Recently arrived migrants tend to be concentrated in a small number of US communities. Colombia arrests smugglers facilitating a non-Darién migration route.

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Developments

In a U.S.-assisted operation, Colombian police and judicial authorities arrested another 17 people, one of them Nicaraguan, for charging migrants $200 to $450 each to travel from Colombia’s Caribbean island department of San Andrés to Nicaragua by boat.

Four of the seventeen—including two local government officials from San Andrés—stand accused of charging migrants from Asia, particularly Vietnam, $2,000 to $2,500 each to fly from Colombia’s border with Ecuador to Nicaragua via San Andrés.

The San Andrés to Nicaragua route allows migrants to avoid the Darién Gap.

Border Report reported on an October 20 shootout between members of Mexico’s National Guard and members of a criminal group on a highway that follows Mexico’s side of the border between El Paso and Tornillo, Texas. The road has recently been upgraded, noted Border Report’s Julián Resendiz, but “some truckers have expressed misgivings about using the highway due to well-documented drug cartel activity in the area known as El Valle de Juarez (Valley of Juarez).”

A Breitbart report noted increased arrivals of asylum seekers turning themselves in to Border Patrol in mid-Texas’s Del Rio Sector. A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) source told Breitbart‘s Randy Clark, a former Border Patrol agent, that “nearly 160” unaccompanied children from Central and South American nations crossed into Eagle Pass within the past week.

Analyses and Feature Stories

In the first article of a pre-election series, ProPublica published a detailed overview of how migration at the U.S.-Mexico border has shifted during the past few years, noting changes in nationalities and demographics and effects on the immigration court system, receiving communities, the U.S. labor market, and electoral politics. The investigation found that the newly arrived migrants have been “concentrated in relatively few places around the country.”

In response to NBC News revelation that 30 percent of Border Patrol’s Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) cameras are broken, Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that border surveillance technology is “political theater” and “a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.”

NPR’s Adrian Florido reported from Florida about how some members of the state’s Venezuelan-American community are agreeing with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s evidence-free demonization of recent Venezuelan migrants as “criminals” and voicing support for their deportation. Some of this attitude appears related to class differences between earlier migrants and newer arrivals, who tend to be poorer and often darker-skinned.

A column at Jacobin criticized NBC’s decision to delay screening Separated, the new Errol Morris documentary about the Trump administration’s family separation policy, until after the U.S. election.

“As the Trump campaign’s rhetorical demonization of immigrants escalates, it is reasonable to wonder why Democrats and liberals around the world have decided to effectively abandon the issue to their adversaries,” reads a column at Newsweek from David Faris of Roosevelt University.