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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Daily Border Update

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.

Get daily links in your email

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 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

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.

On the Right

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.”

On the Right

October 28, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 28, 2024

Panama will start charging hefty fines to people crossing through the Darién Gap. CBS "60 Minutes" looked at "mass deportation" plans.

Daily Border Links posts will end at the end of next week, on November 8, the Friday after the U.S. elections; we lack resources to maintain this tempo indefinitely. This page will remain online as an archive of the past year’s developments.

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

Panama’s president issued a decree establishing fines of $300 to as much as $5,000 for people who enter the country irregularly through the border with Colombia: the Darién Gap jungle route that nearly 800,000 migrants have traversed since 2023. The fine may be adjusted according to migrants’ state of “vulnerability.” Those who do not pay may be prohibited from moving on to Costa Rica and subject to deportation.

EFE reported that “as of October 13, 274,444 irregular travelers have arrived in Panama through the jungle.” That means 11,148 people migrated through the Darién during those 13 days, or 858 per day. That is a very slight increase over the 837 per day reported in September.

The human rights ombudsmen’s offices of Colombia and Panama signed a “letter of binational understanding” pledging increased cooperation on humanitarian and human rights monitoring in the Darién Gap region, where large but untold numbers of migrants perish or are assaulted, robbed, and raped by criminal groups.

A Border Patrol vehicle pursuit southeast of San Diego ended with a crash, killing two citizens of Mexico aboard, on October 22.

The population of Venezuelan migrants in Mexico City—many awaiting CBP One appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border—may have increased 13-fold from 2021 to 2023, judging from a municipal welfare agency’s count of the number of people served, Milenio reported. Many are in the central district of Cuauhtémoc, finding work paying about $60-120 per week.

In Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua, the state government’s security department established a police task force to track the activities of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan organized crime group. At the federal level, the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch, said on October 25 that while security forces have arrested some Tren de Aragua members, “we do not have this group registered as the main generator of violence.”

Leonard Darnell George, a CBP officer found guilty of taking bribes to allow drugs to cross the border through California ports of entry, was sentenced to 23 years in prison. “Prosecutors allege George was so entrenched with the drug traffickers that one trafficking associate took a selfie photograph of himself wearing George’s CBP uniform jacket,” reported San Diego’s NBC affiliate.

Analyses and Feature Stories

CBS News’s 60 Minutes program aired a segment about Republican candidate Donald Trump’s’ plan to carry out a mass deportation campaign if elected. Tom Homan, who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s presidency, said that separating migrant families “needs to be considered, absolutely.”

CBS looked at the last time the U.S. government carried out mass sweeps to deport people–during the Eisenhower administration, an example that Trump cites often–and found that “this short-term show-of-force did not stop the problem.”

The Associated Press reported that some children separated from their parents by the Trump administration are telling their painful stories in social media videos and pro-Kamala Harris campaign events. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt recalled that as many as 1,000 families remain separated over six years later.

At the New York Review of Books, John Washington profiled a woman who fled Guatemala but is stranded in the border city of Nogales, Mexico, after being refused an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States due to Biden administration restrictions. She and her son have been kidnapped twice by criminal groups in Mexico.

At Foreign Affairs, veteran journalist Julia Preston found that, despite the Democratic candidate’s rightward turn on border security and immigration policy, Kamala Harris and the much harder-line Donald Trump offer policy choices that differ in “stark and consequential” ways.

Eurasia Review spoke to Yale University sociologist Ángel Escamilla García, whose interviews with unaccompanied Central American minor children migrating through Mexico showed a significant level of knowledge of U.S. immigration law. A 17-year-old girl from Honduras said she decided not to reveal being raped during the journey “after learning that rape and other physical violence migrants suffer en route to the United States is irrelevant to their asylum applications.”

On the Right

October 25, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 25, 2024

Panama may deport Venezuelans from the Darién Gap to third countries, with US backing. ProPublica takes a deep look at migration politics in a Wisconsin town.

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Developments

At an Arizona rally, Republican candidate Donald Trump said that policies admitting migrants have made the United States “a garbage can for the world.”

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, said that he hopes to identify a third country or countries that would be willing to accept Venezuelan citizens whom Panama would deport after they cross the treacherous Darién Gap migration route. The Homeland Security attaché in the U.S. embassy to Panama told EFE that with U.S. support, air deportations of Venezuelans from the Darién may begin “in the next days, weeks at the latest.” Neither official named any possible third countries.

Panama has run nearly 20 deportation flights since early August, most of them to Colombia and Ecuador. EFE cited a U.S. embassy statement noting that the number of Colombians and Ecuadorians transiting the Darién Gap has fallen by 65 percent and 92 percent, respectively, since the flights began. (Migration from Venezuela, where the government has refused to recognize an apparent opposition victory in July 28 elections, rose 69 percent in the Darién from August to September.)

The South China Morning Post noted a 40 percent drop in border encounters with migrants from China from June to September, according to data reported by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Beyond the Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions, the article noted that “in July, Ecuador suspended its visa-free program for Chinese travelers.” Ecuador had been the principal point of arrival on the Latin American mainland for Chinese citizens arriving by air, most of whom then traversed the Darién Gap.

The Honduran Congress is considering legislation that would permanently repeal a $240 fine charged to undocumented migrants seeking to transit Honduras, in exchange for permission to remain briefly in the country. Since 2022, Honduras has waived this fee to encourage migrants to register with the government, which allows them to board public buses instead of turning to smugglers. The Congress must renew the waiver periodically; it next expires on December 31.

Analyses and Feature Stories

ProPublica published a deeply reported account from Whitewater, Wisconsin, a town that became a political flashpoint after several hundred Nicaraguan immigrants began to settle there, drawn by nearby food processing facilities in need of low-wage labor.

“By mid-2024, more than 20.3 million forcibly displaced and stateless people were hosted in the Americas,” reads a new “Americas Factsheet” from UNHCR, “including 5.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, 8.1 million internally displaced persons, and 5.8 million other people in need of international protection.”

By allowing states to carry out their own independent immigration policies, Texas’s SB4 law criminalizing border crossings could “upend immigration enforcement nationwide” if courts uphold the Texan state government’s argument that migrants constitute an “invasion,” Alejandro Serrano wrote at the Texas Tribune.

At Vox, Christian Paz pushed back on poll data showing over half of U.S. respondents favor a “mass deportation” campaign, like Donald Trump has been proposing. Paz pointed out that pollsters’ questions fail to capture the complexity or the real-life consequences of such a campaign.

“Keeping migrants stuck in southern Mexico–and points further south–has been a perpetual U.S. objective,” write three reporters for the Daily Signal covering Mexico’s stepped-up 2024 policy of doing precisely that by busing several thousand migrants per month from the country’s north to southern cities like Villahermosa, Tabasco.

Jenn Budd, whose book Against the Wall recounts a traumatic experience as a former Border Patrol agent, has compiled a database of agents who have been arrested. “This data is an undercount,” Budd wrote at her site.

Border Report published an overview of electoral matchups in House of Representatives districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. Two—one in New Mexico and one in Arizona—are rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report.

At Inside Climate News, Martha Pskowski covered the dwindling Rio Grande, the river that serves as the border between Texas and Mexico. The river’s bed is completely dry along about 200 miles of west Texas.

On the Right

October 24, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 24, 2024

A federal appeals court affirms that "metering" asylum seekers at ports of entry is illegal.

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Developments

The federal judiciary’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court’s earlier ruling that Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) practice of “metering” asylum seekers at official border crossings is illegal. The term refers to stationing officers at the crossings’ borderline to turn back people without U.S. documentation, preventing them from setting foot on U.S. soil and asking for protection, while allowing only a small number of asylum seekers to access ports of entry each day.

The appeals court judges’ 2-1 decision determined, in the written opinion of Judge Michelle Friedland, that “a noncitizen who presents herself to a border official at a port of entry has arrived in the United States… whether she is standing just at the edge of the port of entry or somewhere within it.”

U.S. law states that a person physically present in the United States has the right to ask for asylum if they fear their life or freedom would be in danger upon return to their country. “You are not breaking the law by seeking asylum at a port of entry,” the Trump administration’s Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, tweeted in June 2018, at the height of that year’s family separations crisis. “Metering,” however, has strictly limited asylum seekers’ ability to access ports of entry.

The decision striking down “metering” caps a seven-year legal battle led by the San Diego and Tijuana-based Al Otro Lado, along with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the American Immigration Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Democracy Forward, along with the law firms Mayer Brown and Vinson and Elkins.

CBP officially rescinded the metering policy in 2021. The Ninth Circuit’s October 23 decision does not appear to affect the Biden administration’s current policy of turning away nearly all asylum seekers who show up to ports of entry without having secured one of 1,450 daily appointments made using the CBP One smartphone app. A May 2024 Human Rights Watch report called this “digital metering.” Organizations involved in the “metering” case have filed a new lawsuit challenging turnbacks of asylum seekers without CBP One appointments.

Border Report and the Arizona Daily Star covered the fiscal year 2024 migration and border enforcement statistics that CBP published on October 22. Border Report noted that the past few months’ drop in Border Patrol migrant apprehensions could see some reversals amid rising migration in Panama’s Darién Gap region and reports of migrant “caravans” forming in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. The Daily Star noted that Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona sector saw the most migration for much of the year, though numbers have dropped sharply along with the Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions, and that fentanyl seizures declined in fiscal 2024 for the first time since the drug began appearing in the mid-2010s.

A “caravan” numbering perhaps 700 migrants, which departed Mexico’s far south at the beginning of the month, is walking in the southern state of Oaxaca, adjacent to the country’s southern border state of Chiapas. A Venezuelan man told the daily Milenio he worries that the possibility of securing CBP One appointments will end if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins the November 5 U.S. election.

Mexican authorities reported rescuing nine migrants from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh whom a criminal group had kidnapped for ransom in the southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. They reported no arrests of kidnappers.

Tapachula now leads all Mexican cities in perceptions of citizen insecurity, according to a survey from the Mexican government’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). Ninety-two percent of Tapachula residents told surveyors that they fear crime. Chiapas, a border state through which large numbers of drugs and people are smuggled and trafficked, has experienced a sharp rise in organized crime violence over the past year.

The city’s mayor told EFE that Tapachula “concentrates 60 percent of the migrants in Mexico”; this estimate may be high, but the number of migrants lacking Mexican documentation and forced to wait there is very large.

A CBP officer faces aggravated assault charges after he fired his weapon 11 times while off duty in an apparent road rage incident on a highway on-ramp in El Paso, Border Report reported.

Bloomberg Law reported on Donald Trump’s intent to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for many migrants in the United States whom the program currently protects from deportation.

Peru’s government has added new restrictions on the approximately 1.54 million Venezuelan citizens residing in the country. These include new documentation requirements for employment and controls on financial remittances. The measures could reduce the number of Venezuelans who consider themselves “firmly settled” in the South American nation, potentially leading some to migrate elsewhere, including to the United States.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At his Substack newsletter, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh published a detailed rebuttal of claims that migrants in the United States are committing crimes at a greater rate than native-born U.S. citizens. Arrest and conviction data indicate otherwise.

The UN Refugee Agency published its annual report for Mexico operations in 2023. Among findings are that nearly 400 mostly charity-run migrant shelters operate in the country, and that over 600 companies have committed to employing refugees inside Mexico.

Iowa Public Radio, reporting from Iowa; Gothamist, reporting from Long Island, New York; and Politico, reporting from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, illustrated how the border security and migration debate is affecting congressional campaigns, particularly in swing districts, far from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Reporting from the border town of Douglas, Arizona, Agénce France Presse echoed residents’ exasperation with politicians from elsewhere falsely portraying border communities as dangerous places in crisis.

On the Right

October 23, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 23, 2024

CBP releases migration and enforcement data for fiscal 2024, including a 25% drop in migration and a 26% drop in fentanyl seizures.

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Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration and enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border during September, which was also the final month of the U.S. government’s 2024 fiscal year. Among key findings:

  • Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants between ports of entry dropped 25 percent from 2023 to 2024 (from 2,045,838 to 1,530,523).
  • Migrants who entered CBP custody at ports of entry, most with CBP One appointments, increased 41 percent from 2023 to 2024 (429,831 to 604,482). CBP had increased appointments to their current level of 1,450 per day in June 2023, near the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
  • Combining Border Patrol and port-of-entry encounters, the nationalities most frequently encountered at the border in 2024 were Mexico (-9% from 2023), Venezuela (-2%), Guatemala (-7%), Cuba (+6%), Honduras (-34%), Colombia (-20%), Ecuador (+5%), Haiti (+16%), El Salvador (-12%), and China (+57%)
  • 38 percent of migrants encountered in 2024 were members of family units, and another 5 percent were unaccompanied children. This is similar to 2023 (33 percent and 6 percent, respectively).
  • In September, Border Patrol apprehended 53,858 people between ports of entry. That is similar to July and August, slightly less than September 2020 when Donald Trump was president during the pandemic, and 78 percent less than the record-setting month of December 2023. The Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions and a crackdown in Mexico continue to suppress migration levels.
  • “Overall, southwest border deaths were down 30% comparing the fourth quarter of last fiscal year to this fiscal year,” CBP reported, without offering aggregate numbers.
  • Seizures of fentanyl fell for the first time since the drug began appearing. CBP seized 21,148 pounds of the potent opioid in 2024, down from 26,718 pounds in 2023 (-26%). Similar to past years, 86 percent of fentanyl seizures occurred at border ports of entry. Of the remaining 14 percent seized by Border Patrol, 4 percent was seized from vehicles at the agency’s interior checkpoints.
  • Seizures of cocaine increased 10 percent and methamphetamine increased 30 percent. Heroin fell 21 percent and marijuana 8 percent.
  • “Cbp Releases September 2024 Monthly Update“ (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, October 22, 2024).
  • Rafael Bernal, “September Border Patrol Encounters Lowest Since the Pandemic“ (The Hill, October 22, 2024).
  • Dan Gooding, “Illegal Border Crossings Keep Falling as Election Day Grows Closer“ (Newsweek, October 22, 2024).
  • Elliot Spagat, “Border Arrests Fall in September in Last Monthly Gauge Before Us Elections“ (Associated Press, Associated Press, October 22, 2024).

“We’ve reached almost 20 flights in 3 months, trying to discourage people from” migration through the Darién Gap region, Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, told reporters during a visit to France. Mulino was referring to stepped-up deportation flights being carried out with U.S. support. As a result, the Panamanian president added, migration through the Darién “has gone down (by around 20% so far this year compared to 2023), but my concern is the worsening of the crisis in Venezuela,” EFE reported.

NBC News obtained Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data indicating that the Department has identified about 600 people in the United States with possible ties to the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization. Of those, about 100 are considered “confirmed members of the gang.” As about 600,000 citizens of Venezuela have been released into the United States in the 2020s, the DHS list covers perhaps 0.1 percent of that population.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A week from today (Wednesday, October 30, 5:00 Eastern), join WOLA, Alliance San Diego, the Eagle Pass Border Coalition, Hope Border Institute, and Human Rights Watch for an online discussion of excessive use of force by Texas state National Guard and police personnel on the borderline.

The Migration Policy Institute published a study of migration trends at the border, coinciding with CBP’s release of September and fiscal 2024 data. The analysis finds that the drop in migration results from the Biden administration’s combination of asylum curbs, encouragement of other countries’ enforcement, and expansion of lawful migration pathways. It concludes that the migration reduction’s long-term persistence is impossible to predict given several factors, many beyond the Biden administration’s control.

A group of investigative journalism outlets published a report about “Border 911,” a non-profit led by Tom Homan, who served as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director during the Trump administration. The report alleges that Homan’s group, linked to “dark money” efforts and border security contracting, uses disinformation about immigration, particularly the notion that migrants and asylum seekers constitute an “invasion,” to build political support for far-right policies and to undermine electoral processes.

If Donald Trump is elected, his promised “mass deportation” campaign would face fewer obstacles than during his first term, argued a USA Today analysis. It reported a poll finding 45 percent of respondents supporting mass deportation, 49 percent against.

The Washington Examiner noted that Trump’s deportation plan, which the campaign has not described in detail, would face obstacles including its scale, ICE capacity, legal challenges, political backlash, and economic impacts.

Among trends in the Mixed Migration Center’s latest quarterly report on Latin America highlights reduced migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, reduced Darién Gap migration, and a drop in asylum cases in Mexico. (Last week, Panama released data showing a September increase in Darién Gap migration, led by Venezuelan citizens, though migration remains below levels measured during the first half of 2024.)

On the Right

October 22, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 22, 2024

Recently arrived migrants tend to be concentrated in a small number of US communities. Colombia arrests smugglers facilitating a non-Darién migration route.

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Developments

In a U.S.-assisted operation, Colombian police and judicial authorities arrested another 17 people, one of them Nicaraguan, for charging migrants $200 to $450 each to travel from Colombia’s Caribbean island department of San Andrés to Nicaragua by boat.

Four of the seventeen—including two local government officials from San Andrés—stand accused of charging migrants from Asia, particularly Vietnam, $2,000 to $2,500 each to fly from Colombia’s border with Ecuador to Nicaragua via San Andrés.

The San Andrés to Nicaragua route allows migrants to avoid the Darién Gap.

Border Report reported on an October 20 shootout between members of Mexico’s National Guard and members of a criminal group on a highway that follows Mexico’s side of the border between El Paso and Tornillo, Texas. The road has recently been upgraded, noted Border Report’s Julián Resendiz, but “some truckers have expressed misgivings about using the highway due to well-documented drug cartel activity in the area known as El Valle de Juarez (Valley of Juarez).”

A Breitbart report noted increased arrivals of asylum seekers turning themselves in to Border Patrol in mid-Texas’s Del Rio Sector. A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) source told Breitbart‘s Randy Clark, a former Border Patrol agent, that “nearly 160” unaccompanied children from Central and South American nations crossed into Eagle Pass within the past week.

Analyses and Feature Stories

In the first article of a pre-election series, ProPublica published a detailed overview of how migration at the U.S.-Mexico border has shifted during the past few years, noting changes in nationalities and demographics and effects on the immigration court system, receiving communities, the U.S. labor market, and electoral politics. The investigation found that the newly arrived migrants have been “concentrated in relatively few places around the country.”

In response to NBC News revelation that 30 percent of Border Patrol’s Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) cameras are broken, Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that border surveillance technology is “political theater” and “a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.”

NPR’s Adrian Florido reported from Florida about how some members of the state’s Venezuelan-American community are agreeing with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s evidence-free demonization of recent Venezuelan migrants as “criminals” and voicing support for their deportation. Some of this attitude appears related to class differences between earlier migrants and newer arrivals, who tend to be poorer and often darker-skinned.

A column at Jacobin criticized NBC’s decision to delay screening Separated, the new Errol Morris documentary about the Trump administration’s family separation policy, until after the U.S. election.

“As the Trump campaign’s rhetorical demonization of immigrants escalates, it is reasonable to wonder why Democrats and liberals around the world have decided to effectively abandon the issue to their adversaries,” reads a column at Newsweek from David Faris of Roosevelt University.

October 21, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 21, 2024

Border wall falls are up sharply in San Diego. "Caravans" keep forming in Mexico's far south.

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Developments

Two San Diego hospitals, Scripps Mercy Hospital and UC San Diego Medical Center, report 993 “severe falls” from the border wall so far this year (Scripps through August, UCSD through September). That is up 58 percent over falls recorded in all of 2023, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee hypothesized that Mexico’s placement of troops in an area east of the city with little or no fencing might be leading more migrants, including those seeking to turn themselves in to authorities, to attempt to scale the wall.

A Mother Jones investigation of the U.S. government’s search-and-rescue system for preventing the deaths of migrants in distress found “a scattershot emergency response system with little accountability, in which responsibility for saving migrants’ lives is divided among Border Patrol agents whose primary duty is law enforcement, not search and rescue; overtaxed county search and rescue teams; and unpaid volunteers from humanitarian groups.”

Another in a series of “caravans,” combining migrants from many nationalities, departed Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas on Sunday. Some participants in the large group said that they felt a need to get to U.S. soil before a transfer of power in the United States, as Republican candidate Donald Trump, who is tied in polls, has pledged to eliminate the use of the CBP One smartphone app and other legal migration pathways.

Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) sought to discourage the movement by offering bus rides from Tapachula to Chiapas’s capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, about 150 miles away. “They told us that they are going to give us a 10-day permit there so that we can wait for a CBP One appointment and they will take us to Tuxtla Gutiérrez,” a Honduran man told EFE.

El Paso, Texas municipal officials told Border Report that they are monitoring the caravans moving through Mexico’s far south, although “we don’t know what part of the border they’re going.”

The Mexican government’s secretaries of interior, foreign affairs, army, and navy met on October 18 “to review the current situation of irregular migration crossing the country, and the repatriation of Mexicans,” Milenio reported.

Mexican civil society organizations making up the “Central Border Monitoring Group” denounced that Mexico City authorities have been arranging to bus migrants to states further north, like Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí, “without clear information or the delivery of regular transit documents.”

NPR reported on a ballot measure in Arizona, Proposition 314, that—like the highly controversial SB4 in Texas—would make it a violation of state law to cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization. Advocates worry that, if the measure passes, local police may profile people they suspect of having crossed illegally, demanding that they “show their papers” anywhere in the state.

Home building firms told NBC News that presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plans for a “mass deportation” campaign would decimate their labor force and cripple their industry. “You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house,” said the CEO of a Texas-based subcontracting firm.

Municipal police in Tijuana are offering to have agents inspect northbound vehicles in order to shorten border crossing times at the busy San Ysidro port of entry, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A New York Times analysis contended that Donald Trump is “doubling down” on the border and immigration as the issue that can win the election for him, despite poll data showing voters more concerned about economic issues.

Amid Democrats’ rightward pivot on border and immigration issues during the 2024 election cycle, Vox reporter Nicole Narea wrote that if elected, Kamala Harris would probably adopt a “two-pronged” approach, keeping current curbs on asylum and boosting border security while also maintaining alternative legal pathways for migrants.

“The Mexican government reported 200,289 Venezuelans ‘in an irregular migratory situation’ in the first half of 2024,” EFE reported. That is 215 percent more than during the first half of 2023. According to this estimate, Venezuela is the number-one nationality of undocumented migrants in Mexico, making up over a quarter of the total.

“Half of the fentanyl coming into the U.S. is seized at the Mariposa Port of Entry” in Nogales, Arizona, CBP’s top official, Troy Miller, told the Arizona Republic. The port, west of downtown with much cargo traffic, is now able to scan about 50 percent of cargo, Miller added.

Increasing organized crime violence in Mexico’s southern state of Tabasco may be related to the Mexican government’s mass busing of migrants to the state’s capital, Villahermosa, mainly from the U.S. border region, according to an InSight Crime analysis. An already existing conflict between organized crime factions in the state is being exacerbated by “large sums” that can be gained “from extorting vulnerable migrants” being bused there at a rate of about 10,000 people per month.

On the Right

October 18, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 18, 2024

Analyses of the Rio Grande Valley border wall's effects; the relative lack of migrant crime; human trafficking in Tapachula; and the righward turn of US immigration politics.

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Developments

On a visit to San Diego, the senior official performing the duties of Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) commissioner, Troy Miller, highlighted “Operation Apollo,” which the local NBC affiliate described as “a relatively new strategy to decrease the amount of apprehensions made by agents through increased enforcement, harsher penalties for offenders and heightened collaboration with relevant agencies.”

Soon, perhaps today, CBP will publish information about migration and drug seizures through September 30, the final day of the U.S. federal government’s 2024 fiscal year.

Two Venezuelan men were shot, one fatally, in an incident at a market near downtown Ciudad Juárez on October 16.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A team of Washington Post reporters published a dispatch from south Texas about the impacts of border wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley region. The border river’s unstable course requires segments of barrier to be built as much as two miles inland, “leaving thousands of acres in the liminal space between the border and the barrier.” That leaves plenty of U.S. soil upon which people have the right to request asylum.

An explainer from Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute pointed out that, according to “a growing volume of research,” immigrants not only commit fewer crimes in the United States, but they may even “lower criminal activity, especially violent crime, in places with inclusive policies and social environments where immigrant populations are well established.”

“I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue,” Silky Shah of Detention Watch wrote at Inquest. “Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is” amid a nationwide rightward shift. Shah concludes, “In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building.”

At Redacción Regional, Bryan Avelar reported from Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, where tens of thousands of migrants, most seeking to make it to the United States, are stranded by Mexico’s efforts to block them and long waits for CBP One appointments. The city “is a kind of paradise for the trafficking of migrant women,” Avelar wrote.

San Antonio’s ABC affiliate featured the work of Operation Identification, a nonprofit at Texas State University that is helping to identify the remains of migrants found in the Texas borderlands and provide closure to their loved ones.

Fernando Castro, a former Guatemalan consular official, wrote a column in Guatemala’s Prensa Libre noting recent government efforts to link up with U.S. medical examiners—especially in Pima County, Arizona—to help relatives of missing migrants contribute DNA samples that could match them to migrant remains recovered near the U.S.-Mexico border.

A report from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, supported by the International Institute of New England, highlighted the severe humanitarian consequences of recent U.S. policies restricting the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. Asylum seekers, the report finds, face worsened risks of kidnapping, extortion, and abuse while waiting in Mexico; Black and LGBTQIA+ migrants face particular discrimination and targeting.

On the Right

October 17, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 17, 2024

Candidate Harris argues with FOX host about the border and migration. Large groups of migrants are arriving in Texas's Del Rio Sector.

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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, spent nearly half of a contentious interview with FOX News host Bret Baier discussing the border and migration.

The New York Times noted that Baier, the FOX host, “repeatedly interrupted the vice president and tried to talk over her.” When able to talk, Harris often returned to her central border talking point: Donald Trump’s opposition to a bill, which failed in the Senate in February following negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators, that would have hired more border officers and agents, increased migrant detention, and tightened asylum availability.

Asked, “Do you regret the decision to terminate Remain in Mexico at the beginning of your administration?” Harris did not address the controversial program but pointed out that, in its early days, the administration backed a comprehensive immigration reform bill (which failed to move through Congress in 2021).

At Vox, Christian Paz viewed Harris’s responses to Baier as ceding political ground to immigration hardliners: “The Vice President had a chance to defend immigrants on Fox News. She passed.”

In a debate between Pennsylvania Senate candidates, incumbent Democrat Bob Casey attacked his Republican challenger, Dave McCormick, for joining Donald Trump in opposing the February compromise Senate bill. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t support that,” Casey said. “It doesn’t make any sense when he knows that we could advance the ball based upon the expertise of the Border Patrol.”

The DeConcini border port of entry in Nogales, Arizona was closed for a few hours yesterday afternoon after a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer shot and wounded a man who attempted to drive through a vehicle lane at the crossing.

Texas police reported apprehending a group of 204 migrants, including 47 unaccompanied children, near the border city of Eagle Pass. This is part of Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, which has experienced an increase in arrivals of large groups of migrants seeking to turn themselves in to authorities over the past few weeks.

New U.S. asylum restrictions and Mexico’s policy of transporting migrants to the country’s south are increasing pressure in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, where large groups have formed this month into so-called “caravans.” The groups walking through Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Tlaxcala states, numbering as many as 1,000 each, intend to reach Mexico City, either to petition Mexican authorities for faster asylum processes or other documentation, or to disperse and seek to reach the U.S. border from there.

Mexican soldiers who fired on a vehicle carrying migrants in Chiapas on October 1, killing six of them, “will be tried under military laws, a key issue for human rights activists who say the process lacks transparency,” Reuters reported. A Mexican military press release stated that two soldiers began shooting after hearing “detonations.” Reporter Lizbeth Díaz spoke to three residents of the area where the incident occurred, who “said they heard no explosions.”

Ecuador’s El Universo told the story of Melissa Barzola, a Guayaquil resident who migrated to Mexico via the Darién Gap and secured a CBP One appointment in Ciudad Juárez, only to be kidnapped from the bus in which she was traveling in mid-September, likely in Durango or Chihuahua, Mexico. The kidnappers demanded $5,000 from her family in Ecuador; they mortgaged their house to pay the ransom, but Barzola has not been released.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At Foreign Affairs, Andrea Flores of FWD.us, a former Biden administration official, pointed out the failure of repeated crackdowns to control migration or bring security to the border. While fixing the U.S. asylum system would help greatly, she argued, it is no substitute for fundamentally updating U.S. immigration laws that mostly date back to 1990. “The overwhelmed asylum system is not the cause of the border crisis but rather a consequence of the United States’ failure to develop a coherent response to global shifts in irregular migration,” Flores wrote.

The American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick published an overview of “the current state of the border” at the organization’s Immigration Impact blog. It notes that crackdowns in Mexico and in U.S. asylum access have brought Border Patrol apprehensions to relatively low levels, a “fragile equilibrium” threatened by “signs that the slow-down in migration is ending” in the Darién Gap and through Central America.

The Dallas Morning News published a status report about the ongoing campaign of Texas’s state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), against nonprofits assisting migrants in the state. Paxton accuses groups like El Paso’s respected Annunciation House shelter network of encouraging unauthorized migration by providing shelter and aid.

On a drive along Arizona’s border, Los Angeles Times reporter Jeffrey Fleishman talked to migrants, volunteers, ranchers, and other community members about the region’s humanitarian, political, and security complexities. Fleischmann heard calls for greater border security from some, and for immigration reform from others, in a region where the number of migrants dying in the desert remains very high.

The independent Cuba-focused media outlet El Toque pointed out that CBP One appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border now rival the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program as the best option available for people fleeing the island.

FOX News reported on alleged U.S. activities of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan criminal organization that some U.S. politicians are using to portray all Venezuelan migrants as threatening due to its small presence among those fleeing the economically depressed South American dictatorship.

On the Right

October 16, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 16, 2024

Fentanyl seizures, long a California-Arizona phenomenon, are now being reported across from El Paso.

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Developments

Police in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, reported seizing 14 kilograms of fentanyl pills in the crime-plagued neighborhood of Anapra, along the border with New Mexico, west of El Paso. This comes shortly after a local media report about a raid on a fentanyl lab in the same neighborhood.

This is notable because since 2019, 96 percent of CBP’s border-zone fentanyl seizures (71,883 of 74,953 pounds) have occurred in California and Arizona—far from the Ciudad Juárez area, which borders Texas and New Mexico.

Aaron Heitke, who served as chief of Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector and is now retired, alleged in a recent congressional hearing that Biden administration officials had “pushed him” to hide groups of asylum-seeking migrants “out of sight” of cameras as they waited between layers of the border wall to turn themselves in.

A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official speaking on background to Voice of San Diego denied Heitke’s allegations. Lilian Serrano of the Southern Border Communities Coalition said that Heitke’s claim confirmed humanitarian groups’ suspicions that Border Patrol “hides migrants from our view…so that we don’t see violations” of policies for humane treatment of people waiting to turn themselves in.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed 50 percent more cases against people for migrant smuggling in Arizona during July-September than it did during January-March, at a time of sharply reduced migrant apprehensions overall, reported Arizona Public Media.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Colombian government’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office reported from the beginning of the route through the Darién Gap that, under organized crime dictates, migrants must pay US$350 each for boat fare, lodging, and “guides” on the Colombian side of the trail.

EFE reported on the reduction in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border due to Mexico’s crackdown on in-transit migration and the Biden administration’s restrictions on asylum access. “Now, usually very few people arrive. For the most part, they are unaware that you use a (mobile) app to make an appointment and get an interview to request asylum,” said Pedro Ríos of the American Friends Service Committee. Ríos pointed out, however, that the wait time for appointments at ports of entry using the CBP One app can be eight or nine months.

Palabra explored the struggles of migrants seeking to integrate into life and the economy in Chicago, focusing on the story of a family who fled Venezuela, could not settle firmly in Colombia, and then traveled through the Darién Gap to the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso.

Snopes examined the role that Kamala Harris has played in migration and border policy as Vice President. The site noted that claims Harris served as a “border czar” are “misleading,” as they “often conflate her role in addressing the root causes of migration with direct border security responsibilities.”

“Latinx artists and storytellers are creating their own narratives about the border as a vibrant and rich landscape,” reads a profile of borderland artists Favianna Rodríguez, Jenea Sánchez, Gabriela Muñoz, and Pita Juárez in The 19th.

On the Right

October 15, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 15, 2024

Migrant deaths hit emergency levels in New Mexico. 30 percent of Border Patrol's RVSS cameras are broken. Texas's economy depends on undocumented labor.

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Developments

The Associated Press reported on the alarming recent increase in migrant deaths along the border in New Mexico, especially in areas not far from the city of El Paso, Texas. Among the causes, Dylan Corbett of the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute cited “systematic” organized crime activity, Texas’s state border crackdown, and the Biden administration’s recent curbs on asylum access.

NBC News revealed that 30 percent of the Border Patrol’s Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) cameras aren’t working. According to a leaked internal Border Patrol memo, this means “roughly 150 of 500 cameras perched on surveillance towers” along the U.S.-Mexico border are inoperable due to “several technical problems.“ The RVSS is not Border Patrol’s only system of cameras along the border but is still its “primary” program.

In Guatemala, a court is considering the case of 23 National Police agents accused of collaborating with “La RS,” an illegal migrant smuggling organization. The police allegedly helped move 10,000 migrants in exchange for bribes, primarily transporting them from Guatemala’s border with El Salvador to its border with Mexico.

The Mexican government’s independent Federal Institute of Federal Public Defense (IFDP) reported that it has not been able to obtain information about the migrants who were killed and wounded in Chiapas on October 1, when soldiers opened fire on the vehicle in which they were traveling. According to Proceso, the IFDP “denounced that the people transferred to the hospital were sent to the ‘Siglo XXI’ migrant detention center, ‘which revictimizes and violates the principle of non-repetition of acts of violence and discrimination faced by people in mobility.’”

Enrique Valenzuela, the longtime head of the State Population Council (COESPO) in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, told a conference that the border city’s migrant shelters are currently at least 40 percent full. Migration levels remain significant in the area, Valenzuela said. However, the Biden administration’s asylum curbs have brought an end, for now, to large groups of people attempting to turn themselves in to Border Patrol.

Analyses and Feature Stories

“By mid-2024, more than 20.3 million forcibly displaced and stateless people were hosted in the Americas,” according to a new UNHCR factsheet.

At Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera found that for all the Texas state government’s political posturing about undocumented migration at the border, the state’s economy is heavily dependent on undocumented migrant labor. The investigation highlighted the state’s construction industry, where migrants fill acute labor shortages.

“Today, Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center study of 2022 census data,” Herrera noted. That means about 1 in 20 people in Texas were undocumented that year, compared to about 1 in 30 nationwide.

The New York Times pointed out the lack of detail with which Republican candidate Donald Trump makes his hardline border security proposals, such as an October 13 pledge to hire 10,000 more Border Patrol agents and a promise to employ the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 to enable a mass deportation campaign.

At his Substack newsletter, Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck offered context about the Alien Enemy Act, concluding that courts are so likely to restrict its use that “this is almost certainly empty (if nevertheless disturbing) posturing by former President Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal published a deep dive into Kamala Harris’s role in border and migration policy during her vice presidency.

The Free Press, a conservative publication, reported that sex trafficking groups are taking advantage of weaknesses in the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s placements of unaccompanied migrant children with relatives or sponsors.

On the Right

October 14, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 14, 2024

Trump renews calls for mass deportations, likely using the military, and for hiring 10,000 Border Patrol agents. Venezuelan migration through the Darién Gap rose 69% in a month.

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Developments

Republican candidate Donald Trump visited Aurora, Colorado on October 11, where he called for a campaign of mass deportations of migrants that, if elected, he would call “Operation Aurora.” The deportation blitz would rely on the Alien Enemies Act, part of the rarely used Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

The Denver suburb has received much attention in conservative media and Republican politicians’ statements because of the alleged presence of members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization, in an apartment block.

The city’s mayor and other Republican officials have said that the presence of Tren de Aragua is minimal, and mayor Mike Coffman (R, a former congressman) criticized Trump for exaggerating it. “The mayor said they were exaggerated. That means there’s gotta be some element of truth here,” Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), said on ABC’s This Week.

Civilian U.S. agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), lack the capacity to carry out Trump’s proposed mass deportation plan on their own. The candidate would use rarely invoked emergency authorities to have members of the U.S. military carry out deportation and border security duties.

It is very unusual to have soldiers carrying out non-defense duties on U.S. soil that put them in regular contact with civilians. But as an Associated Press analysis pointed out, “He [Trump] has pledged to recall thousands of American troops from overseas and station them at the U.S. border with Mexico. He has explored using troops for domestic policy priorities such as deportations and confronting civil unrest. He has talked of weeding out military officers who are ideologically opposed to him.”

Trump’s proposed use of the Alien Enemies Act is highly controversial. Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck pointed out that “Courts have historically taken a remarkably narrow view of the statute’s scope” and would face similar challenges even in today’s more conservative federal courts.

At an October 13 rally in Arizona, Trump brought up leaders of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing most Border Patrol agents. The union’s new president, Paul Pérez, endorsed Trump, telling the crowd, “If we allow Border Czar [Kamala] Harris to win this election, every city, every community in this great country, is going to go to hell.”

The candidate proposed a 10 percent pay raise for Border Patrol agents and a $10,000 signing bonus for recruits, in order to add 10,000 new agents to a force that currently has just under 20,000.

Border Patrol already had enough funds appropriated in 2024 to maintain a workforce of 22,000, but has barely been able to hire more agents than it loses to retirements and other attrition. CBP continues to struggle to find recruits who can pass background checks, including a polygraph exam with a high failure rate. Already, the Washington Post pointed out, “new Border Patrol agents could be eligible for as much as $30,000 in incentives.”

Several news reports noted that in February, Trump urged Republican legislators to kill a compromise Senate bill that, among other provisions, would have hired about 1,500 new Border Patrol agents and CBP officers.

The New York Times noted that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, has been playing up her past performance as a prosecutor and attorney-general in a border state, California, which included many prosecutions of transnational organized crime groups. Her efforts to collaborate with other states and other nations “led to the arrests of larger players in the drug trade and seizures of greater quantities of drugs and other illicit goods,” the Times reported. “Ms. Harris is leaning into that experience as she runs on the most conservative border and immigration platform of any Democrat in decades.”

Panama’s migration authority released data about September migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region. It showed a 51 percent increase in the number of people transiting the Darién Gap last month compared to August, which was one of the lightest months in the past two years.

Of 25,111 migrants registered at the route’s end in September, 79 percent were citizens of Venezuela. Migration from Venezuela leaped 69 percent (19,800, up from 11,733 in August). This is a likely consequence of the Nicolás Maduro regime’s refusal to recognize a probable landslide defeat in July 28 elections, which it followed with a wave of political repression.

Refugees International published an in-depth report about the current experience of migrants transiting the Panama segment of the Darién Gap route, the rest of Panama, and Costa Rica. Researchers Caitlyn Yates and Rachel Schmidtke warned that Panama’s and Costa Rica’s restrictive policies are exacerbating humanitarian crises without curbing migration, and they expect high levels of migration to persist.

The report finds that both countries’ busing system, which intends to reduce smuggling, leaves vulnerable migrants stranded due to high fees and inadequate financial support. Humanitarian needs are particularly acute in Costa Rica’s border regions.

A report from the Venezuela Observatory at Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario highlighted some of the dangers that migrants face during the Darién journey in Colombia and Panama, especially predation by organized crime.

Darién Gap migrants, along with Central Americans and people who take aerial routes into countries like Nicaragua, continue to arrive in large numbers at Mexico’s southern border. Spain’s El País reported from Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, where people trying to use the CBP One app to obtain appointments at the U.S. border are subject to “heightened violence” while they struggle to earn money to survive. Many arrive already traumatized by the journey through the Darién and Central America.

The number of in-transit migrants passing from Nicaragua into Honduras so far this year stood at 318,771 in 2024 as of October 7, about 12 percent less than at the same point in 2023, reported the independent Nicaraguan media outlet Confidencial, citing Honduran government data. Venezuelan citizens make up 49.6 percent of this year’s registered migrants.

About 1,000 migrants formed a “caravan” in Tapachula. Citing an inability to get CBP One appointments, participants said their destination is Mexico City. This is the second large group of migrants in Tapachula this month. According to Milenio, among the nationalities of those participating are “Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Central America, Haiti, Argentina, Panama, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Nepal, and others.”

These “caravans” no longer reach the U.S.-Mexico border as they may have in 2018-2019; migrants tend to organize them now to protest delays in their migratory documentation efforts, or to achieve “safety in numbers” while traveling through segments of southern Mexico.

The Mexican daily Milenio, citing information from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), reported that the Venezuelan-origin Tren de Aragua criminal group “has joined Mexican gangs that operate a network of safe houses in US territory used for human smuggling, particularly in the El Paso region of Texas.” CBP public affairs official Landon Hutchens said, “Most of our criminal smuggling activity is from Mexican cartels, in our region (El Paso) we have three main cartels: La Empresa, La Linea and the Sinaloa Cartel. El Tren de Aragua (from Venezuela) is a new group.”

The Ciudad Juárez daily Norte reported, citing Chihuahua state authorities, that fentanyl labs have begun appearing in the border state, including one in the Ciudad Juárez neighborhood of Anapra across from El Paso’s western suburbs in New Mexico. Nearly all fentanyl has been entering Arizona and California, not Texas and New Mexico.

A federal judge has at least temporarily halted the legal offensive that Texas’s state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), has been carrying out against organizations that assist migrants. In an unrelated case, magistrate Judge Mark Lane of the Western District of Texas granted an injunction stopping Paxton from using a “request to examine” statute in Texas law, determining that it is unconstitutional. The statute empowers Texas prosecutors to require companies and organizations (like legal aid groups or shelters) to “immediately permit” the attorney general to inspect their records.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At USA Today, Lauren Villagrán examined Mexico’s crackdown on in-transit migration, which began at the beginning of the year. “Mexico is holding the line, analysts say, thanks to a carefully negotiated—but unwritten—agreement” with the U.S. government.

The Huffington Post published a thorough review of human rights abuse allegations associated with Texas’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown. It focuses on Texas forces’ excessive use of force against non-threatening asylum seekers, many of them families, at the borderline. The alleged perpetrators are often National Guard military personnel.

Jeremy Slack, the sociology and anthropology department chair at the University of Texas at El Paso, noted that Texas state forces’ alleged abuses have increased sharply at a time when reports of abuse by Border Patrol agents have been dropping. “Border Patrol is a known quantity, and people have been working on the issue of Border Patrol accountability for decades… When you start a new agency doing this, especially in that shoot-from-the-hip, haphazard manner, with no clear mandate about what they’re actually trying to do, that’s a recipe for disaster.”

The Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli interviewed Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), the lead Senate Republican negotiator of the compromise border bill that failed in February, following the Senator’s recent visit to the Arizona border. Lankford called for an end to the use of the CBP One app to admit migrants at ports of entry; for increased use of expedited removal proceedings without asking migrants if they fear return; for use of a “non-detained docket” to hand down rapid asylum decisions as soon as possible for recent arrivals; and for building up infrastructure and staffing at CBP’s border ports of entry.

On the Right

October 11, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 11, 2024

Harris visit to Arizona underscores a cautious, "muted" approach on migration. Darién Gap migration jumped 51 percent from August to September.

Daily Border Links posts will end in four weeks, on November 8, the Friday after the U.S. elections; we lack resources to maintain this tempo indefinitely. This page will remain online as an archive of the past year’s developments.

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

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, discussed immigration at a “town hall” event in Arizona hosted by Univisión. A woman asked Harris about how immigration policy forces undocumented people to live in the shadows, citing her mother who died recently without ever gaining documented status in the United States. While empathetic, the Vice President’s response “also underscored how much her hard-line immigration message has focused on enforcement rather than reform,” the New York Times observed.

The Associated Press revealed that the number of migrants passing through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama, jumped by 51 percent from August to September (from 16,603 to 25,111). Panama has yet to post final September numbers.

Much of the increase appears to be Venezuelan citizens choosing to migrate after the regime in Caracas refused to recognize an apparent opposition victory in July 28 elections. The increase is also happening despite the July inauguration of a new president in Panama, Raúl Mulino, who promised during his campaign to shut down Darién Gap migration and step up deportations. Between early August and October 5, according to Witness at the Border, Panama has carried out 16 flights removing 634 people, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of total migration.

25,111 migrants in a month is still low by the standards of the past few years: the third-smallest monthly total since February 2023. Migration fell after Mulino took office on July 1, but the September data seem to indicate that this lull is ending. It remains unclear whether the increase would once again reach more than 1,200 people per day, which was the Darién average between July 2022 and June 2024.

President Mulino’s administration is allowing Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to return to the Darién Gap region to provide health services at posts receiving migrants at the end of the route. Panama’s previous government withdrew permission for MSF to operate in March, shortly after the group publicly denounced a sharp increase in the number of patients who suffered sexual violence while transiting the Darién.

“We have removed more people last year than we have since any year since 2010,” Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) official performing the duties of the commissioner, Troy Miller, said during a visit to the Arizona border reported by the Tucson Sentinel.

Miller added that 85 percent of all people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry now face expedited removal proceedings. Data show that 51 percent of Border Patrol’s apprehended migrants in August were going to expedited removal, up from 25 percent in May, before the Biden administration’s June asylum restriction rule went into effect. This is not 85 percent; however, 82 percent of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol in August were not released into the U.S. interior.

Miller said that ports of entry are now using scanners to inspect 50 percent of cargo. In March, Miller told NBC News that CBP was able to scan 20 percent of commercial vehicles, but hoped to get to 70 percent by the end of 2025.

In Tijuana, Paola Morales, who heads a migrant rights defense group called Colombians in Baja California, said she was filming some detained migrant families in the city’s airport when an official from Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) said, “Venezuelan and Colombian whores, we are going to cut you up… you little b—, if you publish that video we are going to wrap you up in plastic.”

After 15 suicides of Border Patrol agents in 2022, the agency “overhauled its approach to mental healthcare for employees,” including hiring licensed clinicians, Anna Giaritelli reported at the Washington Examiner. Annual suicide totals have fallen to the single digits.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The American Immigration Council (AIC) published an explainer about the Shelter and Services Program (SSP). This program reimburses local governments and charities that help to receive recently arrived migrants and prevent them from ending up on U.S. cities’ streets. After two devastating hurricanes, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and other politicians have been alleging that the SSP has diverted funds away from FEMA’s disaster response; the AIC piece debunks that claim.

Guardian writer Oliver Laughland traveled to the Arizona border region, visiting a pro-Trump event, humanitarian volunteers in the desert, and a Democratic congressional candidate. The article points to a rightward shift in the region’s mood on border and immigration policy.

Writing at the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein noted how this harder-line shift in public opinion has led Kamala Harris to respond to some of Donald Trump’s most aggressive and racist comments about immigration “cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger.” Harris, the article adds, “has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas” like a mass deportation campaign. Brownstein called for more forceful confrontation of such language to forestall a wave of xenophobia like the United States experienced after World War I.

At the Border Chronicle, Todd Miller interviewed researcher Sarah Towle, author of the recently published Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, based on more than 100 interviews in the border region. “The real crisis at the U.S. southern border is not the people coming across, but the hardening of the human heart,” Towle said.

October 10, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 10, 2024

Polling continues to show U.S. views of the border and migration to be hardening, but still supportive of legal pathways. Deportation of Hondurans has dropped along with border apprehensions.

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Developments

A Yahoo News / YouGov poll found contradictory views of border and migration policy among U.S. respondents. Fifty-one percent agreed with Donald Trump’s statement that “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” At the same time, though, 73 percent agreed with Kamala Harris’s statement: “I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane. We can and we must do both.”

Forty-nine percent favored “rounding up, detaining and expelling millions of undocumented immigrants,” 37 percent favored moving U.S. troops from overseas to the border, and 52 percent supported building more border walls. However, 51 percent support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants.

In what he calls “one of the most dramatic swings in the history of U.S. public opinion,” Rogé Karma at the Atlantic pointed out that the share of U.S. respondents telling the Gallup polling organization “that immigration should decrease” has risen from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent now. This shift has hardened both parties’ rhetoric during the 2024 election campaign.

The foreign minister of Honduras stated that U.S. aerial deportations of Honduran citizens fell 35 percent from 2023 to 2024. This decline corresponds with a 35 percent drop in Border Patrol apprehensions of Honduran citizens at the U.S.-Mexico border, comparing an average month in fiscal 2023 to an average month in fiscal 2024 (for which 11 months of data are available).

The Southern Border Communities Coalition and the Sierra Club filed an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to overturn a lower-court ruling prohibiting the Biden administration from using appropriated funds to remediate environmental damage caused by border wall construction.

Donald Trump said that if elected, he would bring into his administration Tom Homan, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) known for his hard-line, pro-deportation views. Homan ran ICE during the 2017-2018 family separation controversy at the border. In 2023, Homan told the Conservative Political Action Conference: “I’m sick and tired of hearing about the family separation… I don’t give a s***, right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

After 30 years of “tough” border policies that have not discouraged people from migrating, Vicki Gaubeca of Human Rights Watch wrote at The Nation, “It’s time for U.S. leaders to acknowledge the folly of policies aimed at deterring immigration and to rethink how borders can be managed in a way that respects human rights.” The current drop in migrant numbers at the border, Gaubeca argued, is temporary: “the pendulum eventually swings back, no matter how much pain our policies inflict.”

Cuba’s El Toque spoke with Cuban citizens who applied to enter the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for up to a combined 30,000 people per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. They found the parole procedure so backlogged that it was faster to go to Mexico and wait several months for a CBP One appointment at the border.

The administration revealed last week that recipients of the two-year humanitarian parole status will be unable to renew it. A Voice of America article pointed out that most Cuban parole recipients can apply for adjustment of status under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 after they have been in the United States for a year, while Venezuelans who arrived before July 2023 can apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Nicaraguan parole recipients arrived after their countries’ cutoff date for TPS; applying for asylum within a year of arriving in the United States may be an option for remaining in the United States with documented status, if they can prove credible fear of persecution upon return to their countries.

October 9, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 9, 2024

Trump may visit Aurora, Colorado to play up Venezuelan gang allegations. Guatemala's corruption-friendly prosecutor's office raids Save the Children facilities.

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Developments

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump plans a Friday visit to the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, where he will draw attention to allegations that a Venezuelan organized crime group, the Tren de Aragua, has arrived mixed in with the migrant population and taken control of a run-down apartment complex.

Local officials, including the city’s Republican mayor, former congressman Mike Coffman, deny the allegations, acknowledging the Venezuelan gang‘s presence in Aurora but insisting that claims of its power are wildly exaggerated. Trump’s narrative of a migrant “invasion” of Aurora “is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination,” Coffman told NBC News in late September.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has named a new director of the country’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM). Sergio Salomón Céspedes, currently the governor of the state of Puebla, is a career politician who began in the once-dominant PRI political party. His resume includes some time administering the Mexican Red Cross, but he appears to have little background in migration policy.

In December, Céspedes will replace Francisco Garduño, a former prisons official who has headed INM since 2019. Garduño faces criminal charges related to a March 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez INM detention facility that killed 40 migrants. Garduño will stay on for two more months, Sheinbaum said, because “he is working on a comprehensive strategy that [previous] President [Andrés Manuel] López Obrador made for the migration issue, but there are still pending and important issues in the institute.”

Sheinbaum said that arrest warrants have been issued for the two Mexican Army soldiers who fired upon a vehicle carrying migrants through the southern state of Chiapas on October 1, killing six of them. Of surviving victims of the incident, most have been issued temporary documentation and are now near Mexico’s northern border, Milenio reported.

In Guatemala, elements of the Public Prosecutor’s Office—a separate branch of government whose leadership, unlike elected President Bernardo Arévalo, faces U.S. sanctions for corruption—raided five facilities run by the charity Save the Children. The prosecutors allege that the charity may be involved in trafficking unaccompanied migrant children.

Hinting at a larger political agenda, the prosecutor’s office has asked the Texas state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), to collaborate in its investigation of alleged trafficking of Guatemalan children at the U.S. border. Paxton has been on a legal offensive against Texas charities that assist recently arrived migrants.

“We reaffirm that we have never facilitated any transfer of children or adolescents out of Guatemala,” Save the Children, which has operated in Guatemala for over 40 years, told Agénce France Presse.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Mexican-born population in the United States “shrank by more than 1 million people from its peak of 11.7 million in 2010 to 10.7 million in 2022 but has started growing again,” informed a report from the Migration Policy Institute. “As of 2023, 10.9 million U.S. residents were immigrants from Mexico.” MPI estimated that, of the 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States in mid-2022, 5.1 million (45 percent) were from Mexico.

Axios pointed out that recently published FBI data covering 2023 showed “the average homicide rate of 11 border cities was lower than the national average”: 4.4 homicides per 100,000 residents, compared to 5.7 nationwide. The cities measured are Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and El Paso (Texas); Sunland Park (New Mexico); Nogales and Yuma (Arizona); and Calexico and San Diego (California).

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp analyzed the meaning of Donald Trump’s recent remark, referring to migrants in the United States, that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Beauchamp noted, “Immigration is an existential threat to America, per Trump, because it brings in people who are genetically incapable of assimilating into the American body politic.” This genetic determinism, he concludes, combines with nationalism to form a central ideological tenet of today’s Republican Party.

On the Right

October 8, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 8, 2024

Harris defends the administration's record on "60 Minutes." Trump talks about migrants' "genes."

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Developments

“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told a conservative radio host. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” apparently referring to migrants in the United States as genetically inferior.

At CBS News 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker asked Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whether it was “a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did” after Donald Trump left office. (The Biden administration left Trump’s Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy in place for over 27 months.)

Harris replied, “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions,” adding that the Biden-Harris administration’s recent asylum restrictions at the border have cut Border Patrol apprehensions in half. Whitaker sought to ask whether the administration should have acted earlier to restrict asylum, though the legal basis for the June ban on most asylum access between border ports of entry remains in dispute.

In Chiapas, Mexico, civilian prosecutors have begun investigating soldiers’ October 1 killing of six migrants aboard a vehicle. A prominent Mexican human rights organization, the Foundation for Justice, recalled that National Guard soldiers who killed migrants aboard a vehicle in Chiapas in 2021 still have not been brought to justice.

A “caravan” of migrants that departed Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas over the weekend now numbers about 1,000 people and has walked about 45 miles. A woman from Venezuela told Milenio that her family “decided to leave Tapachula due to a lack of employment and opportunities, and in addition to the delay in the response from CBP One, they are forced to remain stranded at the southern border of Mexico.”

At Border Patrol’s checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas, north of McAllen, agents arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor attempting to transport 39 undocumented migrants aboard a bus with a falsified manifest.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Three pieces probed reactions to two Biden administration policy changes, revealed last week, that shrink legal migration pathways: an adjustment making it harder to reverse a June asylum restriction at the border, and a decision not to renew the two-year humanitarian parole status granted to some citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Boston Globe columnist Marcela García argued that with these moves the Democrats, particularly Kamala Harris’s election campaign, are trying to preserve immigration pathways while simultaneously trying to minimize the lead that Donald Trump currently enjoys when voters are polled on the border and migration issue.

Times of San Diego spoke to local migrant rights advocates and service providers who don’t see recent harder-line policies having a long-term impact on migration flows. “I think it’s going to collapse like it’s collapsed in the past, and at some point we’re hoping that humane, sensible solutions will be taken more seriously,” said Margaret Cargioli of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “Our leaders are choosing politics over what’s right, and we cannot allow that,” added Lilian Serrano of the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

In a city with well over 100,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the Houston Chronicle spoke to local migration advocates and service providers who view the non-renewal of humanitarian parole as “electoral politics” and are urging community members to seek alternative protection pathways and “not to panic.”

Andrew Selee and Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute authored an analysis discerning the outlines of “a new architecture for managing migration” emerging from the Biden administration’s combination of legal migration pathways, increased regional cooperation, and tightened asylum access at the border.

On the Right

October 7, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 7, 2024

Less than 54,000 migrant apprehensions in September. FEMA aid to migrants has nothing to do with FEMA disaster assistance. Kids from Egypt among Chiapas army massacre victims.

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Developments

CBS News and the Washington Examiner reported preliminary Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data indicating that Border Patrol apprehended 53,881 migrants in September between U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. That would be the smallest total of the Biden administration, down from 56,399 in July and 58,038 in August. Another 48,000 in September came to the ports of entry, most of them with CBP One appointments.

The Border Patrol figure would be the fewest since August 2020, when Donald Trump was president, and less than the monthly average for 2019.

Fact-checks have debunked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claims that a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program to shelter recently released migrants has “stolen” funds that would relieve victims of Hurricane Helene. FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which helps keep migrants from being released onto border cities’ streets, is funded through a separate channel, through CBP, and is less than 2 percent as large as FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler noted that the only time that FEMA disaster funds were raided to fund migrant response was in 2019, when Trump was president.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated 105 removal flights in September, according to the latest monthly report from Witness at the Border. That is the fewest since July 2023; reduced apprehensions at the border are a likely factor.

The report’s author, Thomas Cartwright, has also been tracking Panama’s stepped-up deportation flights—most of them supported by U.S. funding—of migrants apprehended exiting the Darién Gap. Between early August and October 5, the report notes 16 flights, 12 to Colombia, 3 to Ecuador, and 1 to India. Those planes carried 634 people, which Cartwright notes is equivalent to 1.4 percent of total migration through the Darién during that period.

Two girls from Egypt, aged 18 and 11, were among the 6 migrants killed on October 1 when Mexican soldiers fired on a pickup truck that was transporting them in the southern state of Chiapas. “Three of the dead were from Egypt, and one each from Peru and Honduras. The other has apparently not yet been identified,” the Associated Press reported. Milenio cited a victim from El Salvador, but not Honduras.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said that Mexico’s Army (National Defense Secretariat or SEDENA) initiated the legal complaint against the two soldiers who allegedly fired on the migrants’ vehicle, and that the civilian Attorney General’s Office is investigating the incident.

About 800 migrants formed a “caravan” or protest in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. They began walking north in response to the October 1 incident in which Mexican soldiers killed six migrants, and because “migration procedures take months in the southern border region, and there are no jobs to sustain the wait,” La Jornada reported.

Migrants interviewed by EFE in Tapachula said they worry about failing to secure CBP One appointments before a possible election of Donald Trump.

President Sheinbaum has not yet named a successor to Francisco Garduño, the embattled head of its migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM), who faces criminal charges related to a March 2023 detention center fire that killed 40 migrants in Ciudad Juárez. Garduño, who has headed INM since 2019, remains at his post and has said he would be willing to stay on.

A U.S. federal government body that investigates inspectors-general submitted a report accusing Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General, of “substantial misconduct,” including reprisals against whistleblowers and providing misleading information to Congress. Cuffari, a Trump appointee, has come under fire from non-governmental watchdogs, particularly the Project on Government Oversight, for weakening oversight of a department that includes most U.S. border law enforcement agencies.

Texas state police carried out two separate pursuits of vehicles suspected of smuggling migrants in the El Paso area on October 2; both ended with crashes.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is asking the state’s legislature for an additional $2.88 billion to fund the state government’s border security crackdown, known as “Operation Lone Star.” The Dallas Morning News pointed out that this is “the largest ask in the Republican governor’s appropriations request for the 2026-27 budget cycle.” Operation Lone Star has already cost $11 billion since 2021; Border Patrol migrant apprehensions have not declined faster in Texas than they have in Arizona, which has no similar crackdown.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Jonathan Blitzer, at the New Yorker, and Jamelle Bouie, at the New York Times, published critiques of the Trump-Vance campaign’s view that “mass deportation” could be a policy solution to address problems ranging from housing costs to crime. Blitzer raised concerns about deporting beneficiaries of documented statuses that depend on presidential approval, like humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status.

Tyche Hendricks of California Public Media interviewed Haitians who have settled in the San Diego area, who are “on edge” about losing Temporary Protected Status if Donald Trump is elected.

The Washington Post noted that while some pro-immigration organizations are unhappy with Democrats’ rightward turn on issues like asylum access, they are muting their criticism during the campaign between Vice President Kalama Harris and Donald Trump, who promises a much harder line.

InSight Crime and Pirate Wire Services published analyses contending that the threat of the “Tren de Aragua,” a gang that emerged from Venezuela’s prisons and has the attention of U.S. law enforcement, is exaggerated. “Their reputation far exceeds their capabilities,” wrote Colombia-based reporter Joshua Collins at PWS. “The gang’s reputation appears to have grown more quickly than its actual presence in the US,” concluded InSight Crime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit.

October 4, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 4, 2024

The administration will not renew Venezuelans' 2-year humanitarian parole status. Reactions to Tuesday's army massacre of migrants in Chiapas, Mexico.

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Developments

This month will mark two years since the Biden administration inaugurated a program allowing citizens of Venezuela to reside in the United States with a two-year humanitarian parole status. Now, CBS News revealed, the administration does not plan to allow Venezuelan citizens to renew their humanitarian parole. If they do not seek to adjust their status, Venezuelan parole recipients will find themselves in legal limbo, subject to removal should the government in Caracas allow deportation flights to resume.

The parole program allows people to apply online from elsewhere and arrive by air, avoiding the U.S.-Mexico border. It has been available for up to a combined 30,000 citizens a year of Venezuela and, after January 2023, of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, who have valid passports and U.S.-based sponsors. Mexico used the program’s existence to justify accepting up to 30,000 monthly land-border deportations of those countries’ citizens.

Venezuelans who arrived in the United States before July 2023 are eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status, a non-permanent but firmer documented status. As a result, for the next eight or nine months at least, most Venezuelans facing expiration of their parole have another option. It is unclear what might happen after that, or what might happen to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua whose two-year statuses will begin to expire in January. The outcome of the November 2024 election will be a big factor.

Mexico began reckoning with an October 1 killing of six migrants by Mexican Army soldiers in the southern state of Chiapas. Another 10 were wounded.

That evening, soldiers chased, then fired on, a pickup truck carrying 33 migrants about 50 miles inland from the Guatemala border. Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) claimed that the vehicle “evaded military personnel” and that soldiers heard “detonations.”

Mexico’s newly inaugurated president, Claudia Sheinbaum, called the incident “deplorable,” adding, “a situation like this cannot be repeated.” Sheinbaum said that civilian prosecutors are questioning the two soldiers who fired their weapons; they have not yet been charged with anything.

Mexico’s Senate began its Thursday session with a moment of silence for the shooting’s victims.

The Human Mobility Pastoral, part of the Episcopal Conference of Mexico’s Catholic church, condemned the shooting as “the consequence of the militarization of migration policy and a greater presence of the armed forces on the southern border.” Added a statement from numerous Mexican human rights organizations: “Mexico has chosen to implement a migration policy without a human rights focus, making use of military forces, such as the National Guard, the Navy or the Army, as mechanisms for migration control.”

At a September 30 meeting of the Texas House Committee on State Affairs, Texas Public Radio reported, a court administration official revealed that U.S. citizens were 72 percent of those accused of smuggling immigrants in the state between May 2023 and April 2024. Less than 10 percent were from Mexico.

The conservative news website The Center Square published unofficial data indicating that Border Patrol apprehended at least 1,525,210 migrants in fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 30. This number, however, seems slightly low: it would indicate that Border Patrol apprehended just 48,505 migrants in September (the agency’s reported October-August total was 1,476,705). Other sources have reported that September’s apprehensions totaled about 54,000.

Analyses and Feature Stories

In the first of a series about regional human rights and democracy challenges for the next U.S. administration, WOLA published five sets of principles to guide border and migration policy. They cover human rights and accountability, upholding asylum, comprehensive immigration reform, root causes, and regional cooperation and integration.

In a Wilson Center interview, journalist Molly O’Toole explored how global migration patterns are transforming due to U.S. policies, economic conditions, and environmental crises. That is the overarching subject of O’Toole’s forthcoming book The Route, which traces migration from Brazil to the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s very difficult to think of a policy that the U.S. could conceive of that could stop people who are willing to die in order to make it,” she pointed out.

By declaring Mexican and Venezuelan criminal groups to be “terrorist organizations”—something the federal government has not done—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is carrying out a parallel foreign policy, noted an analysis by Francesca D’Annunzio at the Texas Observer.

“Democrats have traveled a long arc in the last four years,” reads a New York Times newsletter from Hamed Aleaziz. “When Biden took office, he spoke warmly of migrants seeking asylum and even tried to pause deportations altogether. (A court said no.) As his political fortunes sank, he turned toward deterring migrants. Finally, in June, he took a hard line.”

  • Hamed Aleaziz, “A Crackdown” (The New York Times, October 4, 2024).

“The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off,” explained Rogé Karma in an Atlantic essay.

On the Right

October 3, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 3, 2024

Mexican soldiers fire on a truck in Chiapas, killing six migrants from at least three countries. An AIC report estimates a huge price tag for "mass deportation."

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Developments

Mexican Army soldiers chased, then fired on, a truck carrying 33 migrants on the evening of October 1, killing 6 of them and wounding 12. The incident took place on the Pacific coastal highway in Huixtla, Chiapas, about 50 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) issued a statement claiming that the migrants’ truck “evaded military personnel,” who suspected that it was tied to organized crime, which has become much more active in the state of Chiapas over the past year. That alone does not justify use of lethal force; the SEDENA statement contended that soldiers fired at the truck after hearing “detonations.”

The deceased victims were reportedly from Nepal, Egypt and Pakistan. Other migrants aboard the vehicle, including some of the wounded, came from Cuba, India, and what SEDENA called “Arab nationalities.” The Foreign Ministry of Peru claimed that one of the six fatalities was a Peruvian citizen.

SEDENA stated that the two soldiers who fired their weapons have been removed from their posts, and that both the civilian and military justice systems’ prosecutors are investigating. The incident heightens concerns about the Mexican government’s expanding placement of combat-trained soldiers in internal law-enforcement roles.

“People in mobility are exposed to great risks during their journey, that is why it is essential to have legal ways of access, transit and integration to avoid tragedies like this,” read a brief statement from UNHCR.

Border Report pointed out new FBI data showing that violent crime rates in Texas border cities are lower than the average for all cities. All Texas border communities have homicide rates below the 2023 U.S. national average of 5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) annual Homeland Threat Assessment document, released October 2, warned that “over the next year, we expect some individuals with terrorism ties and some criminal actors will continue their efforts to exploit migration flows and the complex border security environment to enter the United States.”

In Washington, DC district court, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the Biden administration violated environmental law when it halted border-wall construction in 2021. Judge Trevor McFadden argued that Biden’s border policies encouraged more migration, and migrants littered trash in border areas.

NewsNation reported, based on an internal Border Patrol alert, that the Northeast Cartel, active in parts of Mexico’s border state of Tamaulipas across from south Texas, has been using electronic devices to disrupt the agency’s surveillance drones.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The American Immigration Council (AIC) released a report about the potential cost of massively deporting undocumented migrants from the United States, which is a core campaign promise of Republican candidate Donald Trump.

It estimated that arresting, detaining, processing, and removing a million undocumented migrants each year would cost an annual total of $88 billion. It would total at least $315 billion for a one-time operation and $967.9 billion for a decade-long campaign.

Deporting about 4 percent of the U.S. workforce would cause the nation’s gross domestic product to “drop anywhere from 4.2% to 6.8%,” the AIC found; that is more than during the 2007-2009 “Great Recession.”

The report’s scope did not extend to the harder-to-quantify costs to human rights and democratic institutions that a mass-deportation campaign might entail, or the harm to U.S. civil-military relations if such a campaign were to mobilize Defense Department resources and personnel.

The ACLU has filed suit in federal court to obtain results of a Freedom of Information Act request about federal government capacity, and potential costs, of a “mass deportation” effort.

The Associated Press fact-checked a column graph of U.S.-Mexico border migrant apprehensions that Republican candidate Donald Trump frequently displays at campaign events; he was gesturing at it when a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear at a July campaign event. The chart includes errors and distortions, including a marker showing Trump leaving office in April 2020, the first full month of the COVID pandemic, when migration plummeted. Trump in fact left office in January 2021, after several months of increased migrant apprehensions.

Washington Post columnist Philip Bump rebutted claims, including those made by JD Vance in Tuesday’s vice-presidential candidates’ debate, that migrants are contributing to crime, fentanyl smuggling, and higher U.S. housing costs. PolitiFact, the Associated Press, and Melvis Acosta at Mother Jones addressed other spurious claims made in the debate, including Vance’s allegation that DHS has “effectively lost” 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

The Project on Government Oversight published allegations that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a key official for oversight of border security agencies, has engaged in a prolonged effort to undermine investigations into his own misconduct, especially claims of whistleblower retaliation. Cuffari is under investigation by the Integrity Committee, a federal panel that oversees inspectors-general, for retaliating against whistleblowers who reported delays in DHS reports, including a report on migrant family separations.

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October 2, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 2, 2024

Strong disagreements, and incorrect claims, about the border and migration at yesterday's vice-presidential candidates debate.

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Developments

The border and migration were the third topic that CBS News moderators posed to candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz in last night’s vice-presidential debate.

Asked about the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation” plans, Vance replied that, if elected, Donald Trump would first focus on deporting migrants with criminal records in the United States; the Ohio Senator did not address the question’s inquiry about whether it would separate families. Vance blamed Walz’s running mate, Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden for “94 executive orders suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system, that has opened the floodgates,” and sought to tie that to fentanyl smuggling.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, repeated the Harris campaign’s charge that Donald Trump torpedoed a compromise bipartisan border-security bill in February 2024 by urging Republican senators to vote against it. That bill, the “Border Act of 2024,” failed in the Senate after months of negotiations between a group of Democratic and Republican senators. As it sought Republican buy-in, that bill included tougher provisions than Democrats would normally support, like severe limits on asylum access between ports of entry, more migrant detention capacity, and expenditure of Trump-era border wall funds. Vance did not address the “Border Act,” which he voted against.

Walz incorrectly claimed that Donald Trump built “less than 2 percent” of border wall (the net increase in fenced-off miles was about 4 percent, but Trump built new pedestrian fencing over 14 percent of the border). Vance incorrectly claimed that there are “20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country” (there were 11 million in 2022); that “we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost” (32,000 children—starting in 2019, when Trump was president—have missed immigration hearings but aren’t necessarily “missing,” while another 291,000 haven’t been issued Notices to Appear but aren’t “missing”); and that the CBP One program is illegal (it employs humanitarian parole, a presidential authority dating back to 1952). As has been documented by a Cato Institute review of obtained official documents, among other sources, the vast majority of fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens, or by non-citizens with border-crossing credentials who are not migrants.

The segment ended with CBS moderator Margaret Brennan fact-checking Vance’s claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are not legally in the United States (nearly all have documentation, mainly humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status). “The rules were that you guys were going to fact check,” Vance complained; the border-migration discussion ended when moderators muted the candidates’ microphones.

The Venezuelan daily Tal Cual reported that while in Mexico to speak on a panel, a Cuban vice minister of labor and social security got a CBP One appointment at the Arizona border, was released into the United States, and now has a date to appear in immigration court in August 2026.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Departed Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “control of the migration valve may have insulated his government from Washington’s meddling,” Eduardo Porter wrote at the Washington Post. “But that tense, unstable equilibrium is unlikely to survive under the government of López Obrador’s anointed successor Claudia Sheinbaum.”

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October 1, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: October 1, 2024

The Biden administration tightens its asylum restrictions still further. Border Patrol likely apprehended 54,000 migrants in September, a very slight decrease.

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Developments

The Biden administration published a revised proclamation and a final rule tightening restrictions, first issued on June 4, on migrants’ ability to access the U.S. asylum system without making appointments at official border crossings (ports of entry). Since then, most who cross between the ports of entry and enter Border Patrol custody are ineligible for asylum.

The rule’s first version revoked asylum access whenever the daily average of Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions exceeds 2,500 over a 7-day period, and would have restored asylum when Border Patrol apprehensions fall below 1,500 over a 7-day period, excluding unaccompanied children.

The new version cements the asylum restrictions further: the daily average would now have to remain below 1,500 per day over 28 days—not 7—and unaccompanied children now count toward the total.

According to Border Patrol data from July, August, and (preliminarily) September, the agency averaged 1,831 apprehensions per day during those months, including 194 unaccompanied children per day (in July and August). That is well over the 1,500-per-day threshold below which apprehensions would need to fall, over 28 days, in order to “turn back on” the right to seek asylum again between ports of entry.

Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act guarantees the right to seek asylum to all who are physically present in the United States “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.”

The UN Refugee Agency voiced “profound concern” about the tightened asylum regulation, which “severely curtails access to protection for people fleeing conflict, persecution, and violence, putting many refugees and asylum seekers in grave danger without a viable option for seeking safety.”

CNN reported that Border Patrol was on track to apprehend about 54,000 migrants (1,800 per day) at the border during the month of September. That would be down slightly from 56,399 (1,819 per day) in July and 58,038 (1,872 per day) in August.

A criminal organization in the border city of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico—near Yuma, Arizona—placed 24 surveillance cameras on telephone poles, wiring them into power lines for electricity and into telephone lines for internet connectivity.

Migrants—some seeking or awaiting CBP One appointments—in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, participated in a procession organized by the local Catholic diocese. They called for protection from organized crime and faster asylum adjudication from the Mexican government’s Refugee Assistance Commission (COMAR).

Analyses and Feature Stories

In Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, where agents have recovered the remains of a local record 175 migrants in fiscal 2024, USA Today’s Lauren Villagrán reported on the mental health toll that deaths and unsuccessful rescues take on personnel.

Analyses from the Washington Post and CBS News explained how the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians have been distorting and misinterpreting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data released in response to an inquiry from border-district Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas). That data points to 13,099 immigrants with homicide convictions on ICE’s “non-detained” docket, which simply means that they are not in ICE’s custody though they may be imprisoned elsewhere.

The vast majority of these individuals did not cross the border during the Biden presidency. Still, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) told CBS’s Face the Nation that the Biden administration “released more than 13,000 convicted murderers who illegally entered this country.”

In recent days, Donald Trump’s “rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding,” wrote Mark Follman at Mother Jones. Migrants, he said at a Wisconsin rally, “are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

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September 27, 2024 — 0

Daily Border Links: September 27, 2024

Kamala Harris is visiting the border and endorsing tougher measures. The Biden administration will soon announce a toughening of its asylum access restrictions.

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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris is to pay her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic candidate for president. She will be in Douglas, Arizona, today, where she is scheduled to meet with CBP personnel at the port of entry and give a campaign speech.

Recent polls have shown Harris narrowly trailing Republican opponent Donald Trump in Arizona, a “battleground state” where competition for electoral votes is tight.

An unnamed senior campaign official told The Hill that Harris plans to “reject the false choice between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is safe, orderly and humane—arguing we must do both to protect our country’s security and enduring legacy as a nation of immigrants.”

Media reports indicate that Harris plans to attack Donald Trump for urging Republican members of Congress to defeat a compromise border-security bill that failed in the Senate in February. Harris will repeat a promise to sign a reintroduced “Border Act” if it reaches her desk. That bill included some common-sense border and migration provisions, like adding capacity at ports of entry and in the asylum system. But it also included harder-line measures like increasing detention beds and denying much access to asylum during busy periods.

A version of the asylum-denial provision is now in place, pending court challenges, under an early-June Biden administration proclamation and rule.

“Anything she says tomorrow, you know is a fraud because she was the worst in history at protecting our country,” Trump said in remarks yesterday in New York. “She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border.” The New York Times noted that after beginning with about 10 minutes of border content, Trump “appeared to grow bored” with his prepared remarks and veered off into other topics.

As early as Monday, CBS News and the New York Times revealed, the Biden administration plans to announce a toughening of its June rule banning asylum between border ports of entry at busy times.

The rule shuts down asylum access for those who cross the border without inspection whenever Border Patrol apprehensions, not counting unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries, average over 2,500 people per day for a week. It would restore asylum access after a weekly average drops below 1,500 per day, not counting unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries. (In August, it was about 1,870 per day.)

The administration’s likely adjustments would put a restoration of asylum further out of reach. Border Patrol apprehensions would have to fall below an average of 1,500 per day for 4 weeks—not 1 week—and unaccompanied children would count toward the total.

Texas’s attorney-general, Ken Paxton (R), is further broadening his legal campaign against non-profits in the state that serve migrants. Paxton has opened an investigation of the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which represents asylum seekers and advocates for migrants’ rights. That makes at least five migrants rights defense organizations or shelters targeted this year.

Las Americas and the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) responded yesterday with a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Paxton. “We’re witnessing a disturbing pattern in Texas in which immigrant legal services and voting rights are under a coordinated siege by the Attorney General under the guise of protecting voter integrity,” said TCRP’s Rochelle Garza.

The Washington Post noted that Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), the Democratic challenger to ultraconservative Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) re-election bid, has, like Harris, pivoted to tougher talk on the border and migration.

In the Darién Gap, migrants from Venezuela interviewed by Agénce France Presse say that they are migrating out of fear amid increased repression after authorities declared that the nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, won re-election on July 28. The Venezuelan government provided no proof to back up this claim.

Border Patrol agents found 72 migrants whom smugglers were keeping in a storage shed in south El Paso.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Human Rights Watch denounced disturbing recent incidents in Eagle Pass, Texas: Texas National Guard personnel continue to fire pepper-spray projectiles at migrants, including families with children, attempting to cross the Rio Grande. Soldiers are using force even though their targets are unarmed, posing no threat, and separated from them by concertina-wire barriers.

The New York Review of Books covered two recent volumes about the border and migration, John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders and Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.

“Immigration is a blessing the U.S. needs to nurture and manage,” wrote Andrés Marínez of Arizona State University at Time. “But our shared politicized narratives on the subject are veering so dangerously off course that a serious contender for the presidency can pass off talk of deporting millions of hardworking immigrants as a sensible proposal.”

Of migrants in their care shortly after arriving at the border in Arizona, Doctors Without Borders noted that most are suffering stress that is “not post-traumatic. They are still in a kind of traumatic reaction, which is a physical and mental state. And they should be. They are hyper alert, and ready to run at any moment after what many of them have gone through.”

Regardless of the election outcome, “the issue of immigration seems set to remain a political cudgel,” Aimee Santillán of the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute told the National Catholic Reporter.

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