Adam Isacson

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

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U.S. Policy

Podcast: Cartels on the terrorist list? Military intervention in Mexico?

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.

The 2024 foreign aid request for Latin America and the Caribbean

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.


View in new window

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Matamoros: not too dangerous to deport and expel, apparently

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.

(Source for this table)

Family detention: even if you put aside the cruelty, it makes no sense

“It is heartbreaking to hear there could be a return to the Trump-era use of” family detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant child advocate lawyer Leecia Welch told the New York Times, in an article published last night revealing that the Biden administration is considering reviving migrant family detention. The administration ceased the controversial practice in 2021.

It’s not just heartbreaking. It’s also nonsensical as a deterrent, and remarkably expensive.

As a deterrent: in January CBP encountered 38,308 members of migrant families, most of whom sought to turn themselves in and seek asylum. The monthly average during the Biden administration is 52,652 family members encountered each month.

Chart: "CBP Encounters with Family Unit Members at the U.S.-Mexico Border," showing how small 2,500 is compared to the total number of family apprehensions.

	Mar-20	Apr-20	May-20	Jun-20	Jul-20	Aug-20	Sep-20	Oct-20	Nov-20	Dec-20	Jan-21	Feb-21	Mar-21	Apr-21	May-21	Jun-21	Jul-21	Aug-21	Sep-21	Oct-21	Nov-21	Dec-21	Jan-22	Feb-22	Mar-22	Apr-22	May-22	Jun-22	Jul-22	Aug-22	Sep-22	Oct-22	Nov-22	Dec-22	Jan-23
Encounters	4675	756	1082	1735	2118	2816	3981	4859	4391	4493	7401	19735	54291	50228	44902	56065	83804	87054	64613	42985	45364	52052	32242	26951	38173	55419	59791	51974	52324	52068	54266	60056	63544	77445	38308

Compare that to the 2,500 family detention bed spaces that the Trump administration maintained, for up to 20 days at a time per family. That’s perhaps 4,000 spaces per month. 4,000 out of 50,000 is an 8 percent chance of ending up in family detention for a few weeks while asylum officers consider the credibility of a family’s asylum claim. Those odds don’t make for much of a deterrent, if that’s the purpose of administration officials favoring a family detention revival.

Remarkably expensive: Here’s a screenshot from the Trump administration’s 2020 congressional budget request for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The administration was congratulating itself for lowering the daily cost of detaining a migrant family from $319.37 to $295.94 per night in payments to private contractors. (One can only imagine what sort of cutbacks in humane treatment that would have meant.)

Text and table from page 144 of the 2020 ICE Congressional Budget Justification. Last row of the table is circled:

Family Beds:
FFP contracts are used for detention beds, guard services, and healthcare at ICE’s three FRCs located in South Texas, Karnes County, and Berks
County. Since these contracts are fixed price, costs do not vary with the number of family detainees. ICE projects total costs of $270.1M in FY 2020
for family beds. The table below shows the break-out of these costs. Dividing the total funding requirement of $270.1M by the projected family ADP
of 2,500 results in an effective family bed rate of $295.94. As with adult beds, beginning in FY 2019, ICE no longer includes indirect expenses in the
derivation of its average daily bed rate for family beds following the SWC realignment.
Projected FFP Contract Costs
(Dollars in Thousands)
FY 2018
Enacted
FY 2019
Projected
FY 2020
Projected
South Texas FRC with Healthcare $207,836 $211,161 $185,829
Karnes County FRC with Healthcare $61,002 $61,978 $64,578
Berks County FRC with Healthcare $11,296 $12,117 $12,780
Other Direct Costs $5,548 $5,637 $6,865
Total Direct Costs $286,312 $290,893 $270,052
Indirect Costs $5,112 N/A N/A
Total Costs $291,425 N/A N/A
Effective Family Bed Rate $319.37 $318.79 $295.94

Even if the Biden administration were to stick to that austerely low per-night rate, adjusting for inflation now raises it to $344.04 per family per night.

$344 per night to adopt a cruel policy that hardly constitutes a deterrent anyway? What exactly is the goal here?

Even the politics don’t make sense: family detention, if implemented, would horrify and demotivate an important portion of Democratic-leaning voters ahead of the 2024 elections. I urge Biden administration officials to drop this.

Mixing messages

I know “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” or whatever, but it’s still jarring to see the U.S. government say, on the same day:

“We’re concerned about Guatemala criminalizing journalists” and

“We’re giving Guatemala’s ambassador a helicopter ride.”

Here’s what Title 42 does to people

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

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

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

Vice: Congress Suddenly Wants to Know If US Taxpayers Were Helping El Chapo

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.”

Family separation by app

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An app is separating families at the border

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sad to say, this would be a break with the past

“One of the principles” of the Bogotá-Washington relationship, Colombia’s ambassador to the United States says, “is to attack drug trafficking head-on ‘but not the communities that need greater opportunities.’

Sadly, that principle has hardly been observed in the past, as the U.S. government contributed a rough average of half a billion dollars per year into Colombia’s drug war so far this century. It’s been observed partially at best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asylum “transit ban” incoming

We’re hearing word from Los Angeles Times and Reuters reporters that the Biden administration plans to announce today its new rule curtailing asylum for migrants who passed through third countries on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border. (That is, anyone who is not Mexican.)

This could not only trigger a humanitarian crisis, it is almost certainly illegal and would depend on Mexico’s government taking back thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of vulnerable people.

WOLA explained this in a report, written principally by me, published last Friday.

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