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Developments

Mexican Army soldiers chased, then fired on, a truck carrying 33 migrants on the evening of October 1, killing 6 of them and wounding 12. The incident took place on the Pacific coastal highway in Huixtla, Chiapas, about 50 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) issued a statement claiming that the migrants’ truck “evaded military personnel,” who suspected that it was tied to organized crime, which has become much more active in the state of Chiapas over the past year. That alone does not justify use of lethal force; the SEDENA statement contended that soldiers fired at the truck after hearing “detonations.”

The deceased victims were reportedly from Nepal, Egypt and Pakistan. Other migrants aboard the vehicle, including some of the wounded, came from Cuba, India, and what SEDENA called “Arab nationalities.” The Foreign Ministry of Peru claimed that one of the six fatalities was a Peruvian citizen.

SEDENA stated that the two soldiers who fired their weapons have been removed from their posts, and that both the civilian and military justice systems’ prosecutors are investigating. The incident heightens concerns about the Mexican government’s expanding placement of combat-trained soldiers in internal law-enforcement roles.

“People in mobility are exposed to great risks during their journey, that is why it is essential to have legal ways of access, transit and integration to avoid tragedies like this,” read a brief statement from UNHCR.

Border Report pointed out new FBI data showing that violent crime rates in Texas border cities are lower than the average for all cities. All Texas border communities have homicide rates below the 2023 U.S. national average of 5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) annual Homeland Threat Assessment document, released October 2, warned that “over the next year, we expect some individuals with terrorism ties and some criminal actors will continue their efforts to exploit migration flows and the complex border security environment to enter the United States.”

In Washington, DC district court, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the Biden administration violated environmental law when it halted border-wall construction in 2021. Judge Trevor McFadden argued that Biden’s border policies encouraged more migration, and migrants littered trash in border areas.

NewsNation reported, based on an internal Border Patrol alert, that the Northeast Cartel, active in parts of Mexico’s border state of Tamaulipas across from south Texas, has been using electronic devices to disrupt the agency’s surveillance drones.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The American Immigration Council (AIC) released a report about the potential cost of massively deporting undocumented migrants from the United States, which is a core campaign promise of Republican candidate Donald Trump.

It estimated that arresting, detaining, processing, and removing a million undocumented migrants each year would cost an annual total of $88 billion. It would total at least $315 billion for a one-time operation and $967.9 billion for a decade-long campaign.

Deporting about 4 percent of the U.S. workforce would cause the nation’s gross domestic product to “drop anywhere from 4.2% to 6.8%,” the AIC found; that is more than during the 2007-2009 “Great Recession.”

The report’s scope did not extend to the harder-to-quantify costs to human rights and democratic institutions that a mass-deportation campaign might entail, or the harm to U.S. civil-military relations if such a campaign were to mobilize Defense Department resources and personnel.

The ACLU has filed suit in federal court to obtain results of a Freedom of Information Act request about federal government capacity, and potential costs, of a “mass deportation” effort.

The Associated Press fact-checked a column graph of U.S.-Mexico border migrant apprehensions that Republican candidate Donald Trump frequently displays at campaign events; he was gesturing at it when a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear at a July campaign event. The chart includes errors and distortions, including a marker showing Trump leaving office in April 2020, the first full month of the COVID pandemic, when migration plummeted. Trump in fact left office in January 2021, after several months of increased migrant apprehensions.

Washington Post columnist Philip Bump rebutted claims, including those made by JD Vance in Tuesday’s vice-presidential candidates’ debate, that migrants are contributing to crime, fentanyl smuggling, and higher U.S. housing costs. PolitiFact, the Associated Press, and Melvis Acosta at Mother Jones addressed other spurious claims made in the debate, including Vance’s allegation that DHS has “effectively lost” 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

The Project on Government Oversight published allegations that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a key official for oversight of border security agencies, has engaged in a prolonged effort to undermine investigations into his own misconduct, especially claims of whistleblower retaliation. Cuffari is under investigation by the Integrity Committee, a federal panel that oversees inspectors-general, for retaliating against whistleblowers who reported delays in DHS reports, including a report on migrant family separations.

On the Right