Migration declines, for now, in the Darién Gap as deportation flights continue. Donald Trump says mass deportations will be "a bloody story."

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Developments

For the first time in three months, Panama has updated official statistics about migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region.

  • 238,185 people migrated through the Darién Gap during the first 8 months of 2024. That is 29 percent fewer than during the first 8 months of 2023 (333,704).
  • The number of migrants transiting the Darién fell from 31,049 in June 2024, to 20,526 in July, to 16,596 in August. The August total was the fewest since June 2022.
  • 71 percent of migrants in August were citizens of Venezuela. During the first 8 months of 2024, 67 percent of migrants were from Venezuela.
  • In June, Ecuador suspended visas for arriving citizens of China. For now at least, the number of Chinese migrants passing through the Darién Gap has plummeted: from 1,074 in June, to 772 in July, to 53 in August.

The drop in Darién Gap migration is probably a short-term “wait and see” effect, as migrants and smugglers pause to evaluate the changes being implemented by Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who was inaugurated on July 1. Mulino has ordered barbed wire laid across some jungle routes, and has launched, with U.S. support, a deportation program that is sending a few planeloads of migrants back to their countries of origin every week.

Panama sent a U.S.-funded deportation flight to India, with 130 people aboard, on September 6. Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border cited a “believable” report that the flight cost $700,000 or “$5,400 per person.” On September 7, a smaller plane carried 29 people from Panama to Colombia, the fifth flight to Colombia since August 9.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a deportation flight to Cap-Haïtien, Haiti on September 6. It was the first such flight since July, and came the day after Secretary of State Anthsony Blinken visited the violence-plagued nation.

Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector reported 3,557 migrant apprehensions during the most recent week, right in the middle of the range reported since late June (3,063 to 3,958). Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector reported 2,700 migrant apprehensions last week, right in the middle of the range reported since late June (2,400 to 2,900).

Reporting from the border city of Cúcuta, Colombia, Santiago Torrado of Spain’s El País found no increase in migration from Venezuela following the Nicolás Maduro regime’s false claims to have won July 28 elections. Local authorities, however, are anxiously expecting “a new migratory wave.”

The late August expansion of the CBP One smartphone app’s geographic coverage to Mexico’s two southernmost states has saturated migrant shelters in Chiapas and Tabasco, La Jornada reported. The director of Tapachula’s El Buen Pastor shelter said that she is now serving 2,000 migrants per day, up from 600 to 700 before August 23, when people could begin using CBP One from Chiapas.

“This is the first time in my 20 to 22 years of government service that I see a state act in direct contravention of national interests,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) hardline border and migration policies in an appearance at the annual Texas Tribune Festival.

“In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state,” Donald Trump said at a Wisconsin campaign rally, apparently referring to since–debunked claims that members Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua organized-crime group who arrived over the southern border had taken over apartment buildings in the Denver suburb of Aurora. “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should never have been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.” Some analysts noted with alarm that the candidate promising “mass deportations” predicted that they would be “bloody.”

In California last Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance visited the borderline with local Republican politicians and Border Patrol agents. At “Whiskey 8,” the site along the border wall near San Diego where until recently many asylum seekers had been turning themselves in to U.S. authorities, the Ohio senator refused to disavow future migrant family separations under a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile in Santee, in San Diego county, House Judiciary Committee Republicans held a field hearing entitled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: California Perspectives.”

Mexican “children as young as nine, 11, and 16 were involved in separate drug seizures this week” at the San Luis port of entry near Yuma, Arizona, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At the Christian Science Monitor, Jody García explored whether the U.S. government’s new tactic of issuing indictments and extradition requests for migrant smugglers in Guatemala might affect smuggling organizations’ “business model.” A top official in Guatemala’s migration agency pointed out that “without international cooperation, arrests like these may not result in much, especially in a country where collaborations between criminal groups and local police are commonplace.”

CNN fact-checked Donald Trump’s claim that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years.” Peter Bergen noted that many more people on the FBI’s terror watchlist have entered from Canada than from Mexico.

At USA Today, Lauren Villagrán profiled Michael DeBruhl, a former Border Patrol agent who runs El Paso’s Sacred Heart Church migrant shelter. “As you rise in the organization [Border Patrol], the higher you go, the better the picture is on the larger issues,” he observed.

On the Right