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Developments

The federal judiciary’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court’s earlier ruling that Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) practice of “metering” asylum seekers at official border crossings is illegal. The term refers to stationing officers at the crossings’ borderline to turn back people without U.S. documentation, preventing them from setting foot on U.S. soil and asking for protection, while allowing only a small number of asylum seekers to access ports of entry each day.

The appeals court judges’ 2-1 decision determined, in the written opinion of Judge Michelle Friedland, that “a noncitizen who presents herself to a border official at a port of entry has arrived in the United States… whether she is standing just at the edge of the port of entry or somewhere within it.”

U.S. law states that a person physically present in the United States has the right to ask for asylum if they fear their life or freedom would be in danger upon return to their country. “You are not breaking the law by seeking asylum at a port of entry,” the Trump administration’s Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, tweeted in June 2018, at the height of that year’s family separations crisis. “Metering,” however, has strictly limited asylum seekers’ ability to access ports of entry.

The decision striking down “metering” caps a seven-year legal battle led by the San Diego and Tijuana-based Al Otro Lado, along with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the American Immigration Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Democracy Forward, along with the law firms Mayer Brown and Vinson and Elkins.

CBP officially rescinded the metering policy in 2021. The Ninth Circuit’s October 23 decision does not appear to affect the Biden administration’s current policy of turning away nearly all asylum seekers who show up to ports of entry without having secured one of 1,450 daily appointments made using the CBP One smartphone app. A May 2024 Human Rights Watch report called this “digital metering.” Organizations involved in the “metering” case have filed a new lawsuit challenging turnbacks of asylum seekers without CBP One appointments.

Border Report and the Arizona Daily Star covered the fiscal year 2024 migration and border enforcement statistics that CBP published on October 22. Border Report noted that the past few months’ drop in Border Patrol migrant apprehensions could see some reversals amid rising migration in Panama’s Darién Gap region and reports of migrant “caravans” forming in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. The Daily Star noted that Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona sector saw the most migration for much of the year, though numbers have dropped sharply along with the Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions, and that fentanyl seizures declined in fiscal 2024 for the first time since the drug began appearing in the mid-2010s.

A “caravan” numbering perhaps 700 migrants, which departed Mexico’s far south at the beginning of the month, is walking in the southern state of Oaxaca, adjacent to the country’s southern border state of Chiapas. A Venezuelan man told the daily Milenio he worries that the possibility of securing CBP One appointments will end if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins the November 5 U.S. election.

Mexican authorities reported rescuing nine migrants from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh whom a criminal group had kidnapped for ransom in the southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. They reported no arrests of kidnappers.

Tapachula now leads all Mexican cities in perceptions of citizen insecurity, according to a survey from the Mexican government’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). Ninety-two percent of Tapachula residents told surveyors that they fear crime. Chiapas, a border state through which large numbers of drugs and people are smuggled and trafficked, has experienced a sharp rise in organized crime violence over the past year.

The city’s mayor told EFE that Tapachula “concentrates 60 percent of the migrants in Mexico”; this estimate may be high, but the number of migrants lacking Mexican documentation and forced to wait there is very large.

A CBP officer faces aggravated assault charges after he fired his weapon 11 times while off duty in an apparent road rage incident on a highway on-ramp in El Paso, Border Report reported.

Bloomberg Law reported on Donald Trump’s intent to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for many migrants in the United States whom the program currently protects from deportation.

Peru’s government has added new restrictions on the approximately 1.54 million Venezuelan citizens residing in the country. These include new documentation requirements for employment and controls on financial remittances. The measures could reduce the number of Venezuelans who consider themselves “firmly settled” in the South American nation, potentially leading some to migrate elsewhere, including to the United States.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At his Substack newsletter, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh published a detailed rebuttal of claims that migrants in the United States are committing crimes at a greater rate than native-born U.S. citizens. Arrest and conviction data indicate otherwise.

The UN Refugee Agency published its annual report for Mexico operations in 2023. Among findings are that nearly 400 mostly charity-run migrant shelters operate in the country, and that over 600 companies have committed to employing refugees inside Mexico.

Iowa Public Radio, reporting from Iowa; Gothamist, reporting from Long Island, New York; and Politico, reporting from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, illustrated how the border security and migration debate is affecting congressional campaigns, particularly in swing districts, far from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Reporting from the border town of Douglas, Arizona, Agénce France Presse echoed residents’ exasperation with politicians from elsewhere falsely portraying border communities as dangerous places in crisis.

On the Right