Adam Isacson

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.

Due to staff travel, we are publishing this week’s Border Update in an abbreviated format.

Biden administration to begin rolling out express asylum screenings

• The Biden administration is rolling out, on a pilot basis, a promised program to make asylum-seeking migrants defend their cases within days of their apprehension, while still in CBP’s or Border Patrol’s austere custody conditions, in “credible fear” screening interviews conducted over telephones with asylum officers.
• Critics (like the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind, whose analysis called it “phone booth asylum”) point out that this “expedited removal” process resembles two programs—Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP)—that the Trump administration had employed. About 75 percent of migrants subject to these programs failed credible fear interviews; under normal conditions, about 75 percent pass. President Biden had terminated PACR and HARP upon assuming the presidency in January 2021.
• Asylum officers, who would carry out these credible fear interviews, voiced dismay to CNN. “At this point, I can’t tell the difference between Biden immigration policy and Trump immigration policy,” one said.
• The administration is meanwhile pausing its slow rollout of a mid-2022 rule designed to speed the asylum process, the Los Angeles Times revealed. Officials said “the pause is a temporary measure designed to ensure that the country’s immigration agencies are prepared for a potential increase in border crossings after the end of Title 42,” the pandemic expulsion authority slated to terminate on May 11. It is possible that many asylum officers assigned to this 2022 process are about to be instead carrying out “expedited removal” credible fear interviews.

Darién Gap migration increases 55 percent from February to March; majority of migrants are Venezuelan

• New data from Panama’s government show that in March, 55 percent of migrants toiling through Panama’s notoriously dangerous Darién Gap region—671 people per day—were citizens of Venezuela. This is despite the Biden administration’s use, since October 2022, of the Title 42 expulsion authority to send Venezuelan migrants back to Mexico.

• Overall migration through the Darién Gap increased by 55 percent, from 24,657 people (881 per day)in February to 38,099 people (1,229 per day) in March.

Top U.S., Colombian, and Panamanian officials pledge a strategy in the Darién region

• Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Southern Command Commander Gen. Laura Richardson, and USAID Administrator Samantha Power paid an April 11 visit to Panama, to meet with Colombian and Panamanian counterparts. The situation in the Darién Gap was the central subject.
• The three countries agreed “to carry out a two-month coordinated campaign to address the serious humanitarian situation in the Darién.” One of this campaign’s goals is to “end the illicit movement of people and goods through the Darién by both land and maritime corridors.” The governments’ statement does not specify the measures they will take to achieve this strikingly ambitious goal.

Mexico’s migration agency leadership under criminal investigation for Ciudad Juárez detention facility tragedy

• Mexico’s National Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía General de la República, FGR) has announced charges and arrests of leaders of Mexico’s migration agency (Instituto Nacional de Migración, INM) for their responsibility for the deaths of 40 migrants locked inside an INM provisional detention center, in Ciudad Juárez on March 27. (See WOLA’s March 30 and April 6 Border Updates.) Those who will face charges include the INM’s director, Francisco Garduño. Garduño meets frequently with U.S. counterparts, and the INM receives significant amounts of U.S. training and other assistance.
• Before this week, Mexican prosecutors had been seeking charges only against three low-level INM employees in Ciudad Juárez, along with a private security guard and a migrant accused of igniting the fire.
• VICE reported on April 6 that the Ciudad Juárez detention facility had operated as a sort of “extortion center” where INM personnel held migrants until they paid $200 bribes.
• Alejandro Solalinde, a priest who has long run a migrant shelter in Oaxaca, met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Solalinde, a vocal López Obrador supporter, has been dropping hints about the INM’s possible replacement with a new “National Commission for Migratory and Foreigners’ Affairs.”
• Garduño, the current INM director, would not be a part of this new body, which is still pending López Obrador’s approval. López Obrazor has defended  Garduño and said he will remain in his post for now.
• Mexico’s government began repatriating remains of the tragedy’s victims to Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. WOLA has not seen reporting mentioning repatriation of victims to Venezuela.

Misinformation and inability to secure “CBP One” appointments lead migrants to gather, again, at Juárez-El Paso border crossing

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) closed the Paso del Norte bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso for nearly three hours on April 10, after a few hundred migrants unable to secure asylum appointments with the “CBP One” app gathered near the Mexican side of the bridge.
• CBS News reported that migrants have used the app to secure over 60,000 asylum appointments since its mid-January launch. Border Report, citing Tijuana migration official Enrique Lucero, found that Russians are by far the nationality that has had the most success in obtaining CBP One appointments at San Diego’s port of entry. “6,645 Russians have landed” CBP One asylum appointments, Lucero stated, along with “2,700 Haitians, 1,864 Mexicans and 1,844 Venezuelans.” The official said Russians have been more successful because they tend to “have better phones and can connect faster to the internet.”
• The El Paso Times visited an abandoned building in Ciudad Juárez that “has become an anteroom for dozens of migrants trying daily—most without success—to use the CBP One digital application to seek asylum at the Southwest border.”
• Border-wide, those stranded in Mexico and attempting to use CBP One include potentially “thousands” of citizens of Afghanistan, the Guardian reported. (Note above Afghanistan’s position among the top ten nationalities of migrants passing through the Darién Gap.)
• “I didn’t see a protest at the bridge,” tweeted longtime Dallas Morning News reporter Alfredo Corchado, who was in Ciudad Juárez. “I saw hundreds of migrants congregating, looking at their cell phones, confused, misinformed.” Corchado said that migrants with whom he spoke were “lured by false social media posts, including one by Breitbart news, that [the] US is processing migrants.”
• A Venezuelan migrant told Ciudad Juárez’s La Verdad, “The news was that supposedly starting April 10 they were going to do like a pilot plan in which they were going to let people in and they were going to do like a quick asylum for them.” (This may be a distorted version of the “expedited removal” pilot program discussed above, which some migrants are reportedly misconstruing as “expedited asylum.”)
• Some migrants who spoke to Corchado cited an April 7 Breitbart article, authored by retired 32-year Border Patrol agent Randy Clark. The article claimed that Mexico was refusing Title 42 expulsions of Venezuelan citizens from Border Patrol’s sectors in El Paso and Del Rio, Texas, and that as a result, “Venezuelan nationals… will now be allowed to apply for asylum instead of being swiftly returned.” In a Twitter exchange with WOLA staff, Clark said that Border Patrol may be moving Venezuelan migrants to other sectors, where Mexico continues to accept expulsions.
• The El Paso city government’s migration dashboard, which includes CBP data, shows no appreciable increase in CBP migrant encounters or releases of migrants into the city. It does, however, show sharp recent growth in the number of migrants in the custody of Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector. The cause of this increase is unclear; an inability to expel some migrants to Mexico could be an explanation.

Other news

• CBP released body-worn camera footage of a March 14 incident in Arizona, a notable step for transparency. It shows a Border Patrol agent shooting and killing the apparently unarmed driver of a car, at point blank range. (Existing policy allows use of lethal force if agents or others face “an imminent threat of death or bodily injury.”)
• Border Patrol agents shot and killed a man who had struck one agent with a “wooden club” on April 2 in rural New Mexico, CBP reported, citing a review of body-worn camera footage.
• Volunteers leaving water, canned food, and first aid materials to prevent migrant deaths in a wilderness area east of San Diego allege that Border Patrol agents may have destroyed some of the supplies.
• Among the thousands of children separated from their migrant parents by the Trump administration are “hundreds, and possibly as many as 1,000,” kids who are U.S. citizens, born in the United States, the New York Times reported.
• “Seven out of ten Central American migrants who crossed the U.S. border undocumented resorted to a guide or coyote, for an average payment of at least $4,500,” according to data from the Mexican government’s Migration Policy Unit reported by La Jornada.
• Mexico sent a delegation of cabinet-level officials to Washington on April 13 to discuss measures to combat northbound fentanyl trafficking and southbound weapons trafficking. Mexican media noted a mismatch in the level of seniority of the two countries’ delegations; the only U.S. cabinet official to meet them was Attorney-General Merrick Garland.
• USA Today reported on a bill moving through the Texas state legislature that would pursue migrants using “roving police units consisting, in part, of ‘law-abiding citizens’—raising the specter of armed vigilantes confronting asylum-seekers at the border.”
• During the first two months of 2023, migration continued to increase throughout the Americas, “in most borders except the United States,” which saw some decline, according to the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) April 1 Migration Trends in the Americas report.
• IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, which has monitored migrant deaths worldwide since 2014, recorded 1,433 deaths of migrants in the Americas in 2022, the largest annual amount since its program began.

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.

Due to staff travel, we will publish next week’s Border Update in an abbreviated format.

This week:

• The death toll now stands at 40 from a March 27 fire in a Ciudad Juárez migrant detention center. Three low-ranking employees, a security guard, and a migrant have been indicted for homicide and intentional injury. The event has multiplied calls for accountability for abusive conditions in Mexico’s migrant detention system.
• Mexico’s asylum system received more applications during the first quarter of 2023 than it has in the first quarter of any year. The most frequent nationality of applicants is Haiti. In January and February, citizens most frequently apprehended by Mexican migration authorities were from Ecuador and Venezuela.
• About 1,200 people per day migrated through Panama’s Darién Gap region in March. Of those making the hazardous 60-mile trip, 20 percent so far this year have been children. An average of five children per day have transited through the Darién Gap unaccompanied.

Fallout from Ciudad Juárez detention center fire

WOLA’s March 31 Border Update reported a death toll of “39 or more people” from a March 27 fire in a Mexican government provisional migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas. On April 3, Mexico’s public security department increased the count to 40 deaths: one of the men injured in the fire died while being flown to a hospital in Mexico City.

Not including this 40th individual, whose nationality was not reported, the fatal victims include 18 Guatemalan migrants (most from the country’s Indigenous-majority highlands), 7 Venezuelans, 6 Hondurans, 6 Salvadorans, 1 Colombian, and 1 Ecuadorian.

As of March 30, 24 migrants were hospitalized in serious or critical condition: 10 Guatemalans, 7 Hondurans, 4 Salvadorans, and 3 Venezuelans. Mexico turned down a U.S. government offer to provide medical treatment to some of the injured in the United States, arguing that they were “too ill to be moved,” the Associated Press reported. Still, Mexico has since sought to fly some to specialized treatment in Mexico City.

Troubling details about the tragedy continue to emerge. “Multiple testimonies” indicate that the facility had no emergency exits or fire extinguishers in its detention area, the daily Milenio reported. Some of the detainees had been there for several days, or even since February, though the legal maximum is 36 hours. In the United States, relatives of the victims are complaining that the Mexican government is not responding to inquiries or helping with the complicated repatriation of remains.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, paid a visit to Ciudad Juárez on March 31, where he said that the tragedy “hurt me a lot, it damaged me.” As the President’s white van, with him in the passenger seat, drove through Ciudad Juárez’s central square, it was detained for several minutes as mostly Venezuelan migrants surrounded the vehicle. López Obrador “opened the window and took the hand of a woman who pleaded with him as others pushed letters into his hand and cried for justicia, or justice, for the migrants,” the El Paso Times reported. One migrant reportedly said to him, “Don’t do what the United States does,” to which he replied, “we are not the same, my love, don’t confuse us.”

A Mexican federal judge ordered the indictment, for homicide and intentional injury, of five people accused of involvement in the tragedy: three employees of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), one private security guard, and a Venezuelan migrant, Jeison Daniel Catarí Rivas, accused of setting fire to mattresses in protest, after guards allegedly said that the men in custody would be deported. “None of the public servants, nor the private security guards, took any action to open the door for the migrants who were inside where the fire was,” said a federal human rights prosecutor cited by the New York Times.

The INM has come under fire for the tragedy, especially after security camera footage showed personnel leaving the facility without opening the doors of a detention area filling with flames and smoke. While no source appears to have a current count, Pie de Página reported that in 2019, INM was managing 30 detention centers throughout Mexico, plus an unknown number of provisional facilities like the one in Ciudad Juárez.

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.

This week:

• A horrific tragedy at a Ciudad Juárez migrant detention center, in which 39 (so far) perished in a fire while locked inside, drew attention to the treatment that migrants in Mexican border cities are receiving as they remain stranded by new blocks on access to asylum.
• Organizations and individuals submitted over 50,000 public comments on the Biden administration’s draft rule banning asylum for most non-Mexican migrants who do not seek it in other countries along the way, or who do not opt for other narrow pathways. Below are links to dozens of organizational comments.

Tragic fire in Ciudad Juárez detention facility

As of mid-day on March 30, the death toll from a fire at a Ciudad Juárez, Mexico migrant detention facility stands at 39 or more people, with about 29 more injured.

The fire started at about 10:00 PM on March 27 at the Mexican federal government’s National Migration Institute (INM) provisional detention center, which sits along the U.S.-Mexico border at the foot of the Stanton Street bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

Mexico’s National Prosecutor’s Office reported on March 28 that the dead and injured included 28 people from Guatemala, 13 from Honduras, 12 from Venezuela, 12 from El Salvador, and 1 each from Colombia and Ecuador. Citizens of all of these countries, except for Colombia and Ecuador, are currently subject to rapid expulsion into Mexico, under the still-in-force Title 42 pandemic authority, if U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or Border Patrol encounter them in the United States.

At a March 28 news conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the detained migrants themselves started the fire, in protest after being told of their probable deportation back to their home countries. “At the door of the shelter, they put mattresses and set them on fire, and they did not imagine that this was going to cause a terrible misfortune,” the President said.

Later on the 28th, very troubling security camera footage from the detention center began circulating on social media. It depicts flames and smoke engulfing an area behind bars and doors, while guards exit the facility without unlocking or opening the doors. Mexican authorities confirmed the video’s authenticity.

The Associated Press reported that Jorge Vázquez Campbell, an attorney representing some of the victims, filed a complaint with Mexican federal investigators making an explosive allegation: that the INM’s delegate for the state of Chihuahua ordered subordinates to prohibit the detainees from leaving. The delegate, Salvador González Guerrero, is a retired Mexican Navy rear admiral.

The AP account further cited the attorney:

Campbell said his clients told him that one of the detained migrants asked a guard for a cigarette and a lighter and then five migrants who had been detained that day began to protest.

“The officials made fun of them, they got irritated, and two of them (migrants) set a mattress on fire,” Campbell said.

That was the moment, Campbell said, that immigration agents at the facility notified González of the fire and he “told them not to do anything and under no circumstances should they let them leave.”

The INM facility was already overcrowded. “A Mexican federal official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity” told the Los Angeles Times that “68 men were packed into a cell meant for no more than 50 people — with no access to drinking water.”

Mexican authorities had detained most or all of the migrants earlier on the 27th, on the streets of Ciudad Juárez. After a March 12 incident when hundreds of migrants massed at one of the border bridges between the city and El Paso (see WOLA’s March 17 Border Update), security and migration forces began taking a more aggressive stance toward the growing population of migrants stranded in the city by Title 42 and other policies.

After that incident, Ciudad Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar said, “the truth is that our level of patience is running out. We’re going to have a stronger posture.” Operations intensified against migrants—many of them Venezuelan—who have become a greater presence on the city’s streets, often begging or trying to earn cash selling food or washing windshields.

Even before that, on March 9, more than 30 local migrant shelters and advocacy organizations had written an open letter accusing authorities of “criminalizing” migrants and asylum seekers, using excessive force and carrying out sweeps to detain migrants off of the streets.

After the tragedy, Mayor Pérez Cuéllar denied that migrants had been rounded up. But migrants’ testimonies signaled otherwise.

• “I was at a stoplight with a piece of cardboard asking for what I needed for my children, and people were helping me with food” on the 27th, a woman migrant told the Associated Press, when “suddenly agents came and detained everyone.”
• Another, who told the El Paso Times that her family had legal permission to be in Mexico, said, “They didn’t ask if we were legal, if we had papers. They just said, ‘Are you Venezuelan? Let’s go.’”
• A Venezuelan man told AFP that agents tricked him into accompanying them to the facility with a false promise of a work permit.

Several dozen were brought to the INM detention facility, but women and children were later released. All of the fire’s victims were men.

In a statement, Mexico’s INM pledged to cooperate with official investigations and support the victims and their families. On March 30, a federal prosecutor issued arrest warrants for three INM officials, two private security guards contracted by INM, and the person accused of starting the fire.

International responses came from many quarters. UN Secretary General António Guterres stated that he was “deeply saddened” and called for a “thorough investigation.” Pope Francis called on people to pray for the victims. “The extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this,” said Felipe Gonzalez Morales, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants.

“Civil society organizations have repeatedly called for an end to the institutional harassment that the population in mobility contexts is suffering in Ciudad Juárez,” a statement from more than 200 Mexican organizations read, recalling that a September 2022 visit to the detention facility where the tragedy occurred found miserable conditions for those held within. The groups called for the resignation of INM Commissioner Francisco Garduño, who has a career in politics, including in Mexico’s prison system.

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.

This week:

• As the Department of Homeland Security announced a new initiative against cross-border fentanyl trafficking, the synthetic opioid appears now to be transiting more through Arizona than through California. Mexico’s production of the drug has become a thorny issue in the bilateral relationship.
• Asylum seekers used the CBP One smartphone app 742 times per day in February to secure appointments at ports of entry, only a fraction of demand. Issues with the app remain so widespread that humanitarian workers in Mexican border cities are spending much of their time offering “tech support.”
• A rally, with strong words from one of San Diego’s congressional representatives, rejected CBP’s plans to build taller segments of border wall through “Friendship Park,” the only federally sanctioned place where friends and relatives on both sides of the fence can meet in person.

Cross-border fentanyl trafficking shifting from California to Arizona

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Mariposa port of entry in Nogales, Arizona on March 21 to commemorate the launch of “Operation Blue Lotus,” a “surge operation” targeting cross-border fentanyl smuggling, which is now increasingly happening in Arizona.

With an increase in targeted inspections and recent installation of a “multi-energy portal (non-intrusive inspection technology or NII)” scanner at the Mariposa port, Mayorkas said that the operation had led to 18 drug seizures during its first week (March 13-19), including “over 900 pounds of fentanyl, over 700 pounds of methamphetamines, and over 100 pounds of cocaine.” The “portal” is the first of two that DHS expects to install at the Nogales border crossing.

The 900 pounds of fentanyl seized in a week is equal to about 19 days’ worth of CBP’s Arizona seizures in February, when the agency confiscated 1,300 pounds of the potent opioid.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement administration considers 2 milligrams of fentanyl to be a “potentially lethal dose;” if the 900 pounds seized were one-half pure, then they would be about 100 million such doses. That traffickers ( reportedly dominated by Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels) are willing to risk losing so much product indicates how cheap fentanyl is to produce, and how compact and easy to smuggle it is.

Since October 2022 (the start of the government’s 2023 fiscal year, which is on pace to break past years’ records), 92 percent of U.S. border authorities’ fentanyl seizures have occurred at ports of entry, the official border crossings. The remaining 8 percent was seized by Border Patrol agents between the ports of entry.

Breaking down this seizure data by month and sector shows a significant shift, starting in the summer and fall of 2022. San Diego (blue and brown on the below chart) had long made up the overwhelming majority of border fentanyl seizures. Rather suddenly, Arizona (green, plus the small red bits) is now where more than half of the drug appears to be crossing.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, caused a stir over the past two weeks by repeatedly claiming, without evidence, that Mexico does not produce fentanyl. His own presidential security briefings, most recently on March 7, along with military press releases, document large-scale seizures of the drug. While López Obrador sought to clarify that Mexican organized crime only has pill presses and does not manufacture the drug itself, the Wall Street Journal was able to visit a fentanyl lab in Sinaloa in 2022.

CBP One’s bumpy adoption continues

The Biden administration’s most recent court filing (dated March 16), the result of a Republican states-led lawsuit to preserve Title 42, includes statistics about asylum-seeking migrants who were able to secure appointments at border ports of entry using the “CBP One” smartphone app in February.

20,778 asylum seekers, 742 per day, were able to secure appointments under a system of Title 42 exemptions. That is up from 706 per day in January (21,881 total), when DHS switched—on January 18—from a less-formal Title 42 exemptions system to full use of the CBP One app.

As noted in several past Border Updates, migrants seeking appointments continue to experience problems with the app, including lack of internet access while fleeing, frequent crashes, limited languages (error messages are in English), and a facial capture feature that is widely reported as not responding to people with darker skin. The largest issue, though, continues to be the small number of daily appointments available, a fraction of current levels of protection-seeking migration.