last year. “With the authorities and the funding that we have, it [the border] is as secure as it can be,” Mayorkas told a Republican questioner.

Mayorkas said he did not recall telling Border Patrol agents that “higher than 85 percent” of encountered migrants were being released into the United States. (Judging from CBP custody statistics, more than 70 percent of encountered migrants received “notices to appear” during the first six months of fiscal 2024.)

At the hearing, Republican legislators presented a flier, first promoted on Twitter by the Heritage Foundation, supposedly produced by a Jewish immigrant aid organization in Texas. The document, which urges migrants to vote for Joe Biden in November, is an obvious fake.

Brazilian fishermen discovered the remains of nine people in a boat drifting off the coast of the country’s northeast on Saturday. They appear to have been migrants from Africa, probably Mali and Mauritania.

A Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 35 north of Laredo, Texas is receiving $15 million in upgrades that will make it the largest interior road checkpoint in the United States, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

“Realistically speaking, having this [Biden administration] asylum ban applied to 100 percent could mean only a few hundred people more a month being ordered removed. Not a huge shift,” pointed out the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick in a factually dense interview with the Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque.

A Bloomberg analysis examined the drift of the Biden administration’s border and migration policies, noting inconsistencies and failures to anticipate new challenges. “The first year of Biden’s term felt like it was a series of good plans getting halted, with frequent leadership changes on the issue,” a former official noted.

On the Right