For about every 300 Honduran citizens living in Honduras, 1 was apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in August 2023 alone. That’s 35,173 people out of a population of 10.6 million.
Even more citizens from Guatemala arrived at the border in August (37,937), but Guatemala’s population is larger (18.1 million). That is 1 of every 477 Guatemalan citizens living in Guatemala.
Here are some more graphics made using data that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released late Friday. WOLA’s whole collection of border infographics is at our Border Oversight website.
The tables in the graphic below show the nationalities of migrants who ended up in Border Patrol custody, after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry, between June and August 2023. As the tiny numbers on the right edge show, several nationalities experienced triple-digit percentage increases from June to August (that is, they more than doubled).
The tables in the next graphic show the nationalities of migrants who were able to present themselves at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry between June and August 2023. Most of them—87 percent in June—made appointments using the “CBP One” smartphone app.
Notable here: Haiti is third in August, as 8,687 of its citizens came to ports of entry, but Haiti does not even appear on the Border Patrol graphic above because zero Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry in August.
Finally, this graphic combines the above two tables. Here is all nationalities at the border from June through August, regardless of how CBP encountered them.
With U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) releasing new data last night, we now know what migration at the U.S.-Mexico border looked like through August.
The most notable thing about these charts is the rapid increase in migrant arrivals from June to August, in the areas between ports of entry (official border crossings) where Border Patrol operates. We know that the increase is continuing in September.
June was the first full month after May 11, 2023, when the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy ended. At that moment, many migrants and smugglers refrained from crossing between ports of entry because it wasn’t clear what would happen next, and migration plummeted to levels not seen since February 2021.
As they grew frustrated with clogged “legal pathways” like the CBP One smartphone app, and as they got better information about the likelihood of being able to pursue asylum claims within the United States despite the Biden administration’s harsh new asylum rule, more have been crossing between the official ports of entry and turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
This chart shows, by country, who has been ending up in Border Patrol custody after crossing between ports of entry.
This chart shows, by country, who was able to present themselves at a U.S.-Mexico border port of entry. Of the 51,913 people shown here in August, 87 percent (45,400) had made appointments using CBP One, according to CBP.
The following charts combine people at and between ports of entry (CBP plus Border Patrol). Here are migrants arriving as members of family units (parents plus children). Border Patrol encountered more migrants arriving as families in August 2023 (93,108) than in any month in history. The second-place month (84,486) was May 2019, when Donald Trump was president.
This chart, combining people at and between ports of entry, shows the countries of origin of migrants arriving as unaccompanied minors. August was the number-12 month ever for Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied migrant children: 13,549 last month.
And here are single adult migrants. It was an unremarkable month for single adults (28th place for Border Patrol apprehensions, 74,402, since October 2011, which is the first month for which I have Border Patrol breakdowns by demographic group.)
Finally, this chart combines all migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border: those at and between ports of entry, single adults, families, and children.
I’m still updating our collection of charts to reflect CBP’s new data dump. But what’s done is at WOLA’s Border Oversight page and downloadable as an 8-megabyte PDF file.
Late on September 22, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration at the U.S.-Mexico border during August 2023.
August was the number-one month ever for Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants traveling as members of families. “Family Unit” apprehensions totaled 93,108 last month.
August was the number-12 month ever for Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied migrant children: 13,549 last month.
Add those numbers, and Border Patrol apprehended 106,657 child and family migrants in August 2023, a record.
August was the number-28 month since October 2011 for Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants traveling as single adults: 74,402 last month. Single adult numbers have been dropping since the end of the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy, which ironically made repeat crossings easier because of less time in custody.
During his marathon morning press conference today, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) preliminary U.S.-Mexico Border migration statistics for the first 17 days of September. He showed this slide about 2 hours and 11 minutes into a video embedded on the Presidency’s page.
The graphic shows a total of 142,000 migrant encounters over those 17 days. It combines migrants who have entered Border Patrol custody plus those who came to official land-border ports of entry, but doesn’t distinguish between them.
In all of July, the last full month that CBP has reported, this number was 183,503.
If September’s pace continues for all 30 days, by the end of the month CBP would report 250,654 migrant encounters. Only December 2022 (252,325) has exceeded that number.
The most Venezuelan migrants in a single month was 33,804 in September 2022. September 2023, with 25,577 people in 17 days, may exceed that.
Panama just posted updated data, detailed by country, gender, and age, about migration through the Darién Gap in August.
It broke all records: 81,946 people passed through this treacherous jungle region in 31 days. The previous monthly record, set in October 2022, was 59,773.
In the first eight months of this year, 333,704 people have migrated through the Darién. Ten years ago, in 2013, the full-year total was 3,051 migrants. In 2011, it was just 281.
60 percent of this year’s migrants through the Darién Gap have been citizens of Venezuela: 201,288 people. In August, the migrant population was 77 percent Venezuelan: 62,700 people.
Jaw-dropping numbers from a region that was viewed as all but impenetrable until perhaps 2021. And there’s little reason why they won’t continue to increase. Any plan to “block” migrants on this route would require a staggeringly large and complex operation that would create additional challenges, like what to do with tens of thousands of stranded migrants.
In its latest annual report, the UK-based group Global Witness counted 177 murders of environmental defenders worldwide last year. And 156 of them happened in Latin America.
Colombia tops the global ranking with 60 murders in yet another dire year for the country. This is almost double the number of killings compared to 2021, when 33 defenders lost their lives. Once again, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, small-scale farmers and environmental activists have been viciously targeted.
In 2022, voters in Brazil and Colombia elected leaders who lean hard into pro-environment rhetoric. That may not mean daily life is any safer for those countries’ beleaguered communities trying to defend forests and other resources. Next year’s numbers, though, absolutely must go down. This is inexcusable.
This is from a September 5 update from the Regional Inter-agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V). Some changes owe to governments (like Panama’s) recalculating their population estimates, rather than actual movement of Venezuelan migrants.
Eight countries (not including the United States) now have at least 100,000 Venezuelan-born people living within their borders:
A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released on September 7, covering harms done by Trump-era U.S.-Mexico border wall construction, includes the only number I’ve seen of the total amount of barriers currently built along the border.
A bit oddly, the report doesn’t exactly say how many miles are fenced off. But GAO reported that number in 2017, and last week’s report explains how many new and replacement miles got built during the Trump years. It’s easy to add them together.
| 2017 | 2023 | Difference | % Difference | |
| Pedestrian Barrier | 354 | 636 | 282 | +80% |
| Vehicle Barrier | 300 | 105 | -195 | -65% |
| Total Border Fencing | 654 | 741 | 87 | +13% |
Taking those sources together reveals that 741 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border is now fenced off.
Of that amount, 636 miles are fenced off with what usually gets called “border wall”: “pedestrian fencing,” or segments of barrier that are high enough, with slats close together enough, to block someone crossing on foot (and unwilling to climb). The other 105 miles are “vehicle fencing”: usually, barrier that is low or widely spaced enough to walk through or over, but not to drive through or over.
The Trump administration built 87 miles of border wall in spaces that had no barrier before. That doesn’t sound like much: a 13 percent increase over where things stood at the end of the Obama administration. But Trump’s people replaced 195 miles of vehicle fencing with pedestrian fencing, for a total of 282 miles of new pedestrian barrier: an 80 percent increase. And they made a lot of old pedestrian barrier taller, or double-layer.
The entire U.S.-Mexico border is about 1,950 miles long (it’s hard to measure exactly over all of the Rio Grande’s twists and turns). So today, about 38 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border is fenced off, 33 percent of it with pedestrian fencing. The Trump administration added new fencing over 4 percent of the border that was previously unfenced, and new pedestrian fencing over 14 percent of the border.
Most of Texas, which follows the Rio Grande and is largely privately owned land, is not fenced.
Here’s where I derive the numbers in the table above:
From report GAO-17-331, Southwest Border Security: Additional Actions Needed to Better Assess Fencing’s Contributions to Operations and Provide Guidance for Identifying Capability Gaps, published February 16, 2017:
From report GAO-23-105443, Southwest Border: Additional Actions Needed to Address Cultural and Natural Resource Impacts from Barrier Construction, published September 7, 2023:
“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.
Tom Cartwright’s latest Witness at the Border monthly report on ICE flights finds “removal flights increased by 54 (55%) from 99 to 153 which was 13 (9%) over August 2022, and up 34 (28%) from the prior 6-month average.”
Of the 44 months Tom has tracked, only September 2021 had more removal flights. That month, the Biden administration went into overdrive expelling Haitians after the Del Rio “horse reins” incident.
There was even a deportation flight to Kathmandu (not shown below).
Screenshot from page 22 of the report
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data this evening about its “encounters” (regular apprehensions and Title 42 expulsions) with undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during March. Here are a few graphics illustrating key trends.
Today the White House released its 2024 budget request to Congress, including some preliminary information about U.S. foreign assistance programs. The State Department’s foreign aid overview points to almost exactly $3 billion in aid requested for next year in Latin America and the Caribbean, which would be about 9 percent more than in 2022.
I took the Latin America-specific items out of the administration’s PDF and present them in a Google Sheet with two tabs, one sorted by country and one sorted by program.
This isn’t quite all of U.S. aid. The budget request mentions some global aid programs (probably including some refugee aid) that also channel resources to the Western Hemisphere, without specifying how much individual regions and countries are getting. So that would be additional. In addition, probably 200 or 300 million dollars in assistance goes to the region’s security forces through the Defense budget, and that’s neither reported well nor reflected here.
So the real 2024 total for Latin America could be closer to $4 billion. At first glance I don’t see any dramatic changes in the proposed assistance, which has followed the same general outlines since Barack Obama’s second term.
In December, Cuba nearly surpassed Mexico as the number-one country of origin of migrants encountered at the US-Mexico border.
The largest increases in encountered migrants from October-December:
The largest decreases:
Here is the underlying data table going back to October 2019, using CBP’s dataset.
248,284 people migrated through Panama’s once-impenetrable Darién Gap jungle region in 2022.
Here’s 2022 by month, showing a steep drop in Venezuelan migration (blue) after the Biden administration, in October, started using Title 42 to expel Venezuelan asylum seekers into Mexico.
Ecuador (green) has since been 1st among the ~40 nationalities migrating through Darién.
These are visualizations of data from Panama’s migration agency (click on the links with “Irregulares en Tránsito Frontera Panamá – Colombia”).
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