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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, spent nearly half of a contentious interview with FOX News host Bret Baier discussing the border and migration.

The New York Times noted that Baier, the FOX host, “repeatedly interrupted the vice president and tried to talk over her.” When able to talk, Harris often returned to her central border talking point: Donald Trump’s opposition to a bill, which failed in the Senate in February following negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators, that would have hired more border officers and agents, increased migrant detention, and tightened asylum availability.

Asked, “Do you regret the decision to terminate Remain in Mexico at the beginning of your administration?” Harris did not address the controversial program but pointed out that, in its early days, the administration backed a comprehensive immigration reform bill (which failed to move through Congress in 2021).

At Vox, Christian Paz viewed Harris’s responses to Baier as ceding political ground to immigration hardliners: “The Vice President had a chance to defend immigrants on Fox News. She passed.”

In a debate between Pennsylvania Senate candidates, incumbent Democrat Bob Casey attacked his Republican challenger, Dave McCormick, for joining Donald Trump in opposing the February compromise Senate bill. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t support that,” Casey said. “It doesn’t make any sense when he knows that we could advance the ball based upon the expertise of the Border Patrol.”

The DeConcini border port of entry in Nogales, Arizona was closed for a few hours yesterday afternoon after a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer shot and wounded a man who attempted to drive through a vehicle lane at the crossing.

Texas police reported apprehending a group of 204 migrants, including 47 unaccompanied children, near the border city of Eagle Pass. This is part of Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, which has experienced an increase in arrivals of large groups of migrants seeking to turn themselves in to authorities over the past few weeks.

New U.S. asylum restrictions and Mexico’s policy of transporting migrants to the country’s south are increasing pressure in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, where large groups have formed this month into so-called “caravans.” The groups walking through Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Tlaxcala states, numbering as many as 1,000 each, intend to reach Mexico City, either to petition Mexican authorities for faster asylum processes or other documentation, or to disperse and seek to reach the U.S. border from there.

Mexican soldiers who fired on a vehicle carrying migrants in Chiapas on October 1, killing six of them, “will be tried under military laws, a key issue for human rights activists who say the process lacks transparency,” Reuters reported. A Mexican military press release stated that two soldiers began shooting after hearing “detonations.” Reporter Lizbeth Díaz spoke to three residents of the area where the incident occurred, who “said they heard no explosions.”

Ecuador’s El Universo told the story of Melissa Barzola, a Guayaquil resident who migrated to Mexico via the Darién Gap and secured a CBP One appointment in Ciudad Juárez, only to be kidnapped from the bus in which she was traveling in mid-September, likely in Durango or Chihuahua, Mexico. The kidnappers demanded $5,000 from her family in Ecuador; they mortgaged their house to pay the ransom, but Barzola has not been released.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At Foreign Affairs, Andrea Flores of FWD.us, a former Biden administration official, pointed out the failure of repeated crackdowns to control migration or bring security to the border. While fixing the U.S. asylum system would help greatly, she argued, it is no substitute for fundamentally updating U.S. immigration laws that mostly date back to 1990. “The overwhelmed asylum system is not the cause of the border crisis but rather a consequence of the United States’ failure to develop a coherent response to global shifts in irregular migration,” Flores wrote.

The American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick published an overview of “the current state of the border” at the organization’s Immigration Impact blog. It notes that crackdowns in Mexico and in U.S. asylum access have brought Border Patrol apprehensions to relatively low levels, a “fragile equilibrium” threatened by “signs that the slow-down in migration is ending” in the Darién Gap and through Central America.

The Dallas Morning News published a status report about the ongoing campaign of Texas’s state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), against nonprofits assisting migrants in the state. Paxton accuses groups like El Paso’s respected Annunciation House shelter network of encouraging unauthorized migration by providing shelter and aid.

On a drive along Arizona’s border, Los Angeles Times reporter Jeffrey Fleishman talked to migrants, volunteers, ranchers, and other community members about the region’s humanitarian, political, and security complexities. Fleischmann heard calls for greater border security from some, and for immigration reform from others, in a region where the number of migrants dying in the desert remains very high.

The independent Cuba-focused media outlet El Toque pointed out that CBP One appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border now rival the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program as the best option available for people fleeing the island.

FOX News reported on alleged U.S. activities of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan criminal organization that some U.S. politicians are using to portray all Venezuelan migrants as threatening due to its small presence among those fleeing the economically depressed South American dictatorship.

On the Right