Well… here’s the purity and inflation-adjusted price of a gram of cocaine on U.S. streets since 1990, so… probably not.
![](https://i0.wp.com/adamisacson.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/200204_coca-2.001.png?fit=30%2C23&ssl=1)
(Source is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Table 8.3 here.)
Well… here’s the purity and inflation-adjusted price of a gram of cocaine on U.S. streets since 1990, so… probably not.
(Source is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Table 8.3 here.)
Here are Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants, by U.S. border state, since the record-setting month of December 2023.
Since December, unauthorized migration has declined by two thirds. Since January—after Mexico started cracking down hard on migrants crossing its territory—migration declined by one third. From May to June, after the Biden administration issued a rule severely limiting asylum access between ports of entry, migration dropped by 29 percent. (This effect is likely to be short-term, but may keep numbers down through Election Day—even as it sends many would-be asylum seekers back to danger.)
Texas’s hardline governor, Greg Abbott (R), likes to claim that his state government’s “Operation Lone Star,” a $10 billion-plus series of security-force deployments, imprisonments, and wall-building, is responsible for the drop in migrants coming to Texas. Abbott even alleges that Texas has pushed migrants to other states.
But did Texas see the largest drop in migration?
From this, It’s really hard to conclude that Greg Abbott’s policies made a big difference. Arizona experienced similar declines without the hardline policies. The 2024 migration decline is a border-wide trend, not a Texas phenomenon.
We should be relieved that cruelty hasn’t paid any dividends.
Here, by month and by country, are appointments that CBP has granted to asylum seekers, using its “CBP One” mobile phone app, to approach U.S.-Mexico land border ports of entry.
Chart – Data Table – Source
The app’s use for this purpose began in January 2023, and today it is very hard to request asylum at the border without an app-scheduled appointment.
It is especially hard since June 5, when the Biden administration imposed a rule banning asylum for most people who cross the border between ports of entry, even though the law specifies that people have the right to ask for asylum on U.S. soil regardless of how they crossed.
Though it is the only pathway for most, appointments are scarce. CBP hasn’t increased the allotment of appointments—currently about 1,450 per day—in a year. Asylum seekers now routinely spend months in Mexico seeking, then awaiting, appointments.
Chart – Data Table – Sources (1) (2)
During the first five months of the 2024 fiscal year (October 2023-February 2024), people from Asia, Africa, or Europe were one out of every eight migrants whom Border Patrol apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.
That’s never come close to happening before. Non-Americas countries are non-blue in this chart:
Here are the countries they came from (click to expand):
After increasing at the beginning of 2024, migration through the Darién Gap has declined somewhat, settling at about 1,000 people per day.
Last month (May), 69 percent of migrants passing through the treacherous jungle region were Venezuelan. In fact, Venezuelans now make up 50 percent of all migrants who’ve passed through the Darién Gap since 2010, when Panama started keeping and publishing records.
Between January 2022 and May 2024, 588,872 citizens of Venezuela journeyed through the Darién. Venezuela had about 30 million people in the mid-2010s when the nation’s exodus began—so fully 2 percent of Venezuela’s population has made the jungle journey since the pandemic’s end.
Colombia for the first time was the Darién Gap’s second-place nationality in May. Haiti, Ecuador, and China are dropping. India and Peru are up.
Of Joe Biden’s 39 full months in office, 2024 so far has seen the months with the third, fourth, eighth, and ninth fewest migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. April was fourth-fewest.
This was unexpected, since it immediately followed some of the Biden administration’s heaviest months for migration, including the record-setting December 2023. The drop appears to owe to a sustained crackdown carried out by Mexico’s government, with migration agents, national guardsmen, and other security forces blocking migrants’ northward progress.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott (R), has been claiming that his state government’s border crackdown reduced migration there and pushed it to states further west. That’s not what the data show.
Since record-setting December, and also since migration dropped in January, Arizona—not Texas—has seen the sharpest percentage drop in migration. Arizona has a Democratic governor, and its state government is not carrying out a severe deterrent policy like Abbott’s $10 billion-plus “Operation Lone Star.” Yet Arizona’s migration reduction is similar. So Texas doesn’t get the credit.
We can zoom in further to look at what has happened to migration in each of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.
Viewed this way, one of Texas’s five sectors did see the sharpest drop in migration: Del Rio, in mid-Texas, fell 86 percent from December to April; 39 percent from January to April. It is the only Texas sector to have decreased more sharply than the border-wide average.
But Tucson, Arizona—Border Patrol’s busiest sector between July 2023 and March 2024—fell almost as steeply as Del Rio (61% since December and 38% since January).
And after a December-January drop, all other Texas sectors are increasing.
Del Rio’s migration decline was led by super-sharp drops in arrivals from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, three nationalities (along with Haiti) whose citizens the Mexican government allows the Biden administration to deport into Mexico under its May 2023 post-Title 42 “asylum ban” rule.
Deportation into Mexico without allowing a chance to seek asylum is almost certainly illegal: a federal judge already struck this part of the rule down (it remains in place pending appeal). It’s possible that this practice—more than Texas’s concertina wire, buoys, and soldiers—may have affected the choices these nationalities’ migrants made in Del Rio since January.
Border-wide between January and April, for every Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan migrant who crossed the border irregularly (43,040), more than five instead arrived via legal channels: either the “CBP One” app (about 120,000) to make appointments at ports of entry, or the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program (about 108,000) for these nationalities.
In Tucson, no nationalities declined as steeply as did Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in Del Rio. But the drop has happened across the board, with only modest increases in apprehensions of Colombians and Peruvians.
From what we know of the month of May so far, migration along the border could be declining even further. Twitter reports from the San Diego and Tucson Border Patrol sector chiefs have showed both regions declining over the past two weeks. The El Paso municipal government’s “migrant crisis” dashboard is also showing flat, even slightly reduced, numbers of encounters there.
See also:
I keep a little webpage that generates tables of data about migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, using CBP’s regularly updated dataset.
For weeks, I’ve wanted to have the ability to sort the tables by clicking on their column headers. It seemed like a big job, though, especially figuring out how to keep the columns’ totals at the bottom, not included in the sort.
This evening, though, I thought to ask ChatGPT—and it gave me exactly what I wanted, with only a couple of dozen lines of code. Here’s what the tables can do now:
The whole process took less than 20 minutes: two queries and me copy-pasting the code into the page. It works flawlessly, which is very cool, and perhaps a bit creepy.
Mexico just posted its February migration numbers… there must be a huge number of people from Venezuela bottled up in Mexico right now.
2024 numbers from Panama – Honduras (change the dates in search) – Mexico (click on “Personas en situación migratoria irregular” then Table 3.1.1) – U.S. (CBP / my search of CBP numbers for 2024)
At the end of the day Friday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration and drug seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border through February. Within minutes, I added the migration data to my online tool that helps you search it, cbpdata.adamisacson.com. I’m glad this is so easy to do now.
Here’s what you get when you search for border authorities’ encounters with migrants during the first five months of the U.S. government’s 2024 fiscal year, listed by nationality. (This is everything: both migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between the ports of entry, and migrants—mostly “CBP One” appointments—who arrived at the ports of entry.) You can see an increase over January, but still well below late last year.
Visit the “cpbdata” tool to view migration data by country, by demographic category, by geographic area, and to see years going back to 2020. I’ll be updating our collection of infographics over the next several days.
Sector chiefs’ weekly Twitter updates point to a mid-March drop in migration in Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California, the two Border Patrol U.S.-Mexico border sectors that have been encountering the most migrants so far this year.
This is not the usual trend. March—and spring in general—is usually a time of steadily increasing migration, until temperatures get too high. In recent years, though, this has become less predictable, as policy changes, internet-driven rumors, and smuggling patterns have had more effect on the numbers of arriving people.
I’ve been posting a bit less this week because I’ve moved my site and domain to a new service provider. (You may have noticed that this page loaded a few milliseconds faster? Probably not.)
I’m now using a virtual server that can host not just this site, but other little projects as sub-domains of adamisacson.com.
One of those little projects is live now: cbpdata.adamisacson.com. It’s a tool that lets you search Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) migration data since 2020.
Every month, CBP updates and publishes a dataset of its encounters with migrants since fiscal year 2020 (October 2019). We may get February’s data any moment now.
But that data is basically a table that right now has 58,866 rows. This site makes it usable.
(CBP has a “dashboard” that shows this data since 2021, and unlike mine, it includes encounters beyond the U.S.-Mexico border, including the Canada border and airports. But it doesn’t let you, for instance, just see how many people came from every country—you have to select each country one by one—and it’s really hard to get data out of it.)
I think the page is self-explanatory. If you visit it, do nothing, and click “Show the Data,” you’ll get a table showing how many migrants CBP encountered—both Border Patrol and ports of entry combined—by country for each year since 2020.
Hover your mouse over any number in the table, and a pop-up will show you the percentage of the total (so in the picture, 27% of 2024’s migrants so far have come from Mexico).
Click the “select table” button, and the entire thing is selected, letting you copy-and-paste it into a spreadsheet or anywhere else.
I encourage you to play around with the options on the main page letting you refine your search. Checking the various boxes lets you see, for instance, “How many family members and accompanied/unaccompanied children from Cuba and Haiti arrived in Texas’s five Border Patrol sectors and two CBP field offices, by month since 2023, listed by whether they came to ports of entry or to areas between them.” Just to give an idea of all the variables.
Also, every search result, including a really long one like that example, has its own unique link.
I hope you find it useful. I’m using it constantly. When CBP releases its February data, I’ll be able to update this within about 10 minutes of obtaining it.
And finally: all the source code is on GitHub if you want to see how it works or have the skills to improve it.
tl;dr: This piece doesn’t make a human rights argument about asylum access, though it does acknowledge cruelty and human cost. Instead, the argument here is cold, analytical, and practical: the past 10 years’ numbers and experience show that trying to deter protection-seeking migrants just doesn’t work. All it does is push their numbers down temporarily.
As President Biden and candidate Trump head to the Texas-Mexico border, immigration opponents are blaming the President’s border policies for the horrific, tragic February 22 murder of a nursing student in Georgia. But the case of the alleged killer, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man named José Ibarra, shows the futility of trying to put asylum out of reach at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since 1980, U.S. law has clearly stated that any non-citizens on U.S. soil have the right to apply for asylum, regardless of how they arrived, if they fear for their lives or freedom upon return to their country for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
Once here, they are entitled to due process, and even Donald Trump’s administration had to honor that, hundreds of thousands of times (though they constantly sought to cut corners).
That is presumably what José Ibarra sought to do when he arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso in September 2022. But in fact, Ibarra came to the U.S.-Mexico border at a time when the U.S. government was going to extreme lengths to make asylum unavailable.
Between March 2020 and May 2023, the “Title 42” pandemic policy—begun by Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden—used public health as a pretext for carrying out the toughest restriction on asylum seekers since 1980. Title 42 empowered U.S. border officials to expel—not even to properly process—all undocumented migrants they encountered.
If they said “I fear for my life if you expel me,” in most cases migrants still didn’t get hearings: they were expelled from the United States as quickly as possible. If they were Salvadoran, Guatemalan, or Honduran—and later Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan—Mexico agreed to take many of them back across the land border.
In September 2022, when Ibarra turned himself in to Border Patrol, Title 42 was in full effect. But “expelled as quickly as possible” was often complicated.
In September 2022 alone, 33,804 Venezuelans—fleeing authoritarianism, corrupt misrule, violence, social collapse, and cratering living standards—arrived at the border.
That month was an especially busy time for Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector (one of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, comprised of far west Texas and New Mexico). Agents there encountered 49,030 migrants over those 30 days, 20,169 of them from Venezuela, including José Ibarra.
(Let’s recall, too, that the vast majority of those people were seeking to step on U.S. soil and turn themselves in to Border Patrol. They weren’t trying to get away. The presence of a border wall near the riverbank is irrelevant: they just want to set foot on the riverbank.)
Of those 20,169 Venezuelan migrants in El Paso that month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used Title 42 to expel… 2.
Why so few? Because U.S. authorities had nowhere to “put” expelled citizens of Venezuela and many other countries. At the time, Mexico was accepting Title 42 expulsions of three non-Mexican nationalities, but not Venezuelans. (That came later, in October 2023, bringing a temporary drop in Venezuelan migration. But despite the threat of expulsion, by the last full month of Title 42—April 2023—the number of Venezuelan migrants had recovered to 34,633, at the time a record.)
In 2022—and again, now—Venezuela’s government, which has no diplomatic relations with the United States, was refusing deportations or expulsions by air. Those flights are very expensive anyway for a country thousands of miles away.
At that pandemic moment, but still today, the sheer number of arrivals at the border—often more than 200,000 per month, at a moment of more worldwide migration than at any time since World War II—often makes detaining asylum seekers impossible, for lack of space and budget. So then, and still now, U.S. authorities release many into the U.S. interior with a date to appear before ICE or immigration courts in their destination cities. (The vast majority show up for those appointments.)
This was the reality even during the draconian Title 42 period, when U.S. authorities did expel people—many of them asylum seekers—2,912,294 times. But even as Mexico took back land-border expulsions of many Mexican and Central American people with urgent protection needs, U.S. officials, unable to expel, released José Ibarra and many others into the United States.
Let’s repeat: this is what was happening when it was U.S. government policy to expel as many asylum seekers as it could, as quickly as it could. Washington tried a massive crackdown on asylum, and it failed to deter people. This is what happened to Border Patrol’s migrant encounters during the Title 42 period:
Right now, though, curbing the ability to ask for asylum at the border is in vogue again. Language in a “border deal” negotiated by Senate Republicans and Democrats—defeated in early February because Republicans didn’t think it went far enough—would have switched on a Title 42-like expulsion authority whenever daily migrant encounters averaged more than 4,000 or 5,000 per day.
Read MoreLate this afternoon—right around the time House Republicans were impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas—CBP released data showing that Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped by 50 percent from December to January.
I’ve got monthly Border Patrol data going back to October 1999, and 50 percent is the steepest one-month drop of all of those 24+ years. Steeper than the first full month of the pandemic (April 2020). Steeper than the first full month after Title 42 ended (June 2023).
It’s peculiar that migration dropped so much over two months during which no policy changes were announced. I’ll repeat the most probable reasons, as laid out in WOLA’s January 26 Border Update.
Also, while there were no policy changes, there was one under heavy discussion: the Senate “border deal” that died a quick death on February 7. The spread of vague, confusing news about impending asylum restrictions could have cooled migration more than usual last month.
Anyway, here are two charts.
Here is all migration at the border, combining people apprehended by Border Patrol and people who, mainly with appointments, showed up at land ports of entry. This is what it looks like when the heaviest month for migration on record at the U.S.-Mexico border is followed by the third-lightest month of the Biden administration’s 36 months.
And here is just Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants between ports of entry. Look at Venezuela: apprehensions of Venezuelan citizens fell by 91 percent from December to January. This does seem to point to everyone feeling like they needed to cross to the United States before 2023 ended, leaving few on the Mexican side after the new year.
See also:
The latest data from Panama show that 36,001 people migrated through the treacherous Darién Gap region in January. That’s an increase from December, reversing four months of declines. But it is still the fourth-smallest monthly total of the last twelve months.
At some point last month, the 500,000th Venezuelan migrant of the 2020s crossed the Darién Gap. 61 percent of everyone who has migrated through this region in this decade has been a citizen of Venezuela.
Actually, to be precise: the 500,000th Venezuelan migrant since 2022 crossed the Darién Gap last month. Out of 503,805 Venezuelan migrants between January 2000 and January 2024, 500,917 came in the last 25 months. There were about 30 million people living in Venezuela: so 1 out of every 60 has walked this nightmare jungle route. In 25 months.
The 30,000th Chinese citizen of the 2020s crossed the Darién last month. A year ago (after January 2023), the decade’s total migration from China was just 2,998 people.
See also:
After dipping sharply after the holidays, the number of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border appears to be increasing again.
That, at least, is the trend that we can discern from the weekly updates that the Border Patrol chiefs in Tucson and San Diego, two of the busiest of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, have been posting to their Twitter accounts.
Late on Friday the 26th, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border through December. Here are some highlights, expressed as nine charts.
Migrants apprehended by Border Patrol (in border areas between ports of entry)
Between ports of entry, CBP’s Border Patrol component apprehended 249,785 people last month. That is probably a monthly record. It is at least the largest amount measured since October 1999, the earliest month for which Border Patrol makes monthly data available.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions jumped 31 percent from November (191,112). Increased migration from Venezuela, which more than doubled, accounted for 41 percent of the border-wide month-to-month increase.
December also saw big increases in migration between ports of entry from the other three nationalities (in addition to Venezuela) whose citizens the Biden administration allows to apply for its humanitarian parole program: Cuba (+192 percent from November to December), Haiti (+1,266 percent), and Nicaragua (+91 percent). This may mean that the humanitarian parole program is saturated by demand and insufficient supply.
It was the first month since May 2022 that more than 1,000 Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry and ended up in Border Patrol custody.
CBP encounters with migrants at ports of entry
At the official border crossings, CBP’s Office of Field Operations encountered 52,249 migrants. This is a record—though not by a wide margin, as CBP tightly controls who gets to step on U.S. soil and approach its ports of entry. Since July 2023, port-of-entry encounters have been within a narrow band: between 50,837 and 52,249. Of December’s encounters, CBP’s release indicates, 45,770 (88 percent, 1,476 per day) had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app.
All encounters
Combine the Border Patrol and port-of-entry totals, and U.S. border authorities encountered 302,034 people at the U.S.-Mexico border last month. That is a record.
Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied children, or parents and children
46 percent of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between ports of entry in December were members of family units (41 percent) or minors who arrived unaccompanied (5 percent). That is the 24th-highest child-and-family share of Border Patrol’s last 147 months, and probably ever: high, but nowhere near a record.
The overall number of children and families (114,192), however, was the second-most ever, nearly matching the record set in September 2023.
CBP encounters with family units (parents with children)
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw the second-highest-ever monthly total of family unit-member encounters: 123,512, just short of September 2023’s record total of 123,815.
Family-unit encounters rose 19 percent from November to December. Citizens of Venezuela arriving as families accounted for 38 percent of the month-to-month increase, and citizens of Mexico accounted for 28 percent.
CBP encounters with unaccompanied minors
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 12,467 children arrive at the border unaccompanied. That was the 17th-highest monthly total ever, and a 5 percent increase over November 2023.
The nationalities that contributed most to the increase in unaccompanied child arrivals were Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Arrivals from El Salvador and Honduras both declined.
Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults
When the pandemic-area Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect, Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults skyrocketed. The reasoning was that (a) a large portion of adult migrants were seeking to evade apprehension, not turn themselves in to seek asylum; and (b) when Title 42 caused them to be expelled to Mexico after a very brief time in Border Patrol custody, many attempted to migrate again, leading to many more repeat apprehensions.
That was borne out in the months after Title 42 ended, when single adult apprehensions dropped sharply. However, even without a quick expulsions policy in place, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of single adult migrants between the ports of entry jumped 41 percent from November to December, from 96,478 to 135,593. This was the 8th largest monthly total of single adult migrant apprehensions of the past 147 months.
CBP encounters with single adults
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 164,907 migrants arrive as single adults, a 32 percent increase over November (125,332). Single adult migrants from Venezuela and Guatemala accounted for nearly two-thirds of the increase, while citizens of Mexico declined slightly.
See also:
As we noted in a June report, Honduras keeps a reasonably accurate count of migrants transiting its territory, because it requires people to register with the government in order to have permission to board a bus. A minority travel with smugglers and don’t register, but most do.
Honduras also reports the nationalities of “irregular” migrants in something close to real time, so here’s what in-transit migration looked like through December.
The top 15 nationalities transiting Honduras during December were:
The top 15 nationalities during all of 2023 were:
A few things are notable about this data:
See also:
Update January 29, 2024: CBP has released final December 2023 data. Read an updated post with nine charts illustrating migration trends.
Border Patrol shares monthly data about its apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border since October 1999. As this chart shows, during that time, the number of migrant apprehensions in a single month has never exceeded 225,000. (224,370 in May 2022, 222,018 in December 2022, 220,063 in March 2000.)
That threshold has now been passed. CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez reported yesterday, “U.S. Border Patrol agents took into custody more than 225,000 migrants who crossed the southern border—in between official crossings—during the first 27 days of December, according to the preliminary Department of Homeland Security [DHS] statistics.”
(This number does not include approximately 50,000 more migrants who come each month to ports of entry—official border crossings—usually with appointments.)
Montoya-Galvez shared Border Patrol’s daily averages, showing modest decline in migrant arrivals over the past week:
The current spike in migration peaked before Christmas, during the week starting on Dec. 14 and ending on Dec. 20, when Border Patrol averaged 9,773 daily apprehensions, according to the data. On several days that week, the agency processed more than 10,000 migrants in 24 hours.
Unlawful crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border have decreased this week, but remain at historically high levels. On Wednesday, Border Patrol processed 7,759 migrants, the statistics show.
In his morning press conference yesterday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared this slide of data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP, Border Patrol’s parent agency), depicting CBP’s monthly migrant encounters through the first 17 days of December. This slide appears to combine Border Patrol apprehensions with CBP’s port-of-entry encounters, so the numbers are a bit higher.
Combining encounters with migrants at the ports of entry and between them, the chart shows a daily average of 9,787 people per day over December 1-17, increasing to 10,187 per day over December 1-21.
The chart shows a sharp increase in daily arrivals of Venezuelan citizens, whose numbers dropped in October and November after the Biden administration’s October 5 announcement that it was resuming deportation flights to Caracas.
There have since been 11 such flights, DHS reported on December 27. It appears that despite the (not huge) risk of being on one of these roughly one-per-week flights, Venezuelan asylum seekers are again coming in greater numbers.
See also:
A remarkable variation, in both nationalities and overall numbers. From data CBP released late yesterday:
Total: Mexico (50,967 of 191,113)
At CBP’s U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry (official border crossings):
Total: Mexico (13,844 of 51,305)
See also:
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.
See also:
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.
And here’s Mexico: down 4 percent from September to October (Mexico, like the United States, has not reported November yet).
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:
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.
See also:
Panama has just posted statistics detailing migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region through November. They show the number of migrants passing through the Darién dropping for the third straight month, to less than half of August and September levels. November was 24 percent lighter than October.
Among major nationalities, the sharpest one-month declines were from Venezuela (-35%), Peru (-39%), Vietnam (-31%), and Benin (-38%). Migration from China increased 39 percent.
Venezuelan migrants may be delaying plans until they see what happens with the Biden administration’s announced resumption of deportation flights to Caracas. Colder weather and the end-of-year holidays may be part of the reason for the across-the-board decline.
Still, the barely governed jungle region finished the year’s first 11 months with nearly half a million migrants (495,459), which has never come close to happening before. A couple of weeks later, the count now stands at more than 506,000.
So far this year, 22 percent of Darién Gap migrants have been minors. (UNICEF has estimated that half of minors transiting the Darién are under five years old.) 52 percent have been men, 26 percent women, 12 percent boys, and 10 percent girls.
The U.S. government’s 2023 fiscal year ended on September 30. Here’s a comparison of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, by migrants’ nationalities, over the past three fiscal years.
From 2021 to 2023,
See also:
Fresh numbers from Panama show a 35 percent drop, from September to October, in the number of people migrating through the Darién Gap. The main cause was a 41 percent decline in the number of citizens of Venezuela (blue in the chart) who traveled through the treacherous jungle region.
2023 is still—by far—a record-breaking year for Darién Gap migration, though. 458,228 people migrated through the region during the first 10 months of the year, making it certain that the year-end total will surpass 500,000. 294,598 of this year’s migrants (64 percent, blue in the chart) have been Venezuelan.
Data from the United States and Honduras also show sharp drops in migration from Venezuela. The cause appears to be U.S. and Venezuelan governments’ October 5 announcement that they would be renewing deportation flights to Caracas. Though these flights are proving to be relatively infrequent so far, the mere possibility of being sent all the way back to Venezuela seems to have led many Venezuelan citizens considering migration to “wait and see” and delay their plans.
Honduras is the country that reports in-transit migration in the most current manner. Looking at weekly migration through Honduras shows a possible recovery in Venezuelan migration (blue) during the first full week of November. However, a single week’s data don’t necessarily point to a trend. Here is migration of citizens of Venezuela during each week between September 1 and November 9.
The chart also shows citizens of Haiti (green), whose numbers rose then fell during the same period. The recent drop owes to the Haitian government, at strong U.S. suggestion, banning charter flights to Nicaragua at the end of October.
See also:
New CBP data for the U.S.-Mexico border is out through October. Combining migrants who came to ports of entry with migrants whom Border Patrol apprehended between the ports of entry, migration fell from 269,735 people in September to 240,988 in October (-11 percent).
Nearly all of the net reduction is citizens of Venezuela, whose numbers fell -39 percent (66,584 in September to 40,863 in October). The Biden administration’s October 5 announcement of resumed deportation flights to Venezuela probably explains the reduction. News of the resumption may have led some would-be migrants to pause their plans.
This drop will probably be short-lived, unless the Biden administration pursues a massive, costly, cruel, and politically absurd blitz of frequent aerial deportation flights to Caracas. (We see no signs of that happening yet.) As I wrote a couple of days ago, it is reasonable to expect Venezuelan migration to recover, as conditions in the country remain dire and as Venezuelans considering migration realize that the probability of aerial deportation is slim.
I made this chart, and underlying data table, by combining CBP’s migrant encounter data from 2020-2023 with data scraped from this big ugly CBP PDF covering 2007-2020.
Looking at this, three things jump out at you:
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We’ve grown accustomed to Venezuela (blue in this chart) being the number-one nationality of migrants transiting Central America and Mexico to come to the United States. Venezuela has been the number-one country of citizenship of people transiting Honduras during every month since March, and U.S. authorities encountered more migrants from Venezuela than from any other country—including Mexico—at the U.S.-Mexico border in September.
Data from Honduras in October, however, show at least a temporary pause in that trend. Last month, Honduras registered more migrants from Haiti transiting its territory (brown in this chart) than from Venezuela. (A new “Mixed Movements Protection Monitoring” report from UNCHR also notes this trend.)
It was a record month for Honduras’s registries of in-transit migrants from around the world: 102,009 people with “irregular” migratory status registered with the government, a necessary step for a short-term legal status making it possible to board buses to get across the country. Of that number, 35,529 were Haitian and 34,547 were Venezuelan. (271 were recorded as Brazilian and 489 as Chilean; many—probably most—of them were children born to Haitian citizen parents who had been living in those countries.)
Transit of Venezuelan migrants through Honduras fell 19 percent from September to October, from 42,550 to 34,547 people.
A possible reason could be a reaction to the Biden administration’s early October agreement with Venezuela to resume deportation flights to Caracas, news of which may have led some would-be migrants to pause their plans. Aerial deportations are expensive, however, and a charter flight to Venezuela only holds about 100-150 people. It is reasonable to expect Venezuelan migration to recover, as conditions in the country remain dire and as Venezuelans considering migration realize that the probability of aerial deportation is slim.
The sharp increase in Haitian migration appears to owe to a new air route from Haiti to Nicaragua, which does not require that visiting citizens of Haiti obtain a visa in advance (though it charges them a steep fee upon arrival). For more on that, see this good November 6 analysis from the Honduras-based journalism website ContraCorriente.
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For the first month since August 2019, Mexico is not the number-one nationality of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border. Venezuela, for the first time, was number one.
Just-released data show that Border Patrol apprehended 54,833 citizens of Venezuela in the areas between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry in September, a record for countries other than Mexico, and far more than its apprehensions of 39,773 Mexican citizens in September.
At the ports of entry (official border crossings), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 11,751 more Venezuelan citizens, most of them asylum seekers who had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app. (In September, of 50,972 people who made it onto U.S. soil at ports of entry, CBP reports that about 43,000—84 percent—had CBP One appointments.) Mexico, with 13,523 citizens encountered, was still the number-one nationality at the ports of entry.
Add together the ports of entry and the areas between them, and Venezuela was the number-one nationality in September with 66,584 migrant encounters. Mexico was the number-two nationality, with 53,296. No other nationality came close; Guatemala was in third place with 34,537.
September marked the end of the U.S. government’s 2023 fiscal year. For decades, CBP has reported its migrant encounters by fiscal year, so we now have a “year-end” comparison, at least for Border Patrol apprehensions between the ports of entry. Using this metric—which may include some double-counting, with the same migrant being apprehended two or more times—we find that 2023 was the number-two year ever for Border Patrol migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border. Only 2022 was higher.
Only 28 percent of migrants apprehended at the Mexico border in fiscal 2023 were citizens of Mexico. Since 2000, 67 percent of migrants apprehended at the border have been Mexican citizens.
(Note: at GitHub, I’ve updated the tool I use to make these and many other migration charts, with data going back to October 2019. I use it all the time, feel free to run a version of your own. It does require you to know how to run a free web server on your computer; I don’t make it public because generating a table with 48 months and 20 countries makes a web server work very hard.)