Join me virtually this coming Monday evening for the National Immigrant Solidarity Rally and screening of the excellent documentary Borderland: the Line Within, which is viewable online today and through the weekend.

Join me virtually this coming Monday evening for the National Immigrant Solidarity Rally and screening of the excellent documentary Borderland: the Line Within, which is viewable online today and through the weekend.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This email has a link to the Border Update, a podcast about the Alien Enemies Act, two posts about some of the people who got sent to El Salvador’s terror prison, some links to recent coverage of Colombia’s peace process, a few shorter posts about border security and human rights, some readings from the past week, and links to upcoming events. (That’s quite a bit for five days since the last update.)
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Over a space of 30 hours on Thursday and Friday, I’m producing a podcast and a Border Update, speaking on a panel, and have 6 other meetings. Plus, my daughter is home from college for spring break, and I’d like to see her.
So don’t expect much posting here or on social media for the rest of the week, and please understand that I will probably be unable to return messages for a little while. Back soon!
Durante un espacio de 30 horas el jueves y el viernes, estoy produciendo un podcast y un Border Update, hablando en un panel y tengo otras 6 reuniones. Además, mi hija está de visita por las vacaciones de primavera de su universidad, y me gustaría verla.
Así que no espere muchas publicaciones aquí o en las redes sociales durante el resto de la semana, y por favor, comprenda que probablemente no podré responder mensajes durante este rato. ¡Volveré pronto!
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the Border Update, a timeline of the Alien Enemies Act judicial order-ignoring fiasco, some links to recent coverage of organized crime-tied corruption in the Americas, some recommended readings, and links to upcoming events.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the Border Update, a WOLA podcast about the Mexico tariff nonsense, videos of three recent interviews in English, some links to recent coverage of arms transfers in the Americas, some recommended readings, and links to upcoming events.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the latest Border Update, a subject index to this year’s Updates so far, a brand-new analysis of the military’s role in migration control, a podcast with colleagues at the border in Nogales, links to upcoming events, and two sets of recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the latest Border Update, media of two interviews about the border and migration, and a joint statement with colleagues at the border. It has links to events and some recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the latest Border Update and our analysis of the USAID aid freeze. It has a video I made while walking around a deserted downtown Washington looking at all the hotspots where a coup is reportedly taking place inside. It has links to events and some recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one is jam-packed because between testifying in the Senate, taking my kid to college six states away, and dealing with Trump’s first days and Colombia deportation fiasco, it’s been hard to find the time to assemble an email. So this edition has some serious accumulated density.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
My posting schedule is all thrown off by travel and testifying in Congress, so this one is late and the next one probably will be, too. But when a lot is going on, there’s a lot to inform about, so I’ll keep these coming.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It may be the last update I’ll send until the weekend of January 11-12. Next week, the last full week before Christmas, is a slow one, and I hope to hunker down and finish a big project (coding, not writing) that I’ve had on the shelf for months. I’ll unveil it at some point next year. So I don’t plan to produce much next week, other than a Border Update. If I do send another message next weekend, it will be thin.
This one is reasonably thick, though: in addition to the Border Update, below you’ll find a great podcast about Colombia, an exploration of the myth that Joe Biden was “soft” on border security and migration, a dig into migration data from the Darién Gap, links to some good readings, and links to three Latin America-related events that I know of during this last working week of 2024.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; an “explainer” and a podcast about Trump already starting to threaten Mexico; some notes on Trump’s troubling nominee to head Customs and Border Protection; two pieces about remarkable border and migration data; a CNN Español interview about Colombia; links to some good readings; and links to 10 upcoming Latin America-related events.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; some links to coverage of organized crime-tied government corruption during the past month; five interesting readings from last week; and some other items that I’ve posted here over the past week.
There are no “upcoming events” in the e-mail, nor will I post any here. Next week is punctuated by the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States (Thursday the 28th), so little will be happening. I will also skip next week’s e-mail update.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; a set of resolutions for post-election daily life; a WOLA podcast episode about what awaits us; an overview of border and migration trends through the end of the U.S. government’s 2024 fiscal year; next week’s relevant events that I know of; five interesting readings from last week; and a self-evaluation of a year of “daily border links” posts.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
On November 27, 2023, with a U.S. presidential election nearly a year away, WOLA’s border and migration program embarked on a “rapid response” strategy to add facts and context to the narrative about one of the upcoming campaign’s main issues.
That day, we published the first of what would be 185 “Daily Border Links” posts totaling over 150,000 words (plus the link citations).
This was a key part of our “rapid response” strategy because it forced me to do the reading and to be excruciatingly up to date on every development and data point. It was an excellent tool for reaching journalists and fellow activists, experts, and service providers. It helped shape some news coverage, and I know that many people in government were reading it.
The idea was to run the Daily Border Links for a year, through U.S. Election Day, and then shut them down and move on. I would entertain the idea of continuing them if the level of demand and engagement was spectacular.
In the end, the level of demand for the “links” posts was healthy enough to have made it more than a worthwhile effort. But it was not overwhelming enough to merit continuing it beyond the election campaign year.
Here’s an evaluation of the experience:
During key moments like an election year, furrowing our brow to do rapid-response news-digging and analysis made sense, and I know the links posts inspired some good media reporting, alerted allies to emerging trends and challenges, and improved our audiences’ access to facts (if those matter anymore). But now, I need to spend more time on work that is less shallow, that adds more value, and that doesn’t require racing to put something out by 9:00 AM.
So now, 347 days after the first post, the last “Daily Border Links” went up today, and there’s no plan to restart. Some colleagues have contacted me to lament this. They have a point: the Trump transition and the first 100 days are a time when our community could really use daily updates.
But WOLA doesn’t have the resources to maintain this pace right now. Like many NGOs that do human rights advocacy without U.S. government funding, we’re in a lean moment.
I suppose I could be convinced to continue producing them if we had specific philanthropic resources to pay for the big investment in staff time they require. However, institutional funders are less interested in backing national-level “narrative work” about borders and migration right now.
You could see the sector-wide lack of resources in major outlets’ campaign coverage, which tended to cite, repeatedly, a small number of border and migration experts. We’re the handful of people who’ve managed to make a living being credible sources of information and clear explainers, while more current and wide-ranging than our counterparts in academia. (No shade to academia, which rewards deeper specialization and a slower, more deliberate pace, not “rapid response” on a spectrum of issues. Imagine trying to do that while teaching a full courseload.)
Without foundation or big individual donor grant money, could we sustain a continued pace of Daily Links posts by charging people to get them, like a Substack model? Perhaps, but I’m not sure the numbers work for something this niche.
For the number of hours I spent on the daily links—news-gathering, reading, writing, all those mailings and social media cross-posts—plus the WOLA infrastructure that makes it possible, I’d conservatively need $3,500 per month. That’s $4,000-4,500 if you include time spent on the weekly updates, too. That would be 400 people paying $10 per month each, or 800 people paying $5 per month.
Given the traffic indicators I mentioned above, that seems unlikely. If we added a paywall (which many Substacks don’t do, asking for voluntary contributions), we’d be shutting down distribution to those who don’t cough up the money, thus negating the original goal of getting friction-free information to as many people as possible.
So that’s more than you probably wanted to know about our foray into producing daily, rapid-response content during an election year. I’m glad I did it, and I’m proud that I never missed a day without giving advance warning first. I certainly don’t rule out doing it again when the need arises.
There are moments each year when all my intentions to maintain an up-to-date, compelling, thoughtful personal website just fall apart, sunk by an armada of 70-hour weeks.
I’m emerging (I hope) from one of those moments. In the last seven days, I’ve:
Today, other than an interview this morning, I’ve got a clear calendar, finally. I’m washing clothes, taking a breath, answering messages (sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you, not that you’re likely to be reading this), planing out the next few weeks, and maybe getting rid of the stubborn cough I’ve had for two weeks (it’s not COVID).
One thing I miss during these “high season” moments is having the chance to share more here. This site is a good space for me to get my thoughts together, sharing information and insights that are deeper than a tweet, but not requiring full editorial review or an institutional voice.
I’d like to share more of that, and to have more time to do the reading on which a lot of it is based. But most of my recent posts to this site have been brief, sporadic links, graphics, or border updates, which are not quite the same. It’s not my goal to run a news-brief service.
I may remain in this rut, though, at least through the U.S. elections: such are the demands of “rapid response,” and I’ll also be spending part of next week at a conference in Guatemala, so there will be a bit of travel.
However, I expect some gradual but steady evolution in the coming weeks as I return to this space and use it more to develop ideas and future work.
That future work will be more on the “security and U.S. policy” side of my advocacy and research, where I’ve allowed a lot of weeds to grow during the past few years as my “borders and migration” focus intensified.
This year, though, WOLA has seen a decline in funding for borders-and-migration work. By no means will I abandon that work, which is very important to me even as it’s hard to promise short-term positive change. Still, as the election-period “rapid response” phase draws to a close, I do expect to turn the dial back toward the “defense oversight” work denoted by my job title.
That means more attention to security policy (what’s up with the “Bukele model?”), U.S. assistance (what’s Southcom up to?), state presence and governance (what’s happening with the Colombian peace accord’s “rural reform” promises? or in the Darién Gap?), organized crime and corruption (Ecuador’s crisis, drug policy challenges), and, yes, borders and migration (all of the above topics as they relate to migrants, plus accountability for abuse and corruption).
I look forward to this site reflecting that shift. It will be happening just as we get a new administration and Congress here in Washington. The election’s two possible outcomes point to two starkly different futures.
Neither promises a golden age for a rights-based U.S. policy toward Latin America. But one outcome promises gradual progress, while the other calls for defending what and whom we can, whenever we can, through a long, dark night.
It’s going to be endlessly interesting, and I’ll aim to document as much of it as I can here, even as these “busy seasons” come and go.
As the Democratic Party’s convention launched in Chicago, its platform, published Monday, includes language calling for changes in the law curtailing asylum access at the border during busy times, as is currently happening under the Biden administration’s June 4 asylum rule. Under a section entitled “Temporary Emergency Authority to Shut Down the Border,” the platform—a non-binding document—suggests:
When the system is overwhelmed, the President should have emergency authority to expel migrants who are crossing unlawfully and stop processing asylum claims except for those using a safe and orderly process at Ports of Entry. The authority should be accompanied by humanitarian exceptions for vulnerable populations including unaccompanied children and victims of trafficking.
In remarks to the Convention on Monday evening, President Biden hailed the drop in migration that took place in the first weeks after the asylum-restriction rule went into effect:
Then I had to take executive action. The result of the executive action I took: border encounters have dropped over 50%. In fact, there are fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office. And unlike Trump, we will not demonize immigrants, saying they’re the poison of the blood of America, poison the blood of our country.
A look at the Border Patrol sectors that report weekly data points to this initial drop in migration leveling off by mid-July; Border Patrol apprehensions have been largely flat since then.
Panama today will begin deporting some migrants aboard U.S.-funded deportation flights after they exit the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route from Colombia.
The U.S. government has reportedly allocated $6 million to support those flights. Assuming $500 per deportee, that would be enough to remove 12,000 people, equivalent to 6 percent of the migrant population in the Darién region during the first half of 2024.
At least the initial flights will go from Panama to Colombia, the country from which migrants entered. As Colombians are only about 6 percent of migrants passing through the Darién, most of those aboard the planes will probably be citizens of other countries, mainly Venezuela (65 percent of Darién migrants).
Analyzing Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) recently released data about Border Patrol apprehensions reveals that despite heavy investment in its “Operation Lone Star” crackdown, Texas has not experienced steeper migration declines than Arizona, where the Democratic governor has not pursued similar hard-line measures.
These data are derived from CBP’s reporting of “U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations Encounters by State,” subtracting Laredo and El Paso Field Office port-of-entry encounters from Texas, Tucson Field Office port-of-entry encounters from Arizona, and San Diego Field Office port-of-entry encounters from California. (A small number of New Mexico port of entry encounters gets subtracted from Texas, as they fall under the El Paso Field Office; this makes Texas’s decline look slightly steeper than it is.)
A boy from southern Mexico seeking to migrate to the United States was killed, and eight people from Ecuador, Africa, and Mexico were wounded, when assailants opened fire on the vehicle in which they were traveling in Mexico’s border state of Sonora, across from Arizona. The attack may have been related to violent competition between migrant smugglers.
Migrant rights activist Abraham Monarez told Ciudad Juárez’s Norte that the number of migrants in the Mexican border city has plummeted because of the Mexican government’s operations to remove migrants to the southern part of the country, and because people find they can seek CBP One appointments from elsewhere in Mexico. Many who come to Juárez are staying in hotels instead of shelters, Monarez said. “Now, when they get their appointment at CBP, that’s when they move” north from places further south, like Mexico City.
“As Colombians try to settle down in Denver, they often feel overlooked” amid a larger number of asylum seekers from Venezuela who have received more attention from service providers, the Denver Post reported.
Just because it seemed like an interesting thing to do, I’ve linked this site to ActivityPub. Which means you can catch every post by following it from Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma, or any other Fediverse application.
The address is @adamisacson@adamisacson.com.
(And as the graphic indicates, each post has its own unique shortlink using the domain “admis.me.” I figured out how to do that myself. Fancy.)
I can’t really say that I’m in “sabbatical mode” yet, but I’m laying the groundwork, I suppose?
I’d stayed up a bit too late last night learning how to use Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot for my upcoming coding projects, and then I couldn’t stop myself from writing a data-heavy post about border trends. Knowing that I didn’t have to report to work the next day let me follow the topic wherever it took me, and by the time I looked up from my screen, it was 12:30 AM.
Though I was up later than on a regular work day, this morning otherwise looked like…a regular work day. I wanted to go through my news feeds and create a daily border links post because it’s impossible to look away from Senate Democrats’ deeply regrettable decision to move forward with asylum-restrictions legislation this week.
I also guest-taught a class of U.S. diplomats via Zoom. It was my second time trying out a 45-minute presentation about Latin America’s security challenges. The narrative flows across these topics:
While I’m on this sabbatical, I hope to polish this talk some more, then post a screencast delivering the narrative as audio over my slides.
After that talk, I spoke to a journalist about border trends for half an hour. Then I took my daughter out to the suburbs and sat in a cafe while she got a haircut. While in the cafe, I put out one of my weekly (OK, not quite “weekly”) emails to my mailing list.
I paid a quick visit to the grocery store after that, and upon returning home found on the doorstep some items that I’d ordered when I was in Medellín last week. I’m on a tight budget—non-profit salary, child at a private college—but had thought it would be worthwhile to set up a basic screen shelter and some sort of outdoor furniture in our tiny urban back yard.
More than two hours of assembly later, here it is. I now have an extremely rustic “writing shed” to work in during the coming months.
I’m writing in it now, and it’s just barely starting to feel, maybe, like I’m on sabbatical.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be working on some of the projects I’d discussed in my “sabbatical coming” post from last week. In the afternoon, though, I’ll be going to the Nationals baseball game with my mother and her husband, who live out in the suburbs. The weather is supposed to be perfect.
See also:
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has highlights from last week’s trip to Medellín, some writing and data work about the border, and some thoughts on my two-month work sabbatical, which started yesterday. There are also weekly events links (16 of them) and links to some good readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
I keep a little webpage that generates tables of data about migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, using CBP’s regularly updated dataset.
For weeks, I’ve wanted to have the ability to sort the tables by clicking on their column headers. It seemed like a big job, though, especially figuring out how to keep the columns’ totals at the bottom, not included in the sort.
This evening, though, I thought to ask ChatGPT—and it gave me exactly what I wanted, with only a couple of dozen lines of code. Here’s what the tables can do now:
The whole process took less than 20 minutes: two queries and me copy-pasting the code into the page. It works flawlessly, which is very cool, and perhaps a bit creepy.
That’s it until July 22. I won’t be in my office for more than two months, unless I’ve forgotten something.
I’m off to Medellín tomorrow morning for an academic conference about migration. I return Saturday. And on Monday, my two-month sabbatical begins.
WOLA gives us a sabbatical every five years: a time to reflect and work on other projects. My last one was in the fall of 2015. Between the pandemic and my procrastination on the “sabbatical proposal,” it’s taken me eight and a half years to start a new one.
I’m lucky to have it. This is a much different period of my life than last time.
My work plan for 2024 called for focusing on communications. (How could it be otherwise: I work on borders and migration during the 2024 election year. There’s a lot to communicate.) If you follow this site, you’ve seen that reflected in daily and weekly border updates, other written and quantitative work, lots of social media, and perhaps some regular-media appearances.
That work has been going well: I think it’s been the right strategic choice. But this late spring-early summer interlude is very welcome.
Lately, a typical week has included at least a dozen interviews, a few coalition meetings, a few internal meetings, and 20-25 email and text replies per day, on top of the writing and updates. Work that requires deeper thought has been falling behind.
So I’m ready to at least log out of WhatsApp and miss some of those meetings. The border updates will be infrequent, too, though I don’t plan to shut them down entirely. (I’m still reading the news.)
Now that there’s a chance, though, there’s a lot to think about.
In addition to all these things to think about, I’ve got projects that I’m eager to pursue, but haven’t had the time.
I know this is a lot. I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t do all of these things, and I certainly don’t want to finish the sabbatical more tired than I started it. But if I spend this time well, I’ll emerge able to contribute more, and more creatively, for many years.
Finally, all of this means that you should not take it personally if I don’t answer your email right away, or if I end up ghosting your WhatsApp message or missing your DM. This is why I’m in “slow response” mode, and I’ll be back soon enough.
This site has been quiet this week. It will remain so for a bit longer, then I expect to be posting way more than usual.
In about half an hour, I’m headed downtown to WOLA’s 50th anniversary celebration and human rights award dinner. I’m looking forward to seeing dozens of people I’m very fond of, and whom I haven’t seen in a long time.
Tomorrow, I’m off to Massachusetts to pick my kid up at college (sophomore year, incredibly, is over). On the way back, I’ll be seeing an old high school friend in New Jersey, where I grew up.
Then on Tuesday, I’m off to Medellín for three days, to participate in a conference on migration at Colombia’s National University.
When I return a week from Saturday, things get interesting. I’ve got a two-month sabbatical. (WOLA encourages staff to take sabbaticals every five years; in my case, it’s been eight and a half years.)
I’ll be traveling to Bogotá for a few days in June for the LASA Congress, and to El Paso for three weeks in June and July for a “change of scene.”
Both while traveling and while at home, I want to do some deep thinking and also some work on a “coding project” that I’ll discuss here along the way. Actually, it’s two coding projects, but I’ll see how much I manage to accomplish. Like a carpenter who makes his own hammers, I’m fashioning tools that will help me do my work better when I come back.
During those two months, once I catch up on all the accumulated sleep deprivation, I expect to have a lot more unstructured time than usual. That means I’ll be harder to reach, because a sabbatical full of meetings and emails isn’t a sabbatical at all.
I’ll be posting to this site often, though. One idea I’ve had, which I’m not ready to commit to, is to post an original entry every evening, so that I can have a record of this mid-career time “out of the fray.” Those records and ruminations may be of more value to me than to readers, but I guess that’s the whole point of running a personal website.
So be warned, for a couple of months this site may depart dramatically from the “daily border links” and “infographics” groove that it has slipped into lately. I look forward to spending more time here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update, an analysis of why migration is unexpectedly declining at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year, a look at the link between cocaine trafficking and violence in Ecuador, and a podcast about international drug policy. Also, links to some really good readings, and to 11 Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update with a bit too much data, a roundup of arms transfers that took place in the Americas over the past month (way too many), links to five really good “long reads” about security in the Americas over the past month, and some notes about asylum access at the U.S.-Mexico border. Also, links to some really good readings, and to six Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update after an eventful week; a few charts showing what appears to be an unusual spring migration slowdown at the U.S.-Mexico border (but not on the migrant route further south); some links from the past month about civil-military relations; and some other interesting odds and ends. Also, links to some really good readings, and to six Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
At the end of the day Friday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration and drug seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border through February. Within minutes, I added the migration data to my online tool that helps you search it, cbpdata.adamisacson.com. I’m glad this is so easy to do now.
Here’s what you get when you search for border authorities’ encounters with migrants during the first five months of the U.S. government’s 2024 fiscal year, listed by nationality. (This is everything: both migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between the ports of entry, and migrants—mostly “CBP One” appointments—who arrived at the ports of entry.) You can see an increase over January, but still well below late last year.
Visit the “cpbdata” tool to view migration data by country, by demographic category, by geographic area, and to see years going back to 2020. I’ll be updating our collection of infographics over the next several days.
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.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update; a screencast video where I give a lengthy “Border and Migration 101” presentation; a long written piece about why it will harm people—but make little overall difference at the border—if the Biden administration starts blocking asylum seekers; some links from the past month about organized crime-tied corruption; and an argument for the urgently opening up more asylum appointments at border ports of entry. Also, links to some really good readings, and to 11 Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one has a Weekly Border Update; a new mini-report plus a podcast about security in Ecuador; and a breakdown with links explaining the past month in Colombia’s peace process. Also, links to some good readings, and to an incredible 46 Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week (counting Inter-American Human Rights Commission hearings). It’s going to be a busy week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.