Texas guardsmen shoot pepper balls at migrants through the concertina wire in El Paso. Mayorkas says many asylum seekers "try to game the system."

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Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.

Developments

Texas National Guard personnel fired at least one pepper irritant projectile on migrants at the Rio Grande in El Paso on Tuesday. The migrants, who included families with children, were separated from the soldiers by a mass of fencing and concertina wire and posed no apparent threat of death or injury, calling into question Texas’s use-of-force guidelines. Texas’s Department of Public Safety has not commented on the incident, caught on video from the Ciudad Juárez side.

“An unidentified Venezuelan man said two pepper balls struck him in the neck and side after he crossed the Rio Grande to plead with the soldiers to let families come across the razor wire,” Border Report reported. A Venezuelan mother and father told a videographer that they had “placed a piece of cardboard between two shrubs on the Mexican side of the river to protect their 1-year-old daughter from stray shots.” A photographer said that a guardsman shot at him twice while he filmed from the Mexican side.

“The reality is that some people do indeed try to game the [asylum] system,” the Biden administration’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, told CBS News. “That does not speak to everyone whom we encounter, but there is an element of it, and we deal with it accordingly.”

“The White House and a White House official told me that no final decisions have been made about an executive action that is potentially being considered” to shut down migrants’ access to asylum at the border at times of heavy migration, reported PBS NewsHour’s Laura Barron-Lopez. “But sources told me that this specific executive action could come as early as next week after the Mexican elections on June 2.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Upon this week’s 100th anniversary of the founding of Border Patrol, the agency’s chief, Jason Owens, looked back on his career and told CBP’s Frontline magazine website that people considering a career in the force should fully commit to it as a “calling.” Owens described tools using AI technology as a “force multiplier” for agents in the field. “It would be so much better if the migrants went to the port of entry,” Owens added. (CBP has capped port of entry capacity to receive asylum seekers at 1,450 people per day border-wide.)

The Southern Border Communities Coalition commemorated the anniversary with a press conference in San Diego with loved ones of people killed, wounded, or racially profiled by agency personnel, none of whom has been penalized.

“Revelations of some agents’ racist vitriol toward migrants, along with allegations of sexual misconduct against women employees, have rocked public trust in recent years,” noted a Christian Science Monitor analysis of Border Patrol’s centennial.

The International Displacement Monitoring Center “recorded over 6.3 million total IDPs [internally displaced persons] in the Americas at the end of 2023, marking a 6% decrease from the end of 2022 but remaining on par with 2021’s figure of 6.2 million,” notes a summary of IDMP’s mid-May annual report at Jordi Amaral’s Americas Migration Brief. Conflict and violence displaced over 600,000 people in 2023.