Harris criticizes Trump's mass-deportation plans, for which a poll finds 54% support. Federal checkpoints prevent undocumented people who need reproductive healthcare from exiting Texas to get it.

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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, included a few paragraphs about the border and migration in remarks given yesterday to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Without mentioning specifics or referring to the Biden administration’s current imposition of asylum restrictions, Harris called for immigration reform, protection for “DREAMers,” an “earned pathway to citizenship” and ensuring that “our border is secure.”

Harris attacked Donald Trump for presiding over family separations and for his campaign’s plan to carry out mass deportations if elected. “Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How is that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?”

A Scripps News/Ipsos poll found that 39 percent of U.S. respondents, and 47 percent of Arizona respondents, ranked “immigration” second, after “inflation,” as one of the most important issues facing the United States.

  • Three in five said they “are closely following news around the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
  • 54 percent of respondents said they favored mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, though 68 percent favored a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers: undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
  • By a margin of 44 to 34 percent, respondents voiced a view that Donald Trump would “do a better job handling immigration.”

The Republican-majority House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee held a hearing yesterday entitled “A Country Without Borders: How Biden-Harris’ Open-Borders Policies Have Undermined Our Safety and Security.” Witnesses at the highly contentious proceedings included a former Border Patrol sector chief; a Republican member of San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors; the mother of a woman allegedly raped and murdered by a man from El Salvador; and the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, which includes Nogales.

By a vote of 266-158, the House of Representatives passed the “Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act,” a Republican-led bill that makes deportable any non-citizen convicted of “a crime of domestic violence or a sex offense.” Advocates like the Tahirih Justice Center worried that the bill could jeopardize immigrant victims of those crimes: “Abusers who better understand the U.S. language and laws can prevent victims from accessing safety by threatening to expose immigrant victims to the police, ICE, and the deportation machine.”

The House’s Republican majority failed to muster enough votes to pass a budget measure to keep the U.S. government open after fiscal year 2024 ends on September 30. The bill had language attached to it requiring states to demand that all who register to vote provide proof of citizenship. Next steps for avoiding a government shutdown are currently unclear.

Republican and Democratic legislators in both houses of Congress introduced the “Enhancing Southbound Inspections to Combat Cartels Act,” legislation that would increase inspections of outbound traffic from the United States to Mexico, seeking to combat flows principally of firearms and bulk cash.

Citing official figures, a UNHCR update reported that 272,168 people entered Honduras irregularly, most with the intention of migrating to the United States, during January-July 2024. Because “not all persons on the move who enter Honduras irregularly register” with Honduran authorities, UNHCR estimated that 340,000 people transited the country during those 7 months.

Panama reported a much smaller number (221,582) of people transiting the Darién Gap region during January-July 2024. Much of the difference is citizens of Nicaragua who pass through Honduras, plus citizens of other countries who avoid the Darién passage by flying to Nicaragua, taking advantage of the country’s less-restrictive visa policies.

October will mark two years since the Biden administration established a humanitarian parole program for citizens from Venezuela, and January will mark two years since that program expanded to include citizens of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. As the parole status expires after two years, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told Univisión that its beneficiaries need to adjust their immigration status before their deadlines.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Recently published analyses of the Trump-Vance campaign’s unfounded and racist attacks on Haitian migrants living and working legally in Springfield, Ohio included an in-depth investigation of the attacks’ origin at the Wall Street Journal; an Atlantic essay by Adam Serwer; a Washington Post column by Edwidge Danticat; an Isaac Chotiner interview at the New Yorker with white-supremacism expert Kathleen Belew; and a post to the American Council’s Immigration Impact site by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

A report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Texas warned that federal and state immigration checkpoints combine with a state-level abortion ban to make it impossible for undocumented migrants to leave Texas to obtain reproductive health services. CBP and Border Patrol maintain 19 federal checkpoints in the state of Texas, making road travel difficult for those without documentation.

NPR investigated the deployment of National Guard troops from Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) controversial “Operation Lone Star.” The three non-border, Republican-governed states have spent a combined $7.1 million to send troops to the border.

The El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights and the Texas Civil Rights Project held a news conference to report on numerous recent examples of Texas National Guard soldiers, working in support of Operation Lone Star, physically and verbally abusing migrants at the borderline. (WOLA published a September 13 commentary documenting similar credible allegations.)

Interviewed by Newsweek, the Cato Institute’s David Bier disputed the Trump campaign’s wildly inflated claim that 20 million migrants have been allowed into the United States during the Biden presidency.