Mexico's government sends its first bus of people with CBP One appointments. Ciudad Juárez's municipal migrant shelter closes. Venezuela's Tren de Aragua gang gets more attention.

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Developments

Mexico’s migration agency posted video of the first bus transporting migrants across the country to their CBP One appointments at U.S. ports of entry. It departed Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, destined for the U.S. border-zone city of Reynosa. Security-force personnel are to accompany the buses, which pass through areas dominated by organized crime.

In Ciudad Juárez, the municipal government’s “Kiki Romero” migrant shelter is closing. The border city’s population of migrants needing shelter has shrunk due to a Mexican government crackdown making transit of the country more difficult; a June Biden administration rule placing asylum out of reach for people who cross the border without a CBP One appointment; and the possibility of awaiting appointments using the backlogged app in other, usually safer, parts of Mexico.

The U.S. State Department announced “visa restrictions on senior officials of a European charter flight company for facilitating irregular migration to the United States through Nicaragua.” Nicaragua’s dictatorship does not require many countries’ visitors to obtain visas before arrival, and many have used this aerial route to the Central American mainland as a way to request asylum at the U.S. border without having to pass through the Darién Gap.

Mexican soldiers and national guardsmen raided a stash house near the Suchiate River, along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, freeing 52 men, 58 women and 28 minors, mainly from Honduras, Ecuador and Venezuela. No captors were arrested.

Between October 2019 and July 2024, 9,885 Brazilian citizens—many of them encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border—were deported aboard more than 100 chartered flights to an airport in the state of Minas Gerais, sociologist Gustavo Dias wrote at Venezuela’s Tal Cual.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised that his government would “help take care of the situation of” Venezuelan migrants entering Brazil following the Caracas government’s false claim to have won July 28 presidential elections, EFE reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Wall Street Journal reported on the U.S. presence of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan organized-crime group that has begun to receive the level of attention that El Salvador’s MS-13 gang did during the Trump administration. Some of the group’s members appear to be sprinkled in among the approximately 700,000 Venezuelan citizens encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border since fiscal 2021. A “high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] official” told the Journal that “there are now more than 100 investigations in the U.S. involving suspected members of Tren de Aragua.”

In April, Insight Crime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit had reported: “the few crimes attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in the United States appear to have no connection with the larger group or its leadership in Venezuela. And none of more than a dozen national, state, and local law enforcement agencies contacted by InSight Crime has reported any significant presence of Tren de Aragua.”

In the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, the Republican mayor and a Republican city council member put out a statement downplaying claims, amplified by Trump and other national Republican political leaders, that the city is suffering a wave of Tren de Aragua-related crime.

Several border and migration-related analyses followed the September 10 presidential candidates’ debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The New York Times reported that Republican candidate Donald Trump’s recurrence to anti-migrant “vitriol” has become even more frequent than it was in earlier campaigns. Reporters Hamed Aleaziz, Jazmine Ulloa, Michael D. Shear assert that Trump’s move into more extreme territory is, at least in part, a reaction to the Democratic Party’s own rightward shift on the immigration issue since 2021.

Ian Millhiser published an explainer at Vox about the “racist, cat-eating conspiracy theory” that Trump amplified.

Newsweek reviewed Trump’s false or misleading claims about pet-eating, crime committed by migrants, migrants taking jobs from U.S. citizens, Harris’s border-policy responsibilities within the Biden administration, and Harris’s alleged support for gender transition surgeries in migrant detention centers.

At Mother Jones, Isabela Dias lamented that Trump’s positions framed the debate’s vision of immigration: “The only political points made on immigration on stage were about enforcement.”