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Mexico just posted its February migration numbers… there must be a huge number of people from Venezuela bottled up in Mexico right now.
2024 numbers from Panama – Honduras (change the dates in search) – Mexico (click on “Personas en situación migratoria irregular” then Table 3.1.1) – U.S. (CBP / my search of CBP numbers for 2024)
Sector chiefs’ weekly Twitter updates point to a mid-March drop in migration in Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California, the two Border Patrol U.S.-Mexico border sectors that have been encountering the most migrants so far this year.
This is not the usual trend. March—and spring in general—is usually a time of steadily increasing migration, until temperatures get too high. In recent years, though, this has become less predictable, as policy changes, internet-driven rumors, and smuggling patterns have had more effect on the numbers of arriving people.
Late this afternoon—right around the time House Republicans were impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas—CBP released data showing that Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped by 50 percent from December to January.
I’ve got monthly Border Patrol data going back to October 1999, and 50 percent is the steepest one-month drop of all of those 24+ years. Steeper than the first full month of the pandemic (April 2020). Steeper than the first full month after Title 42 ended (June 2023).
It’s peculiar that migration dropped so much over two months during which no policy changes were announced. I’ll repeat the most probable reasons, as laid out in WOLA’s January 26 Border Update.
Also, while there were no policy changes, there was one under heavy discussion: the Senate “border deal” that died a quick death on February 7. The spread of vague, confusing news about impending asylum restrictions could have cooled migration more than usual last month.
Anyway, here are two charts.
Here is all migration at the border, combining people apprehended by Border Patrol and people who, mainly with appointments, showed up at land ports of entry. This is what it looks like when the heaviest month for migration on record at the U.S.-Mexico border is followed by the third-lightest month of the Biden administration’s 36 months.
And here is just Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants between ports of entry. Look at Venezuela: apprehensions of Venezuelan citizens fell by 91 percent from December to January. This does seem to point to everyone feeling like they needed to cross to the United States before 2023 ended, leaving few on the Mexican side after the new year.
See also:
The latest data from Panama show that 36,001 people migrated through the treacherous Darién Gap region in January. That’s an increase from December, reversing four months of declines. But it is still the fourth-smallest monthly total of the last twelve months.
At some point last month, the 500,000th Venezuelan migrant of the 2020s crossed the Darién Gap. 61 percent of everyone who has migrated through this region in this decade has been a citizen of Venezuela.
Actually, to be precise: the 500,000th Venezuelan migrant since 2022 crossed the Darién Gap last month. Out of 503,805 Venezuelan migrants between January 2000 and January 2024, 500,917 came in the last 25 months. There were about 30 million people living in Venezuela: so 1 out of every 60 has walked this nightmare jungle route. In 25 months.
The 30,000th Chinese citizen of the 2020s crossed the Darién last month. A year ago (after January 2023), the decade’s total migration from China was just 2,998 people.
See also:
After dipping sharply after the holidays, the number of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border appears to be increasing again.
That, at least, is the trend that we can discern from the weekly updates that the Border Patrol chiefs in Tucson and San Diego, two of the busiest of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, have been posting to their Twitter accounts.
A Senate deal on Ukraine, Israel, and border funding might include new restrictions on the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, satisfying Republican legislators’ demand. Of what we know, the most radical of these would be a new legal authority shutting the border to asylum seekers when the daily average of migrant apprehensions exceeds 5,000.
That would trigger a new “Title 42” authority expelling people out of the United States (if Mexico agrees to take them), regardless of protection needs.
On January 27, President Biden described this as an “emergency authority to shut down the border until it can get back under control.” He added, “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.“
We keep hearing this notion that more expelled asylum seekers equals fewer migrants at the border. But that’s not what happened during the Title 42 period (March 2020 to May 2023).
True, there was a decline in arrivals of would-be asylum-seekers from nationalities whose expulsions Mexico would accept. But the number of people from other countries, and of all people seeking to evade Border Patrol, grew sharply.
Migration ballooned during the Title 42 “expulsions” period. Title 42 was in place:
This was not a time when the border was “fixed.”
If the Senate deal results in a new expulsion authority, it might bring the numbers down at the border for a few months, as all “get-tough” strategies against migration tend to do. But as we saw in 2020-2023, migration will recover despite the expulsions, after a period of adjustment—perhaps by Election Day.
See also:
Late on Friday the 26th, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border through December. Here are some highlights, expressed as nine charts.
Migrants apprehended by Border Patrol (in border areas between ports of entry)
Between ports of entry, CBP’s Border Patrol component apprehended 249,785 people last month. That is probably a monthly record. It is at least the largest amount measured since October 1999, the earliest month for which Border Patrol makes monthly data available.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions jumped 31 percent from November (191,112). Increased migration from Venezuela, which more than doubled, accounted for 41 percent of the border-wide month-to-month increase.
December also saw big increases in migration between ports of entry from the other three nationalities (in addition to Venezuela) whose citizens the Biden administration allows to apply for its humanitarian parole program: Cuba (+192 percent from November to December), Haiti (+1,266 percent), and Nicaragua (+91 percent). This may mean that the humanitarian parole program is saturated by demand and insufficient supply.
It was the first month since May 2022 that more than 1,000 Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry and ended up in Border Patrol custody.
CBP encounters with migrants at ports of entry
At the official border crossings, CBP’s Office of Field Operations encountered 52,249 migrants. This is a record—though not by a wide margin, as CBP tightly controls who gets to step on U.S. soil and approach its ports of entry. Since July 2023, port-of-entry encounters have been within a narrow band: between 50,837 and 52,249. Of December’s encounters, CBP’s release indicates, 45,770 (88 percent, 1,476 per day) had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app.
All encounters
Combine the Border Patrol and port-of-entry totals, and U.S. border authorities encountered 302,034 people at the U.S.-Mexico border last month. That is a record.
Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied children, or parents and children
46 percent of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between ports of entry in December were members of family units (41 percent) or minors who arrived unaccompanied (5 percent). That is the 24th-highest child-and-family share of Border Patrol’s last 147 months, and probably ever: high, but nowhere near a record.
The overall number of children and families (114,192), however, was the second-most ever, nearly matching the record set in September 2023.
CBP encounters with family units (parents with children)
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw the second-highest-ever monthly total of family unit-member encounters: 123,512, just short of September 2023’s record total of 123,815.
Family-unit encounters rose 19 percent from November to December. Citizens of Venezuela arriving as families accounted for 38 percent of the month-to-month increase, and citizens of Mexico accounted for 28 percent.
CBP encounters with unaccompanied minors
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 12,467 children arrive at the border unaccompanied. That was the 17th-highest monthly total ever, and a 5 percent increase over November 2023.
The nationalities that contributed most to the increase in unaccompanied child arrivals were Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Arrivals from El Salvador and Honduras both declined.
Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults
When the pandemic-area Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect, Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults skyrocketed. The reasoning was that (a) a large portion of adult migrants were seeking to evade apprehension, not turn themselves in to seek asylum; and (b) when Title 42 caused them to be expelled to Mexico after a very brief time in Border Patrol custody, many attempted to migrate again, leading to many more repeat apprehensions.
That was borne out in the months after Title 42 ended, when single adult apprehensions dropped sharply. However, even without a quick expulsions policy in place, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of single adult migrants between the ports of entry jumped 41 percent from November to December, from 96,478 to 135,593. This was the 8th largest monthly total of single adult migrant apprehensions of the past 147 months.
CBP encounters with single adults
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 164,907 migrants arrive as single adults, a 32 percent increase over November (125,332). Single adult migrants from Venezuela and Guatemala accounted for nearly two-thirds of the increase, while citizens of Mexico declined slightly.
See also:
As we noted in a June report, Honduras keeps a reasonably accurate count of migrants transiting its territory, because it requires people to register with the government in order to have permission to board a bus. A minority travel with smugglers and don’t register, but most do.
Honduras also reports the nationalities of “irregular” migrants in something close to real time, so here’s what in-transit migration looked like through December.
The top 15 nationalities transiting Honduras during December were:
The top 15 nationalities during all of 2023 were:
A few things are notable about this data:
See also:
Update January 29, 2024: CBP has released final December 2023 data. Read an updated post with nine charts illustrating migration trends.
Border Patrol shares monthly data about its apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border since October 1999. As this chart shows, during that time, the number of migrant apprehensions in a single month has never exceeded 225,000. (224,370 in May 2022, 222,018 in December 2022, 220,063 in March 2000.)
That threshold has now been passed. CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez reported yesterday, “U.S. Border Patrol agents took into custody more than 225,000 migrants who crossed the southern border—in between official crossings—during the first 27 days of December, according to the preliminary Department of Homeland Security [DHS] statistics.”
(This number does not include approximately 50,000 more migrants who come each month to ports of entry—official border crossings—usually with appointments.)
Montoya-Galvez shared Border Patrol’s daily averages, showing modest decline in migrant arrivals over the past week:
The current spike in migration peaked before Christmas, during the week starting on Dec. 14 and ending on Dec. 20, when Border Patrol averaged 9,773 daily apprehensions, according to the data. On several days that week, the agency processed more than 10,000 migrants in 24 hours.
Unlawful crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border have decreased this week, but remain at historically high levels. On Wednesday, Border Patrol processed 7,759 migrants, the statistics show.
In his morning press conference yesterday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared this slide of data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP, Border Patrol’s parent agency), depicting CBP’s monthly migrant encounters through the first 17 days of December. This slide appears to combine Border Patrol apprehensions with CBP’s port-of-entry encounters, so the numbers are a bit higher.
Combining encounters with migrants at the ports of entry and between them, the chart shows a daily average of 9,787 people per day over December 1-17, increasing to 10,187 per day over December 1-21.
The chart shows a sharp increase in daily arrivals of Venezuelan citizens, whose numbers dropped in October and November after the Biden administration’s October 5 announcement that it was resuming deportation flights to Caracas.
There have since been 11 such flights, DHS reported on December 27. It appears that despite the (not huge) risk of being on one of these roughly one-per-week flights, Venezuelan asylum seekers are again coming in greater numbers.
See also:
The Mexican government just released new data showing that it recorded 97,969 “events of people in irregular migratory situation” during November 2023. That’s 5 percent more than October, and sets a new record for the most migrant encounters that Mexico has ever recorded in a month:
Migrants came from 111 countries. Of nationalities with more than 1,000 migrant encounters, those that increased the most from October to November were Mauritania (119%), the Dominican Republic (92%), and Honduras (65%). Those that declined the most from October to November were Cuba (-52%), Senegal (-28%), and Guinea (-11%). Venezuela, the number-one nationality, declined 8 percent.
Even as Mexico measured an increase in migration in November, two countries to the south, Panama and Honduras, reported double-digit percentage decreases.
See also:
According to leaked CBP data, U.S. authorities encountered 14,509 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border yesterday (December 18). That’s probably about 13,000 Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry (official border crossings) and about 1,500 people reporting to the ports of entry, nearly always with appointments made using the “CBP One” app.
That’s almost certainly the largest number of migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border in any day since at least 2000.
Aaron at the American Immigration Council says this increase, which seems to have begun in November, “is driven partly by rumors that the border will close soon and the CBP One app will be shut down.” That may explain it. A funding crisis at Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) could also be a factor.
This is really unusual, though, because migration data further south along the U.S.-bound migration route would lead one to expect the numbers at the U.S.-Mexico border to be declining. Panama, Honduras, and Mexico have been reporting fewer people coming after record-breaking levels in late summer and early fall.
Here’s Panama: a 24 percent decline in migration through the Darién Gap from October to November, and a 50 percent decline in migration from September to November. So, fewer people departing the South American continent.
Here’s Honduras: down 41 percent from October to November. So, fewer people coming from South America and through the increasingly used aerial entry point in Nicaragua.
And here’s Mexico: down 4 percent from September to October (Mexico, like the United States, has not reported November yet).
Why are the numbers up so much at the U.S. border when they’re down everywhere else along the route? The answer probably has to do with:
Also, If recent Decembers are a guide, the U.S. border numbers could be on the verge of dropping. The first halves of December 2021 and December 2022 saw very heavy migration, capping off growth that accelerated all fall (as did the fall of 2023). Numbers dropped during the second halves of those Decembers, as the holidays approached.
See also:
Panama has just posted statistics detailing migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region through November. They show the number of migrants passing through the Darién dropping for the third straight month, to less than half of August and September levels. November was 24 percent lighter than October.
Among major nationalities, the sharpest one-month declines were from Venezuela (-35%), Peru (-39%), Vietnam (-31%), and Benin (-38%). Migration from China increased 39 percent.
Venezuelan migrants may be delaying plans until they see what happens with the Biden administration’s announced resumption of deportation flights to Caracas. Colder weather and the end-of-year holidays may be part of the reason for the across-the-board decline.
Still, the barely governed jungle region finished the year’s first 11 months with nearly half a million migrants (495,459), which has never come close to happening before. A couple of weeks later, the count now stands at more than 506,000.
So far this year, 22 percent of Darién Gap migrants have been minors. (UNICEF has estimated that half of minors transiting the Darién are under five years old.) 52 percent have been men, 26 percent women, 12 percent boys, and 10 percent girls.
The Americas, a region not at war, continue to have the world’s highest homicide rate. Nearly triple the world average.
At WOLA’s Border Oversight site, I’ve updated all of our giant collection of charts and graphics about border security and migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, and along the U.S.-bound migration route.
There’s about 90 charts there. That’s hard to navigate. In order to fix that, I’ve added a table of contents to the archive.
Here, through the magic of copy-and-pasting, is that table of contents:
Visualizations of data related to U.S. border governance and migration
The U.S. government’s 2023 fiscal year ended on September 30. Here’s a comparison of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, by migrants’ nationalities, over the past three fiscal years.
From 2021 to 2023,
See also:
New CBP data for the U.S.-Mexico border is out through October. Combining migrants who came to ports of entry with migrants whom Border Patrol apprehended between the ports of entry, migration fell from 269,735 people in September to 240,988 in October (-11 percent).
Nearly all of the net reduction is citizens of Venezuela, whose numbers fell -39 percent (66,584 in September to 40,863 in October). The Biden administration’s October 5 announcement of resumed deportation flights to Venezuela probably explains the reduction. News of the resumption may have led some would-be migrants to pause their plans.
This drop will probably be short-lived, unless the Biden administration pursues a massive, costly, cruel, and politically absurd blitz of frequent aerial deportation flights to Caracas. (We see no signs of that happening yet.) As I wrote a couple of days ago, it is reasonable to expect Venezuelan migration to recover, as conditions in the country remain dire and as Venezuelans considering migration realize that the probability of aerial deportation is slim.
I made this chart, and underlying data table, by combining CBP’s migrant encounter data from 2020-2023 with data scraped from this big ugly CBP PDF covering 2007-2020.
Looking at this, three things jump out at you:
See also:
We’ve grown accustomed to Venezuela (blue in this chart) being the number-one nationality of migrants transiting Central America and Mexico to come to the United States. Venezuela has been the number-one country of citizenship of people transiting Honduras during every month since March, and U.S. authorities encountered more migrants from Venezuela than from any other country—including Mexico—at the U.S.-Mexico border in September.
Data from Honduras in October, however, show at least a temporary pause in that trend. Last month, Honduras registered more migrants from Haiti transiting its territory (brown in this chart) than from Venezuela. (A new “Mixed Movements Protection Monitoring” report from UNCHR also notes this trend.)
It was a record month for Honduras’s registries of in-transit migrants from around the world: 102,009 people with “irregular” migratory status registered with the government, a necessary step for a short-term legal status making it possible to board buses to get across the country. Of that number, 35,529 were Haitian and 34,547 were Venezuelan. (271 were recorded as Brazilian and 489 as Chilean; many—probably most—of them were children born to Haitian citizen parents who had been living in those countries.)
Transit of Venezuelan migrants through Honduras fell 19 percent from September to October, from 42,550 to 34,547 people.
A possible reason could be a reaction to the Biden administration’s early October agreement with Venezuela to resume deportation flights to Caracas, news of which may have led some would-be migrants to pause their plans. Aerial deportations are expensive, however, and a charter flight to Venezuela only holds about 100-150 people. It is reasonable to expect Venezuelan migration to recover, as conditions in the country remain dire and as Venezuelans considering migration realize that the probability of aerial deportation is slim.
The sharp increase in Haitian migration appears to owe to a new air route from Haiti to Nicaragua, which does not require that visiting citizens of Haiti obtain a visa in advance (though it charges them a steep fee upon arrival). For more on that, see this good November 6 analysis from the Honduras-based journalism website ContraCorriente.
See also:
For the first month since August 2019, Mexico is not the number-one nationality of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border. Venezuela, for the first time, was number one.
Just-released data show that Border Patrol apprehended 54,833 citizens of Venezuela in the areas between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry in September, a record for countries other than Mexico, and far more than its apprehensions of 39,773 Mexican citizens in September.
At the ports of entry (official border crossings), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 11,751 more Venezuelan citizens, most of them asylum seekers who had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app. (In September, of 50,972 people who made it onto U.S. soil at ports of entry, CBP reports that about 43,000—84 percent—had CBP One appointments.) Mexico, with 13,523 citizens encountered, was still the number-one nationality at the ports of entry.
Add together the ports of entry and the areas between them, and Venezuela was the number-one nationality in September with 66,584 migrant encounters. Mexico was the number-two nationality, with 53,296. No other nationality came close; Guatemala was in third place with 34,537.
September marked the end of the U.S. government’s 2023 fiscal year. For decades, CBP has reported its migrant encounters by fiscal year, so we now have a “year-end” comparison, at least for Border Patrol apprehensions between the ports of entry. Using this metric—which may include some double-counting, with the same migrant being apprehended two or more times—we find that 2023 was the number-two year ever for Border Patrol migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border. Only 2022 was higher.
Only 28 percent of migrants apprehended at the Mexico border in fiscal 2023 were citizens of Mexico. Since 2000, 67 percent of migrants apprehended at the border have been Mexican citizens.
(Note: at GitHub, I’ve updated the tool I use to make these and many other migration charts, with data going back to October 2019. I use it all the time, feel free to run a version of your own. It does require you to know how to run a free web server on your computer; I don’t make it public because generating a table with 48 months and 20 countries makes a web server work very hard.)
September was the 2nd busiest month ever (after August) for migration through the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama, according to data just published by Panama’s government.
Blue is Venezuela, green is Haiti, brown is Ecuador.
Here is the same information, except zoomed out annually since 2010.
Data table listing more than 140 nationalities that have transited Honduras since August 2022
Just over five months ago, we visited what is by far the most-used border crossing from Nicaragua (Trojes-Danlí) and were amazed by the number of people we saw on the move. Now, it’s more than three times as many people.
The source is the Honduran government’s National Migration Institute. Since August 2022, Honduras has waived fees charged to migrants entering its territory, instead requiring all to register and have their information entered in a database. That allows migrants to get a form required to board buses through the country. As a result, Honduras’s numbers do record most people coming through.
We now have 11 months of data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about how much illicit drugs the agency seized at the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2023 fiscal year so far (from October 2022 to August 2023). That’s enough to compare this year’s drug seizures with previous years’.
With one exception—fentanyl—the data show a drop or stagnation in the amount of drugs being detected crossing the border.
Drugs manufactured from plants are turning up less often. A few years ago, Americans addicted to prescription opioids were turning to heroin made in Mexico (from the poppy plant), and heroin seizures were way up. That is no longer true: fentanyl competes with heroin, and it’s cheaper and easier to make. Heroin seizures have fallen sharply.
As is the case with all drugs except marijuana, 90 percent of this year’s border heroin seizures have taken place at ports of entry (official border crossings), where CBP’s Office of Field Operations operates—not the areas in between the ports where Border Patrol operates. 60 percent of all border-wide heroin seizures happened at California ports of entry (CBP’s San Diego Field Office).
Cocaine seizures are flat, despite evidence of increased production in the Andes (from the coca plant). 81 percent has been seized at ports of entry this year. 47 percent of all border-wide heroin seizures happened at California ports of entry (CBP’s San Diego Field Office), and another 23 percent at south Texas ports of entry (Laredo Field Office).
Marijuana seizures have been declining for a while. With so many U.S. states now allowing some form of legal, regulated sale of cannabis, there’s far less reason to take the risk of importing it from Mexico.
Marijuana is the only drug that mostly gets seized between the ports of entry. Only 25 percent was seized at ports of entry in fiscal 2023. Most marijuana gets seized in Texas (in 2023 so far, Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector 31 percent, Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector 22 percent, CBP’s Laredo Field Office 19 percent, and Border Patrol’s Laredo Sector 12 percent).
I haven’t done the research to understand why, but seizures of a major synthetic (not plant-based) drug, methamphetamine, have also fallen. 88 percent of meth got seized at ports of entry this year. Of all border-wide 2023 seizures, 63 percent happened at California ports of entry (CBP’s San Diego Field Office).
The one drug that’s being seized in far greater amounts is fentanyl. CBP seized 106 percent more of the highly potent, highly compact synthetic opioid in the first 11 months of fiscal 2023 than it did in the same period of fiscal 2022. (That’s measured in the weight of pills or other form of seized doses, not the weight of pure fentanyl.)
89 percent of fentanyl seizures took place at ports of entry during the first 11 months of fiscal 2023. The ports in California (San Diego, blue) and Arizona (Tucson, green) have accounted for 87 percent of all 2023 fentanyl seizures border-wide.
Using data released today from the Mexican government’s Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR), here is the breakdown of asylum requests before Mexico’s system during what is certain to be a record-breaking year. Asylum requests in Mexico are on track to exceed 150,000 in 2023.
Last month, Mexico received 11,984 asylum requests, the second-lowest monthly total all year. 33 percent came from citizens of Haiti, plus another 6 percent from Brazil and Chile who are almost entirely the children born in those countries to Haitian migrants there. Honduras followed with 27 percent of September’s total, then Cuba (11 percent).
CBS News reported new information about Venezuelan migration at the U.S.-Mexico border in September, from preliminary U.S. government data:
Approximately 50,000 migrants from crisis-stricken Venezuela crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unlawfully last month, a record and once-unthinkable number, according to preliminary Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News.
According to my records (U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s public monthly reporting by citizenship is spotty before the mid-2010s), 50,000 Venezuelan citizens is the greatest-ever number of migrants in a single month at the U.S.-Mexico border from any country other than Mexico. For non-Mexican migrants, the closest numbers I see in the past are 45,201 citizens of Guatemala in May 2019, and 45,297 citizens of Honduras in July 2021.
Charted out, that September number would look like this. The blue part, which more than doubled from August to September, is Venezuelan migrants who crossed the border between ports of entry, ending up in Border Patrol custody. We still don’t know the additional green part for September, which shows migrants who came to ports of entry, usually with “CBP One” appointments (9,373 Venezuelan citizens in August).
Data table without the September estimate added
Heavy U.S.-bound movement of Venezuelan citizens continues through the Darién Gap, Central America, and Mexico. If arrivals continue at this pace, calls to “do something” about the situation causing so many Venezuelans to migrate will proliferate. Within a few months, Venezuela could be right up there—after perhaps Ukraine and the South China Sea—among the Biden administration’s top foreign policy priorities going into an election year.
This chart comes from a September 27 Congressional Research Service report, by Peter Meyer, about U.S. aid to Latin America and the Caribbean, going through the 2024 appropriations request (which Congress hasn’t funded yet).
When you adjust for inflation, nothing comes close to the amount of U.S. assistance the region received in the 1960s, during the Alliance for Progress, an aid program the Kennedy Administration launched in large part to prevent other countries from turning to Communist revolution like Cuba did.
The next biggest peaks are the 2010 response to Haiti’s earthquake just as the Mérida Initiative aid package was getting underway in Mexico; the Reagan administration’s Cold-War funding of civil wars in Central America; the Plan Colombia years of the 2000s; the Central America strategy that the Obama administration started (and Trump did not continue) after a 2014 wave of child and family migration; and the onset of the Drug War in the late 1980s.
My own career started during that deep trough of assistance during the post-Cold War Clinton 1990s. (I graduated college in 1992 and grad school in 1994.) Ironically, it was right at the absolute nadir that I co-founded a project to monitor U.S. security assistance in the Americas. (The data from that project, going back to 1996, is still part of the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor.)
The director of the Mexican government’s Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR) just shared on ex-Twitter that 112,960 people sought asylum in Mexico’s protection system during the first 9 months of 2023.
The tweet reads, “At the end of September, COMAR had registered 112,960 applicants for refugee status in Mexico. This figure exceeds by 26.39% the historical mark for the same period established in 2021. With this trend, the number of applicants will exceed 150,000 by the end of the year.”
Here’s how Mexico’s asylum applications during the first nine months of 2023 compare with the first nine months of the previous five years. It’s not even close.
While not 100 percent exact—the Department of Homeland Security isn’t sharing exact numbers—this chart gives a pretty accurate sense of which nationalities’ citizens have benefited from the two-year Humanitarian Parole program that the Biden administration has set up for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. To qualify for the paroled status in the United States, citizens of those countries must apply online from outside U.S. territory, have a passport, have a U.S.-based sponsor, and undergo a background check.
Haitians have taken fullest advantage of the program since the Biden administration created it for Venezuelan citizens in October 2022, and expanded it to the other three countries in January 2023. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported on September 22:
Through the end of August 2023, over 211,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans had arrived lawfully under the parole processes. This number includes more than 45,000 Cubans, more than 71,000 Haitians, more than 32,000 Nicaraguans, and more than 61,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the U.S. More than 47,000 Cubans, more than 84,000 Haitians, more than 39,000 Nicaraguans, and more than 68,000 Venezuelans have been vetted and authorized for travel.
For about every 300 Honduran citizens living in Honduras, 1 was apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in August 2023 alone. That’s 35,173 people out of a population of 10.6 million.
Even more citizens from Guatemala arrived at the border in August (37,937), but Guatemala’s population is larger (18.1 million). That is 1 of every 477 Guatemalan citizens living in Guatemala.
Here are some more graphics made using data that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released late Friday. WOLA’s whole collection of border infographics is at our Border Oversight website.
The tables in the graphic below show the nationalities of migrants who ended up in Border Patrol custody, after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry, between June and August 2023. As the tiny numbers on the right edge show, several nationalities experienced triple-digit percentage increases from June to August (that is, they more than doubled).
The tables in the next graphic show the nationalities of migrants who were able to present themselves at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry between June and August 2023. Most of them—87 percent in June—made appointments using the “CBP One” smartphone app.
Notable here: Haiti is third in August, as 8,687 of its citizens came to ports of entry, but Haiti does not even appear on the Border Patrol graphic above because zero Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry in August.
Finally, this graphic combines the above two tables. Here is all nationalities at the border from June through August, regardless of how CBP encountered them.
With U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) releasing new data last night, we now know what migration at the U.S.-Mexico border looked like through August.
The most notable thing about these charts is the rapid increase in migrant arrivals from June to August, in the areas between ports of entry (official border crossings) where Border Patrol operates. We know that the increase is continuing in September.
June was the first full month after May 11, 2023, when the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy ended. At that moment, many migrants and smugglers refrained from crossing between ports of entry because it wasn’t clear what would happen next, and migration plummeted to levels not seen since February 2021.
As they grew frustrated with clogged “legal pathways” like the CBP One smartphone app, and as they got better information about the likelihood of being able to pursue asylum claims within the United States despite the Biden administration’s harsh new asylum rule, more have been crossing between the official ports of entry and turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
This chart shows, by country, who has been ending up in Border Patrol custody after crossing between ports of entry.
This chart shows, by country, who was able to present themselves at a U.S.-Mexico border port of entry. Of the 51,913 people shown here in August, 87 percent (45,400) had made appointments using CBP One, according to CBP.
The following charts combine people at and between ports of entry (CBP plus Border Patrol). Here are migrants arriving as members of family units (parents plus children). Border Patrol encountered more migrants arriving as families in August 2023 (93,108) than in any month in history. The second-place month (84,486) was May 2019, when Donald Trump was president.
This chart, combining people at and between ports of entry, shows the countries of origin of migrants arriving as unaccompanied minors. August was the number-12 month ever for Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied migrant children: 13,549 last month.
And here are single adult migrants. It was an unremarkable month for single adults (28th place for Border Patrol apprehensions, 74,402, since October 2011, which is the first month for which I have Border Patrol breakdowns by demographic group.)
Finally, this chart combines all migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border: those at and between ports of entry, single adults, families, and children.
I’m still updating our collection of charts to reflect CBP’s new data dump. But what’s done is at WOLA’s Border Oversight page and downloadable as an 8-megabyte PDF file.
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