After a several-month pause, Mexico's government has begun updating its “migrant encounter” data. Like U.S. authorities, they are measuring a drop in migration—though encountering more people than CBP is reporting.
After a several-month pause, Mexico’s government has begun updating its “migrant encounter” data.
Like U.S. authorities at the border, they are measuring a drop in migration inside Mexico—though encountering more people than CBP is reporting at the border.
Mexico’s reported encounters with migrants inside Mexico (brown) are once again greater than U.S. authorities’ reported encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border (green plus blue).
The difference between U.S. and Mexican authorities’ encounters is even greater when you look only at non-Mexican migrants. (Mexico, after all, doesn’t apprehend Mexican migrants.)
By imposing tariffs on Mexico, "Trump seems not to want even a transactional relationship, but rather to blow up the relationship." One of the conclusions of a conversation I recorded today with Stephanie and John from WOLA, in the wake of Trump's imposition of tariffs on Mexico.
By imposing tariffs on Mexico, “Trump seems not to want even a transactional relationship, but rather to blow up the relationship.” One of the conclusions of a conversation I recorded today with Stephanie and John from WOLA, in the wake of Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Mexico.
In an expected but still stunning escalation, the Trump administration has imposed 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, citing cross-border flows of fentanyl as justification. The move has sent shockwaves through U.S.-Mexico and North American relations, rattling markets and generating a general outcry.
In this episode, Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico, and John Walsh, WOLA’s director for drug policy, unpack the political, economic, and security implications of the tariff imposition and an apparent return to failed attempts to stop drug abuse and drug trafficking through brute force.
Brewer breaks down how the tariffs and other new hardline policies, like terrorist designations for Mexican criminal groups and fast-tracked extraditions, are reshaping and severely straining the bilateral relationship.
Walsh explains why Trump’s focus on supply-side crackdowns is doomed to fail, drawing on decades of evidence from past U.S. drug wars. He lays out a harm reduction strategy that would save far more lives.
The conversation concludes with an open question: is Donald Trump really interested in a negotiation with Mexico? Or is the goal a permanent state of coercion, which would explain the lack of stated benchmarks for lifting the tariffs?
Links:
See Brewer and Walsh’s February 14, 2025 Q&A on “Tariffs, Fentanyl, and Migration: Updates on U.S.-Mexico Relations after Trump’s First Month in Office.“
They covered this territory in a December 5, 2024 podcast episode, shortly after Trump—then the president elect—first signaled his intention to impose tariffs.
The December 5 podcast also came with a Q&A: “Trump’s Threats of Tariffs as a Response to Migration and the Fentanyl Overdose Crisis.”
I had a great conversation with Greg Sargent at the New Republic for his popular “Daily Blast” podcast, which he released on February 6. The audio is here and a transcript is here. We talked about migration through Mexico and the futility of blowing up a multifaceted bilateral relationship by threatening tariffs over it.
The introductory text for the podcast reads:
Stephen Miller privately worried about imposing overly aggressive tariffs on Mexico because it could imperil Mexico’s effort to apprehend migrants traveling north to our southern border, reportsTheWall Street Journal. That revelation is striking. Understood correctly, it’s an acknowledgment that Mexico had already been cracking down on migration, due to an arrangement secured by President Biden. That badly undermines Trump’s scam that his threat of tariffs forced Mexico to do his bidding on the border. We talked to Adam Isacson, an expert on Latin America, who explains what Mexico has actually been doing on immigration, and why it undercuts Trump’s biggest claims about immigration, tariffs, Mexico, and more. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
I wrote the part about migration. An excerpt is below, but I recommend reading the whole thing here.
Mexico’s 2024 crackdown has been its most intense ever. Since January, Mexico has averaged 115,636 blocked or encountered migrants per month—11 times the monthly average during Trump’s first administration. For the first time ever, Mexico’s number has equaled or even exceeded Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) and Border Patrol’s count of migrants encountered at the border. Mexico cracked down so swiftly that Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions plummeted 50 percent in a single month, from December 2023 to January 2024: the sharpest month-to-month drop of the 21st century so far. This happened without a mention of tariffs or other punishments.
Despite tariff threats, Mexico's security and migration forces are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
<Edit, November 27:> It was great talking to Greg Sargent yesterday for an excellent New Republic piece that embeds the below graphic.
All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them and he’ll start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.
…[W]e may not be prepared for the gale-force agitprop that’s about to hit us.
</Edit>
Yesterday the President-Elect promised to levy tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to stop migration to the U.S. border.
However, Mexico’s security and migration forces (green in the chart) are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
(Mexico hasn’t yet updated its September and October numbers. Underlying numbers are in the image’s alt text.)
Mexico has stepped up its migrant interdiction efforts so much that its "encounters" with migrants now rival those of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In July, absolutely for the first time ever, Mexico reported “encountering” (apprehending, blocking, turning back, detaining) more migrants in its territory than U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which includes Border Patrol) reported encountering at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Citing a “restructuring process,” Mexico’s authorities say their reporting of September data will be delayed, but at least through August, the two countries’ migrant encounters remain nearly equal for the first time in history. And, of course, the U.S. figure includes Mexican citizens, and Mexico’s does not.
Much has been written about Mexico’s undeclared but vigorous policy of redirecting other nations’ migrants to the country’s south and cutting way back on humanitarian visas, even as detention and deportation have grown less frequent. It’s been called the “chutes and ladders” or “merry-go-round” policy, shipping people south when they try to come north.
Mexico has changed its constitution to allow direct election of judges, placement of a militarized National Guard under direct Army control, and other changes. Stephanie Brewer of WOLA and Lisa Sánchez of MUCD explain what this means, in a new WOLA podcast episode.
Mexico has changed its constitution to allow direct election of judges, placement of a militarized National Guard under direct Army control, and other changes. Stephanie Brewer of WOLA and Lisa Sánchez of México Unido contra la Delincuencia explain what this means, in a new WOLA podcast episode.
In September 2024, Mexico’s legislature quickly approved a series of constitutional reforms at the behest of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The revisions, among other things, fundamentally change the nature of the country’s judiciary and fundamentally and permanently change the role of the armed forces in public security.
Under the overhaul of Mexico’s judiciary, citizens will now directly elect all judges, increasing the likelihood of eroding the judicial branch’s independence. That, in turn, could complicate accountability for organized crime activity, corruption, and human rights abuses.
Another reform places the National Guard, a recently created internal security force whose members are mostly former soldiers, directly within the Defense Ministry. This further cements significant increases in military participation in internal security, immigration control, public works, and the economy during the López Obrador administration.
These changes pose likely setbacks to the struggle to hold people and institutions accountable for human rights abuse and corruption, and they threaten to weaken the quality of Mexico’s democracy.
In this episode, WOLA’s director for Mexico, Stephanie Brewer, and Lisa Sanchez, the director of México Unido Contra la Delincuencia (MUCD), explain the constitutional reforms and their likely consequences.
“This particular constitutional reform fully militarized public security at the federal level by turning the National Guard into a fourth armed force,” said Sánchez. “What we did was to fully and permanently militarize public security at the federal level in Mexico for good.”
While these reforms are not a “fatal blow” for Mexico’s democracy, Brewer pointed out, they create even more adverse conditions for “victims, survivors, family members, civil society, NGOs, and others” working for rights and justice in the country. “They really need our attention, and our support from the international community. We need to be listening to their voices.”
Here’s an analysis we published yesterday about this year’s unusual springtime decline in the number of migrants making it to the U.S.-Mexico border. As migration levels drop to some of the lowest of the Biden administration, this piece notes that:
Texas’s “Operation Lone Star” doesn’t explain it.
The main factor appears to be Mexico’s government bottling people up, even as large numbers continue arriving in the country’s south.
“Shutting down” asylum, as President Biden is considering trying to do by executive order, could bring numbers down in the short term but—as we saw with Title 42—won’t have a lasting effect.
Crackdowns will always fail. The way to a solution runs through overhauling the creaky U.S. asylum system.
Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border is a series of vignettes and character sketches about gun trafficking, organized crime, and migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Jusionyte makes the point that Mexico is not inherently a violent place, that the United States’ approach to firearms plays a role too.
I’ve given the book a very close read and am completely over-prepared. Looking forward to Thursday.
I liked this part:
I began following American guns south in order to understand what they were doing to Mexican society. From the stories migrants and refugees told me I already knew I would find communities scarred by gun violence and people who were living in fear, some of whom were choosing to leave their homes in search of safety and better lives. I knew that this journey would eventually take me back to the border, right to where I had started, that the plight of migrants and refugees running away from threats would only lead to further militarization and fortification of the barrier separating “us” from “them.” After all, the desire to prevent migrants from crossing is a strong political potion that reliably wins elections in the United States. And yet I was surprised by how few people recognize that it’s a circle. Even the language we use to talk about violence south of the border, using such terms as “narcos” and “cartels,” only reinforces the idea that Mexico is a dangerous country and we need to build a barrier lest those people coming from over there—not only Mexico, but also Honduras and Guatemala, Haiti and Venezuela, and many other places—would bring violence here.
Somehow, we fail to connect the dots: that the violence people are fleeing, the violence we are afraid they would spread in the United States is, in large part, of our own making—that the tools come from the factories in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Tennessee, some smuggled across the borders, others legally exported to foreign military and police forces with records of abuse. Even more: these guns come from the same regions where addiction to opioids has created demand for drugs that continue to enrich smugglers in Mexico; that the money Americans spend on fentanyl, heroin, or meth will be used to buy guns to arm those who supply this contraband. Nor do we realize that the US government’s pursuit of most prominent Mexican traffickers and their extraditions to face trials on this side of the border—the list that includes several leaders of the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas—have deprived communities that have suffered their brutality most directly from recourse to justice, further fraying the social fabric of the Mexican society.
The Mexican government just released new data showing that it recorded 97,969 migrant encounters during November 2023, a new monthly record
The Mexican government just released new data showing that it recorded 97,969 “events of people in irregular migratory situation” during November 2023. That’s 5 percent more than October, and sets a new record for the most migrant encounters that Mexico has ever recorded in a month:
Migrants came from 111 countries. Of nationalities with more than 1,000 migrant encounters, those that increased the most from October to November were Mauritania (119%), the Dominican Republic (92%), and Honduras (65%). Those that declined the most from October to November were Cuba (-52%), Senegal (-28%), and Guinea (-11%). Venezuela, the number-one nationality, declined 8 percent.
Even as Mexico measured an increase in migration in November, two countries to the south, Panama and Honduras, reported double-digit percentage decreases.
On December 18, the US-Mexico border saw a record high of 14,509 migrant encounters, according to leaked CBP data. This is despite declining migration through Panama, Honduras, and Mexico.
According to leaked CBP data, U.S. authorities encountered 14,509 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border yesterday (December 18). That’s probably about 13,000 Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry (official border crossings) and about 1,500 people reporting to the ports of entry, nearly always with appointments made using the “CBP One” app.
That’s almost certainly the largest number of migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border in any day since at least 2000.
Aaron at the American Immigration Council says this increase, which seems to have begun in November, “is driven partly by rumors that the border will close soon and the CBP One app will be shut down.” That may explain it. A funding crisis at Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) could also be a factor.
This is really unusual, though, because migration data further south along the U.S.-bound migration route would lead one to expect the numbers at the U.S.-Mexico border to be declining. Panama, Honduras, and Mexico have been reporting fewer people coming after record-breaking levels in late summer and early fall.
Here’s Panama: a 24 percent decline in migration through the Darién Gap from October to November, and a 50 percent decline in migration from September to November. So, fewer people departing the South American continent.
Here’s Honduras: down 41 percent from October to November. So, fewer people coming from South America and through the increasingly used aerial entry point in Nicaragua.
Why are the numbers up so much at the U.S. border when they’re down everywhere else along the route? The answer probably has to do with:
A jump in migration from citizens of Mexico and Central American, and/or
Crossings of Venezuelans and others who had arrived in Mexico more than 1-2 months ago, and perhaps are now giving up on waiting for CBP One.
Also, If recent Decembers are a guide, the U.S. border numbers could be on the verge of dropping. The first halves of December 2021 and December 2022 saw very heavy migration, capping off growth that accelerated all fall (as did the fall of 2023). Numbers dropped during the second halves of those Decembers, as the holidays approached.
In a conversation with reporters whose transcript has not yet been posted online, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for border and immigration policy, dropped an important and rarely publicized statistic.
Since the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy ended in May, Mexico has accepted the U.S. deportation into its territory of 17,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. These are people denied access to asylum under the Biden administration’s “transit ban” rule.
17,000 over nearly 5 months is far fewer than the rate of Title 42 expulsions during the pandemic, when Mexico agreed to accept nearly a million land-border expulsions of citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Today, Mexico just accepts citizens of the latter four countries. But 17,000 is still a lot of people, some with protection needs denied because, under the “transit ban” rule, they crossed the border improperly.
The last time we saw this number reported was July 27, when Nuñez-Neto mentioned 4,000 deportations of those countries’ citizens into Mexico. So there have been another 13,000 in the succeeding 10 weeks, or nearly 200 deportations into Mexico each day.
Why isn’t this statistic shared more often, for instance in CBP’s monthly data updates? My guess is that Mexico doesn’t like to see it publicized, and the U.S. government respects those sensibilities. (DHS would probably be happy to share news about its deportations into Mexico, out of a belief that it might discourage some migrants.)
Using data released today from the Mexican government’s Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR), here is the breakdown of asylum requests before Mexico’s system during what is certain to be a record-breaking year. Asylum requests in Mexico are on track to exceed 150,000 in 2023.
Last month, Mexico received 11,984 asylum requests, the second-lowest monthly total all year. 33 percent came from citizens of Haiti, plus another 6 percent from Brazil and Chile who are almost entirely the children born in those countries to Haitian migrants there. Honduras followed with 27 percent of September’s total, then Cuba (11 percent).
The director of the Mexican government’s Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR) just shared on ex-Twitter that 112,960 people sought asylum in Mexico’s protection system during the first 9 months of 2023.
The tweet reads, “At the end of September, COMAR had registered 112,960 applicants for refugee status in Mexico. This figure exceeds by 26.39% the historical mark for the same period established in 2021. With this trend, the number of applicants will exceed 150,000 by the end of the year.”
Here’s how Mexico’s asylum applications during the first nine months of 2023 compare with the first nine months of the previous five years. It’s not even close.
An investigation by four veteran Reuters reporters finds a link between the Biden administration’s use of an app that makes asylum seekers wait for weeks in Mexico, and an increase in attacks on migrants, especially rapes of migrant women, in Mexico’s organized crime-dominated northern border state of Tamaulipas.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration in May moved to a new system that required migrants to secure an appointment—via an app known as CBP One—to present themselves at a legal border crossing to enter the United States.
Nine experts, including lawyers, medical professionals, and aid workers, told Reuters the new system has had unintended consequences in the two cities, contributing to a spike in violence.
The high risk of kidnapping and sexual assault in Reynosa and Matamoros is one of the factors pushing migrants to cross illegally, four advocates said. Crossings border-wide surged in September.
Tamaulipas border cities like Matamoros and Reynosa have been notoriously dangerous for years. They’re home to the decades-old Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel (an heir of the Zetas), and other splinter groups that compete violently.
These regional cartels have less-solid control of their territory than do larger national cartels like Sinaloa. This makes them more prone to use violence against newcomers and outsiders—including U.S. citizens, four of whom were kidnapped, two killed, in March when they came to Matamoros for a cosmetic surgery procedure. These criminal groups also make somewhat less money from the drug trade than the larger cartels; such “poorer” criminal groups are more likely to fund themselves by preying on vulnerable people, including migrants.
The Mexican state, especially the hyper-corrupt local government in Tamaulipas, is no protection. Officials often collude with organized crime.
So in recent months, when an asylum seeker uses CBP One, they can travel from elsewhere in Mexico to the border and show up at a U.S. port of entry at their appointed time. They do not need to hire a smuggler. That’s great.
What’s less great is that, when the port of entry is in south Texas (Laredo, McAllen-Hidalgo, and Brownsville, which make up 42 percent of CBP One appointments border-wide—605 out of 1,450 daily spots), the asylum seeker must travel through Tamaulipas territory under organized crime control. In order to be sure not to miss their appointment, they may even stay in this territory, near the port of entry, for days or weeks.
When they do that, the cartels—whose eyes and ears in the region are thorough enough to rival Cold-War East Germany—often find them and demand money. Reuters explains:
[C]riminal groups are still demanding these migrants pay to enter their territory, the experts said.
“Rape is part of the torture process to get the money,” said Bertha Bermúdez Tapia, a sociologist at New Mexico State University researching the impacts of Biden’s policy on migrants in Tamaulipas.
As I noted earlier today, I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.
I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.
A new report from WOLA dives deeply into the growing power and roles of Mexico’s military, and what that means for human rights, democracy, and U.S.-Mexico relations.
In some new findings, Militarized Transformation reveals official data showing that the military isn’t even reporting its arrests of civilians to civilian security authorities and oversight bodies. The report updates and group together various indicators regarding the justice system and respect for fundamental rights by the security forces, with a focus on the armed forces and the National Guard, as well as the differentiated impacts and situations faced by women. And it makes a series of short-term and long-term recommendations for needed reforms.
This podcast episode features the report’s principal author, Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico. Brewer discusses the report’s main findings, conclusions, and recommendations, along with a general view of Mexico’s democracy, civil-military relations, and U.S. policy.
“We recognize militarization is is the reality we’re currently working in,” Brewer concludes. “But while that’s going on, what possible reason could there be for the country to want the armed forces not to be operating under effective civilian control or not to be transparent about things like their use of force? Or not to be fully giving information to Congress? That would have to be something that that is in everybody’s interest in the short term.”
Militarized Transformation is the latest of several WOLA reports examining the military’s growing power in Mexico and its human rights and democracy implications. Among them:
Video: Militarization in Mexico: a discussion of the future of security, human rights, and civil-military relations (November 10, 2022)
Podcast: Mexico Sends in the Troops: Stephanie Brewer on the Militarization of Public Security (September 19, 2022)
“The Mexican government is giving more and more power to institutions known precisely for their lack of transparency, and it is doing so without adequate civilian controls, in a process that will be difficult to reverse,” warns a report published today by my colleagues in WOLA’s Mexico Program.
Ernesto López Portillo of the Universidad Iberoamericana Citizen Security Program, writing at Elefante Blanco, echoed those concerns:
The total operational deployment of military personnel for public security in 2023 exceeds the total number of state and municipal police. The news is unprecedented in contemporary Mexico.
…The total operational deployment of military personnel for public security already amounts to 261,644, while state and municipal police forces total 251,760.
The Mexican government’s refugee agency, COMAR, just posted data through August about the number of migrants from other countries who have applied for asylum in Mexico. Eight months into the year, COMAR is nearly at 100,000 applications, on pace to reach, or be just below, 150,000 by the end of the year. Mexico appears certain to break 2021’s record of 129,768 asylum applications.
Most applicants are from Haiti, Honduras, and Cuba. As Gretchen Kuhner of Mexico’s non-governmental Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) pointed out in last week’s WOLA Podcast, a lot of migrants stranded in Mexico are being channeled into the asylum system by a lack of other options for having a legal status in the country.
Mexico’s government is again increasing the number of military personnel assigned to what the Presidency’s regular security updates call the “Plan de Migración en la Frontera Norte y Sur.”
May 18, 2023: A video shows that, contrary to the Army’s version of events, soldiers shot and killed five men, following a confrontation and pursuit, after they had already been captured and disarmed.
February 26, 2023: Soldiers, shooting 80 times, killed five men following a pursuit.
August 31, 2022: Soldiers open fire on a vehicle and kill a four-year-old girl on board. A friend of Heidi Mariana’s mother was taking her to the hospital to treat a stomachache.
February 7, 2021: Soldiers in an Army truck blocked a private vehicle and opened fire, killing one aboard and wounding two.
July 3, 2020: Following a shootout, after soldiers overtook their assailants’ vehicles, they fired on the vehicles, killing all aboard—including kidnap victims whom the assailants were transporting.
March-May 2018: Mexican marines arbitrarily detained and disappeared 27 people in Nuevo Laredo. The bodies of 12 have been found, dumped.
September 5, 2009: An elite state police unit (Centro de Análisis, Inteligencia y Estudios de Tamaulipas) killed five men and three women. The police allegedly removed the victims from their homes, killed them, and posed the bodies in “northeast cartel” vests around a pickup truck with handmade armor to simulate combat.
Zeta published a table with 16 examples of extrajudicial executions going back to 1995. Seven took place in Nuevo Laredo.
Despite very heavy military involvement in public security, Nuevo Laredo continues to be one of the most dangerous and organized crime-dominated places in Mexico. (See my discussion of what we saw in Nuevo Laredo during a March 2022 WOLA border visit.) Things are so bad that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is not even granting appointments for asylum seekers using the “CBP One” smartphone app across the river in Laredo, Texas.
One of the benefits of hosting WOLA’s podcast is learning something new from the people I interview. I learned a lot in this one about the seemingly intractable problem of fentanyl trafficking. I spoke here with my colleagues John Walsh, who runs WOLA’s Drug Policy Program, and Stephanie Brewer, who runs our Mexico Program. Both were clear, informed, and on their game. Highly recommended.
Record overdose deaths in the United States have fixed attention on fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, synthesized mainly in Mexico, that is highly addictive and very small in volume. WOLA’s director for drug policy, John Walsh, and director for Mexico, Stephanie Brewer, argue that the challenge fentanyl poses demands a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. approach to illicit drugs.
Today, however, the sense of crisis has escalated so much that, even with an administration that is open to “harm-reduction” approaches to drug policy, policymakers and lawmakers are turning to the get tough recipes of the drug war’s past 50 years.
A push to use military force and demand crackdowns is harming relations with Mexico, where top leadership inaccurately denies that fentanyl is produced. A push to increase incarceration at home threatens to repeat some of the tragic mistakes of the recent past, in which strong-sounding policies did great damage to both Latin America (measured by crime and instability) and the United States (measured by overdose deaths and other harms).
All pure fentanyl consumed in the United States in an entire year can fit inside the beds of two pickup trucks. The drug is “un-interdictable.” Walsh and Brewer argue here that fentanyl’s rise makes evident the need for a harm reduction approach that saves lives and helps people recover from addiction, while working with Mexico to address the conditions that allow organized crime to thrive.
This talking point about a “95% drop in border migrant encounters from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela” is problematic.
Why? Let’s examine encounters along the migration route, from north to south.
Here’s where the 95% comes from.
US Border Patrol’s apprehensions of these 4 countries’ migrants really did drop steeply from December—after Mexico agreed to accept Title 42 expulsions of these nationalities, and once a “humanitarian parole” option opened up for some of them.
But there’s no 95% drop anywhere else along the migration route, where people fleeing those countries have become stranded.
Since December, Mexico’s encounters with these 4 countries’ migrants are only down 42%.
Since December, Honduras’s encounters with Cuban, Haitian, and Venezuelan migrants are up 10%.
(Nicaraguan citizens don’t need passports to be in Honduras, and thus don’t end up in Honduras’s count of “irregular” or “undocumented” migrants.)
Since December, in Panama’s Darién Gap, migration from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela is up 250% (though down 57% from a high in October, before Mexico started accepting expulsions of Venezuelan migrants).
The upshot: migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela may be down sharply at the US-Mexico border, due to aggressive Title 42 expulsions.
But the expulsions have absolutely not deterred these nations’ citizens from migrating. They’re still fleeing—but they’re stranded.
I just sat and recorded an episode of the solo podcast that I created when I started this website six years ago. Apparently, this is the first episode I’ve recorded since July 2017.
There’s no good reason for that: it doesn’t take very long to do. (Perhaps it should—this recording is very unpolished.) But this is a good way to get thoughts together without having to crank out something essay-length.
This episode is a response to recent calls to add Mexican organized crime groups to the U.S. terrorist list, and to start carrying out U.S. military operations against these groups on Mexican soil.
As I say in the recording, both are dumb ideas that won’t make much difference and could be counter-productive. Confronting organized crime with the tools of counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency won’t eradicate organized crime. It may ensnare a lot of American drug dealers and bankers as “material supporters of terrorism,” and it may cause criminal groups to fragment and change names. But the territories were organized crime currently operates will remain territories where organized crime still operates.
Neither proposal gets at the problem of impunity for state collusion with organized crime. Unlike “terrorist” groups or insurgencies, Latin America’s organized crime groups thrive because of their corrupt links to people inside government, and inside security forces. As long as these links persist, “get-tough” efforts like the terrorist list or military strikes will have only marginal impact.
You can download the podcast episode here. The podcast’s page is here and the whole feed is here.
A possibly meaningless thing I keep track of: Mexico has reduced the number of military personnel assigned to its “northern and southern border migration” missions for the 4th month in a row.
The city of Matamoros, where the 4 US citizens are kidnapped, is a dangerous place.
Matamoros is also the site of 184 US deportations of Mexican citizens every week.
And that doesn’t count Title 42 expulsions of Mexicans and non-Mexicans, I don’t have the exact number of expulsions to Matamoros but it’s probably at least 184 per week.
From a very good piece at VICE by Keegan Hamilton, who closely followed the New York trial of former Mexico public security chief Genaro García Luna:
For watchdogs like Adam Isaacson [sic.], director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, it’s no surprise that the U.S. government turned a blind eye toward García Luna while he was in power.
“It seems pretty clear that the DEA and other parts of the United States government knew that Garcia Luna was not somebody that they could fully trust, and that, in fact, he may have been colluding with armed groups or with organized crime,” Isaacson told VICE News. “But they still found him useful because he was going after other organized crime groups at the same time.”
Isaacson pointed to examples beyond Mexico, such as Honduras and Brazil, where the U.S. has provided funding and training to state security forces linked to corruption and human rights abuses, and said it’s no longer shocking—it’s simply business as usual in the war on drugs.
“Their mission is not to make corruption go away,” Isaacson said. “Their mission is to break a drug organization and get as many tons of drugs seized as possible so it doesn’t make it to the United States. And if that means making common cause with bad guys to go after other bad guys, they’re going to do it without regard to the institutional or accountability damage that that might do in the countries that they’re working.”
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.
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.
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