Border Patrol apprehensions are down to 1,650 per day. Darién Gap deportations may be voluntary. A caravan forms in Chiapas.

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Developments

Border Patrol apprehended an average of 1,650 migrants per day last week, CBS News reported. If the average drops below 1,500 per day, people who cross the border between ports of entry will once again be able to apply for asylum, under the Biden administration’s June rule curtailing asylum access. The right to seek protection for those who cross between the ports would be shut down again if the daily average were to rise above 2,500 per day.

If the current tempo were to sustain for an entire month, it would be the month with the fewest Border Patrol apprehensions since September 2020, late in the Trump administration.

An American Immigration Council blog post recalled that the Biden rule is not the only reason why migration has dropped to its current relatively low level: Since January, Mexico has pursued a crackdown with the goal of “wearing out” migrants.

The scope of Mexico’s crackdown, which involves mass busing of non-Mexican migrants away from the U.S. border deep into Mexico, was laid out in a July fact sheet by the Mexico-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) and a July report from two El Paso and Ciudad Juárez-based groups, the Hope Border Institute and Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción (DHIA).

Panama’s recently inaugurated president, José Raúl Mulino, said that his government would only deport migrants from the Darién Gap if they agree to voluntary repatriation. This softens Mulino’s campaign pledge to halt Darién migration by flying migrants back to their home countries after they cross the 60-70 mile jungle region. The Biden administration pledged to help Panama fund these flights.

Panama’s border service counted 11,363 migrants crossing the Darién Gap during the first half of July, one of the lowest daily averages since late 2022.

Several hundred migrants—some reports claim 2,000 or even 3,000—from many countries began walking north from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. They chose to start walking en masse, some told reporters, after Mexico’s migration agency (INM) refused to give them travel documents and Mexico’s refugee agency (COMAR) proved too slow to respond to their asylum applications.

Some told the Associated Press that they feel some urgency to get to the U.S. border before a possible second Donald Trump term, when pathways like the CBP One app would probably shut down.

The group is just arriving in the southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. No “migrant caravan” has reached the U.S. border even partially intact since early 2019.

Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the outgoing chief of the National Guard Bureau, repeated earlier criticisms of the Texas state government’s large-scale deployment of guardsmen to the state’s border with Mexico. Hokanson argued that the long-term border mission is undermining the National Guard’s readiness to carry out more traditional military missions like warfighting.

Attorneys for Border Patrol agent Dustin Sato-Smith succeeded in moving a prosecution against him from California state court to federal court, where they argue that he will be immune from prosecution. In February 2023, while performing an abrupt U-turn to respond to a report of undocumented migrants nearby, Sato-Smith collided with an uninvolved U.S. citizen aboard a motorcycle, killing him. (Despite reporting requirements, CBP did not release information about the fatal crash.) His attorneys claim that, because he was performing his duties at the time of the crash, the federal court should grant Sato-Smith immunity under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

“He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job,” said Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, during Trump’s marathon July 18 Republican National Convention speech. Trump attacked Bukele—who admires the former U.S. president and has cultivated ties with key Republicans—for supposedly lowering El Salvador’s crime rate by “sending” his country’s criminals as migrants to the United States. While a small number of gang members are mixed in with the Salvadoran migrant population, no proof supports the claim that Bukele is deliberately exiling them to the United States.

Calling Donald Trump “a man of intelligence and vision,” Mexico’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said that he would write Trump to warn him, if he is elected, not to close the U.S.-Mexico border or blame migrants for cross-border drug trafficking.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, visited Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, to discuss fentanyl interdiction with U.S. and Mexican authorities. Only about 2 percent of border-wide fentanyl gets seized in the south Texas region that Kaine visited.

The July 19 Microsoft / CrowdStrike global software glitch paralyzed border ports of entry, forcing people to wait several hours to cross from Mexico into the United States.

Analyses and Feature Stories

By busing more than 120,000 migrants to Democratic Party-governed cities, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) reshaped migration patterns and drew national attention to the border and migration issue, a New York Times feature reported. Without the paid buses, it contends, Venezuelan migrants would have been more likely to join existing communities in Florida and Texas instead of coming to New York City.

The number of migrants aboard Texas-funded buses is a single-digit percentage of the more than 3 million people, mostly asylum seekers, released into the U.S. interior since 2022. The busing program has cost Texas over $230 million, the Times reported, which would add up to nearly $2,000 per passenger.

William Murillo of the Ecuadorian organization “1-800 Migrantes” told the Guayaquil daily El Universo that people migrating from Ecuador tend to follow at least four clandestine routes: by air to Panama and the Bahamas then by boat to Florida; overland to Colombia, then flying to Central America and overland through Mexico; overland through the treacherous Darién Gap, Central America, and Mexico; and by air to Panama then overland through Central America and Mexico.