Trump and Vance double down on racist claims about Haitian immigrants. Arizona advocates find that a large portion of children report abuse in Border Patrol custody.

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Developments

Republican Vice Presidential candidate stood by his repeatedly debunked, racist claims that Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio are consuming people’s pets. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated the false claims about Haitians. In a post to his “Truth Social” network, Trump promised to terminate use of the CBP One app for port-of-entry appointments, suspend the refugee resettlement program, and return migrants—apparently including people currently documented with humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, pending asylum claims, and other statuses—“to their home countries.”

The Washington Post covered “the merry-go-round”: Mexico’s ongoing effort, launched at the beginning of the year, to reduce migration to the U.S. border by massively busing about 10,000 non-Mexican migrants per month to the country’s south. “It’s unclear whether the results are sustainable. The number of migrants camped out in Mexican cities is rising.” In Villahermosa, Tabasco, where many southbound buses’ routes end, the city’s only migrant shelter is at double last year’s capacity.

In Mexico’s northern-border city of Ciudad Juárez, from where many migrants are bused back south, the municipal government has closed one large migrant shelter and is converting a few community centers into new migrant shelters.

The independent Venezuelan daily Tal Cual found that a “wave” of people leaving Venezuela has yet to materialize following stolen July 28 elections. Still, “it is clear that there is an increase in migratory movements compared to previous months.” Venezuela’s El Pitazo reported that about 1,500 people per week are crossing from the Venezuelan border state of Zulia into Colombia’s department of La Guajira, a portion of whom intend to migrate overland to the United States.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A report from the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which plays a role in overseeing treatment of children in CBP custody, found that of children surveyed in 2023 and 2024, nearly 4 in 10 reported verbal abuse from Border Patrol agents, including racist and derogatory language. One in ten reported physical abuse like being pushed, kicked, or handcuffed. Children frequently reported being denied medical care.

An Arizona Republic investigation found that nearly a quarter of human smuggling suspects arrested at Arizona’s border don’t get prosecuted “because Border Patrol agents failed to convey adequate probable cause before making a traffic stop or because migrants are unable to serve as material witnesses in a case.” It added, “countless others” have avoided prosecution due to COVID-19, lack of criminal history, or prosecutors’ “Tucson Sector guidelines” for prioritizing cases.

“I have worked in the humanitarian field for almost 20 years and I have never seen what I saw regarding women crossing the Darién Gap,” the director of Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan, told Spain’s El País while on a visit to towns in northwestern Colombia from which migrants embark on the dangerous journey into Panama. “Sexual violence is so prevalent that they carry the morning-after pill when they begin the journey.” HRW published the third of three reports on the Darién Gap last week.