Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

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Daily Border Links: March 22, 2024

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Developments

Mexico filed an amicus curiae brief in federal court in support of the ongoing challenge to Texas’s state immigration law, S.B. 4. The brief argues that the law, which would allow state law enforcement to arrest, imprison, or deport people suspected of crossing the border improperly, would do significant harm to Mexican citizens living in Texas.

Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena told the Washington Post that her government would place “increased vigilance and controls” along the Texas border to prevent Texas state authorities from carrying out their own deportations without Mexico’s permission.

Across Texas’s 254 counties, sheriffs are unclear about how they are meant to enforce S.B. 4 if courts give the strict law a green light, the Associated Press reported. “If we start going and talking to everybody and asking for papers, where do we stop?” asked the president of the Texas Sheriff’s Association.

In El Paso, a group of migrants on the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande pushed their way past Texas state National Guard personnel blocking access to the border wall, where they hoped to turn themselves in to federal Border Patrol agents. Video showed a chaotic scene.

S.B. 4 is “not going to stop us from doing our job,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said in a CBS News interview, adding that there is “no better partner for the Border Patrol than the Texas Department of Public Safety.” Owens called for “jail time” for more migrants who cross the border between ports of entry, and cited a “need to take a look at the asylum laws and make it where only people that have a legitimate claim can claim asylum.”

CBP released body-worn camera footage of the February 17 death, apparently by suicide, of a man in a holding cell at a Laredo, Texas checkpoint. The footage does not show the exact circumstances of how the man died because “the video recording system at the Border Patrol checkpoint was not fully functioning at the time of the incident.”

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was in Guatemala. With President Bernardo Arévalo, the Secretary reviewed nine topics including migration. The migration talks focused on information sharing and “coordinated operational plans” against smugglers.

Arévalo will be in Washington Monday, where he will meet Vice President Kamala Harris. Mayorkas noted that the “Safe Mobility Office” established in Guatemala in mid-2023 has “already helped more than 1,500 Guatemalans safely and lawfully enter the United States” via legal pathways.

Speaking to Guatemala’s Prensa Libre, Assistant DHS Secretary for Border Policy and Migration Blas Nunez-Neto said that organized crime has taken over the migrant smuggling business all along the U.S.-bound route: “The cartels that previously had no direct participation in the movement of people in an irregular manner are increasingly controlling these flows.”

So far in 2024, the U.S. and Mexican governments have deported 20,018 citizens of Guatemala back to their country by air, more than 5,000 above the total at the same time in 2023. The United States has returned 18,437 people on 154 flights, while Mexico has returned 1,632 on 15 flights.

Mexico’s government reached an agreement with Venezuela’s government to facilitate aerial deportations of Venezuelan citizens back to Caracas. As part of the deal, some of Mexico’s largest corporations, would employ Venezuelan deportees, paying them a “stipend” of US$110 per month for a six-month period. “We’re sending Venezuelans back to their country because we really cannot handle these quantities,” said Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena.

Criminals have kidnapped a group of 95 Ecuadorian migrants in the Pacific coastal region of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.

Federal authorities arrested a historic leader of the MS-13 gang at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego on March 7.

On the Right

Daily Border Links: March 21, 2024

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Developments

This morning the congressional appropriations committees made public the text of the 2024 Homeland Security appropriations bill, one of six budget bills that Congress needs to pass by Friday to avert a government shutdown.

The legislation provides the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with $61.8 billion for fiscal year 2024, which is nearly half over—DHS has been operating at 2023 funding levels. Provisions include:

  • A $3.1 billion increase in Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) budget, to $19.6 billion.
  • $496 million to sustain 22,000 Border Patrol agents. (As of the 4th quarter of 2022, Border Patrol had 19,359 agents; reaching 22,000 has been more an issue of attrition and recruitment challenges than lack of budget.)
  • $19 million to hire 150 new CBP officers at ports of entry.
  • Funding for 41,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds, which is 7,500 above the 2023 level and the amount in the Republican-majority House of Representatives’ version of the bill.
  • $650 million to fund state and local governments’ efforts, usually funding NGOs, to receive recently released asylum seekers and other migrants through FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP). This is probably similar to 2023 levels, depending on whether CBP would transfer additional money for the SSP’s activities as it did last year.
  • “Up to an additional $2.2 billion is available to ensure that asylum seekers are processed quickly, ports and other border facilities are not overcrowded, and Border Patrol has the tools it needs to improve border security,” reads a release from Senate appropriators.
  • There is no money in the bill for additional border wall construction. Congress rejected the administration’s $165 million request for a third joint processing center for apprehended migrants.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing to consider whether to maintain a stay on Texas’s controversial migration restriction law, S.B. 4, which is currently on hold as appeals of legal challenges continue (see yesterday’s border links). The three judges in yesterday’s proceedings were a Biden nominee, a Trump nominee, and a George W. Bush nominee.

It is unclear how the panel will decide on whether to allow Texas to implement S.B. 4 while appeals proceed, or when that decision might come. Judges’ comments during the hearing indicated clear disagreements.

The law would allow state law enforcement to arrest people suspected of migrating from Mexico into Texas without authorization, and to imprison them if they do not agree to allow Texas authorities to deport them into Mexico. Texas state lawyers said that the state does not plan to carry out its own deportations—Mexico refuses to accept non-federal deportees—but instead to turn captured migrants over to CBP personnel at ports of entry. But the Biden administration’s DHS has declared that it would not cooperate with enforcement of S.B. 4, a law that it is challenging in court.

Texas lawyers sought to argue that S.B. 4 aims to work within the framework of a 2012 Supreme Court decision striking down an Arizona immigration-restriction law. While the hearing was ongoing, though, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) gave remarks arguing that the law instead reflects the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in that 2012 ruling.

The appeals court will hold another hearing on April 3 about S.B. 4’s overall legality (not just the question of whether it can be implemented during appeals).

Immigration judges have thrown out about 200,000 deportation cases during the Biden administration “because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hadn’t filed the required Notice to Appear (NTA) with the Court by the time of the scheduled hearing,” according to documentary evidence obtained by TRAC Immigration. “In three-quarters of these 200,000 cases the immigrant was effectively left in legal limbo without any way to pursue asylum or other means of relief,” TRAC’s analysis notes.

The DHS Inspector-General reported on unannounced July 2023 inspection visits to CBP holding facilities in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Though this was a moment of relatively less migration—the post-Title 42 lull—the agency’s investigators found Border Patrol routinely holding migrants at processing centers for more than the 72-hour limit set by policy.

Analyses and Feature Stories

With its migration policies—its cooperation on blocking northbound migrants, its response to Texas’s S.B. 4 law—the government of Mexico has leverage over U.S. election outcomes, argue analyses by Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter and Los Angeles Times reporter Patrick McDonnell.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador condemned S.B. 4 as “dehumanizing” during his morning press conference yesterday. Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said that the law could cause “phenomenal chaos.”

At the Darién Gap, the New York Times covered visits from right-wing social media influencers, who interview migrants at posts on the Panamanian end of the trail, often taking their statements out of context in order to make them appear more threatening. Their videos focus on single male, Muslim, and Chinese migrants.

At the Los Angeles Times, Andrea Castillo reported on vulnerable Democratic legislators’ recent tendency to vote for harder-line Republican border and migration legislation in order to stave off conservative attacks.

The Republican governors of Texas and California were far more moderate on immigration issues twenty years ago, noted an analysis at Time from University of Houston Professor Brandon Rottinghaus, which narrates the party’s rightward lurch.

On the Right

An Odd Lull in Springtime Migration

Sector chiefs’ weekly Twitter updates point to a mid-March drop in migration in Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California, the two Border Patrol U.S.-Mexico border sectors that have been encountering the most migrants so far this year.

This is not the usual trend. March—and spring in general—is usually a time of steadily increasing migration, until temperatures get too high. In recent years, though, this has become less predictable, as policy changes, internet-driven rumors, and smuggling patterns have had more effect on the numbers of arriving people.

Daily Border Links: March 20, 2024

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Developments

Texas’s strict new immigration law, S.B. 4, is currently on hold after a roller-coster day of judicial proceedings that defies description. The main question at issue has been whether Texas can begin implementing the law while federal courts consider appeals.

Between December 18 and March 17Between March 18 and the morning of March 20
December 18, 2023: Texas governor Greg Abbott (R) signs S.B. 4 into law. It would go into force on March 5.

December 19: The ACLU, El Paso County, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and American Gateways sue to challenge the law.

– January 3, 2024: the Biden administration Justice Department sues to challenge S.B. 4. This suit and the ACLU suit are later combined.

February 29: U.S. District Court Judge David Ezra, a Reagan appointee, blocks S.B. 4’s implementation. Texas appeals.

March 3: The federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals allows Texas to implement S.B. 4 while it considers Texas’s appeal. However, it delays implementation until March 10, to allow the Biden administration to ask the Supreme Court to rule whether the law may go into effect while appeals continue.

March 4: The Supreme Court keeps S.B. 4 on hold until March 13 while it decides how to proceed.

March 12: The Supreme Court extends its stay until 5:00PM Eastern on March 18.
March 18: just after 5:00PM, the Supreme Court keeps in place its hold on S.B. 4, without an end date.

– March 19: by a 6-3 decision, with its Republican-appointed majority of justices voting together, the Supreme Court allows S.B. 4 to go into effect while appeals continue.

– March 19: with a late-night order on a 2-1 vote, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals suspends implementation of S.B. 4 while deliberations continue.

– March 20: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is to hear arguments about the stay of S.B. 4’s implementation.

– April 3: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is to hear arguments about the challenges to S.B. 4 that Judge Ezra upheld on February 29.

If it goes into effect, S.B. 4 would allow Texas state police and National Guard personnel to arrest people on suspicion of having migrated without authorization. Courts could then imprison defendants or deport them to Mexico. Rights advocates worry that this would allow Texas to carry out its own immigration enforcement—a federal responsibility—while upholding spurious claims that asylum seekers constitute an “invasion” and creating incentives for racial profiling throughout the state.

A dissent yesterday from Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the law “will disrupt sensitive foreign relations, frustrate the protection of indi­viduals fleeing persecution, hamper active federal enforce­ment efforts, undermine federal agencies’ ability to detect and monitor imminent security threats, and deter noncitizens from reporting abuse or trafficking.”

After the Supreme Court’s decision allowing S.B. 4 to go ahead, Mexico’s government issued a strongly worded statement refusing to receive migrants deported by Texas state authorities. “We fundamentally disagree with the Supreme Court’s order allowing Texas’ harmful and unconstitutional law to go into effect,” read a White House statement.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Lighthouse Media, El Paso Matters, and La Verdad de Juárez published a detailed investigation and a 16-minute video about the March 2023 Ciudad Juárez migrant detention facility fire that killed 40 people whom migration authorities had locked inside. The report highlighted glaring safety failures and Mexican authorities’ likely criminal behavior. It is based on newly revealed security footage, court documents, and survivor interviews. The report notes that a year later, Francisco Garduño, the commissioner of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), remains in his post.

Daily Border Links: March 19, 2024

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Developments

A “handshake agreement” between congressional leaders and the White House appears to have resolved differences over the 2024 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriation, the largest federal budget sticking point that negotiators needed to overcome to avoid a partial government shutdown after Friday (March 22).

Details of the Homeland Security budget compromise are not yet available, but should be coming shortly. It will be an actual appropriations bill for 2024, instead of—as some reporting had indicated was likely—a “continuing resolution” freezing the Department at 2023 levels through the end of the year.

A group of 41 ultraconservative House Republicans wrote a letter urging their colleagues to reject a bill that doesn’t include “core elements” of H.R. 2, a bill approved on party lines last May that would, among other things, all but end the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. It is unclear (but unlikely) whether hardliners in either congressional chamber will have opportunities to offer amendments this week.

Minutes after a 5:00 deadline expired, the Supreme Court indefinitely suspended application of Texas’s draconian new state immigration law, S.B. 4, while lower-court appeals continue. S.B. 4 would allow Texas law enforcement, anywhere in the state, to imprison or deport non-citizens who cross the border improperly—allowing the state to enforce federal immigration law and possibly enabling “show me your papers” scenarios statewide.

S.B. 4 was to go into effect on March 5. The Biden administration Department of Justice, the ACLU, and other organizations sued to challenge the law, and on February 29 a federal district judge blocked its implementation. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals “un-blocked” the law, staying the lower-court judge’s decision while considering Texas’s appeal, but gave time for the Supreme Court to decide whether to keep it blocked. Justice Samuel Alito temporarily suspended S.B. 4’s implementation twice—through March 13 and through March 18—but this latest stay is open-ended.

A new report and database from No More Deaths, an organization that has mainly worked in Arizona, provided the first documentation of migrant deaths in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico. Its mapping finds that a majority of deaths are happening not in remote areas of the Chihuahuan Desert, but in the immediate environs of El Paso and neighboring Sunland Park, New Mexico. This means many migrants are dying painful and preventable deaths within a short distance of help.

The report confirms local organizations’ longstanding contention that Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) estimates of migrant deaths on U.S. soil, which total over 9,500 between 1998 and 2022, under-report the true number.

Yesterday, Border Patrol agents found the remains of a migrant not far from Sunland Park.

CBP yesterday released its own reporting on migrant deaths—for fiscal year 2022, which ended nearly 18 months ago. The agency’s Border Rescues and Mortality Data document reported the recovery of 895 migrants’ remains in 2022, a record by far.

Of remains whose gender could be identified, 79 percent were men. Where cause of death could be identified, 43 percent were heat-related and 20 percent were water-related (mainly drowning). The deadliest of Border Patrol’s nine sectors was Del Rio, Texas (29 percent), where drownings in the Rio Grande are frequent, followed by the Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and Arizona’s Tucson. Of the 23 nationalities that could be identified, 64 percent were citizens of Mexico.

Migration will be on the agenda next Monday (March 25) when Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, meets with Vice President Kamala Harris. Arévalo plans to host a regional ministerial meeting on migration in April.

Texas state national guardsmen prevented a large group of asylum-seeking family migrants from turning themselves in to federal agents at the border wall’s Gate 36 in El Paso.

An internal Border Patrol memo recounted the apprehension of a Lebanese man in El Paso on March 9 who told agents he had come to “try to make a bomb.”

Daily Border Links: March 18, 2024

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Developments

Friday is the deadline Congress has set to approve the 2024 Homeland Security appropriations bill, among other long-delayed budget legislation for a fiscal year that is nearly halfway over. Congressional negotiators have yet to publicize the text of any agreed legislation.

Failure to pass this and five other budget bills could cause a partial government shutdown unless Congress passes another “continuing resolution” keeping federal departments running at 2023 levels for a fixed period of time.

A shutdown would not immediately impact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), most of whose employees are considered “essential” or are funded by fees.

Congress may decide to fund DHS with a continuing resolution all the way to the end of fiscal year 2024, as border programs are proving too controversial to permit bipartisan agreement during an election year. A full-year continuing resolution could fund DHS at levels approved at the end of 2022, by what was then a Democratic-majority Congress.

The Supreme Court is to decide today whether to allow Texas to start implementing a controversial migration-restriction law while appeals continue in lower courts. The law, S.B. 4, allows Texas state law enforcement anywhere in the state to arrest migrants whom they believe crossed the border irregularly, then jail them or deport them to Mexico. Critics “have said the law could lead to racial profiling and family separation,” the Associated Press observed. The Supreme Court stayed the law until March 18. It is currently before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals after a district court judge struck it down.

The Biden administration’s Family Expedited Removal Management program, a very strict “alternatives to detention” program that closely monitors some family asylum seekers after release into the United States, has been applied to 19,000 people since May, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data obtained by the New York Times. “More than 1,500 of them have been deported and around 1,000 have absconded by prying off their ankle monitors.”

Pima County, Arizona, which includes Tucson, is running out of federal funds to provide short-term shelter for asylum-seeking migrants released from CBP custody. As is already happening in San Diego, where funds ran out last month, this could mean daily drop-offs of hundreds of homeless migrants on Tucson’s streets, Reuters reported.

Al Otro Lado and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS), groups based in California and Baja California, have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to get information about Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP)’s policies for “open-air detention sites.” The term refers to the austere outdoor encampments on the borderline where Border Patrol agents have been making asylum seekers wait to turn themselves in, often for days.

An upsurge in organized crime violence along the border between Mexico’s violent northern-border state of Tamaulipas and adjacent Nuevo León, south of southern Texas, is displacing thousands of people, some of whom are seeking to cross the U.S. border. Some towns in the area have lost 80 percent of their population.

Kidnappers in Tamaulipas released a Russian migrant without forcing her to pay ransom, handing her over at a police station in Reynosa, the city across the river from McAllen, Texas.

Though violence in Haiti has reached emergency levels, the U.S. Coast Guard continues to return Haitians encountered at sea to the island. “There is a specific disdain when it comes to Haitian asylum-seekers,” Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance told NBC News. “The first [U.S.] act is not ‘How do we protect the people?’ it is ‘How do we deter them and how do we make sure they don’t make it to our shores?’”

U.S. diplomats met with counterparts from Ecuador on March 13-14. Ecuador committed to extend the “Safe Mobility Office” operating in its territory through the end of 2024, and U.S. diplomats agreed to “facilitate access to lawful pathways, such as H2 visas, for Ecuadorian citizens.” The State Department “confirmed receipt” of an Ecuadorian request for Temporary Protected Status for citizens of Ecuador who have migrated to the United States.

The government of Honduras has done away with a seven-day “pre-check” requirement for visiting Nicaraguans, a policy that had been in place since 2017. That eases travel through Central America for Nicaraguan citizens; under a 33-year-old arrangement, citizens of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua may visit each others’ countries without use of passports.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported that the Biden administration has doubled last year’s pace of the credible fear screening interviews that asylum officers administer to some protection-seeking migrants at the border. However, as the DHS workforce includes only about 1,000 asylum officers, “the number of people screened remains a small fraction of the number who cross the border illegally. And the government does not have the detention capacity to hold others long enough to interview them.”

Of those subjected to the interviews—about 24,500 in January—59 percent are passing, Miroff reported. This is down from about 85 percent between 2014 and 2019, before the Biden administration raised the “fear” standard that interviewees must meet.

A new memo from Human Rights First cited several cases of migrants, from China, Venezuela, Egypt, and Ecuador, who faced strong examples of persecution but, now that credible fear standards have been raised, failed to clear the screening and were ordered deported.

Smuggler use among migrants in Latin America and the Caribbean is not as common as perceived, with two out of every five respondents hiring smugglers, according to a new report from the Mixed Migration Center, based on over 3,000 surveys of migrants in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico. It found that use of smugglers declined from 49 percent of respondents in 2022 to 34 percent in 2023.

The San Diego Union-Tribune covered muralists’ work on newly rebuilt, taller segments of border wall near the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana.

Latin America-Related Events in Washington and Online This Week

(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)

Monday, March 18, 2024

  • 9:00-10:30 at csis.org: USAID/MujerProspera: Advancing Gender Equality in Northern Central America (RSVP required).
  • 2:00-5:00 at CSIS and csis.org: From Terrestrial to Celestial: Unlocking the Potential to Enhance U.S.-Latin American B2B Collaboration (RSVP required).

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Thursday, March 21, 2024

A New Tool for Migration Data

I’ve been posting a bit less this week because I’ve moved my site and domain to a new service provider. (You may have noticed that this page loaded a few milliseconds faster? Probably not.)

I’m now using a virtual server that can host not just this site, but other little projects as sub-domains of adamisacson.com.

One of those little projects is live now: cbpdata.adamisacson.com. It’s a tool that lets you search Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) migration data since 2020.

Every month, CBP updates and publishes a dataset of its encounters with migrants since fiscal year 2020 (October 2019). We may get February’s data any moment now.

But that data is basically a table that right now has 58,866 rows. This site makes it usable.

(CBP has a “dashboard” that shows this data since 2021, and unlike mine, it includes encounters beyond the U.S.-Mexico border, including the Canada border and airports. But it doesn’t let you, for instance, just see how many people came from every country—you have to select each country one by one—and it’s really hard to get data out of it.)

I think the page is self-explanatory. If you visit it, do nothing, and click “Show the Data,” you’ll get a table showing how many migrants CBP encountered—both Border Patrol and ports of entry combined—by country for each year since 2020.

Hover your mouse over any number in the table, and a pop-up will show you the percentage of the total (so in the picture, 27% of 2024’s migrants so far have come from Mexico).

Click the “select table” button, and the entire thing is selected, letting you copy-and-paste it into a spreadsheet or anywhere else.

I encourage you to play around with the options on the main page letting you refine your search. Checking the various boxes lets you see, for instance, “How many family members and accompanied/unaccompanied children from Cuba and Haiti arrived in Texas’s five Border Patrol sectors and two CBP field offices, by month since 2023, listed by whether they came to ports of entry or to areas between them.” Just to give an idea of all the variables.

Search result: Monthly Migration at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Presented by “Whether Encountered At or Between Ports of Entry” at “Big Bend Sector, Del Rio Sector, El Paso Sector, Laredo Sector, and Rio Grande Valley Sector” at “El Paso Field Office and Laredo Field Office” for migrants from “Cuba and Haiti” who are “Accompanied Minors, Family Unit Members, and Unaccompanied Children / Single Minors” Between 2023 and 2024
Whether Encountered At or Between Ports of Entry	Oct 2022	Nov 2022	Dec 2022	Jan 2023	Feb 2023	Mar 2023	Apr 2023	May 2023	Jun 2023	Jul 2023	Aug 2023	Sep 2023	Oct 2023	Nov 2023	Dec 2023	Jan 2024	Total
At the Ports of Entry (CBP Office of Field Operations)	2,085	1,699	1,845	1,055	1,551	1,804	2,288	2,110	3,413	4,366	3,607	2,806	2,943	3,372	3,979	4,627	43,550
Between the Ports of Entry (Border Patrol)	4,085	6,001	7,786	1,351	17	109	180	408	79	122	124	174	220	397	1,464	314	22,831
Total	6,170	7,700	9,631	2,406	1,568	1,913	2,468	2,518	3,492	4,488	3,731	2,980	3,163	3,769	5,443	4,941	66,381

Also, every search result, including a really long one like that example, has its own unique link.

I hope you find it useful. I’m using it constantly. When CBP releases its February data, I’ll be able to update this within about 10 minutes of obtaining it.

And finally: all the source code is on GitHub if you want to see how it works or have the skills to improve it.

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: March 15, 2024

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

Support ad-free, paywall-free Weekly Border Updates. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to sustain this effort. Please contribute now and support our work.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

73,167 people made the treacherous northbound journey through the Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama during the first two months of 2024. That is 47 percent ahead of the same period in 2023, a year that ended with over 520,000 people migrating through. Panama’s government suspended Doctors Without Borders’ permission to provide health services at posts where the Darién trail ends; the announcement’s timing is curious because the organization had been denouncing rapidly increasing cases of sexual violence committed against the people whom their personnel were treating.

The White House sent Congress a $62 billion budget request to fund the Department of Homeland Security in 2025. The base budget for Customs and Border Protection would decrease slightly, though the agency would share in a $4.7 billion contingency fund for responding to surges in migration. The administration proposes to hire 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP officers, 1,600 USCIS asylum officers, and 375 new immigration judge teams. The budget request stands almost no chance of passing this year, as Congress has not even passed the Department’s 2024 budget.

For at least a few more days, the Supreme Court has kept on hold Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law, which allows state authorities to jail and deport migrants, while lower-court appeals continue. A federal judge threw out Texas’s and other Republican states’ challenge to the Biden administration program offering humanitarian parole to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A state judge blocked Texas’s legal offensive against El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter.

The Republican response to President Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address included a graphic, harrowing story of a woman being subjected to years of sexual violence at the border. Further scrutiny revealed that Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Alabama) account described crimes committed in Mexico during the Bush administration. President Biden voiced regret for using the term “an illegal” to refer to a migrant who allegedly killed a Georgia nursing student in February, in an off-the-cuff response to Republican hecklers during his address.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Read More

Daily Border Links: March 15, 2024

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Developments

Posting to Twitter while on a visit to Panama’s side of the Darién Gap, human rights lawyer Julia Neusner reported that Panamanian police used force to put down a peaceful protest staged by migrants stranded at a government-run reception center. At least 12 migrants who had participated in the protest were detained, and their relatives do not know where they are.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told Politico that he expects to pass a “stand-alone” Ukraine and Israel aid bill, with Democratic votes. If accurate, this would be a significant about-face, because it could mean dropping Republican legislators’ insistence that such a bill include border and migration language, like new limits on access to asylum.

The Speaker has been blocking consideration of a foreign aid bill that the Senate passed in February, because it had no border language attached to it. The Senate had failed to pass an earlier version with negotiated “border deal” language, which would have allowed some expulsions of asylum seekers at the border.

The number of cross-border incursions of drones, apparently operated by Mexican organized crime groups, “was something that was alarming to me as I took command last month,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 14. “We could probably have over a thousand” drones crossing over the border each month, Guillot added. “I haven’t seen any of them manifest in a threat to the level of national defense, but I see the potential only growing.” Organized crime uses drones for surveillance—what Guillot called “spotters trying to find gaps”—or to move small amounts of high-value drugs.

“The number of Chinese [citizens] that are coming across the border is a big concern of mine,” Gen. Guillot added, in response to a question from Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri). Among Guillot’s concerns: “while many may be political refugees and other explanations, the ability for counter intelligence to hide in plain sight in those numbers.”

Asylum seekers released from CBP custody, and seeking to board commercial flights from border cities to their U.S. interior destinations, must now submit to facial recognition technology when passing through airport security if they lack passports. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) abruptly rolled out the new policy this week, apparently without informing airlines or other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies. As a result, dozens of migrants ended up stranded in Texas border towns, the Associated Press reported, after being unable to board flights for which they had purchased non-refundable tickets.

With federal funds for migrant shelters running out, raising the likelihood that CBP may start releasing asylum seekers on the street, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) wrote a letter to congressional leaders asking for $752 million to pay for migrant services and shelters.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Analysts at Mexico City’s Universidad Ibero published a 250-page report on the militarization of Mexico’s civilian migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM). It points to the agency’s increasing portrayal of migrants as “internal enemies”; the use of military-grade weapons in migrant detention operations (by Mexican National Guard personnel accompanying INM agents); placement of retired officers in INM managerial positions; and use of surveillance technologies, among other indicators. The report sees a U.S. government role in encouraging some of these changes.

Coyotes bringing a group of migrants over the border wall will sometimes “intentionally push [a] person off the wall so that Border Patrol has to provide healthcare, so the remaining individuals can scramble and get away more freely,” Rajiv Rajani, chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) in El Paso, told Newsweek.

“The CBP One app is plagued with technical problems and privacy concerns, and it raises troubling issues of inequitable asylum access, including facial recognition software that misidentifies people of color,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) told NextGov in a statement.

Daily Border Links: March 14, 2024

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Developments

Panama’s government reported data through February about migration in the treacherous Darién Gap region. During the first two months of 2024, 73,167 people made the journey, much more than the 49,291 who did so during January-February 2023. By the end of 2023, a once-unthinkable total of 520,085 people had transited the Darién jungles.

Of this year’s migrant population, 64 percent are citizens of Venezuela—similar to 2023 (63 percent). The next four most frequent nationalities are Ecuador, Haiti, Colombia, and China—also similar to 2023. (View graphics and data of Darién Gap migration by year and month.)

In 2023, U.C. San Diego Health “saw 500 head injuries” from migrants who had fallen from the 30-foot-high Trump-era border wall between San Diego and Tijuana, “with many patients needing surgery,” a local television station reported. The per-patient cost for surgery got treat traumatic head injuries is about $250,000; UCSD Health neurosurgeon Joseph Ciacci said that “taxpayers are footing the bill.”

A Mexican National Guard and National Migration Institute (INM) deployment has brought a sharp drop in the number of asylum-seeking migrants coming to Jacumba Springs, California, just over an hour’s drive east of San Diego. Daily crossings, which were so frequent that people were stuck in encampments on the borderline waiting for Border Patrol to process them, have dropped from 800 to 70, said the INM delegate to Baja California. The official added that the agency expects people to seek to cross elsewhere as a result. (Border Report noted last week that crossings have increased sharply in nearby Campo, California.)

As the political and security situation in Haiti devolves further into a humanitarian emergency, CNN revealed that the Biden administration is considering reactivating a facility to process Haitians interdicted at sea, at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Those processed will be returned to Haiti or a third country.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), an opponent of protection-seeking migration from Latin America, has sent 250 national guardsmen and state police, and over a dozen air and sea craft, to the state’s southern coast to “combat illegal vessels” carrying “a potential influx of illegal immigrants” from Haiti, in DeSantis’s words.

Analyses and Feature Stories

WOLA’s Adam Isacson (this update’s author) made public a tool (cbpdata.adamisacson.com) that improves public access to CBP’s 2020-24 migration dataset. It generates custom tables of numbers revealing migrants’ nationalities, demographic characteristics, geographic areas of arrival, and whether they came to ports of entry or areas in between.

On the Right

A bit of construction

This site may look goofy or outdated for a couple of days as I move to a new server. Thanks for your patience!

In the meantime, I’ll keep posting daily border updates at our Border Oversight site.

Daily Border Links: March 12, 2024

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Developments

The Biden administration sent its 2025 budget request to Congress yesterday. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) submission repeats many items that appeared in a supplemental funding request that failed to pass the Senate in early February. These include the hiring of 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP officers, 1,600 USCIS asylum officers, and 375 new immigration judge teams, along with “$849 million for cutting-edge [fentanyl and other contraband] detection technology at ports of entry.”

The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) request foresees a reduction in the agency’s overall budget, from an enacted level of $20,968,070 in 2023 to a requested level of $19,764,120 in 2025.

As in the 2024 budget request—which Congress still has not passed, with the next deadline coming up on March 22—the administration is seeking a flexible $4.7 billion “emergency fund” to deal with migration surges. Republican legislators refused to support the idea last year, calling it a “slush fund.”

A close read of the CBP request finds some notable performance metrics:

  • 11.8 percent of Border Patrol’s apprehended migrants made “at least a second attempt” to enter in fiscal 2023, down from 16.6 percent in 2022. The decline owes mainly to the end of the Title 42 policy, when re-entries followed large numbers of rapid, consequence-free expulsions.
  • Border Patrol estimated that agents interdicted 75.6 percent of illegal entries in 2023, similar to 75.9 percent in 2022 but down from 82.6 percent in 2021 and 86.3 percent in 2019.
  • Border Patrol carried out 26 joint operations with Mexican “law enforcement partners” in 2023, up from 23 in 2022 but down from 39 in 2019.

President Biden told reporters that he is no longer considering executive action on migration at the border, like a legally dubious order to expel asylum seekers when daily migration exceeds a particular amount. On February 21, several media outlets had reported that the White House was considering such an action. Yesterday, Biden instead called on Congress to change the law.

If the Supreme Court does not act, a controversial Texas state law will go into effect tomorrow (March 13). S.B. 4 would allow authorities to imprison and deport people who cross the border irregularly, which may imply authorities in Texas’s interior demanding that people they encounter prove that they did not enter the United States that way. A federal judge blocked S.B. 4 on February 29, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals un-blocked it while deliberations continue.

Texas and other Republican states will appeal a federal judge’s March 8 ruling throwing out their effort to end the Biden administration’s use of humanitarian parole authority to permit the entry of some citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

In El Paso, a Texas state judge blocked the conservative state government’s legal attacks on Annunciation House, a decades-old shelter that receives migrants released from CBP custody. In early February Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R) demanded that the shelter turn over a large amount of records on very short notice or risk revocation of its operating license. In a hearing last week, State District Court Judge Francisco Dominguez’s written opinion called out “the Attorney General’s efforts to run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play,” alleging politicized motives.

“When an organization leaves there is always a concern for the organizations to be able to meet those needs,” said Panama-based UNICEF official Margarita Sánchez, about Doctors Without Borders’ (MSF) forced departure from the Darién Gap. ” So, in this case, we hope that, surely, the Panamanian state can respond to that need.” Last week, MSF revealed that Panama’s government had revoked the organization’s permission to provide medical care to migrants arriving at posts where the dangerous Darién trail ends.

MSF had been denouncing a sharp recent rise in cases of sexual abuse, which raises questions about the motives and timing of the Panamanian government’s decision to suspend the group’s activities. “Blocking the operations of MSF sends a chilling message to the international aid community to censor their communications,” International Crisis Group investigator Bram Ebus told the New Humanitarian. There is no word yet on whether Panama might be persuaded to reconsider.

The State Department announced that it has begun denying visas of executives of charter airline companies that offer flights to Nicaragua, which requires visas of few arriving nationalities, to people who intend to migrate from there to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Deaths of migrants by drowning are worsening in the Rio Grande, which is swollen by recent rains, Aaron Nelsen reported at Texas Monthly. “No U.S. or Mexican agency, however, keeps a comprehensive count of migrant deaths,” and there is little coordination between local and national agencies on either side of the border.

Though the actual policy is “murky,” Mexico is busing apprehended people to the country’s south at an increased pace in order to slow U.S.-bound migration, the Guardian reported. The PBS NewsHour spoke to migrants stranded in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula.

President Biden’s off-the-cuff State of the Union remark referring to a migrant as an “illegal,” Jose Antonio Vargas wrote at CNN, “does underscore the political reality that, in the Trump era, the country has veered right on immigration, and the language that shapes the anti-immigrant policies being pushed at almost all governmental levels reflects it.”

At the New Republic, a lengthy analysis by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa looked at recent Republican gains in south Texas’s Latino-majority Rio Grande Valley border region.

Daily Border Links: March 11, 2024

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Developments

A helicopter crash near Rio Grande City, Texas claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent and two members of the New York National Guard. A third New York National Guardsman is seriously injured. The cause of the UH-72 Lakota crash, while on a routine flight, is as yet unknown. The Guard personnel were working with Joint Task Force-North, a decades-old Defense Department Northern Command component that supports Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—not the state National Guard mission within Texas’s separate, state-funded “Operation Lone Star.”

In the televised Republican response to President Joe Biden’s Thursday State of the Union address, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) told a harrowing story about migration and the border. Further coverage revealed that Britt left out key context and manipulated the narrative.

Speaking from her kitchen, the senator told of meeting a woman in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, who told of being a victim of human trafficking and suffering thousands of rapes from the age of 12.

Sen. Britt used the story as an example of the failure of Joe Biden’s border policies, but closer scrutiny—led by a TikTok video from former AP reporter Jonathan Katz—revealed that the crimes happened more than 15 years ago, during the Bush administration. The victim, activist Karla Jacinto Romero, has spoken publicly about what was done to her, including in U.S. congressional testimony, and the crimes happened in Mexico, not the United States.

President Biden voiced regret about using the word “illegal” to refer to a migrant who allegedly killed a Georgia nursing student in February, in an off-the-cuff response to Republican heckling during the State of the Union address.

A federal district court judge in Texas threw out a lawsuit from Texas and 20 other Republican-led state governments that sought to block President Biden’s use of a 1950s humanitarian parole authority to give a temporary documented status in the United States to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with passports and U.S.-based sponsors. (The “CHNV” program has allowed 365,000 citizens of those countries—up to 30,000 per month permitted—to fly to the United States since late 2022.)

Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump nominee, ruled that Texas lacks legal standing to stop Biden’s use of the policy because the state government failed to demonstrate that it “suffered an injury,” particularly since the parole program is linked to a drop in arrivals of those countries’ citizens at the border. Texas can still appeal.

In a separate decision on a suit brought by Texas and other Republican-led state governments, Tipton temporarily blocked the Biden administration from stopping Trump-era border wall construction and redirecting money to environmental remediation. The administration can still appeal.

A March 9 video from Samira Gozaine, the director of Panama’s Migration Service, said that more than 82,000 people have migrated through the Darién Gap so far this year. That is nearly equal to the total Panama measured for the entire first three months of 2023 (87,390). During all of 2023, Panama counted over 520,000 migrants, a previously unthinkable sum for a route that rarely exceeded 1,000 before the mid-2010s.

Of 2,600 migrants put on buses to Costa Rica on March 8, Gozaine said that about 2,100 were citizens of Venezuela, followed in number by citizens of Ecuador, China, Colombia, and Haiti.

Panama has not yet posted February data about Darién Gap migration.

There is no new word on Panama’s controversial decision last week to ban Doctors Without Borders, which has been providing essential health services at reception posts where the Darién Gap jungle trail ends. The organization has been the only source about many hundreds of reports of sexual violence committed against migrants on this route.

Migration has begun to rise in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico. CBP is averaging 1,113 migrant “encounters” per day, up from less than 700 in January, according to the El Paso municipal government’s migration dashboard. Migrant shelter occupancy across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juárez has increased by 30 percent in the past few days as more people arrive in the region, EFE reported.

The Spanish news agency indicated that word-of-mouth spread about federal courts delaying Texas’s implementation, originally scheduled for March 5, of a draconian state law that would imprison or deport migrants who cross the border irregularly. That law, S.B. 4, will go into effect on Wednesday March 13, unless the Supreme Court decides to keep it on hold while appeals proceed.

Mexico’s government is about to open a new migrant detention facility about 50 miles south of Ciudad Juárez, nearly a year after a March 2023 fire that destroyed a facility in the city, taking the lives of 40 migrants whom guards left locked inside.

At a March 9 party convention in Oklahoma City, 225 state-level Republican leaders voted by a wide margin to censure their senior U.S. senator, James Lankford, for having negotiated the bipartisan “border deal” that failed a month ago in the face of Republican opposition.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A Los Angeles Times column from Brown University’s Ieva Jusionyte links the heavy southbound flow of illegal U.S. weapons into Mexico and Latin America with the northbound flow of migrants. The link between arms trafficking and migration is the subject a forthcoming book by the column’s author.

On the Right

Latin America-Related Events in Washington and Online This Week

(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)

Monday, March 11, 2024

  • 10:00-11:15 at the Wilson Center and wilsoncenter.org: China’s Voice in Latin American Media (RSVP required).
  • 2:30 in Room 216, Hart Senate Office Building: Hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Worldwide Threats.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Thursday, March 14, 2024

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