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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Border Security

January 19, 2025 — 0

“Migrant Crime” is a Distraction, and the Laken Riley Act is a Dangerous Bill

I got in a shouting match with Sen. Josh Hawley in a hearing. Here's evidence backing up my arguments about "migrant crime" and the Laken Riley Act.

Another congressional hearing testimony, another nasty shouting match. These aren’t fun because you don’t have the floor, but you have to stand up to bullies.

If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s how the Fox News website covered it:

“Here’s Laken Riley,” said Hawley as her picture was posted behind him. “Her murder, her horrific murder at the hands of this illegal migrant who was also unlawfully paroled in the United States. [Is] her death not an actual issue?”

The activist, Adam Isacson, who works as director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, responded by saying: “Of course it’s an issue, it’s a tragedy.”

“I didn’t say that Laken Riley’s death was not an actual issue, I said that migrant crime is not an actual issue,” said Isacson. “Migrant crime is much less of an issue than U.S. citizen-committed crime.”

To which Hawley answered, “[Riley] is dead because of migrant crime.”

Sen. Hawley was citing these two sentences from a March 1, 2024 “Border Update” video. (It took me a while even to find it, because things said in videos don’t show up in online searches. That’s good opposition research.)

The horrific murder of a nursing student in Georgia has a lot of people on the right talking about ‘migrant crime’ like it’s an actual issue. But the data, in fact, show that migrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens.

Of course I stand by that. I’m telling the truth. Evidence shows that migrants—undocumented, asylum-seeking, and otherwise—commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens. If you’re governing a community and want to make sure it’s protected from crime, you’re doing it wrong if you divert law enforcement resources to targeting immigrants, who (with tragic exceptions because all humans commit crimes) break laws less often.

Here are some the of sources I was drawing from at the time:

  • “Illegal Immigrants Have a Low Homicide Conviction Rate” by Cato Institute expert Alex Nowrasteh
  • Washington Post fact-checker: “Immigrants tend to be more law-abiding“
  • NBC News: “Trump’s claims of a migrant crime wave are not supported by national data“
  • “More recently, there’s been an explosion of research in this area because of public perception and interest. And what’s pretty amazing is, across all this research, by and large, we find that immigrants do not engage in more crime than native-born counterparts, and immigration actually can cause crime to go down, rather than up, so quite contrary to public perception.” — Charis Kurbin of UC Irvine, author of the book Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, on PBS Newshour.
  • “The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.” — writer Anne Applebaum, author of a few books about democracy and authoritarianism, on Twitter.

In full smarm mode, Sen. Hawley feigned shock that a witness invited by the Democrats might oppose the Laken Riley Act, a bad bill. In fact, more than three-quarters of Senate Democrats voted against it on Friday: it avoided a U.S. Senate filibuster due to just 10 Democratic senators’ votes.

This bill is almost certainly unconstitutional and could harm innocent people, some of them people seeking protection in the United States:

  • It will require migrants—including those with documented status like DACA and TPS recipients, and people with pending asylum cases—to be detained until an immigration judge resolves their cases, which could take a year or more, if they’re accused of minor crimes like shoplifting. And I mean “accused”: the text of the law reads “is charged with, is arrested for.” They don’t have to be found guilty in court: all it takes is a false accusation that leads to an arrest, even for allegedly stealing a candy bar from a CVS. “Innocent until proven guilty” goes out the window. The potential for abuse is tremendous.
  • It gives state attorneys-general superpowers to sue to block aspects of U.S. immigration law, disfiguring the federal government’s ability to carry out immigration policies for the greater good. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent pointed out, this could even cause a schism within MAGA. Trump backers who oppose legal immigration, like Steve Bannon, have been in a public fight with Trump’s tech-sector backers, like Elon Musk, over visas for skilled overseas workers. Bannon will need only enlist an attorney-general like Texas’s Ken Paxton to sue to block migrants from, say India, from where companies like Musk’s hire many immigrants.

The hearing episode got me a wave of insults on social media and in my comms accounts from people who hate migrants or think I somehow don’t care about a tragic murder. Most of the insults are lame and probably written by people in Belarus, but some of them (like “beta-male f*ckstick”) are sheer poetry and I plan to use them.

See also:

January 16, 2025 — 0

Today’s testimony

Overview of my testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on the "Remain in Mexico" program.

It was fun—at times—to engage with senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this morning on Republican-led proposals to revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy. There’s a lot to say about it and I’ll post more later. For now:

WOLA’s landing page is here. Here’s the text of my opening statement:

Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today.

I did a lot of fieldwork and data work along the U.S.-Mexico border when Remain in Mexico—MPP—was first implemented. The evidence I saw is clear: Remain in Mexico enriched cartels. It failed to meaningfully deter migration. And it soured relations with a key ally. Pursuing it again would harm U.S. interests.

Instead, I urge this Committee to focus on fixing our asylum system. That system saves tens of thousands of lives each year, but we need it to be both fair and efficient. No one supports the idea of five-year waits for asylum decisions: the backlogs create a pull factor of their own. But this is an administrative challenge, and the U.S. government is good at handling administrative challenges. It’s just a question of processing, case management, and adjudication.

People truly did suffer while remaining in Mexico. I personally heard harrowing accounts of torture and abuse. Nearly all of that abuse was the work of organized crime groups, or cartels.

The cartels’ cruelty and sadism wasn’t just a human rights issue, though. These criminals aren’t barbaric just for its own sake. This is their economic model, and that makes it a national security issue.

Organized crime is trying to extract as much money out of migrants and their loved ones as it can while those migrants are present on the “turf” that they control. Cartels fight each other for this business.

“Remain in Mexico” kept migrants on cartels’ turf for very long periods of time: months or even years in Mexican border cities waiting for their hearings. MPP created a new market opportunity for cartels.

That’s a big difference from CBP One. The app also requires months-long waits to come to a U.S. port of entry, but it makes it easier to wait elsewhere, in parts of Mexico that are safer than its northern border zone, where states are under State Department travel warnings because of cartel crime and kidnapping.

When outsiders are waiting for months in Mexico’s border zone, they are sitting ducks for the cartels:

  • First, there was extortion: foreigners had to pay just to exist for that long in cartel-controlled neighborhoods. If you don’t pay, it’s not safe to go outside your shelter.
  • Second, if people wanted to give up on the long wait for MPP, cartels offered “coyote” services: the chance to cross the border and try to evade Border Patrol. They charge several thousand dollars for that.
  • Third was kidnapping for ransom: cartels held people in horrific conditions, raping and torturing them, as their relatives—frequently in the United States—had to wire thousands of dollars to free them.

The financial scale of this exploitation is staggering. Let’s consider it. Take a conservative estimate of $1,000 per migrant in extortions, ransoms, or coyote fees—I ran that figure by some border-area experts and they laughed at how low that estimated amount is. Multiply that by 71,000 people in MPP, and you get $71 million in cartel profits, an amount equal to the annual base salaries of 1,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents.

For all that, Remain in Mexico didn’t really do that much to reduce or control migration.

For more than 10 years now, there’s been a series of crackdowns on asylum seekers. My testimony maps them out in a graphic. These crackdowns follow the same pattern: you get an initial drop in migration numbers, it lasts a few months, and then there’s a rebound.

Title 42 and its expansions? A classic example. So was “Remain in Mexico.”

After it expanded in June 2019, Border Patrol’s apprehensions did fall for four months. Then the migration numbers plateaued—at the same level they were in mid-2018. In fact, at the same level as the Obama administration’s eight-year monthly average. And that’s where the numbers stayed.

And then in the first months of 2020, Border Patrol apprehensions started rising. They were on pace to grow by a double-digit percentage from February to March. But then COVID came, and all but ended March 10 days early.

Title 42 ended up eclipsing Remain in Mexico: no more hearing dates; asylum seekers got expelled. Remain in Mexico became irrelevant and the Trump administration rarely used it again.

MPP also strained relations with Mexico. The Mexican government at first resisted the program, agreeing to it only after very heavy diplomatic pressure. This complicated cooperation on other shared priorities.

There are a lot of those priorities, from trade to fentanyl. Mexico is one of the ten largest countries in the world, with the 14th-largest economy. The border is just one reason why the United States needs good relations with Mexico.

Compelling Mexico to agree to a new Remain in Mexico takes bandwidth away from those priorities. Why do all that for a policy that actually enriches drug cartels? Why do all that for a policy that doesn’t even have a clear and lasting effect on migration?

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

See also:

January 13, 2025 — 0

Testifying in the Senate Thursday morning

Tune in at 9:00 Eastern on Thursday when I testify in the Senate Homeland Security Committee in opposition to proposals to restart the "Remain in Mexico" program.
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs Full Committee Hearing Remain in Mexico Date: January 16, 2025 Time: 9:00am Location: Senate Dirksen Building, SD-342 THE HONORABLE KENNETH CUCCINELLI Former Senior Official Performing the Duties of Deputy Secretary (2019-2021) U.S. Department of Homeland Security ANDREW R. ARTHUR Resident Fellow in Law and Policy Center for Immigration Studies ADAM ISACSON Director for Defense Oversight The Washington Office on Latin America

Tune in at 9:00 Eastern on Thursday when I testify in the Senate Homeland Security Committee in opposition to proposals to restart the “Remain in Mexico” program.

Remain in Mexico was a human rights travesty. It enriched Mexican organized crime. It complicated U.S.-Mexico relations. And in the end, it didn’t do much to deter migrants.

I look forward to making all of those points in a few days. Wish me luck—and I apologize if not much gets posted here over the next few days while I prepare testimony.

January 10, 2025 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: January 10, 2025

Republican-led Congress Accelerating Border and Migration Agenda; Bracing for Executive Orders and “Mass Deportation”; Migration Appears to be Declining Ahead of Inauguration

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:

Read More
December 20, 2024 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: December 20, 2024

Signs of at least a modest pre-inauguration migration increase; Mass deportation; Auctioning unused border wall segments

Due to end-of-year staff vacation time, WOLA will not publish Border Updates for the next two weeks. Updates will resume on January 10, 2025.

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:

November data showed migration levels at the border continuing to decline following Donald Trump’s election, to such an extent that, for the first time, port-of-entry arrivals exceeded Border Patrol apprehensions. Still, some reports from Texas point to an increase in mid-December as some people try to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day. Rumors sent some migrants to attempt to turn themselves in at a border wall gate in El Paso, where state forces repelled them violently. Caravans continue to form in southern Mexico, but none remain intact beyond Mexico’s southernmost states.

As Trump administration officials ramp up plans to deport undocumented migrants on a massive scale likely requiring the use of military aircraft, concern is sweeping throughout communities where many families are “blended”: citizens living with non-citizens. Fear is spreading in south Texas, while council members and law enforcement in San Diego disagree on cooperation.

Conservative media and Donald Trump complained bitterly about the Biden administration’s auctioning off of border wall parts left over when construction halted after Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. In fact, the selloff was mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Read More
December 13, 2024 — 1

Did Joe Biden Encourage the Big 2021-2023 Migration Increase?

We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever.

If the text below reads like a Twitter thread, that’s where it comes from. It’s a response to arguments from New York Times columnist David Leonhardt making some sweeping mischaracterizations of what happened at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years.

Leonhardt’s words go a long way toward cementing in place a growing view in elite opinion that Democrats lost the election because Joe Biden’s administration was “too soft” on migrants. According to this view, the administration failed to crack down out of fear of offending “the groups”—in this case, migrants’ rights defenders.

In fact, Biden was never “soft” and the groups were disillusioned from the get-go. His revocation of a few of the most severely anti-migrant Trump policies does not explain why migration increased during his term. Leonhardt’s inaccurate claims risk pushing moderate Democrats—who read and cite him—into adopting much of Trump’s approach to the border and migration.

Here’s the thread, which is getting massive numbers on Twitter because of a boost from New Republic writer Greg Sargent.

We need to address this notion that Biden somehow swung the door open to migrants. He kept in place the harshest ban on asylum ever: Title 42. It just didn’t deter a migrant population that changed dramatically.

During Donald Trump’s term, 90+ percent of migrants were from Mexico and Central America (blue, green, brown, yellow in the chart below). If you were a migrant from those countries, your probability of being released into the United States after apprehension didn’t change much after Biden’s inauguration.

Data table

(An exception is unaccompanied children from Central America: Biden stopped Trump’s practice of expelling them, alone, back into their countries regardless of protection needs. The moral argument for doing that is self-evident, and it didn’t move the needle much overall.)

Migrants may have found Biden’s initial moves and rhetoric encouraging? But Biden kept in place Stephen Miller’s Title 42 expulsions policy, which shut down asylum for everyone who could be deported easily. Ending “Remain in Mexico” didn’t matter, Title 42 had eclipsed it.

This chart shows that the Biden administration continued applying Title 42, expelling people as vigorously as possible (orange). But yes, the chart shows a decline in the _percentage_ of people being expelled in 2021.

Data table

That is not Biden being soft-hearted toward migrants. Instead, it reflects a historic change in the migrant population: new nationalities began arriving in ways unimaginable before 2021.

Just as Joe Biden was being inaugurated, the world’s borders were opening up post-pandemic. So did new migration routes like the Darién Gap.

The U.S.-Mexico border became accessible to people from very distant countries. South America and beyond. This had never happened before. By 2023, Mexico and Central America were just 55 percent of migrants at the border. By early 2024, one in nine were from Europe, Asia, or Africa.

Data table

You may have noticed that these countries are far away. It’s costly to deport people to them—if it’s even possible diplomatically—because you have to fly them. More had to be released into the U.S. interior to seek asylum.

Expulsions across a land border are way cheaper than by air. Under Trump, Mexico agreed to take back Title 42 expulsions from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Biden admin worked on Mexico to agree to take expelled people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Biden expanded Title 42! It was a huge crackdown, especially on Mexicans and Central Americans (blue). But the overall flow of people from distant countries (green) was even larger, more than Mexico could absorb on its own.

When Title 42 ended, Biden placed a ban on asylum access on everyone who passed through a third country and didn’t get an asylum denial there. But the same challenge remained: people from distant countries who are hard to return. Numbers kept growing.

In late 2023, in yet another Biden crackdown, the admin leaned on Mexico to intensify its own efforts to block migrants crossing the country. It is unprecedented for Mexico to have sustained a migration crackdown for this long; they usually erode after a few months.

And then in June, Biden put in place an overall ban on asylum access between ports of entry, which lowered numbers further.

A common media question is “why did Biden wait so long” to ban asylum, a right enshrined in U.S. law. Because it’s probably illegal to do so? Because blanket bans on entry don’t apply to people who are already on U.S. soil, as courts told Trump?

In sum, it’s hard to argue that Biden did much to make the border more open for migrants. Those from Mexico and CentAm faced similar low odds of avoiding expulsion, compared to Trump. Those from elsewhere are harder to remove—but they are a new phenomenon Trump never faced.

This thread is already too long, so it doesn’t discuss the enormous human cost of these asylum denial policies, which WOLA and others have documented at length. That whole vital line of argument doesn’t seem to have much sway with the “Biden wasn’t harsh enough” crowd.

See also:

December 13, 2024 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: December 13, 2024

Congressional Republicans’ hardline early-2025 border agenda coming into focus. Setting the stage for mass deportation. The impact in Mexico and elsewhere along the migration route. Personnel changes at border and migration agencies.

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:

Following likely confirmation of the incoming Trump administration’s choice for Homeland Security secretary, the 119th Congress will move by late January on a package of hardline border and immigration measures whose total cost could be more than $100 billion. As it will move under a special Senate rule called “reconciliation,” it could pass the chamber, where Republicans lead by a 53-47 margin, by a simple majority.

Without offering much detail, President-Elect Trump and other White House officials have been previewing plans to carry out a promised campaign of mass deportations of undocumented migrants in the United States. They are exhibiting a willingness to deport U.S. citizen children together with their undocumented parents, and are preparing aggressive tactics against Democratic state and local officials who do not cooperate.

Many migrants cannot be deported quickly or inexpensively because they come from distant countries, or countries whose governments do not allow deportation flights. The incoming Trump administration is seeking third countries to accept some deportees, including a reluctant Mexico that may already find itself receiving large numbers of its own citizens across the land border. Impacts of imminent policy changes are evident all along the U.S.-bound migration route, including the Darién Gap which saw, in November, the lightest migration flow since April 2022.

The incoming administration announced nominees to head CBP and ICE, along with White House and ambassadorial choices. CBP nominee Rodney Scott, a former Border Patrol chief, is an outspoken critic of the Biden administration whose past activities raise concerns among rights defenders. A former Border Patrol union chief is the nominee to head the U.S. embassy in Chile.

THE FULL UPDATE:

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December 7, 2024 — 2

Notes on Trump’s Pick to Head CBP

We expect senators to ask tough questions about troubling allegations surrounding Trump's pick to head CBP.

President-Elect Trump has nominated Rodney Scott as the next commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. government’s leading border security agency, which includes Border Patrol and runs official border crossings from the Mexico border to ports and airports. Scott, a career Border Patrol agent, was chief of the Patrol during the last year of the Trump administration and the first few months of the Biden administration, which dismissed him.

In 2023, I launched a website that tracks allegations of abuse, corruption, and misconduct at U.S. border agencies through an online database. (This project has fallen out of date because it lacks funding—a grant ran out in early 2024. I’m working to convince philanthropic organizations to back the 10-12 expert person-hours per week that its upkeep would require, but I’ve had no luck so far.)

Rodney Scott comes up four times in this database. The often troubling events and allegations are below.

Late November 2021: Rodney Scott, the Trump administration’s last Border Patrol chief who exited his position in August, faced a San Diego Superior Court judge for a September tweet in which he advised former Border Patrol agent turned activist Jenn Budd, who has recounted being raped at the Border Patrol academy, to “lean back, close your eyes, and just enjoy the show.” [On December 6, 2024 Budd wrote on BlueSky, “The judge found that he did make the rape threat, he admitted to hav[ing] CBP open an investigation on me, & I still lost the case.”] Budd also posted screenshots on Twitter showing Scott among those on private CBP and Border Patrol agents’ Facebook groups sharing images of Border Patrol shoulder patches reading “Let’s Go Brandon,” a right-wing euphemism for “F— Joe Biden.”

October 25, 2021: A strongly (and explicitly) worded report from the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform, issued on October 25, detailed the disciplinary process following 2019 revelations of a secret Facebook page at which CBP personnel posted racist, violent, and lewd content (original link). The Committee discovered that for most involved, consequences were light: they “had their discipline significantly reduced and continued to work with migrants” (original link)… “CBP knew about Border Patrol agents’ inappropriate posts on ‘I’m 10-15’ since 2016, three years before it was reported publicly,” the House Committee found. Among the Facebook group’s members were Border Patrol’s last two chiefs, Carla Provost (2018-2020) and Rodney Scott (2020-August 2021). Both indicated that they followed the group in order to monitor agents’ attitudes and complaints.

September 29, 2021: A letter to Justice Department leadership and the DHS Inspector-General from Alliance San Diego alleged that former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who left his post in August 2021, had violated the Ethics in Government Act. Scott established a consulting firm in July 2021, while still working for Border Patrol. On September 18, he issued a Facebook request for active-duty CBP and ICE personnel to provide information, possibly including restricted information, “to counter the lies and missinformation [sic.] that the DHS Secretary and Biden officials spew everytime they speak about the border.”

January 27, 2021: Relatives of Anastasio Hernández Rojas filed a brief before the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, contending that Border Patrol covered up, and improperly interfered with the investigation of, agents’ role in Hernández’s 2010 death. Video showed numerous Border Patrol agents and CBP officers beating and tasing a hogtied and handcuffed Hernández to death. The brief contended that the acting deputy chief patrol agent in Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector at the time, Rodney Scott, signed a potentially illegal subpoena to obtain Hernández’s autopsy. (Scott went on to be Border Patrol chief from 2020 to 2021.)

In a thread on BlueSky, the CBP Watch coalition posted links to news coverage of additional allegations:

  • In June 2018, during the height of the uproar over the Trump administration’s separations of migrant parents and children, Scott told Politico, “I would like to remind people too, when we look at a child in the United States and say, ‘Oh, that 14-year-old young man,’ or, ‘That’s an adult in a lot of other countries. That kid’s been working for years, may or may not have been associated with gangs.’ A lot of times, especially if there’s any kind of a use of force or a violent encounter with law enforcement, and the person’s under 18, people get this picture in their head that it’s like the kid that lives next door to you, and it’s not. Some of these kids are hardened adults, and I’m not going to say that that’s all of them. But look into it, pull the layers of the onion back a little bit more, and you’ll find out most of these stories just are not true. They’re exaggerations.”
  • “Scott was chief of Border Patrol when the agency deployed BORTAC”—the agency’s elite, SWAT team-like force—“against protestors in Portland” after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
  • “Scott was also directly implicated in expelling 13,000 unaccompanied children during title 42”—the 2020-2023 policy of removing asylum seekers without an opportunity to seek protection, in the name of pandemic response—“a policy that never got the press scrutiny it deserved (with some honorable exceptions).”

There was no reason not to expect Donald Trump to nominate someone with extremely hardline views to head CBP, someone who may worsen the climate for human rights abuse at an agency that already exhibits serious institutional culture problems. That’s what has happened—and as a career official and a known quantity among the Republican senators who will hold a majority next year, Rodney Scott will probably win confirmation.

I’ll be watching the confirmation closely, along with others in the human rights and government oversight communities. We’ll note how senators vote, and expect at least some to take their oversight role seriously by raising these allegations during the confirmation process. That’s why I’m gathering them all here, to make them available in one place.

See also:

December 6, 2024 — 0

Chart: Border Patrol Apprehensions by Country at the U.S.-Mexico Border Since October 2013

Observations from reading over a new chart showing 11 years of Border Patrol apprehensions according to migrants' nationalities.

I mashed together data from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security Statistics and from Customs and Border Protection to make this chart of the past 11 years’ Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants, by country.

Here’s the underlying data table, with statistics from 101 countries (note that OHSS does some rounding to the nearest 10).

A few things about what you see here:

  • This is just Border Patrol apprehensions: migrants caught out in the open areas between the official border crossings (ports of entry). I only have CBP port of entry data by country (which is smaller until very recently), for just 21 countries and a big “other” category, going back to October 2019.
  • Note how 10 months of the Trump administration (2017-2020) saw more migration than October 2024 (56,530 migrant apprehensions).
  • Note how the migrant population was almost completely Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran before the pandemic, and far more diverse after it.
  • You can see the early 2024 drop resulting from Mexico’s ongoing crackdown on migrants trying to transit its territory, and then a further mid-2024 drop resulting from the Biden administration’s ban on nearly all asylum access for people who cross between the border’s ports of entry.

See also:

December 6, 2024 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: December 6, 2024

Migration is reduced at the border, but may be activating in southern Mexico. Relations with Mexico following Trump’s tariff threat. Notes on the incoming Trump administration’s border and migration plans.

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:

Preliminary data indicate that Border Patrol apprehended fewer migrants at the border in November than any month since July 2020. An expected post-election rush, with migrants seeking to get to the United States before Donald Trump’s inauguration, has not happened. In southern Mexico, though, people appear to be arriving in larger numbers and seeking to migrate in large groups.

President-Elect Trump appeared to pull down his November 25 threat to slap tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods until they stop the entry of migrants and drugs, following a reportedly cordial phone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. However, Sheinbaum showed a willingness to push back, disputing Trump’s characterization of what was agreed. A future area of disagreement may be Mexico’s willingness to accept deportations of migrants from third countries.

This section lists several analyses and reports about the incoming administration’s hardline approach to the border and migration. Topics include potential use of the U.S. military, the Texas state government’s crackdown serving as a model or template, the shaky future of alternative migration pathways, and signs that at least some Democrats are moving rightward.

THE FULL UPDATE:

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December 4, 2024 — 0

Biden-Era Border Patrol Apprehensions Hit New Low

Preliminatry numbers show the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic.

“U.S. authorities made about 46,700 arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico in November, down about 17% from October to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency,” reported the Associated Press’s Elliot Spagat.

That is the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic. Here’s what it looks like:

Data table

The chart shows:

  • Migration rising in the final months of the Trump administration, as the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy ceased to deter people from coming to the border.
  • A big jump in migration in early 2021, after Trump left office and the world’s borders reopened several months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • A drop in January 2024 as Mexico’s government, at the Biden administration’s behest, started cracking down harder on migrants transiting the country.
  • A further drop in June 2024 as the Biden administration, in a questionably legal move, banned most asylum access between border ports of entry.
  • Many observers, including me, expected more migrants stranded in Mexico to rush to the border after Donald Trump won the November 5 election, seeking to get to U.S. soil before Inauguration Day on January 20. That is not happening, at least not yet. It may still happen, and activity is increasing in southern Mexico. Still, as the end-of-year holidays usually bring a lull in migration, it might not happen at all.

See also:

November 26, 2024 — 0

Mexico is Already Blocking as Many Migrants as CBP and Border Patrol Are

Despite tariff threats, Mexico's security and migration forces are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.

<Edit, November 27:> It was great talking to Greg Sargent yesterday for an excellent New Republic piece that embeds the below graphic.

All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them and he’ll start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.

…[W]e may not be prepared for the gale-force agitprop that’s about to hit us.

</Edit>

Yesterday the President-Elect promised to levy tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to stop migration to the U.S. border.

However, Mexico’s security and migration forces (green in the chart) are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.

Migrant Encounters: CBP at the U.S.-Mexico Border, and Mexico Throughout its Territory United States: Between the Ports of Entry (Border Patrol) CBP at the Ports of Entry 23-Oct 188749 52178 23-Nov 191106 51293 23-Dec 249740 52241 24-Jan 124215 51980 24-Feb 140641 49272 24-Mar 137473 51886 24-Apr 128895 50842 24-May 117905 52811 24-Jun 83532 46883 24-Jul 56400 47700 24-Aug 58009 49464 24-Sep 53858 47932 24-Oct 56530 49814 Mexico 23-Oct 91581 23-Nov 97204 23-Dec 94816 24-Jan 113839 24-Feb 118865 24-Mar 117973 24-Apr 114514 24-May 125499 24-Jun 121589 24-Jul 116243 24-Aug 96563 24-Sep 24-Oct

(Mexico hasn’t yet updated its September and October numbers. Underlying numbers are in the image’s alt text.)

See also:

November 22, 2024 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: November 22, 2024

Incoming Trump administration hints at coming crackdown; The view from Mexico; CBP’s October border data shows little change in migration flows

Due to the U.S. holiday, there will be no Weekly Border Update on November 29, 2024. Updates will resume on December 6.

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:

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November 15, 2024 — 0

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

The Trump administration assembles an ultra-hardline border and migration team. A possible rush to the border before January 20? Migration dips modestly in October in the Darién Gap. Senate committee produces text of 2025 Homeland Security Appropriations bill.

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:

In the days following his election to the presidency, Donald Trump has named three officials with direct border and migration responsibilities. All of them represent the Republican Party’s hard line on border security crackdowns and restriction of immigration. Stephen Miller will be Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the White House. Tom Homan will be in the White House as a “border czar.” Kristi Noem is the nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security. They will manage a planned “mass deportation” campaign while seeking to do away with legal migration pathways that the Biden administration preserved or established. Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio will lead a foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere, especially Mexico, for which migration will be a dominant issue.

Analysts and border-security planners continue to expect the number of migrants approaching the U.S.-Mexico border to increase ahead of Inauguration Day as people race to reach U.S. soil before a crackdown. So far, though, this has not materialized: Border Patrol apprehensions have actually dropped since Election Day.

22,914 people migrated in October through the treacherous Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama. That is a modest drop from 25,111 in September, which may be due at least in part to weather conditions. The number of migrants from Venezuela (19,522) barely dropped from September.

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Democrats until the chamber switches to Republican control, published the text of its version of the 2025 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security. It includes more money for CBP, especially for ports of entry, and more funding for shelters and local jurisdictions receiving and integrating released migrants. It does not include additional money to hire Border Patrol agents or to build new border barriers. It is unclear whether this bill will move forward. Republicans may seek to write their own bill after they assume the Senate majority in January, though that would require keeping the U.S. government open after December 20, the deadline for passing a 2025 budget.

THE FULL UPDATE:

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November 12, 2024 — 0

From WOLA: Five Migration and Security Trends at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Crackdowns temporarily lowered numbers. Children and families made up 43 percent of migrants encountered. The geography of migration has undergone rapid post-pandemic shifts and moved west since the end of Title 42. Texas’s crackdown did not cause this. Migrant deaths may have declined. But deaths as a share of the migrant population have not. Fentanyl seizures dropped for the first time. It’s not clear why.

Here’s 2,000 words and 12 charts that I wrote and drafted before the Election Day cataclysm. In late October, the U.S. government published final fiscal year 2024 data about border and migration topics. I waded through all that and distilled it into five key trends:

  1. Crackdowns temporarily lowered numbers.

  1. Children and families made up 43 percent of migrants encountered.

  1. The geography of migration has undergone rapid post-pandemic shifts and moved west since the end of Title 42.  Texas’s crackdown did not cause this.

  1. Migrant deaths may have declined. But deaths as a share of the migrant population have not.

  1. Fentanyl seizures dropped for the first time. It’s not clear why.

Read the whole thing, with text explaining these graphics, at WOLA’s website.

November 11, 2024 — 0

A “Border Czar”

Migrant family separation proponent Tom Homan is to be Trump's "border czar," a made-up position that doesn't need Senate approval.

Thomas Homan was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Donald Trump’s last administration. He’s an extreme pro-deportation hardliner and was a key proponent of the 2017-2018 policy of separating migrant families at the border.

In October, CBS’s 60 Minutes asked Homan, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

He replied, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

“I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country. You better start packing now,” Homan told the Republican National Convention in July.

Donald Trump just announced that Tom Homan will be his administration’s “border czar,” a made-up position, presumably in the White House, that doesn’t require Senate approval. Homan will have responsibilities “including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security” and “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”

“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he told a July conference of so-called “National Conservatives,” adding, “They ain’t seen sh*t yet. Wait until 2025.”

See also:

November 8, 2024 — 0

How That Year of “Daily Border Links” Posts Went

I produced 185 "daily border links" posts in the past year as part of our election-year rapid-response strategy. It was worthwhile, but not enough to do indefinitely.

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).

  • Each one was a summary of that day’s U.S.-Mexico border-related news: breaking developments and deeper analysis pieces, with fully cited links below each item.
  • Each was just a few hundred words: a quick read, most of the time produced by about 9:00 or 10:00 Eastern each weekday.
  • I would then share them on WOLA’s Border Oversight microsite, on my own blog, and—as up to four attached images of each page’s text—on seven social media sites (Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tumblr).
  • I would also share them with three mailing lists: two NGO coalition listservs, and a Google Group open to the public. (You can still sign up for that and get WOLA’s Weekly Border Updates, which we’ve been producing since 2020.)

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:

The good

  • As a rapid response strategy, the Daily Border Links succeeded in reaching journalists and NGO partners. It appeared to reach U.S. executive branch officials quietly: they knew about it but rarely interacted with them. Legislative staff give much more frequent feedback on our weekly updates, which are actual narratives, rather than on annotated links like the dailies.
  • Having to write these each weekday kept me super sharp, which made my “post-9:00 AM” border and migration advocacy work far more effective. I know so much about what’s happening, in alarming detail. It made me a good interview, I think.
  • I didn’t miss a single deeply reported piece, investigation, or NGO or government report. (Though I also see most of those when doing the weekly updates.)
  • I’m very proud of the archive that will remain on the web for good. The November-to-November story is a journey from the late-2023 Senate negotiations over the “bipartisan border bill” at a time of record migration, to the bill’s failure, Mexico’s crackdown, all the things the candidates were saying as both tacked rightward, the Biden administration’s body blow to asylum access, and the recent decline in migration. All of this interspersed with innumerable fact checks, deeply reported investigations, and tragedies that people forget after a few news cycles.

The not-so-good

  • As noted, the Daily Links did not set the world on fire, traffic-wise, although it’s hard to tell because—since I wanted to get the information out frictionlessly—I shared them in a way that allowed people to read it without me knowing. I used graphics to put the whole thing on social media platforms, and I mailed it to listservs. My analytics service, Plausible, says that just 2,900 people visited the main news archive page in a year, which is not impressive; 4,600 people when you include visits to individual updates’ pages. But I gave people few reasons to visit the site itself, because the same information appeared in so many other formats and on so many other platforms.
  • While I created a Google Group mailing list (no cost to me, but not the friendliest format for people without Gmail accounts), I didn’t advertise it except for a link at the top of each post. Still, 158 people signed up between January and now. Between that and listservs, several hundred people got it in their mail every morning. That is good reach for a niche product, but nothing to brag about. (WOLA’s Weekly Updates do a lot better. They’re not as rapid response, and they run long. But Google features them prominently and they often get over 3,000 downloads each. About 1 in 10 exceeds 10,000 downloads.)
  • I ended up having to wade through a lot of mediocre content in my daily “gatherings” from news sources (a Twitter list of news posters, RSS feeds, Google News searches). There’s a lot of “boiler room,” “shovel,” “press release,” or “police blotter” reporting out there—especially on Google News—that I’m happy not to have to comb through anymore. What a waste of time.
  • Ultimately, it’s not our goal to be a “news service”: we should be active participants in the movement for a rights-respecting, humane, well-managed border.

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.

Why stop now? Resources.

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.

November 8, 2024 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: November 8, 2024

Border communities and migrants brace for another Trump administration; Possibility of a jump in migration ahead of Inauguration Day; Soldiers kill migrants, again, in Mexico; Darién Gap notes

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:

Donald Trump’s election points to a return, and likely intensification, of ultra-hardline border and migration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere. We can expect a suspension or curtailment of most legal migration pathways, from CBP One to asylum access to humanitarian parole. We can expect a “mass deportation” campaign in the U.S. interior. This section lists and explains some of the president-elect’s promised and likely initiatives, and what they mean for U.S.-Mexico relations.

Trump’s victory creates an incentive for some migrants to try to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day, January 20, rather than await CBP One appointments. In Mexico, “caravans” are already forming, while migrants in shelters along the route voice anxiety about their future.

Members of Mexico’s National Guard, a recently created force made up mostly of transferred soldiers, opened fire on a vehicle carrying migrants along the border east of Tijuana. Two Colombian people were killed. It is the second such incident since October 1, when Mexican Army soldiers killed six migrants in Chiapas. In both incidents, military leadership claims that the soldiers were returning fire, or thought that they were; witnesses dispute that.

Migration through the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama appears to have dropped modestly from September to October. However, reports are pointing to an increase in people entering Colombia from Venezuela. Since August, Panama has operated 25 deportation flights, with U.S. support, to Colombia, Ecuador, and India.

THE FULL UPDATE:

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November 8, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: November 8, 2024

Donald Trump reiterates his intention to launch a mass deportation campaign. Dispatches from all along the border and Mexico examine the potential impact and advocates' response.

This is the final Daily Border Links post. Thank you for reading and sharing these as our year-long “rapid response” effort shifts down. The archive will remain online.

WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates, as we have for over four years, and we will continue to send them to the mailing list that you can join here.

For daily updates about migration, see the National Immigration Forum’s Forum Daily newsletter, and Mary Turck’s Immigration News site.

Developments

On November 6, a Donald Trump spokesperson told Fox News that the president-elect has a mandate to fulfill his campaign promises, including “on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants.” The next day, Trump told NBC News, “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not–really, we have no choice” but to massively deport people.

A Reuters/Ipsos online poll taken after Trump’s election victory found that during Trump’s first 100 days in office, “25% of respondents said he should prioritize immigration, a much larger share than any other issue.”

Quiet preparations to implement “mass deportation” are now “ramping up” to full-scale planning, CNN reported. Advisers are discussing priority targeting of undocumented migrants with criminal records while they debate the next steps for “dreamers,” undocumented people who were brought to the United States as children. Slate pointed out that the deportation plan may count on the participation of local police departments nationwide.

Private security contractors that run prisons and detention centers are ramping up their own planning, CNN added. The stock prices of private detention companies like CoreCivic and Geo Group soared following Trump’s election. GEO Group’s board chair said his company was “well-positioned” to go from its present allotment of 13,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds to “over 31,000 beds.” But the incoming administration won’t immediately have the money to pay them unless it resorts to emergency authorities.

Unnamed Border Patrol agents shared their ecstatic response to Trump’s election with the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli.

A federal district court judge has struck down the Biden administration’s “Keeping Families Together” program, which sought to use humanitarian parole authority to allow hundreds of thousands of undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to remain in the United States. Judge J. Campbell Barker, a Trump appointee, determined that the presidential parole authority for migrants, which dates back to 1952, does not empower a president to parole people already inside the United States. The administration is unlikely to appeal, since the incoming Trump administration opposes the program and will not defend it.

Analyses and Feature Stories

If Donald Trump acts after taking office to cut off legal migration pathways like asylum and the CBP One appointments program, migrants are certain to turn to smugglers and seek to enter the United States through other, more dangerous, means, experts and advocates told Associated Press reporters in Mexico. Shelter directors in Mexico, meanwhile, say that they have heard of no Mexican government plans to receive a large number of U.S. deportees.

On a visit to the capital of Mexico’s Chiapas state last week, Gretchen Kuhner of the Mexico-based Institute for Women in Migration saw migrants “getting their cellphones charged every day at some makeshift place on the street so they can check their CBP One appointments… while they’re breastfeeding and sleeping in a tent without any water.”

In a Mother Jones listing of likely Trump policies, Isabela Dias warned of “indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights.”

Dias and NPR’s Sergio Martínez-Beltrán spoke to immigrant rights defenders who plan to use litigation and other tools to seek to block or at least slow Trump’s planned closures of legal immigration pathways.

Gustavo Torres of CASA told NPR that his organization’s corps of activists “are expressing disappointment in the Democratic Party’s strategy and policy on immigration and that the Harris campaign failed to articulate or promote clear immigration or border policies such as pathways to citizenship. When the issue came up during the race, Harris would criticize Trump for scuttling a bipartisan border bill.”

At the Intercept, Aída Chávez pointed out that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party have “nothing to show” for their rightward shift on border and immigration policy during the 2024 campaign and the latter part of the Biden presidency.

Several analyses examined the impact that a second Trump administration may have along different parts of the border.

La Verdad de Juárez reported that Mexican border cities like Ciudad Juárez should prepare for a “boom” of migrants trying to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day, January 20. That city’s “Somos Uno Por Juarez” shelter network is currently at 45 percent capacity, but that could increase. Analysts foresee more migrants turning to smugglers, taking dangerous routes to avoid detection.

Migrants awaiting CBP One appointments in Ciudad Juárez told Border Report of their fear that the CBP One program will soon disappear, and the odds of winning cases will plummet for those who manage to apply for asylum.

In Mexico’s southern state of Veracruz, through which many migrants pass while traveling between the Mexico-Guatemala border and Mexico City, state officials expect an increase in the number of people passing through between now and Inauguration Day, Milenio reported.

Officials in Baja California, Mexico, told Border Report that they, too, expect an increase in migration ahead of Inauguration Day. Shelters are currently at 60 percent capacity in Tijuana and 70 percent in Mexicali.

In California, the state with the largest undocumented migrant population, Wendy Fry reported at CalMatters, non-profits are bracing for the humanitarian impact of Trump’s policies and preparing to oppose them using tools like litigation.

Searchlight New Mexico voiced concerns that the coming crackdown is likely to increase fear in immigrant communities, deterring crime reporting, healthcare access, and social service use, while raids may increase the separation of children from undocumented parents. The publication foresees a further increase in migrants dying in New Mexico’s deserts as they seek to avoid apprehension. The article further notes notoriously grim conditions at the state’s ICE detention centers, like Otero and Torrance.

In Texas, migrant rights defenders are bracing themselves, the Texas Observer reported. “Texas is definitely going to be on the front lines of a mass deportation operation,” said Daniel Hatoum of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Donald Trump’s election victory in south Texas’s majority Mexican-American border counties–a solidly Democratic stronghold as recently as 2016–is “the starkest example of what has been a broad national embrace of the Republican candidate among Hispanic and working-class voters,” according to a New York Times analysis. Voters were concerned about inflation and what they perceived as uncontrolled immigration. The Associated Press reported on the same phenomenon from Starr, one of the south Texas counties that ended a long streak of voting for Democratic presidential candidates.

The Economist recalled Trump’s threats to slap tariffs on Mexican goods if, in his view, the Mexican government is not doing enough to block U.S.-bound migration and accept U.S. deportees–including an agreement to be a “safe third country” for other nations’ asylum seekers, a status that Mexico has resisted.

November 7, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: November 7, 2024

Expectations of a jump in migration before Trump takes office. Advocates, and the governments of Mexico and Guatemala, brace for what is coming.

Daily Border Links posts will end tomorrow, on November 8; we lack resources to maintain this tempo indefinitely. We have been producing these since last November; the archive will remain online.

WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates, as we have for over four years, and we will continue to send them to the mailing list that you can join here.

For continued daily updates about migration, see the National Immigration Forum’s Forum Daily newsletter, and Mary Turck’s Immigration News site.

Developments

Even as the Republican Party and Donald Trump made sharp Election Day gains in border counties, especially in Texas, incumbents won all races in House of Representatives districts along the border. Among the narrowest victories are those of Reps. Vicente González (D) in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Gabe Vásquez (D) in New Mexico, and Juan Ciscomani (R) in southeast Arizona. Ciscomani won by about 1,600 votes over Democratic challenger Kirsten Engel; a Green Party candidate won 6,600.

In Arizona, 63 percent of voters approved a ballot initiative making it a state crime to cross the border without authorization. The measure resembles Texas’s S.B. 4, which passed in late 2023 but faces court challenges, including by the Biden Justice Department. The Arizona Daily Star’s Howard Fischer noted that it passed “without organized campaign support. But the measure, put on the ballot by Republican state lawmakers, could have benefited from years of headlines and videos about people entering the country illegally.”

In Chiapas, Mexico, participants in a migrant “caravan” exiting the city of Tapachula voiced concern to Reuters that Donald Trump’s election ends their hopes of seeking asylum or protection in the United States. A few turned back to Tapachula.

Milenio reported that some migrants may be trying to pick up their pace to reach the U.S. border before Trump takes office.

NBC News reported that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is making contingency plans ahead of a possible increase in migration as people attempt to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day. “A common theme emerged among multiple users: The time to come to the U.S. is now,” NBC said of WhatsApp groups used by migrants.

Asylum seekers awaiting CBP One appointments in Tijuana voiced a well-founded fear that this opportunity will disappear on Inauguration Day. Casa del Migrante shelter director Pat Murphy told Milenio that dangerous irregular migration will increase if the CBP One pathway disappears: “People are going to keep trying to cross and there will be more deaths at the border.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Donald Trump’s election “sets the stage for a sharp turn in immigration and border policy that could upend millions of lives and recast the U.S. economy and labor force,” wrote longtime Washington Post border and immigration reporters Maria Sacchetti and Nick Miroff.

Chad Wolf, who headed the Department of Homeland Security during the last Trump administration, told the Post that U.S. public opinion is more favorable now for Trump’s hardline policies: “You’ll see a different mindset, and over time it’ll be possible to remove large numbers of people.” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU said, “We anticipate it will be much worse this time and are particularly concerned about the use of the military to round up immigrants.”

Melissa López, director of Estrella del Paso (formerly known as Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services), told Border Report that her organization is urging migrants “to be getting legal advice as soon as possible so they can find out where they stand” before Trump is inaugurated.

Mexico’s government is bracing for threats, including Trump’s campaign promise to impose tariffs, if it fails to meet the president-elect’s demands to block migrants, accept deportees, and curb drug transshipment, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“There’s no reason to be worried,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told a morning press conference yesterday. “There’s going to be dialogue.” Trade between Mexico and the United States exceeded $800 billion in 2023.

“Mexico gave in to the pressures back then [during Trump’s last term], and the question is whether Mexico will give in again,” Tonatiuh Guillén, a migration scholar who headed Mexico’s migration agency at the beginning of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term in 2018-19, told the New York Times. “I think the likelihood it will is high.”

The Times analysis noted that massively deporting people back to Mexico would severely damage the country’s economy by increasing the unemployed population and slashing remittances. “We’re going to see deportees who are harder to reintegrate,” said Eunice Rendón of the advocacy coalition Migrant Agenda.

The Associated Press noted that Trump’s plans to massively deport as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants lack any detail. However, Trump and advisors have referred to using the National Guard or the military and invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. “We all have to have our eyes wide open to the fact that this isn’t 2016,” Heidi Altman of the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund told the AP. “Trump and Stephen Miller learned a lot from their first administration. The courts look very different than they did four years ago.”

The Dallas Morning News recalled that Trump advisor Stephen Miller said last year that mass deportation could involve detention camps built “on open land in Texas near the border.”

Officials from the last Trump administration singled out the State Department as a potential obstacle to the president-elect’s proposed mass deportation program. “Nobody” in the diplomatic corps “really thought that was their problem,” Reuters reported that Trump’s ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, said in an October panel discussion.

“The president has a lot of discretion when it comes to the refugee program,” said Mark Hetfield, the CEO of HIAS, one of several advocates and service providers interviewed by Voice of America. “And for asylum, [he’s] going to make it impossible to apply at the border as he did with Title 42 and his Remain in Mexico policies.”

Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing a large majority of Border Patrol agents, told Newsweek, “We consider today’s victory for President Trump not just a victory for himself, but a victory for the entire country.” The union endorsed Trump in every election since the 2016 primaries.

The New York Times talked to Democratic-leaning voters who chose Donald Trump on Tuesday because they disapproved of the Biden administration’s handling of the border and migration. “There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute told the Times’s Miriam Jordan.

Guatemalan analysts and former officials interviewed by Prensa Libre expect a big increase in U.S. pressure to halt migration and accept more deportees after Donald Trump moves into the White House. The same newspaper noted that hopes for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Guatemalan citizens in the United States have evaporated.

At Palabra, Dianne Solís reflected on the United States’ history of migrant deportations, which Donald Trump proposes to step up massively. For asylum seekers, “Their deportation could be a death sentence,” Jenifer Williams of Dallas-based Migrant Emotional Health told Solís. “They live with a lot of anxiety, usually in the form of PTSD.”

A Colombian government report counted “261,975 detections of migrants in irregular transit to the north of the continent” leaving the country in the first 7 months of 2024. That is a slower pace than in 2023 when Colombia counted 539,959 people over the entire year. Of January-July “detections,” 70.8 percent were citizens of Venezuela.

November 6, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: November 6, 2024

A quick, difficult, and probably partial list of the programs and pathways that Donald Trump will curtail, and the new hardline initiatives his administration will undertake.

Daily Border Links posts will end this week, on November 8, the Friday after the U.S. elections; we lack resources to maintain this tempo indefinitely. We have been producing these since last November; the archive will remain online.

WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates, as we have for over four years, and we will continue to send them to the mailing list that you can join here.

Developments

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” said Donald Trump, as U.S. voters elected him to the presidency with a majority of the electoral and popular votes, while giving the Republican Party a majority of the U.S. Senate and the possibility of a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We’re going to have to seal up those borders and we’re going to have to let people come into our country,” the president-elect said in his acceptance remarks’ only substantive reference to the U.S.-Mexico border. “We want people to come back in, but we have to, we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally.”

Based on statements of the president-elect and his surrogates, the list of policies, programs, and migration pathways that a second Trump administration would be likely to end, curtail, or sharply reduce include:

  • Use of the CBP One smartphone app to schedule appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry.
  • Nearly all access to asylum between ports of entry (which would largely continue a Biden administration policy dating back to early June 2024).
  • The Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
  • Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era policy that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of undocumented people who were brought to the United States as children. Challenges to DACA remain before a federal court.
  • Continued Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for citizens of 16 countries, including El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
  • Other pathways including family reunification programs and the Central American Minors Program.
  • The “Safe Mobility Offices” program offering access to migration pathways for a limited number of some countries’ migrants in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala.
  • Assistance to UNHCR, IOM, and humanitarian non-profits helping to integrate migrants in other countries in the Americas, and to provide urgent assistance to those in transit.
  • The FEMA Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which supports municipalities and non-profits, including shelters receiving released migrants.
  • Justice Department challenges to Texas’s border and migration crackdowns, including the S.B. 4 law making unauthorized border crossings a state crime.

Initiatives that may be coming after Trump’s January 20 inauguration may include the following policies, or attempts to implement policies:

  • A campaign of “mass deportation” that could eject millions from the United States via sweeps and raids, internment in staging camps, and large-scale removals, possibly employing military personnel.
  • A renewed “Remain in Mexico” program, if the Mexican government is compelled to agree with it.
  • A possible attempt to use a prevalent disease of non-pandemic proportions as a pretext to revive the “Title 42” policy of expelling asylum seekers. If it happens, it would come with a reversal of the Biden administration’s reluctance to expel unaccompanied minors.
  • Expanded use of detention facilities managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often through private contractors.
  • A “lawfare” campaign, similar to what the Republican attorney-general of Texas has been carrying out, seeking to shut down, punish, and otherwise block the work of shelters, legal aid groups, and other service providers assisting migrants.
  • Renewed border wall construction.
  • More National Guard and perhaps regular military deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • A more aggressive stance toward the Mexican government, especially on blocking migrants and stopping fentanyl. This may include threats of tariffs on Mexican goods if the Mexican government does not comply with hardline policies, like “Remain in Mexico,” that require its cooperation. Some close to Trump have proposed using drones or Special Forces teams to attack organized crime targets inside Mexico without the Mexican government’s consent.
  • Weaker oversight of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol in human rights abuse cases.
  • Invoking the Constitution’s “invasion” clause to justify hardline policies, essentially classifying migrants and asylum seekers as the equivalent of an invading army.

Exit polls from CNN and NBC News showed that immigration fell on voters’ list of priority issues, well behind the economy. “There has also been growing unease among voters about deporting those who have been in the country for several years,” noted a Newsweek analysis of poll data.

Arizona voters approved Proposition 314, a ballot measure that makes unauthorized border crossing a state crime. It appears to have won more than 60 percent of the vote. The measure is similar to Texas’s S.B. 4, a law passed in late 2023 that remains on hold pending legal challenges.

Opponents of these laws point to the chaos that could result if states adopt and carry out different immigration policies, and the likelihood that the law might empower local and state police to stop people who look like they are of Latino descent merely on suspicion of having crossed the border illegally.

The Republican Party made historic gains in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley border region, until recently a solidly Democratic area. Rep. Mónica de la Cruz (R), the first Republican elected in the region in many years, won re-election. Rep. Henry Cuéllar (D), who is under indictment on bribery charges, won re-election by a narrower margin than ever. No call has been made in Rep. Vicente González’s (D) re-election bid.

New Mexico’s border House seat remains in the hands of Rep. Gabe Vásquez (D), by about a 4-point margin.

Fearing an end to CBP One, asylum access, and other migration pathways after Trump’s January 20 inauguration, approximately 2,500 to 3,000 people formed a “caravan” in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula yesterday. We can expect an increase in migration over the next few months as people seek to get to U.S. soil before the new administration starts closing down existing pathways.

People at Tijuana migrant shelters shared with EFE their fear of being stranded by the electoral result after long journeys to the U.S.-Mexico border region.

InsightCrime reported on the U.S. Treasury Department’s recent sanctions against four people and two companies tied to the Ciudad Juárez-based “La Línea” criminal organization. Treasury holds them responsible for colluding with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel to smuggle fentanyl, a drug that U.S. authorities have overwhelmingly seized at California and Arizona border crossings, not the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso area.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Border Report’s Julián Resendiz talked to political and economic leaders in Ciudad Juárez, including Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuellar, before the U.S. voting began. They worry about Donald Trump’s tariff threats, Mexico’s ability to absorb millions of forcibly deported people, threats to “close” the border, and rhetoric bullying Mexico. A finance sector leader doubted Mexico’s ability to meet Trump’s demands to secure its northern border, since the country has been unable to get a handle on its own public security challenges. Mayor Pérez Cuéllar concluded, however, that “the level of interdependence between the two countries is so large that it is practically impossible” to break.

“It’s not going to happen. It’s just not. It’s going to be an empty campaign promise, to be honest with you,” Thaddeus Cleveland, the sheriff of Terrell County, Texas (Fort Worth), a Trump supporter, told Nexstar about the Trump administration’s plans for a “mass deportation” campaign.

At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque interviewed Nicole Ramos of the Tijuana and San Diego-based assistance and advocacy group Al Otro Lado. The organization is named in a lawsuit that brought an end to CBP’s policy of “metering” asylum seekers (blocking all but a few from approaching ports of entry). Still, Ramos observed, “Anytime an organization like Al Otro Lado, ACLU, or Raices gets a win on asylum access, the U.S. government creates another policy to evade their obligations under that decision.”

In New York, Documented spoke to Venezuelan asylum seekers who fear that Donald Trump’s administration will force them to leave the United States without a hearing.

At The Conversation, Ragini Shah gave a brief overview of the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, concluding that the agency’s culture continues to be “rough” and soft on human rights abusers within the ranks. “Giving the Border Patrol ever more money, agents and higher-tech equipment only spurs more violence and lawlessness,” Shah concluded.

Although the number of people migrating through the Darién Gap region has declined in 2024, the number of minors migrating unaccompanied has increased, according to a Panama-based UNICEF official. Last year, about 3,300 children walked through the Darién jungles unaccompanied. During the first nine months of 2024, 3,800 children have done so. Most are Venezuelan.

Speaking to advocates and experts from Mexico’s northern and southern borders, an Al Jazeera video program looked at the Mexican government’s undeclared but vigorous 2024 policy of blocking migrants and busing them to the country’s south.

November 5, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: November 5, 2024

Mexican soldiers kill migrants for the 2nd time since October 1. On election eve, Trump threatens high tariffs if Mexico doesn't seal the border.

Daily Border Links posts will end this week, on November 8, the Friday after the U.S. elections; we lack resources to maintain this tempo indefinitely. We have been producing these since last November; the archive will remain online.

WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates, as we have for over four years, and we will continue to send them to the mailing list that you can join here.

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Developments

For the second time since October 1, Mexican soldiers have shot and killed migrants. Members of Mexico’s recently created National Guard, much of whose personnel were transferred from the Army, opened fire on a vehicle near Tecate, Baja California, along the border east of Tijuana. Two Colombian migrants were killed in the November 2 incident, and four others were wounded.

Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA, the Army and Air Force) contended that the soldiers fired their weapons in self-defense after alleged smugglers fired on them. Witnesses dispute that: “We had no weapons, we are not criminals, they were never shot at,” a survivor told the Tijuana-based investigative publication Zeta. Witnesses say that, before aiding the wounded, the guard members spent a few minutes cleaning up their spent ammunition cartridges, which, if true, would constitute altering a crime scene.

Three guard members who opened fire have been taken off duty while investigations proceed.

On October 1, soldiers opened fire on a vehicle carrying migrants, killing six. In that case, too, SEDENA claimed that the soldiers responded after hearing “detonations,” though witnesses disputed that.

On Monday, the final day before Election Day, Republican candidate Donald Trump vowed, if elected, to impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods, escalating to 100 percent, if Mexico’s government does not act to stop migrants and fentanyl from crossing its northern border. He said that if he wins today’s elections, his first call will be to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to convey this threat.

On the eve of the U.S. election, CBS News spoke with migrants awaiting CBP One appointments in shelters in Nogales, Sonora. They fear a Donald Trump victory today would end the CBP One program. “They’re very scared. They think that the asylum system is going to close,” said immigration attorney Alba Jaramillo.

Reporting from just north of Mexico City, the Los Angeles Times Patrick McDonnell spoke with migrants determined to come to the United States regardless of who is elected. “If you’re a migrant, you’re going to suffer whoever is president,” a Honduran man said.

A measure on the ballot in Arizona would make it a state crime to cross the international border without authorization, the Associated Press reported. Proposition 314 resembles S.B. 4, the Texas law–currently on hold facing legal challenges–that could empower law enforcement to enforce a separate state-level immigration policy, and to stop anyone on suspicion of having crossed the border illegally.

Speaking with Cronkite News, border-area political and law-enforcement leaders voiced reluctance to finding themselves having to use scarce resources to enforce immigration laws, a mission for which they are not trained, if Proposition 314 passes.

At one of the busiest official border crossings between Colombia and Venezuela, authorities are measuring an increase in the number of Venezuelan citizens departing the country. “What is undeniable is that the exodus is still latent along this border and has increased after the electoral process of July 28,” reported the Venezuelan daily La Nación. The paper referred to presidential elections almost certainly won by the political opposition, followed by a wave of repression carried out by the current regime, which denies that result.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Thomas Cartwright at Witness at the Border published his latest monthly report on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation flights. The agency removed migrants on an average of 5.3 flights per weekday in October, up slightly from September but down from over 6.0 per weekday during the summer. Fewer migrant apprehensions at the border are the likeliest reason for the drop. The top removal destination countries were Guatemala (37 flights in October), Honduras (20), Mexico (20), El Salvador (11), Colombia (9), and Ecuador (9).

The report noted that Panama operated 25 deportation flights between August 1 and November 2, with 989 people—about 1.5 percent of Darién Gap migration—taken to Colombia (19), Ecuador (5), and India (1).

At InsightCrime, Steven Dudley and Parker Asmann highlighted the sharp contrasts between two Arizona border-zone sheriffs. Mark Dannels of Cochise County is an outspoken border and migration hardliner who often appears on Fox News and as a Republican congressional hearing witness. David Hathaway, from neighboring Santa Cruz County (which includes Nogales), favors a more humanitarian approach that prevents harm to migrants.

On the Right

November 4, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: November 4, 2024

As the election looms, in-depth reports about migration filed from Ecuador, Chiapas, Del Rio, the post-Darién Gap route through Central America, and New York.

Daily Border Links posts will end this week, on November 8, the Friday after the U.S. elections; we lack resources to maintain this tempo indefinitely. We have been producing these since last November; the archive will remain online.

WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates, as we have for over four years, and we will continue to send them to the mailing list that you can join here.

Get daily links in your email

Developments

About 200 families participated in the annual “Hugs Not Walls” event organized by the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso. For a few minutes, people living in El Paso shared a moment in person with loved ones living on the Ciudad Juárez side of the border.

Reporting from coastal Ecuador, Elliot Spagat of the Associated Press documented the spike in organized crime-violence that has made many communities unlivable and populations desperate, spurring an increase in migration that made Ecuador the number-seven nationality of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2024.

Mexican migration officials “discreetly” dismantled a 500-person migrant “caravan” a few days after its members entered the southern state of Oaxaca from Chiapas. The officials reportedly told people they would be transported further into Oaxaca; while some boarded buses, migrants quoted by Milenio voiced fear that they would instead be sent back to Mexico’s southern border.

Three unnamed U.S. officials told CBS News that migration to the U.S.-Mexico border could “spike” if Donald Trump wins tomorrow’s presidential election, as migrants race to get to U.S. soil before Inauguration Day.

The Gulf Clan, the organized crime group that dominates Colombia’s entrance to the Darién Gap migration route, called on the U.S. and Colombian governments to “join a constructive dialogue” about migration, drugs, and deforestation. The group charges roughly $50 to $80 or more per person to allow migrants to enter the Darién and manages “guides” and other services on the Colombian side of the trail. Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s government is conducting informal talks with the Gulf Clan about its potential demobilization.

Two Colombian migrants were killed, and another five reportedly wounded, in an apparent crossfire involving organized crime in Tecate, along Mexico’s northern border east of San Diego and Tijuana.

Along the border wall in Tijuana, the Casa del Migrante migrant shelter and the coalition Pro Defensa de los Migrantes installed an altar to commemorate migrants who have died trying to reach the United States. “In the last six years, at least 225 people have lost their lives at the border [in the area], either because of extreme weather conditions or because of the violence that stalks them,” said Father Pat Murphy of the Casa del Migrante.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A New York Times analysis concluded that the Biden administration failed to leave behind any lasting solution to the U.S. government’s “fundamentally broken” immigration system. Biden’s reform goals, the Times noted, “were stymied by the need to confront a worldwide surge of displaced people fleeing their homes and a determined Republican opposition.”

The Washington Post noted several Democratic candidates’ rightward drift on border and migration policies in closely fought legislative races.

NPR, too, noted the Biden administration’s turn away from reform and toward “enforcement, restrictions, and punishments – a strategy at times indistinguishable from the Trump administration.”

At its Immigration Impact site, the American Immigration Council explained key aspects of the “Border Act of 2024,” the oft-cited bill that failed to pass the Senate in February 2024 following months of negotiations between a group of Democratic and Republican senators. While the bill would open up some immigration pathways and preserve presidential humanitarian parole authority, it also would codify bans on asylum during busy periods, raise standards some asylum seekers would have to meet, and add funding for barrier construction and migrant detention.

At ProPublica, Emily Green reported on rampant kidnappings of migrants near Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas, on Mexico’s southern border en route to Tapachula. With only modest pressure from authorities, criminals are holding hundreds of migrants in livestock pens until they pay a ransom of about $75 per person. “The kidnapping is so widespread and open that migrants walk around Tapachula with stamps of a bird on their forearms as a sign that they paid the ransom.”

Green noted that the situation is worsened by Mexico’s vigorous busing of migrants to Tapachula and other southern Mexican destinations after apprehending them elsewhere in the country. Last week, the Associated Press, too, reported on this suddenly worsening kidnapping wave at Mexico’s southern border.

In an article for the Times of London, Thomas Graham illustrated Mexico’s busing policy, which has helped to reduce the number of migrants entering U.S. custody at the northern border while stranding tens of thousands in Mexico.

The Washington Post’s Arelis Hernández followed the journey of the Orasma family from Azure, Venezuela, to the United States, illustrating the political and logistical obstacles thrown in asylum seekers’ way. The family, once solidly middle class, underwent a harrowing trip through the Darién Gap and atop Mexico’s “La Bestia” cargo train, forced by Mexico’s crackdown to turn to exploitative smugglers. They documented the trip with photos and videos. The Orasmas are now in New York, struggling amid delays in obtaining a work permit.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune profiled Joe Frank Martinez, a Democrat who is the first Latino sheriff of Val Verde County, which includes the border town of Del Rio. Martínez has come under political fire for perceived leniency toward migrants, as local political opinion has grown more hostile to them, even though border management is not part of the sheriff’s job.

In Laredo, Texas, a border city whose voters have opposed having a border wall built along its riverfront, local leaders worry about such construction happening if Donald Trump wins the election, the Laredo Morning Times reported.

At Mother Jones, Tim Murphy explained that a legal crusade against Texas border-area organizations assisting migrants, led by the state’s hardline attorney general Ken Paxton (R), stems from a conspiracy theory about undocumented migrants being registered to vote in elections.

A Politico article by Myah Ward told the story of Angelina and her father Teodoro, a Guatemalan migrant family separated for seven months by the Trump administration’s family separation policy in 2017, when Angelina was eight. Both continue to suffer trauma symptoms.

A story at the independent Nicaraguan website Confidencial made clear that after emerging from the Darién Gap jungles, migrants’ road through Central America is little, if at all, easier. What is loosely called a “humanitarian corridor” through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras is more of an effort “to ‘pass the buck’ and get rid of them as soon as possible.” Among those countries, Nicaragua is a “black hole” without a transportation policy, where officials often demand bribes to allow migrants to pass through.

“As of June 2024, around 86% of asylum-seekers, refugees, and stateless people in the Americas lived in countries highly vulnerable to climate disruptions, where limited capacity hinders effective responses and mitigation efforts,” read a UNHCR fact sheet on “Americas Climate Action.”

On the Right

November 4, 2024 — 0

Weekly Migration in the Three “Busiest” U.S.-Mexico Border Sectors

Weekly data from Border Patrol's San Diego, Tucson, and El Paso sectors show a four-month plateau in migration.
San Diego (California) Sector Feb 28 - Mar 5 8168 March 6-12 8389 March 13-19 6985 March 20-26 7353 Mar 27 - April 7 6698 April 3-9 6997 April 10-16 8959 April 17-23 9513 April 24-30 10023 May 1-7 8303 May 8-14 8016 May 15-21 6157 May 22-28 6777 May 29-Jun 4 8488 June 5-11 7693 June 12-18 June 19-22 June 23-29 3696 Jun 30 - Jul 6 3958 July 7-13 July 14-20 3552 July 21-27 3089 Jul 28 - Aug 3 3174 August 4-10 3389 August 11-17 3237 August 18-24 3063 August 25-31 3557 Sep 1-7 4000 September 8-14 3169 September 15-21 3292 September 22-28 2294 Sep 29 - Oct 5 2803 October 6-12 3016 October 13-19 3710 October 20-26 3228 Tucson (Arizona) Sector March 1-7 12200 March 8-14 10500 March 15-21 9000 March 22-28 7200 Mar 29 - Apr 4 6600 April 5-11 6700 April 12-18 7500 April 17-23 7600 Apr 26 - May 2 7900 May 3-9 7300 May 10-16 6700 May 18-24 7400 May 25-31 7800 June 1-6 7500 June 7-13 6900 June 14-20 4900 June 21-27 3700 Jun 28 - Jul 4 2900 July 5-11 2700 July 12-18 2600 July 19-25 2400 Jul 26 - Aug 1 2800 August 2-8 2400 August 9-15 2600 August 16-22 2500 August 23-29 2900 Aug 30 - Sep 5 2700 Sep 6-12 2500 September 13-19 2500 September 20-26 2400 Sep 27-Oct 3 2800 October 4-10 2400 October 11-17 2400 October 18-24 2600 October 25-31 2600 El Paso Week 10 7791 Week 11 5656 Week 12 5761 Week 13 7756 Week 14 7112 Week 15 6678 Week 16 8463 Week 17 7028 Week 18 5397 Week 19 5586 Week 20 5397 Week 21 4704 Week 22 5082 Week 23 4417 Week 24 3164 Week 25 3234 Week 26 2702 Week 27 2807 Week 28 2597 Week 29 2296 Week 30 2597 Week 31 2800 Week 32 3010 Week 33 2975 Week 34 2968 Week 35 3171 Week 36 2940 Week 37 2716 Week 38 2968 Week 39 2968 Week 40 2653 Week 41 2380 Week 42 2471 Week 43 2380 Week 44 2394

This chart shows the number of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol each week in the three geographic sectors at the U.S.-Mexico border where the agency apprehends the most people right now. (Border Patrol has nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.)

Numbers have been remarkably flat since late June, following the Biden administration’s June 4 declaration of a near-total ban on asylum access for migrants arriving at the border between ports of entry. I don’t have a big archive of weekly apprehensions data, but looking at months, it is unusual to see migration remain at a low level following a decline for more than six months or so. We’re at four months now.

The source for the San Diego (California) and Tucson (Arizona) sectors is weekly tweets from the sectors’ chiefs. The source for the El Paso (far west Texas plus New Mexico) sector is the city of El Paso.

See also:

November 1, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: November 1, 2024

54,000 Border Patrol apprehensions in October, very similar to July-September. A modest drop in Darién Gap migration from September to October.

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Developments

Citing “preliminary figures,” Reuters reported that Border Patrol apprehended about 54,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in October. That is almost identical to September’s apprehension number (53,858) and very similar to July’s (56,400) and August’s (58,009).

Dual crackdowns—Mexico’s stepped-up blocking and southward busing of migrants, and the Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions—continue to keep apprehensions at their lowest level since September 2020. However, the number stopped declining months ago.

On October 31, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said that the number of migrants transiting the treacherous Darién Gap would likely be “a little more than 21,542.” That would be a modest drop in Darién Gap migration from 25,111 in September. Citizens of Venezuela remain by far the number-one nationality.

Mulino said that, mainly with U.S. support, Panama has run 23 deportation flights since early August, sending about 800 people primarily to Colombia and Ecuador but some to China and India. The president, who took office in July, reiterated the terms of an October 25 decree instituting steep fines for people, like Darién border-crossers, who enter the country without authorization.

The U.S. government sent a deportation flight to Haiti on October 31 with 77 people aboard, even as a gang offensive is intensifying, the Miami Herald reported. On October 26, a gang coalition called Viv Ansanm looted and burned a Missionaries of Charity convent and hospital in Port-au-Prince, which Mother Teresa had inaugurated in 1979.

In Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, hundreds of people with confirmed appointments at U.S. border ports of entry, made using the CBP One app, are “saturating” the local offices of Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM), La Jornada reported. They are demanding that the agency issue permits allowing them to transit Mexican territory to attend their appointments. It is unclear whether the backlog owes to any changes at INM, which has offered to coordinate protected travel from Chiapas for at least some of those with appointments.

Analyses and Feature Stories

As migrant smuggling organizations have become wealthier and more sophisticated, U.S. law enforcement agencies are struggling to catch up, facing resource, judicial, and intelligence gaps, concluded a Washington Post investigation, focusing on a case in Guatemala, by Mexico-Central America correspondent Mary Beth Sheridan. U.S. agencies are also hampered by decades of focus specifically on drug trafficking instead of human smuggling, and by partner nations’ official corruption.

Five organizations, including border-area service providers, released a report about climate-related migration, finding that the expected increase in people fleeing climate change is now happening. The report provides data on responses from over 3,600 migrants whom Al Otro Lado, Haitian Bridge Alliance, International Refugee Assistance Project, and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center have served, including over 3,000 from the Americas. Of those from the Americas, 43 percent “reported experiencing environmental disasters such as hurricanes, droughts, extreme heat, and floods in their home countries.” The report recommends expanding legal immigration pathways for climate refugees and victims.

The International Refugee Assistance Project issued a “practice advisory” clarifying that Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan recipients of two years’ humanitarian parole, under a Biden administration initiative that has helped reduce border apprehensions from those nationalities, still have the right to apply for a renewal of their parole status. Many descriptions of an early October Biden administration policy change have erroneously interpreted it as refusing parole renewals; the change, in fact, specifies that while there is no “re-parole process,” it remains true that “any individual parolee may apply to renew their parole.”

In a report from San Diego and Tijuana at KQED News, Tyche Hendricks explained the recent decline in the number of migrants arriving at the border, the crackdowns and legal pathways that enabled it, human rights concerns, and the likelihood that lower numbers might persist.

The San Diego-based iNewSource reported from Tijuana where large numbers of migrants, including Mexican citizens fleeing violence in their own country, are enduring long waits for appointments at U.S. ports of entry using the CBP One app. While they wait, migrant children are showing signs of regression and trauma, while parents struggle with emotional distress. One family interviewed by reporter Sofía Mejías-Pascoe has waited over a year for a CBP One appointment. “Asylum isn’t something you can schedule,” said Christina Asencio of Human Rights First.

At the Border Chronicle, Todd Miller reflected on the prominent role that the border and its barrier continue to play in a third consecutive U.S. election campaign. “Contemplating Trump’s rhetoric decrying U.S. ‘open borders’ while in the shadow of the wall is absurd,” Miller concluded.

At the Progressive, Jeff Abbott examined the harm that a “mass deportation” campaign, which U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is promising, would do to economic and political stability in Central America. Sending millions of Central American migrants back to impoverished countries, thus halting remittance flows, “would be the worst catastrophe that could possibly occur. It would be worse than a major earthquake,” said a former president of El Salvador’s central bank.

At USA Today, Nick Penzenstadler and Lauren Villagrán examined how much the federal government might have to pay to carry out Trump’s plan, and how handsomely its private contractors would profit.

The Associated Press profiled Sam Schultz, a 69-year-old volunteer who shuns politics and doggedly provides daily assistance to migrants waiting to be processed for asylum in the cold, rugged hills near the border around Jacumba Springs, California.

On the Right

November 1, 2024 — 0

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: November 1, 2024

Pre-election notes; Updates about migration in Mexico; Panama decrees fines for at least some Darién Gap migrants

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:

While border security and migration have been top issues in the too-close-to-call  U.S. presidential campaign, its last full week was not dominated by a single theme, narrative, or developing story. This section presents a series of links to coverage of incremental developments and links to substantial analyses of both candidates’ positions, likely outcomes if each is elected, views from swing states and border states, and how policy debates have shifted in 2024.

Along with the Biden administration’s June restrictions on asylum, a key reason why migration has declined during the 2024 election year is an unstated but vigorous Mexican government strategy of stepped-up interceptions of migrants, many of whom Mexican authorities then transfer to the country’s far south. This section presents links to several accounts of the impact this policy is having on people along the route through Mexico.

Panama’s recently inaugurated president issued a decree requiring migrants to pay fines for unlawful entry after they emerge from the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route. These fines may be waived or adjusted according to migrants’ “vulnerability.” President Raúl Mulino said he hopes to expand an ongoing program of deportation flights to include citizens of Venezuela. After rising sharply from August to September, the number of migrants transiting the Darién appears to have leveled off or increased slightly during the first half of October.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Read More
October 31, 2024 — 0

Season 1 of WOLA’s “Border Update” Videos

A series of 12 videos, about 2 minutes each, about border and migration trends.

Every week between August 7 and October 30—that is, 12 times—I threw together a script and some visuals on Tuesday afternoon, and then on Wednesday morning WOLA’s terrific communications team would set me up with a camera and a microphone to record, then edit and distribute, a 2-minute video about the U.S.-Mexico border and migration.

It was a good experience as we “learned by doing.” While they never went viral, we got much more sophisticated over those three months in communicating the message. They still look thrown together quickly, but the more recent ones look far less like “hostage proof-of-life” videos than the earlier ones.

Here is the entire YouTube playlist, and a page that WOLA has created to host some of the videos.

And below, after the jump, is each video embedded individually, in reverse chronological order.

Read More
October 31, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 31, 2024

A west Texas sheriff, tired of hard-line border politicization, embraces pragmatism. New analyses voice concern about the human impact of US asylum restrictions.

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Developments

Smugglers abandoned four unaccompanied migrant children on an inflatable raft in the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, Border Patrol reported.

CBP reported that a man whom officers shot and wounded at Nogales, Arizona’s DeConcini port of entry on October 16 had 3,140 rounds of AK-47-style rifle ammunition stashed in his vehicle’s spare tire.

Fox News covered the Trump campaign’s pledge to take down billboards in Texas, posted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), reminding people with relatives in immigration custody that those relatives have recourse if they are being abused. Republican legislators have sought to defund and shut down OIDO, which was created in response to 2019 Democratic-led legislation.

Texas’s state government has named the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization, a “tier 1” gang threat, alongside “notorious prison gangs the Texas Syndicate and the Mexican Mafia, as well as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Crips, the Bloods, and the Latin Kings,” according to the Dallas Morning News.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Yesterday’s WOLA-organized discussion of state forces’ human rights abuse at the Texas-Mexico border, with experts and advocates from Human Rights Watch, Hope Border Institute, Eagle Pass Border Coalition, and Alliance San Diego, is viewable on YouTube. Border Report published highlights of the event.

Writing for Puente News Collaborative and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, Alfredo Corchado profiled Arvin West, the sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, just east of El Paso. A prominent border hardliner, West has become disillusioned with the politicization of the national debate on border security and migration and now supports more pragmatic, local approaches.

  • Alfredo Corchado, “A Lawman’s Change of Heart“ (Puente News Collaborative, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, October 30, 2024).

A detailed analysis by Lillian Perlmutter at Rolling Stone discussed the harder-line turn in the Biden administration’s border policies, including strict limits on asylum access. “In their attempt to find a message that resonates with the American public,” Perlmutter wrote, “Democrats have forced hundreds of thousands of migrants into potentially deadly situations.”

At America: The Jesuit Review, David Agren covered the Mexican government’s undeclared but vigorous effort, launched at the beginning of the year, to block migrants attempting to transit Mexico’s territory and reroute many of them to the country’s south. Agren added that many people migrating in Mexico feel an urgency to obtain CBP One appointments before Donald Trump, if he wins the November 5 elections, terminates the program. Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest working in south Texas and Tamaulipas, Mexico, said that the wait for CBP One appointments is now often seven months for non-Mexican migrants and ten months for Mexicans.

Reporting from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Agénce France Presse noted how the Biden administration’s restrictions on asylum between ports of entry have reduced unauthorized border crossings and channeled migrants into long waits for CBP One appointments.

Reflecting on a recent visit to the Darién Gap in the Los Angeles Times, Human Rights Watch director Tirana Hassan called for more robust U.S. measures against Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his inner circle, and to do much more to “uphold the rights of migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the crisis in Venezuela.” Hassan laments that instead, the Biden administration “has put Venezuelans in further danger and undercut their access to asylum.”

Data that the Cato Institute obtained via the Freedom of Information Act reveals that the Trump administration “released nearly 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records, including 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers,” often to clear detention space for asylum seekers arriving at the border. Cato’s David Bier noted that the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy, which the Trump administration launched in March 2020, “removed consequences for convicted criminals who crossed the border illegally, enabling them to try again and again.”

Writing for Mother Jones, Isabela Dias covered immigrant rights defense groups’ scenario planning and preparations for responding to a possible Donald Trump victory in Tuesday’s elections. “Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness.”

At Washington Monthly, Bill Scher looked at the data and concluded that the Trump administration was more effective at curbing legal migration than reducing unauthorized migration to the United States.

Reporting from North Carolina, the Australian network ABC concluded that Republican political candidates are having some success spreading the inaccurate belief that migrants bring fentanyl across the U.S.-Mexico border. (More than 90 percent is seized from vehicles, and more than 80 percent of those arrested at ports of entry are U.S. citizens.)

October 30, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 30, 2024

Migrant kidnappings have risen sharply along Mexico's southern border in Chiapas. Texas buys a second ranch along the border in order to build its state wall.

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Developments

Associated Press reporter María Verza reported from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, where she found “migrants continue pouring into Mexico” but organized crime—which has vastly ramped up ransom kidnappings in the area—is doing more to “manage the flow” of migrants than Mexican authorities. Released kidnap victims say that criminals are holding about 500 people at a time at a ranch near the border town of Ciudad Hidalgo; they stamp the skin of those who pay for their release, while those who cannot pay are often sexually assaulted.

At Mexico’s northern border, the Ciudad Juárez newspaper El Norte reported on a proliferation of “safe houses” where smugglers or kidnappers hold migrants, “packing them in like sardines.” In recent years, the report found, these houses have become more common in more central urban neighborhoods, not just on the city’s outskirts.

Texas’s state government has made a second large land purchase along the border so that it might build border barriers on the properties. Following news yesterday of the purchase of a 1,400-acre ranch along the border in Starr County, in the southern part of the state, the Texas General Land Office revealed that it has bought the 353,785-acre Brewster Ranch, bordering Big Bend National Park. “The ranch had been listed for $245,678,330,” according to the Land Report.

Cochise County, a border county in southeast Arizona, held a dedication ceremony for a new multi-million-dollar “Border Operations Center” to support local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. At the ceremony, Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, criticized “the federal government’s failure to address” border issues.

Analyses and Feature Stories

WOLA, together with Alliance San Diego, the Eagle Pass Border Coalition, Hope Border Institute, and Human Rights Watch, is hosting a webinar about human rights and state border security forces’ use of force along the borderline in Texas. It starts at 5:00 Eastern today, and registration is open.

Young people unable to find decent employment, many of them well educated, are heavily represented in the population of Colombian citizens emigrating, according to a report from Colombia’s La Silla Vacía. Colombia was the number-six nationality of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2024. The article also cites a recent worsening of citizen security as a reason for Colombians choosing to leave.

Border Report contrasted the views of conservatives who want the State Department to push countries along the migration route to do more to block people from coming to the United States, with the views of rights advocates who contend that the solution lies in expanding legal pathways for safer migration, including through reform of U.S. immigration laws.

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October 29, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 29, 2024

Several analyses published yesterday examine the electoral impact of border and migration trends, and of recent crackdowns in the U.S. and Mexico.

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Developments

Mexico’s army reported seizing over 900 kilograms (1,984 pounds) of cocaine in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, a border town near Yuma, Arizona. This one seizure is equivalent to one-fifteenth of all cocaine that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported seizing at the border throughout fiscal 2024 (30,383 pounds, or 13,781 kilograms).

On Friday, hospitals in Texas must begin collecting information about their patients’ citizenship status, under an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott (R).

Abbott’s state government has purchased a 1,400-acre ranch along the border in Starr County, in the southern part of Texas, where it plans to build a new length of border wall, Fox News reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Reuters reported on Mexico’s policy, begun in January, of blocking in-transit migrants and systematically transporting many to the country’s south. The undeclared but vigorous effort is a central reason why the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border is down during the 2024 U.S. election campaign. Reuters revealed that Mexico’s migration authority has paid over $65 million to one charter bus company since last year.

A New York Times analysis concluded that regardless of who wins the 2024 U.S. presidential election, curbs on the right to access asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border are likely to remain in place or become even stiffer. As a result, many asylum seekers in North America and Europe “are finding themselves increasingly stranded in desperate, unsafe conditions like camps or crowded boats.”

At Vox, Nicole Narea evaluated Donald Trump’s oft-repeated campaign promise by examining past attempts at “mass deportation” and past challenges to the overuse of wartime powers.

“Fearmongering over the threat that illegal immigration poses to native-born white women is misleading at best,” David Kirkpatrick wrote at the New Yorker. Still, Republican candidates and Fox News are winning over some voters in close states by amplifying cases like the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, allegedly by a man who recently migrated from Venezuela.

Anti-immigrant attitudes could also affect the election outcome in Wisconsin, a swing state where many migrants have settled in response to unmet labor needs, Alfredo Corchado and Dudley Althaus wrote at the San Antonio Express-News. However, they find that the state’s small Latino vote could counteract those attitudes.

Similarly, the New York Times looked at how candidates in New York state have sought to gain an electoral advantage from a large increase in migrant arrivals to New York City during the Biden administration.

At Caracas Chronicles, Carlos Rodríguez López wrote about how “unsustained allegations about an exponential rise of violent crime brought by Venezuelan gangs” have made Venezuelan migrants a “political football” in the 2024 election campaign. Only 35 percent of people of Venezuelan origin in the United States have U.S. citizenship, Rodríguez López points out: many are recent arrivals, and most cannot vote.

The New York Times’s Miriam Jordan told the story of José, a sixth-grader living with his parents in Houston, whom Border Patrol agents had separated from his family in May 2018, at the height of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. “I don’t trust anybody,” the boy said. “I just trust my mom and dad.”

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