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Developments

At an Arizona rally, Republican candidate Donald Trump said that policies admitting migrants have made the United States “a garbage can for the world.”

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, said that he hopes to identify a third country or countries that would be willing to accept Venezuelan citizens whom Panama would deport after they cross the treacherous Darién Gap migration route. The Homeland Security attaché in the U.S. embassy to Panama told EFE that with U.S. support, air deportations of Venezuelans from the Darién may begin “in the next days, weeks at the latest.” Neither official named any possible third countries.

Panama has run nearly 20 deportation flights since early August, most of them to Colombia and Ecuador. EFE cited a U.S. embassy statement noting that the number of Colombians and Ecuadorians transiting the Darién Gap has fallen by 65 percent and 92 percent, respectively, since the flights began. (Migration from Venezuela, where the government has refused to recognize an apparent opposition victory in July 28 elections, rose 69 percent in the Darién from August to September.)

The South China Morning Post noted a 40 percent drop in border encounters with migrants from China from June to September, according to data reported by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Beyond the Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions, the article noted that “in July, Ecuador suspended its visa-free program for Chinese travelers.” Ecuador had been the principal point of arrival on the Latin American mainland for Chinese citizens arriving by air, most of whom then traversed the Darién Gap.

The Honduran Congress is considering legislation that would permanently repeal a $240 fine charged to undocumented migrants seeking to transit Honduras, in exchange for permission to remain briefly in the country. Since 2022, Honduras has waived this fee to encourage migrants to register with the government, which allows them to board public buses instead of turning to smugglers. The Congress must renew the waiver periodically; it next expires on December 31.

Analyses and Feature Stories

ProPublica published a deeply reported account from Whitewater, Wisconsin, a town that became a political flashpoint after several hundred Nicaraguan immigrants began to settle there, drawn by nearby food processing facilities in need of low-wage labor.

“By mid-2024, more than 20.3 million forcibly displaced and stateless people were hosted in the Americas,” reads a new “Americas Factsheet” from UNHCR, “including 5.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, 8.1 million internally displaced persons, and 5.8 million other people in need of international protection.”

By allowing states to carry out their own independent immigration policies, Texas’s SB4 law criminalizing border crossings could “upend immigration enforcement nationwide” if courts uphold the Texan state government’s argument that migrants constitute an “invasion,” Alejandro Serrano wrote at the Texas Tribune.

At Vox, Christian Paz pushed back on poll data showing over half of U.S. respondents favor a “mass deportation” campaign, like Donald Trump has been proposing. Paz pointed out that pollsters’ questions fail to capture the complexity or the real-life consequences of such a campaign.

“Keeping migrants stuck in southern Mexico–and points further south–has been a perpetual U.S. objective,” write three reporters for the Daily Signal covering Mexico’s stepped-up 2024 policy of doing precisely that by busing several thousand migrants per month from the country’s north to southern cities like Villahermosa, Tabasco.

Jenn Budd, whose book Against the Wall recounts a traumatic experience as a former Border Patrol agent, has compiled a database of agents who have been arrested. “This data is an undercount,” Budd wrote at her site.

Border Report published an overview of electoral matchups in House of Representatives districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. Two—one in New Mexico and one in Arizona—are rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report.

At Inside Climate News, Martha Pskowski covered the dwindling Rio Grande, the river that serves as the border between Texas and Mexico. The river’s bed is completely dry along about 200 miles of west Texas.

On the Right