Late on September 22, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration at the U.S.-Mexico border during August 2023.
August was the number-one month ever for Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants traveling as members of families. “Family Unit” apprehensions totaled 93,108 last month.
August was the number-12 month ever for Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied migrant children: 13,549 last month.
Add those numbers, and Border Patrol apprehended 106,657 child and family migrants in August 2023, a record.
August was the number-28 month since October 2011 for Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants traveling as single adults: 74,402 last month. Single adult numbers have been dropping since the end of the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy, which ironically made repeat crossings easier because of less time in custody.
It broke all records: 81,946 people passed through this treacherous jungle region in 31 days. The previous monthly record, set in October 2022, was 59,773.
In the first eight months of this year, 333,704 people have migrated through the Darién. Ten years ago, in 2013, the full-year total was 3,051 migrants. In 2011, it was just 281.
60 percent of this year’s migrants through the Darién Gap have been citizens of Venezuela: 201,288 people. In August, the migrant population was 77 percent Venezuelan: 62,700 people.
Jaw-dropping numbers from a region that was viewed as all but impenetrable until perhaps 2021. And there’s little reason why they won’t continue to increase. Any plan to “block” migrants on this route would require a staggeringly large and complex operation that would create additional challenges, like what to do with tens of thousands of stranded migrants.
According to the Colombian daily El Espectador, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime detected 230,000 hectares of coca in Colombia in 2022. That amount—which extends the dark blue line in the chart below to 2022—would be the most coca that the UN agency has detected in any year since it began issuing estimates in 1999.
Colombia was governed for just over the first seven months of 2022 by Iván Duque, and for the remaining less than five months by Gustavo Petro.
Petro was still putting together his government by the time 2022 ended. His drug policy team only published their counter-drug strategy this past weekend. While that is a notably slow pace, it was not the cause for 2022’s result.
Petro has sought to de-emphasize forced eradication of small-scale coca farmers’ crops, which places the government in an adversarial relationship with poor people in historically abandoned territories. Through July, forced eradication is down 79 percent over the same period in 2022. Instead, the new strategy document promotes interdiction, targeting cocaine production and related finances, and other strategies.
Still, critics of the Petro government’s choices will use the 230,000 figure to oppose them. It’s possible, though, that the 2023 coca acreage figure could be reduced, because a historic drop in prices may be making the crop less attractive to many growers.
The Mexican government’s refugee agency, COMAR, just posted data through August about the number of migrants from other countries who have applied for asylum in Mexico. Eight months into the year, COMAR is nearly at 100,000 applications, on pace to reach, or be just below, 150,000 by the end of the year. Mexico appears certain to break 2021’s record of 129,768 asylum applications.
Most applicants are from Haiti, Honduras, and Cuba. As Gretchen Kuhner of Mexico’s non-governmental Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) pointed out in last week’s WOLA Podcast, a lot of migrants stranded in Mexico are being channeled into the asylum system by a lack of other options for having a legal status in the country.
As you can tell from the last few posts here, I’ve been updating my collection of border and migration infographics (a fancy word for “charts”). I’m done now.
Those all live in a section at WOLA’s Border Oversight website. There, they’re organized by category and by when they were last updated. For nearly all of them, I’ve now added a link to a Google spreadsheet with the underlying data.
I haven’t updated this one in a while. Here is a chart of migrants apprehended per Border Patrol agent per year between 1992 and 2022. The data table is here.
With 133 migrants per agent, 2022 saw the largest number since the year 2000. Unlike 2000, though, 35 migrants per agent were unaccompanied children or family unit members, nearly all of whom were trying to be apprehended—no pursuit needed—in order to seek asylum.
The same describes many of the 95 single adults, and of those seeking to avoid capture, many were double-counted because the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy facilitated repeat attempts to cross. In 2000, nearly all migrants were single adult Mexican citizens who did not request asylum.
Mexico’s government is again increasing the number of military personnel assigned to what the Presidency’s regular security updates call the “Plan de Migración en la Frontera Norte y Sur.”
This chart of migrants who end up in Border Patrol custody in the agency’s Yuma sector (western Arizona and eastern California border) looks wrong, like I messed something up. But I assure you it’s correct.
Through July 30, the month saw 52% more migration than second-place October 2022, and represented a 75% increase over June 2023.
Countries with over 1,000 migrants through July 30 were Venezuela (51% of the total), Cuba, Ecuador, Mauritania, Haiti, Senegal, and Egypt.
96 percent of registered migrants did so in the Nicaragua border-zone towns of Danlí and Trojes, in El Paraíso department. We visited that zone at the very end of April, and posted photos and a report, when the flow of migrants was less than half what it was at the end of July.
June migration data from the U.S.-Mexico border, posted yesterday by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), show a 42 percent drop, from May, in the number of migrants who crossed the border in the areas between the ports of entry (official border crossings), ending up in Border Patrol custody. There is a lot of red (reductions) in this chart of tables:
At the same time, it shows a 27 percent increase in the number of migrants who were able to approach the land-border ports of entry. The 45,026 people processed at ports of entry in June 2023 was a record. There is a lot of green (increases) in this chart of tables:
The number of nationalities whose citizens go to the ports of entry more than 20 percent of the time increased from 4 in April to 9 in June.
This is positive. The “CBP One” app that migrants must now use to secure asylum appointments at ports of entry continues to have flaws, but with 1,450 appointments per day now available, wait times in Mexican border cities—while still too long—have decreased.
It is much more humane to process asylum seekers and other migrants at the ports of entry, instead of requiring them to cross rivers or climb walls to stand on U.S. soil and turn themselves in to Border Patrol. I encourage CBP to continue increasing appointments until protection-seeking migrants no longer have an incentive to take the great risk of crossing the border on riverbanks and deserts.
As that happens, Border Patrol can mostly be cut out of the asylum processing picture, a very welcome outcome.
And even if the Biden administration’s new rule banning asylum for many migrants who cross “improperly” survives court challenges, greater access to the ports of entry will make such crossings less attractive to protection-seeking migrants anyway.
The shifts in June are a step toward that.
Finally, here is a combination of the first two tables, combining migrants who arrived at, and between, the ports of entry in April, May, and June. Overall, migration declined 30 percent from May to June.
Last month, 35,317 migrants (mostly asylum seekers) were permitted to approach US-Mexico border ports of entry (official crossings). That’s a one-month record.
This talking point about a “95% drop in border migrant encounters from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela” is problematic.
Why? Let’s examine encounters along the migration route, from north to south.
Here’s where the 95% comes from.
US Border Patrol’s apprehensions of these 4 countries’ migrants really did drop steeply from December—after Mexico agreed to accept Title 42 expulsions of these nationalities, and once a “humanitarian parole” option opened up for some of them.
But there’s no 95% drop anywhere else along the migration route, where people fleeing those countries have become stranded.
Since December, Mexico’s encounters with these 4 countries’ migrants are only down 42%.
Since December, Honduras’s encounters with Cuban, Haitian, and Venezuelan migrants are up 10%.
(Nicaraguan citizens don’t need passports to be in Honduras, and thus don’t end up in Honduras’s count of “irregular” or “undocumented” migrants.)
Since December, in Panama’s Darién Gap, migration from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela is up 250% (though down 57% from a high in October, before Mexico started accepting expulsions of Venezuelan migrants).
The upshot: migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela may be down sharply at the US-Mexico border, due to aggressive Title 42 expulsions.
But the expulsions have absolutely not deterred these nations’ citizens from migrating. They’re still fleeing—but they’re stranded.
Biden administration officials might view this chart as evidence of “policy success.”
Combining Title 42 expulsions, “CBP One” appointments, and humanitarian parole brought a 95% decrease in Border Patrol’s encounters with Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants since December, and a 50% increase in the much smaller number of those able to come to ports of entry.
But a lot of the people who were in those tall green columns—many of whom may have valid asylum claims—remain in Mexican border cities. Stranded. More are coming, but since they’re not crossing the border from Mexico, this chart doesn’t show them.
Forty of these stranded people died in a fire a month ago in Ciudad Juárez. Now, in the past couple of days, 2,000 living in miserable tents in Matamoros have come under attack. The Associated Press reports:
About two dozen makeshift tents were set ablaze and destroyed at a migrant camp across the border from Texas this week, witnesses said Friday, a sign of the extreme risk that comes with being stuck in Mexico as the Biden administration increasingly relies on that country to host people fleeing poverty and violence.
The fires were set Wednesday and Thursday at the sprawling camp of about 2,000 people, most of them from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico, in Matamoros, a city near Brownsville, Texas. An advocate for migrants said they had been doused with gasoline.
The entire Western Hemisphere is in a moment of mass migration, as the Migration Policy Institute reminded us in a feature published last week. “The number of migrants living in the region nearly doubled from 8.3 million in 2010 to 16.3 million in 2022… Notably, much of the migration has been between countries within the region,” not to the United States.
A region-wide crisis demands that the Biden administration further expand its ability to process and fairly adjudicate this increased number of protection claims. At a time of historically low unemployment, it also requires creating more legal pathways to migration.
Right now, that can mean adjusting policies that are already in place.
The number of “CBP One” appointments for asylum applicants at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, which reached 764 per day in March, needs to increase substantially to keep up with the demand in Mexican border cities, where each day’s allotment of appointments runs out in minutes.
The administration’s “humanitarian parole” program must loosen its passport and U.S.-based sponsor requirements, which exclude people lacking connections, who are often the most vulnerable.
Without changes like these, Mexican border cities are going to continue filling up. We’ll see more tragedies, more attacks, more bridge closures as large groups of people gather after being misled by misinformation.
The people in this chart’s tall green columns aren’t going anywhere. Most have nowhere else to go. The pressure is going to keep building.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data this evening about its “encounters” (regular apprehensions and Title 42 expulsions) with undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during March. Here are a few graphics illustrating key trends.
CBP and Border Patrol encountered migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border 23% more often in March than in February. Much of the variation was seasonal: March is usually busier due to milder weather.
The nationalities that increased by more than 2,500 migrant encounters from February to March were Mexico, Colombia, India, Venezuela, and Peru.U.S. border authorities used the zombie Title 42 authority 87,661 times in March to expel migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s the most expulsions in a single month since last June.Here’s the nationalities of migrants taken into CBP and Border Patrol custody at the US-Mexico border in each of the past 3 months.
Notable:
– Colombia is now the number 2 nationality (which may loom a bit over President Gustavo Petro’s visit to Washington this week). – Peru is now 5th. – March saw by far the largest number of migrants from India in a single month. – Just because Title 42 gets applied to a nationality doesn’t mean it drops in the ranking.These tables show which countries’ migrants most often come to the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry (official border crossings).
This may give a sense of which nationalities’ migrants are having at least some success with the “CBP One” app’s asylum appointments feature. It’s surprisingly consistent.One more: March saw CBP grant the largest number yet of appointments for migrants to seek asylum at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry (official border crossings).
It averaged 764 appointments per day, virtually all of them made via the “CBP One” smartphone app.
Judging from widespread reports of frustration with the app in Mexican border cities, 764 spots a day is still just a fraction of protection needs. (These stats are from a court filing from yesterday, not CBP’s March data release.)