Developments
On a visit to San Diego, the senior official performing the duties of Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) commissioner, Troy Miller, highlighted “Operation Apollo,” which the local NBC affiliate described as “a relatively new strategy to decrease the amount of apprehensions made by agents through increased enforcement, harsher penalties for offenders and heightened collaboration with relevant agencies.”
Soon, perhaps today, CBP will publish information about migration and drug seizures through September 30, the final day of the U.S. federal government’s 2024 fiscal year.
- Dana Williams, “During San Diego Visit, Acting Border Patrol Boss Says Enforcement Has Been Enhanced” (NBC San Diego, October 17, 2024).
Two Venezuelan men were shot, one fatally, in an incident at a market near downtown Ciudad Juárez on October 16.
- Julian Resendiz, “Two Venezuelan Men Shot in Head in Juarez” (Border Report, October 17, 2024).
Analyses and Feature Stories
A team of Washington Post reporters published a dispatch from south Texas about the impacts of border wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley region. The border river’s unstable course requires segments of barrier to be built as much as two miles inland, “leaving thousands of acres in the liminal space between the border and the barrier.” That leaves plenty of U.S. soil upon which people have the right to request asylum.
- Frank Hulley-Jones, Kirsten Luce, Laris Karklis, Nick Miroff, “Between the Border and the Wall” (The Washington Post, October 18, 2024).
An explainer from Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute pointed out that, according to “a growing volume of research,” immigrants not only commit fewer crimes in the United States, but they may even “lower criminal activity, especially violent crime, in places with inclusive policies and social environments where immigrant populations are well established.”
- Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, “Explainer: Immigrants and Crime in the United States” (Migration Policy Institute, October 17, 2024).
“I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue,” Silky Shah of Detention Watch wrote at Inquest. “Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is” amid a nationwide rightward shift. Shah concludes, “In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building.”
- Silky Shah, “Preparing for the Worst” (Detention Watch, Inquest, October 17, 2024).
At Redacción Regional, Bryan Avelar reported from Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, where tens of thousands of migrants, most seeking to make it to the United States, are stranded by Mexico’s efforts to block them and long waits for CBP One appointments. The city “is a kind of paradise for the trafficking of migrant women,” Avelar wrote.
- Bryan Avelar, “Diarios Desde Babel: La Trampa-Chula” (Redacción Regional (Central America), October 17, 2024).
San Antonio’s ABC affiliate featured the work of Operation Identification, a nonprofit at Texas State University that is helping to identify the remains of migrants found in the Texas borderlands and provide closure to their loved ones.
- Zaria Oates, “Nonprofit at Texas State University Works to Identify Unknown Remains Along Texas-Mexico Border” (KSAT (San Antonio), October 17, 2024).
Fernando Castro, a former Guatemalan consular official, wrote a column in Guatemala’s Prensa Libre noting recent government efforts to link up with U.S. medical examiners—especially in Pima County, Arizona—to help relatives of missing migrants contribute DNA samples that could match them to migrant remains recovered near the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Fernando Castro, “Se Incrementan Desaparecimientos y Muertes de Migrantes en Frontera Sur de Ee. Uu.” (La Hora (Guatemala), October 17, 2024).
A report from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, supported by the International Institute of New England, highlighted the severe humanitarian consequences of recent U.S. policies restricting the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. Asylum seekers, the report finds, face worsened risks of kidnapping, extortion, and abuse while waiting in Mexico; Black and LGBTQIA+ migrants face particular discrimination and targeting.
- “Mariposas de la Frontera” (International Institute of New England (IINE), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), October 17, 2024).
- Sarah Betancourt, “Report Says Migration Down at the Border, at the Cost of Humanitarian Law” (Boston Public Radio, October 17, 2024).
On the Right
- Byron York, “Finally Faced With Hard Questions on Border, Harris Has No Answers” (The Washington Examiner, October 17, 2024).