The mayor of Eagle Pass said 2,500 migrants arrived in one day, part of a recent surge in crossings along the border that has taxed local, state and federal resources.
The border city of Eagle Pass, Texas is where Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has deployed a world-famous “wall of buoys” in the Rio Grande, about 90 miles of rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire that injured 133 people statewide in July and August, and a huge contingent of state police and National Guard.
Who could possibly have foreseen that so much security theater wouldn’t deter people who are desperate enough to leave their homes, uproot their lives, travel across a continent, and turn themselves in to uniformed U.S. border agents?
The answer, of course is “everyone who’s paying attention.” We all could have guessed that this would happen, and will keep happening. Deterrence at the border is cruel—but it also doesn’t work.
And now, as of yesterday, more than 2% of them (714,700 people) qualify for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the United States, as they absolutely should. From DHS:
There are currently approximately 242,700 TPS beneficiaries under Venezuela’s existing TPS designation. There are an additional approximately 472,000 nationals of Venezuela who may be eligible under the redesignation of Venezuela.
Under U.S. asylum law, as amended in 1996, applicants for asylum in the United States cannot obtain a work authorization until their application is six months old. Asylum seekers want to work, and TPS is a way to get around this unhelpful 27-year-old law to enable that.
One of many reasons—but a big one—why U.S.-bound migration has hit record levels, and may break records again this fall, is that the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama is no longer an impenetrable barrier.
In fact, the Darién Gap has been crossed over 330,000 times so far this year, including 82,000 crossings in August, according to the latest in a very good series of reports from New York Times correspondent Julie Turkewitz and photographer Federico Ríos.
It’s not really clear what Colombia and Panama can do about it. The options are really lousy:
Try to block migrants? Good luck with that. The Darién Gap is dense, roadless jungle (at least for now). If security forces focus on one pathway, another will open up. And what if Colombia and Panama somehow succeed in blocking migrants? What do they then do with hundreds of thousands of stranded people from all over the world? Fly them back to China, India, Afghanistan, Cameroon, and dozens of other destinations, at huge expense and at huge risk to the returnees? Bus them back to threats and penury in Venezuela and Ecuador?
Create a safe movement corridor? Channeling migrants through a route that is government-controlled territory—or, better yet, avoids the environmentally fragile forest entirely—would cut organized crime out of the picture. It would reduce many of the alarming security risks that migrants now face. Governments would have biometric records and other data about everyone attempting to pass through. By registering most migrants and permitting them to transit their territory on buses, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras are already doing this. But the political obstacles to “safe passage” approaches are beyond daunting: the U.S. government (or at least, key officials and members of Congress) would condemn and seek to punish Colombia and Panama for waving everyone northward. U.S. officials would fear that the promise of safe passage would attract still more migrants.
”Soft blocking” of migrants? That more or less describes the situation today in the Darién region (and Mexico, Guatemala, and some South American countries). The official position is that migration is an administrative offense, and migrant smuggling is illegal. A handful get detained or deported, and some (usually very low-level) smugglers get arrested. But either security forces view their checkpoints and patrols as opportunities to shake migrants down for bribes, or organized crime takes over routes. Usually both. Migrants get assaulted, robbed, or worse. Some may spend time in state detention. But if they can run that gauntlet and remain alive—and most do, obviously—very few end up discouraged from proceeding northward.
None of these options is promising: some violate the most basic human rights, some assist organized crime, some are simply impossible, and the least-bad choice would hit a political brick wall.
Faced with these very poor choices, it’s not surprising that leaders like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro are reluctant to make in-transit migration a priority. According to the Times:
Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, acknowledged in an interview that the national government had little control over the region, but added that it was not his goal to stop migration through the Darién anyway — despite the agreement his government signed with the United States.
After all, he argued, the roots of this migration were “the product of poorly taken measures against Latin American peoples,” particularly by the United States, pointing to Washington’s sanctions against Venezuela.
He said he had no intention of sending “horses and whips” to the border to solve a problem that wasn’t of his country’s making.
That last bit is a veiled reference to a September 2021 incident in Del Rio, Texas, where Border Patrol agents on horseback were caught on camera charging at Haitian migrants on the bank of the Rio Grande. The Times continues:
just like the people running the migration business, he [President Petro] presented his hands-off approach to migration as a humanitarian one.
The answer to this crisis, he said, was not to go “chasing migrants” at the border or to force them into “concentration camps” that blocked them from trying to reach the United States.
“I would say yes, I’ll help, but not like you think,” Mr. Petro said of the agreement with the Biden administration, which was big on ambition but thin on details. He said any solution to the issue had to focus on “solving migrants’ social problems, which do not come from Colombia.”
He expects half a million people to cross the Darién this year, he said, and then a million next year.
For many of us, the Chilean coup changed the way we thought—and still think—about the United States. It also sparked the creation of new organizations dedicated to educating and promoting a human rights framework for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Brilliant piece at The Hill by WOLA’s founder, Joe Eldridge, who was in Chile 50 years ago today when the U.S.-backed coup happened.
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:
A three-year-old Venezuelan girl died on August 10 aboard one of the buses that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has contracted to take asylum-seeking migrants from his state’s border areas to cities run by Democratic mayors—in the case of this bus, to Chicago.
On September 6, the coroner of Marion County, Illinois, where Jismary Alejandra Barboza Gonzalez’s bus was passing through when she died of “bacterial Shigella Flexneri Colitis and Aspiration Pneumonia,” put out a statement about the event.
Juxtaposing that document with the August 11 account of Texas’s Department of Emergency Management shows a confusing discrepancy about the child’s symptoms when Texas officials placed her and her parents aboard a bus. See the highlighted text below.
A real honor to be invited to do a Q&A with one of my top can’t-miss-an-article websites about what’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Border Chronicle, and its co-founder Todd Miller, author of some essential books about border security and human rights.
We talk in depth about WOLA’s recent report, with the Kino Border Initiative, on CBP and Border Patrol abuse and accountability at the U.S.-Mexico border. Why we did the report, what it found, what we recommend, and what happens next. Read it at the Border Chronicle.
July was the hottest month on record for the state of Arizona (a very hot state), by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which takes up most of the state’s border miles, the agency apprehended more migrants (about 40,000) than in any single month since April 2008.
That is incredibly dangerous. Migrants face an elevated risk of death by dehydration or heat stroke in the region that, of all nine Border Patrol U.S.-Mexico border sectors, has been the deadliest for migrants over the past 25 years (blue in this chart).
The move to Arizona is recent. It appears to be a shift in response to the Biden administration’s post-Title 42 policies limiting access to asylum: word appears to have gotten out—correctly or not—that turning oneself in to Border Patrol in remote parts of Arizona increases chances of entering the U.S. asylum system without being deported, detained, or forced to wait weeks or months in a Mexican border city.
As of yesterday, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have completed work on the 2024 State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill—more colloquially, the “foreign aid bill.” The Republican-majority House appropriators approved their bill on July 12, and Senate appropriators approved theirs on July 20.
Here’s a very top-level overview of Colombia provisions in the 2023 foreign aid budget, what the Biden administration requested of Congress in March, and the House and Senate bills as they’ve emerged from committee.
U.S. Assistance to Colombia in the State/Foreign Operations Appropriation
Both houses must approve their bills (changes to Colombia provisions are unlikely).
A “conference committee” must resolve differences.
Once that revised and combined bill is approved, it gets sent to the President for signature, often combined with several other budget bills into a single “omnibus” bill.
What a week last week was. I was just back from Honduras, I had an all-day staff planning retreat Wednesday, and I drove from Washington to Massachusetts and back on Thursday and Friday, as my daughter finished her first year of college.
And, oh yes, Title 42 ended on May 11th.
Things were so busy that, while I managed to write this commentary for WOLA’s site as fast as I could type it, I never actually posted a link to it here, at my personal site.
A week later, this piece has almost exactly 40,000 “unique pageviews” and about twice that many “pageviews,” according to WOLA’s Google Analytics account. That definitely breaks my career record, at least for writings where I’ve seen the stats.
May 11 is the final day for the Trump and Biden administrations’ “Title 42” policy, which undid the basic right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border for 38 months.
Now, 2.8 million migrant expulsions later, the U.S. government is reverting to immigration law as it existed before the world went into lockdown. But as it does so, the Biden administration is adding a new limitation on asylum that, with Mexico’s cooperation, promises to continue the pandemic-era practice of sending asylum seekers away from the United States, placing many in danger.
Media coverage is anticipating a wave of migration at the border, with headlines proclaiming that officials are “bracing for an influx.” Legislators are seeking new ways to block asylum seekers, citing “chaos.” Such concerns are misplaced.
Migration will increase, just as it did before each of Title 42’s earlier, abortive expiration dates. But the post-May 11 increase is likely to be neither giant nor long-lasting. After all, Title 42 hardly deterred migration in the first place: it’s at or near record levels already, right now. And the Biden administration is working, with the Mexican government’s collaboration, to keep asylum out of reach to an extent that may resemble what we’ve already seen over the past 38 months.
Instead of a “migrant wave,” we should be concerned about:
A questionably legal “asylum transit ban” rule, about to go into effect, that could endanger many thousands of people who, though on U.S. soil, will be denied the legal right to seek protection. It’s not yet clear which nationalities, and which demographics, of migrants would be sent back into Mexico without that right. But if fully implemented, this rule would put asylum out of reach to an extent recalling what we saw during Title 42.
A worsening crisis of stranded migrants in Mexico’s border cities, resulting from the López Obrador government’s agreement to take back asylum seekers whom the U.S. government rejects, often without giving them a hearing.
A humanitarian crisis along the migration route, as new nationalities try to traverse treacherous regions like the Darién Gap.
The continued dysfunction of the U.S. asylum system, and the fragility of the tattered patchwork of alternative pathways to legal entry into the United States.
The situation at the border after May 11 may, for a time, appear disorderly. But it already has been, and it was before the pandemic began. If anything, Title 42’s lifting will make plain the need to reform our immigration system and align it with reality. And it will highlight the U.S. political system’s frustrating paralysis in the face of that challenge.
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.
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 my work on border security at WOLA, I maintain a database of cases of alleged human rights abuse and other misconduct committed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol personnel since 2020. It’s too large, with over 370 entries, and I have some in my inbox that still need to be entered.
Among the most serious are cases in which agents have taken a life, in circumstances that don’t make clear that an imminent risk of death or bodily injury warranted use of deadly force.
This commentary, published today, lays out the 10 cases since 2020 in our database that stand out to us as “cases of fatalities since 2020 that may—pending the final outcome of investigations, complaints, and litigation—have violated the agencies’ Use of Force policy.”
It’s very troubling, and highlights problems with the DHS accountability process. Read it here.
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