House Republicans prepare a resolution condemning Kamala Harris's nonexistent border policy role. Border Patrol apprehensions dropped below 1,500 on Monday.

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Developments

On a party-line vote, the Republican-majority House of Representatives’ Committee on Rules approved the chamber’s consideration of a resolution “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”

The legislation claims that “on March 24, 2021, President Biden asked Vice President Kamala Harris to serve as the administration’s border czar.” As numerous media have pointed out, this is fully inaccurate. Biden tasked Harris with the portfolio of addressing root causes of migration from Central America. (That is a role that Biden himself had taken on in the Obama administration in 2014, after the first major wave of child and family asylum-seeking migrants from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border.) Harris did not have larger border or migration policy responsibilities.

The resolution is being rushed to the floor just days after President Joe Biden decided not to seek re-election and endorsed Vice President Harris to run in his stead.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said, and New York Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz separately tweeted, that Border Patrol apprehended fewer than 1,500 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border on July 22. (Salazar said this was the fewest in a day since 2018, which is inaccurate: the last month during which apprehensions averaged less than 1,500 per day was July 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The Biden administration’s June 5, 2024 asylum restriction rule states that, should the weekly average of migrant apprehensions drop below 1,500 per day for 3 weeks, and should the average remain below 2,500, then U.S. border authorities will no longer automatically deny asylum access to people who cross between ports of entry to ask for protection. (The administration’s May 2023 rule, denying asylum to most who fail to seek it in another country through which they passed, would remain in effect.)

A “caravan” of migrants—estimates range from several hundred to about 2,000—has walked about 35-40 miles from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. A few have walked a bit further into Chiapas, more than 1,000 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

La Jornada reported it as “the fourth largest caravan so far this year.” The participants, mostly from Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, say they have been waiting for months to secure appointments with Mexican migration authorities.

Many tell reporters that their goal is to reach a part of Mexico (from Mexico City northward) where they might be able to use the CBP One app to make appointments with U.S. authorities at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Mexico has been more aggressive this year in blocking undocumented migrants’ efforts to travel northward.

When the Texas state government arrests migrants on trespassing charges under its “Operation Lone Star,” counties must pay the cost of those who end up in county-run jails. El Paso County’s commissioners unanimously approved sending a grant application to the office of Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to reimburse $8 million in costs it has incurred in holding people arrested by Texas state forces. By the end of the year, Operation Lone Star incarcerations could end up costing El Paso’s Democratic Party-governed county $18 million.

Responding to some U.S. politicians, Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said that any closure of the U.S.-Mexico border “will not be allowed, and Mexico will never have a closed border.”

“Dozens of makeshift ladders,” most made out of rebar, “mysteriously appeared in a dumpster” near the 30-foot border wall south of San Diego, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Congressional Budget Office, an independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, published a report finding that recent years’ sharp increase in migration will reduce the U.S. budget deficit by $900 billion over the 2024-2034 period. The projection is based on estimates of the number of people paying taxes and receiving benefits ($1.2 trillion in tax revenue and $0.3 trillion in demand for benefits), and of the rising migration’s effect on interest rates and U.S. workers’ productivity.

CNN reported from the Tohono O’Odham Nation reservation, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora. Its people do not recognize the borderline and have long guarded their sovereignty, but border realities like migration, smuggling, and migrant deaths have placed stress both on the Nation’s autonomy and its uneasy relationship with Border Patrol and other U.S. authorities. That relationship grew more tense after agents shot and killed an O’Odham man, Raymond Mattia, outside his house in May 2023.

At Foreign Policy, Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center and Channing Lee of the Special Competitive Studies Project punched holes into claims that large numbers of spies or saboteurs might be embedded in the increased number of migrants from China arriving at the border. Instead, they argue, the United States should view as a moral victory that so many people from a competing power are choosing the U.S. political and economic model.

On the Right