Adam Isacson

Still trying to understand Latin America, my own country, and why so few consequences are intended. These views are not necessarily my employer’s.

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Human Rights

The cost of “success”

Chart: Migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela Encountered At and Between Ports of Entry

	Oct-19	Nov-19	Dec-19	Jan-20	Feb-20	Mar-20	Apr-20	May-20	Jun-20	Jul-20	Aug-20	Sep-20	Oct-20	Nov-20	Dec-20	Jan-21	Feb-21	Mar-21	Apr-21	May-21	Jun-21	Jul-21	Aug-21	Sep-21	Oct-21	Nov-21	Dec-21	Jan-22	Feb-22	Mar-22	Apr-22	May-22	Jun-22	Jul-22	Aug-22	Sep-22	Oct-22	Nov-22	Dec-22	Jan-23	Feb-23	Mar-23
At Ports of Entry (CBP Office of Field Operations)	2098	1404	771	402	352	262	6	20	31	39	35	36	31	25	45	36	69	264	258	291	475	777	1083	98	44	124	116	166	207	352	1340	2999	4170	5129	6512	5088	6867	6729	7154	10173	12328	10698
Between Ports of Entry (Border Patrol)	1051	1138	1832	1204	1498	1137	276	603	1180	1829	2376	3443	2640	2233	3105	4410	6225	13016	13402	17103	23519	27885	27262	40464	29431	41518	55112	47270	34596	54042	55910	57280	40470	50069	56209	78256	71656	75658	84192	11909	2052	3811

Biden administration officials might view this chart as evidence of “policy success.”

Combining Title 42 expulsions, “CBP One” appointments, and humanitarian parole brought a 95% decrease in Border Patrol’s encounters with Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants since December, and a 50% increase in the much smaller number of those able to come to ports of entry.

But a lot of the people who were in those tall green columns—many of whom may have valid asylum claims—remain in Mexican border cities. Stranded. More are coming, but since they’re not crossing the border from Mexico, this chart doesn’t show them.

Forty of these stranded people died in a fire a month ago in Ciudad Juárez. Now, in the past couple of days, 2,000 living in miserable tents in Matamoros have come under attack. The Associated Press reports:

About two dozen makeshift tents were set ablaze and destroyed at a migrant camp across the border from Texas this week, witnesses said Friday, a sign of the extreme risk that comes with being stuck in Mexico as the Biden administration increasingly relies on that country to host people fleeing poverty and violence. 

The fires were set Wednesday and Thursday at the sprawling camp of about 2,000 people, most of them from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico, in Matamoros, a city near Brownsville, Texas. An advocate for migrants said they had been doused with gasoline.

The entire Western Hemisphere is in a moment of mass migration, as the Migration Policy Institute reminded us in a feature published last week. “The number of migrants living in the region nearly doubled from 8.3 million in 2010 to 16.3 million in 2022… Notably, much of the migration has been between countries within the region,” not to the United States.

A region-wide crisis demands that the Biden administration further expand its ability to process and fairly adjudicate this increased number of protection claims. At a time of historically low unemployment, it also requires creating more legal pathways to migration.

Right now, that can mean adjusting policies that are already in place.

  • The number of “CBP One” appointments for asylum applicants at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, which reached 764 per day in March, needs to increase substantially to keep up with the demand in Mexican border cities, where each day’s allotment of appointments runs out in minutes.
  • The administration’s “humanitarian parole” program must loosen its passport and U.S.-based sponsor requirements, which exclude people lacking connections, who are often the most vulnerable.

Without changes like these, Mexican border cities are going to continue filling up. We’ll see more tragedies, more attacks, more bridge closures as large groups of people gather after being misled by misinformation.

The people in this chart’s tall green columns aren’t going anywhere. Most have nowhere else to go. The pressure is going to keep building.

From WOLA: CBP and Border Patrol Deadly Force Incidents Since 2020

In my work on border security at WOLA, I maintain a database of cases of alleged human rights abuse and other misconduct committed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol personnel since 2020. It’s too large, with over 370 entries, and I have some in my inbox that still need to be entered.

Among the most serious are cases in which agents have taken a life, in circumstances that don’t make clear that an imminent risk of death or bodily injury warranted use of deadly force.

This commentary, published today, lays out the 10 cases since 2020 in our database that stand out to us as “cases of fatalities since 2020 that may—pending the final outcome of investigations, complaints, and litigation—have violated the agencies’ Use of Force policy.”

It’s very troubling, and highlights problems with the DHS accountability process. Read it here.

WOLA Podcast: Guatemala: An Eroding Democracy Approaches New Elections

Guatemala’s presidential vote happens June 25. But candidates are being excluded, and anti-corruption leaders are being jailed and exiled. As gains made since a 1985 democratic transition face threats, I discuss ways forward with with Ana María Méndez Dardón, WOLA’s Director for Central America, and with Will Freeman, Fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Here’s the text from WOLA’s page for this episode.

As in much of Central America, Guatemala’s democracy has deteriorated recently. Progress on human rights and accountability, made since a 1985 transition to democracy and a 1996 peace accord, is either threatened or reversed. The judicial system has been turned against people who had fought during the 2010s to hold corrupt individuals accountable.

Elections are drawing near, with the first round scheduled for June 25. Candidates are being disqualified, while judicial workers and journalists continue to be imprisoned or exiled. U.S. policy upholds reformers at times, but is inconsistent and hard to pin down.

This episode discusses Guatemala’s current challenges with Ana María Méndez Dardón, WOLA’s Director for Central America, and with Will Freeman, Fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

See also:

Justice for Eduardo Mendúa and the Dureno community’s ancestral lands

On February 26 in Dureno, northeast Ecuador, someone fired 12 bullets at Cofán Indigenous leader Eduardo Mendúa, killing him.

Dureno was founded by Cofán people displaced by Texaco oil operations (Chevron bought Texaco long ago). Ecuador’s Cofán have lost about 95% of their ancestral land to oil development since the 1960s.

In Dureno in November 2008, Cofán leader Emergildo Crillo shows his community, and nearby oil operations, on a map.

I visited Dureno in 2008. (My Twitter profile photo is from later that day.) People there lack most basic services as pollution festers and litigation drags on.

Ecuador must identify and punish all who ordered Eduardo Mendúa’s murder, which appears to be a grave escalation.

Here’s what Title 42 does to people

From a Stephania Taladrid account of a Venezuelan family’s journey posted to the New Yorker on Thursday. This obviously happened before October, when Title 42 was expanded to allow Venezuelans to be expelled into Mexico, also.

While Yenis readied herself to cross, Alexis learned that the woman in the other group was Salvadoran; she was in the company of her four children. Each of them got in line to form a human chain across the Rio Grande.

Once in the water, Yenis turned her back on the current to minimize its impact on her belly. There was an islet mid-river, where she paused to regain her breath, and everyone else huddled around her. It was there that the Salvadoran woman confided that she needed a favor. She had heard that Salvadoran adults, unlike Venezuelans, were not being let into the U.S. Like Alexis and Yenis, she and her children had been through too much to risk deportation, so she needed her son and daughters to make the final leg of the trip on their own. The couple exchanged glances, unable to utter a single word—they felt enough responsibility already with Diana and their unborn child. But, before they could say no, the woman began to wade in the opposite direction. “Me los cuidan, por favor,” she said—“Please, take care of them.”

Dominican Republic deportations of Haiti citizens

Dominican Republic deportations of Haiti citizens:

  • 2019: 67,400
  • 2020 (pandemic): 23,600
  • 2021: 85,000
  • 2022: 171,000

That’s 238 per day.

Source is Dominican President’s state of the union address, which lauds plans to build 54km of fence along the Haitian border.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in February:

In my visit to the Ouanaminthe in the northeast of the country [Haiti], I heard terrible stories of the humiliating treatment to which many migrants are subjected to, including pregnant women and unaccompanied or separated children.

Sunday morning in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

Army personnel are police in everything but name in today’s Mexico. Policing is just not a mission that they’re properly trained to carry out. An episode on Sunday morning (February 26), in the organized crime-dominated border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, seems especially serious.

From the Mexican online media outlet Elefante Blanco:

According to the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee, in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 26, a military convoy shot at a white Chevrolet pickup truck on Huasteca Street between Jiménez and Méndez.

The people inside the vehicle tried to protect themselves, but only one survived. Upon hearing the gunshots, the neighbors went out between 4:30 and 5:00 AM to see the scene as the sun came up. At 10 AM, the Sedena [Defense Department, or Army] intervened at the scene of the killing, moving the truck.

…What really inflamed the residents was when the soldiers attempted to tow the white Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck, at that point the main evidence in the case, to take it away.

There the confrontation escalated. Residents blocked the way by standing in front of the tow truck, threw stones, and released the truck. One soldier fell and was beaten by several civilians, another was run over by a military vehicle.

Dozens of residents and reporters recorded what was happening on Huasteca Street. The soldiers took cover in the chaos and snatched cell phones, which provoked the population even more. The president of the Committee, Raymundo Ramos, was pushed, his cell phone fell and a pickup truck rammed him.

Seizing, and apparently smashing, a witness’s mobile phone. Credit: Luis Valtierra

Family separation by app

We’re getting more and more reports from media and border-area NGOs that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is forcing asylum-seeking families to separate at the borderline when only some family members were able to secure appointments, via the “CBP One” smartphone app, at ports of entry.

Due to a very limited number of exemptions to the Title 42 expulsions policy, these appointments to apply for asylum are scarce, and difficult to obtain for larger groups, such as parents and children all together.

Within the past week or two, CBP officers on the borderline reportedly began more strictly enforcing appointments, refusing entry to family members who had not managed to secure spots with the app, even as they accompanied spouses or parents with appointments.

The Rio Grande Valley, Texas Monitor reported on the scene at the bridge between Reynosa, Tamaulipas and Hidalgo, Texas:

Over on the Hidalgo bridge connecting with Reynosa, Priscilla Orta, an attorney working with Lawyers for Good Government, was in line last Wednesday waiting to cross back into the U.S.

“Next thing I know, there it is, at the bridge, you’re seeing it — people are being forced to make the decisions, families are fighting, there’s crying, they’re screaming,” Orta said.

Families she spoke with also reported feeling jilted by the sudden enforcement that meant they’d have to make a quick decision.

Orta returned to frantic families in Reynosa the next day with questions that CBP is attempting to address.

“I think what’s happening now is that they are trying to correct the issue,” Orta said. “But it’s a pretty big issue, because there are no slots,” she said, referring to the appointment slots available. “They’re gone sometimes by 8:03 a.m. We have sometimes seen that the spots are gone by 8:01 a.m. And everyone knows it.”

On February 24, 2023, the Los Angeles Times cited a Venezuelan migrant who went through this experience in Matamoros, Tamaulipas:

The 25-year-old from Venezuela eventually secured appointments for himself and his wife, but the slots filled up so quickly that he couldn’t get two more for their children. They weren’t worried though — they had heard about families in similar situations being waved through by border officials.

Instead, he said, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent told them last week that because each member of the family did not have an appointment: “You two can enter, but not your children.”

An app is separating families at the border

Every morning, a few spots become available on the new “CBP One” app for a few asylum seekers to approach a port of entry (official border crossing) at the U.S.-Mexico border. The spots fill up fast.

Priscilla Orta, an attorney working with Lawyers for Good Government, told reporter Valerie González at the Rio Grande Valley, Texas Monitor, “There are no slots. … They’re gone sometimes by 8:03 a.m. We have sometimes seen that the spots are gone by 8:01 a.m. And everyone knows it.”

It’s easier for a single person to get one of the scarce, coveted spots than it is for an entire family to get a few of them. González spoke to migrant parents who have been able to secure spots for themselves using the app, but not for their spouses or dependent children.

In the weeks after its mid-January rollout of the CBP One app for Title 42 asylum exemptions, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was being lenient about parents wanting to bring family members to their single-person appointments. That leniency has stopped, González reports.

“What happened last week was that they decided to enforce it,” said Felicia Rangel-Samponaro of the Sidewalk School, a service provider that assists migrants across from south Texas.

For some families who witnessed families crossing intact one day and then learning of the new enforcement the next, the change was felt immediately. “So, people had to make decisions on that bridge,” Rangel-Samponaro said.

The way that CBP is enforcing CBP One appointments is causing families to separate. Parents are sending their minor children across the border separately, because the Biden administration isn’t using Title 42 to expel unaccompanied minors. The parents then have to hope somehow to be reunited with their children if CBP gives them entry into the United States and access to the U.S. asylum system.

The practice of sending kids without their parents is not uncommon, Orta said.

On Monday, Orta said about a dozen people crossed, but all of them had already sent their kids as unaccompanied minors without them by that point. They hoped they would be reunited, but “they didn’t understand that their children wouldn’t be waiting for them 24 hours,” Orta said.

A CBP representative told the Monitor that a May 2022 court order preserving Title 42 is preventing the agency from making more appointments available.

A CBP spokesperson who spoke to The Monitor to provide background information said CBP is limited in the number of appointments it can offer due to a court order from Louisiana.

The Biden administration’s proposed “transit ban” on asylum seekers

The Departments of Homeland and Security and Justice have posted the draft text of a new rule that will make it much harder for migrants to request asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The rule would place a “rebuttable presumption of ineligibility” on any asylum seeker who passes through another country en route to the border. In order to avoid being automatically ineligible for asylum, regardless of the threats they may have faced, non-Mexican asylum seekers would have to:

  • Apply, using CBP’s “CBP One” smartphone app, for one of a limited number of appointments available at land-border ports of entry. This is very difficult to do, as we noted in a February 17 report and in our February 2 Border Update. Right now, the daily allotment of appointments usually fills up in about two minutes. If all migrants from third countries must use the app, and if the number of appointments doesn’t grow dramatically, then the new rule will create a sort of “super-metering on steroids” process in which only a trickle of protection-seeking migrants is permitted to seek asylum.
  • It’s not at all clear that Mexico’s government has agreed to take back an expanded number of rejected asylum-seeking migrants from third countries. The draft rule just refers to Mexico’s “willingness” to take migrants back across the border as long the U.S. government offers other legal pathways to some protection-seeking migrants, like the “humanitarian parole” program the Biden administration is currently offering to the limited number of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who hold passports and have U.S.-based sponsors.

The rule would go into effect once the Title 42 policy terminates, and remain in effect for two years, though it could be prolonged.

Here’s WOLA President Carolina Jiménez’s contribution to a multiple-organization response at the website of the #WelcomeWithDignity campaign.

“It’s impossible to imagine how the Biden administration’s revival of this cruel Trump-era policy could be legal,” said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America. “A federal court struck down a similar measure in 2020. U.S. law clearly provides only two circumstances in which asylum seekers can be excluded by a transit ban: if a ‘safe third country agreement’ exists, or if the migrant was ‘firmly settled’ in another country. These conditions almost never apply. People fleeing violence and persecution have the human right to seek protection regardless of how they arrived. Curtailing access to asylum also sets a dangerous precedent that other countries in the region might model.”

WOLA Podcast: Peru’s Turmoil and “the Danger of a Much Deeper Crisis”

Perhaps you’ve been focused on the crisis at the border, the gang crackdown in El Salvador, Brazil’s presidential transition, human rights violations in Venezuela and Nicaragua, Colombia’s peace talks, or something else. But Peru is having a moment that, if unaddressed, could quickly devolve into something much worse.

I spoke to Jo-Marie Burt, a senior fellow at WOLA who closely follows Peru, to talk about what’s been happening. It’s very much worth a listen. Here’s the content of WOLA’s podcast landing page.

A deeply divided country with the world’s highest COVID death rate, Peru has suffered a series of political crises. After the latest, it is now governed by its seventh president in less than seven years.

December 2022 has seen a president’s failed attempt to dissolve Congress and subsequent jailing, and now large-scale protests met with a military crackdown. Divisions between the capital, Lima, and the rural, largely indigenous interior have been heightened by President Pedro Castillo’s exit. The military is playing a more active, openly political, role.

WOLA Senior Fellow Jo-Marie Burt explains how Peru got here, the political divisions, the role of the international community, and the dangerous—but avoidable—possible outcomes of the present crisis.

Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

Soyapango, El Salvador

From El Salvador’s Gato Encerrado, reporting on the government’s encirclement of Soyapango, a poor San Salvador suburb, with 8,500 soldiers (about 1/3 of El Salvador’s military) and 1,500 police. The troops and cops are doing sweeps to arrest people whom they believe are gang members.

Translated caption of this photo, credited to Melissa Paises: “According to the human rights organization Cristosal, the majority of the more than 56,000 people detained under the emergency regime have been young men between the ages of 18 and 30, who were detained simply for their appearance or for living in stigmatized areas such as Soyapango.”

At least 0.6% of Haiti’s current population was deported there this year

An Associated Press story reports that the Dominican Republic has deported 43,900 Haitian migrants back across the two countries’ land border between July and October. Another 6,492 of them were deported just last week, according to local media. Things are so extreme in the DR right now that the U.S. embassy issued a travel warning cautioning darker-skinned Americans from visiting, due to the risk of being caught up in a sweep.

In September, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that the United States, Cuba, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, and other countries had deported 21,215 Haitian migrants back to Haiti since January. (That’s on top of 19,629 returns from those countries in 2021.)

Putting those numbers together—an incomplete picture—documents that at least 71,607 people have been returned—in nearly all cases, against their will—to Haiti, a nation currently on the verge of anarchy and collapse amid gang violence, hunger, and a menacing spike in cholera cases.

Haiti has perhaps 11.4 million people. So at least 1 in every 159 people in Haiti right now—0.6 percent of the population—has been forcibly returned there since 2022 began. Despite the miserable and dangerous conditions that Haitians are facing in their country.

Bukele’s gang crackdown has imprisoned nearly 1 percent of El Salvador’s population

In March, after a violent weekend likely caused by a secret truce’s breakdown, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared all-out war on the country’s MS-13 gang.

This isn’t the first time a Salvadoran president has announced a “mano dura” (iron fist) policy against MS-13, Barrio 18 and other gangs that have made daily life in El Salvador dangerous for a generation. But Bukele’s campaign is the broadest and most indiscriminate.

As of late August, over 51,800 people had been arrested and jailed since March 26 when, in a 3:00 AM meeting with security officials, Bukele gave an order for sweeping arrests. Every day, families surround one of the country’s main prisons, awaiting news about loved ones seized off the streets or even from their homes, as Jonathan Blitzer detailed in a September 5 New Yorker profile of Bukele.

A September 12 investigation by the Salvadoran daily La Prensa Gráfica includes new information about the draconian policy’s origins. “They told us to go that very day and capture all the MS gang members that were identified. They told us: you have to bring in the heads of the gang; you have to touch the gang’s finances. The order was to surround them, to surround their family members, their acquaintances,” an official present at the March 26 meeting said.

The police chiefs were told that they would not have to “worry about the Attorney General’s Office.” According to the sources, the instruction, which was later passed on to all active police officers in the country, was that “the Attorney General’s Office is going to receive the MS gang members that we send them. Without much proof.”

There was no officer or anyone in that room who did not know that they were asking us to go against the law, but that was the order: to bring this to an end,” said one of the sources.

“During the state of emergency, the military performs public security tasks, an assignment that the Salvadoran Constitution gives only to the police,” reads the caption of this image from La Prensa Gráfica photojournalist Luis Martínez.

This is not entirely a police operation. El Salvador’s military, a significant recipient of U.S. military aid, plays a robust role as well. The initial 3:00AM meeting “was not attended by Armed Forces commanders,” La Prensa Gráfica reported, but “military and police officials consulted said that they received orders at another meeting called by Minister Merino Monroy,” referring to the country’s defense minister, René Francis Merino Monroy, an active-duty vice-admiral.

A veteran police agent told La Prensa Gráfica:

This state of emergency has been the first time that he has seen, for example, soldiers patrolling on their own, soldiers detaining civilians, with the freedom to act as if they knew anything about public security tasks. The Minister of Defense has assured that some 18,000 military operatives are carrying out tasks that the Salvadoran Constitution entrusts to the PNC [Civilian National Police].

The newspaper’s investigation continues:

To date, human rights organizations in El Salvador have counted more than 3,000 complaints of human rights violations for the same number of detainees under the state of emergency. The cases analyzed for this investigation confirm a common denominator: the Attorney General’s Office, more than 150 days later, is still unable to prove the gang membership of hundreds of detainees, and in dozens of cases the link between the detainees and these structures is based on informants, the “public voice,” or supposed police records of the detainees, about whom the same arrest records indicate that they had no criminal record or records in databases.

Today, “In El Salvador, having tattoos, being drunk, acting nervous or just looking suspicious are enough reason for police to arrest people.”

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