I wrote the part about migration. An excerpt is below, but I recommend reading the whole thing here.
Mexico’s 2024 crackdown has been its most intense ever. Since January, Mexico has averaged 115,636 blocked or encountered migrants per month—11 times the monthly average during Trump’s first administration. For the first time ever, Mexico’s number has equaled or even exceeded Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) and Border Patrol’s count of migrants encountered at the border. Mexico cracked down so swiftly that Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions plummeted 50 percent in a single month, from December 2023 to January 2024: the sharpest month-to-month drop of the 21st century so far. This happened without a mention of tariffs or other punishments.
Donald Trump's crude tariff threat against Mexico and Canada last week tells a lot about what we'll be dealing with over the next few years.
Here’s a WOLA podcast episode recorded Wednesday (December 4) with my WOLA colleagues Stephanie Brewer (Mexico) and John Walsh (Drug Policy). Donald Trump’s crude tariff threat against Mexico and Canada last week tells a lot about what we’ll be dealing with over the next few years. It also showed a possible new side to Mexico’s responses to this sort of bullying. And meanwhile, we need never to lose sight of the absurdity and cruelty of the migration and drug policies that Trump is trying to force on the United States’ closest neighbors.
On November 25, President-Elect Donald Trump announced via social media that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada unless migration and fentanyl trafficking ceased entirely. The announcement caused widespread alarm, spurring a flurry of responses and an unclear conversation between Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The event was instructive about what we might expect after Trump assumes the presidency in January, WOLA Director for Mexico Stephanie Brewer and Director for Drug Policy John Walsh observe in this episode.
Brewer explained the “tariff threat” incident, how it plays into the political agendas of both Trump and Sheinbaum, and the danger of doing serious damage to a multifaceted, interdependent bilateral relationship.
Host Adam Isacson, who covers border and migration policy at WOLA, joined the discussion to point out that Trump seeks to bully Mexico into carrying out a crackdown on migration that has, in fact, already been underway for some time—with serious human rights implications.
Walsh observed that demands on Mexico to crack down on fentanyl threaten a reversion to supply-side, prohibitionist approaches to a complex drug problem that not only haven’t worked over the past 50 years, but may in fact have ceded much control to armed and criminal groups.
The U.S.-Mexico border, and the bilateral relationship, may be marked by these episodes of threat and bluster for much of the next few years. Weathering this period will require civil society in both the United States and Mexico to play an aggressive role, demanding “steadiness, focus on facts, keeping things grounded in reality,” and never losing sight of what better migration and drug policies would look like.
Despite tariff threats, Mexico's security and migration forces are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
<Edit, November 27:> It was great talking to Greg Sargent yesterday for an excellent New Republic piece that embeds the below graphic.
All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them and he’ll start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.
…[W]e may not be prepared for the gale-force agitprop that’s about to hit us.
</Edit>
Yesterday the President-Elect promised to levy tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to stop migration to the U.S. border.
However, Mexico’s security and migration forces (green in the chart) are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
(Mexico hasn’t yet updated its September and October numbers. Underlying numbers are in the image’s alt text.)
Here's a CNN Español segment I recorded at the studio (which is one neighborhood away from home) on Monday evening. It's about State Department sanctioning, for serious human rights allegations, a general who was a key U.S. "partner" at the outset of Plan Colombia in the early 2000s.
Here’s a CNN Español segment I recorded at the studio (which is one neighborhood away from home) on Monday evening. It’s about State Department sanctioning, for serious human rights allegations, a general who was a key U.S. “partner” at the outset of Plan Colombia in the early 2000s. Also, the Colombian government’s request to pardon a FARC leader currently in the federal Supermax prison in Colorado after being extradited in 2005.
In 2001, Mario Montoya was the "can-do" general whom the U.S. and Colombian governments frequently featured with reporters. Now he's sanctioned by the U.S. government for gross human rights violations. There's a lesson here.
That’s quite a turnabout for Colombian Army Gen. Mario Montoya. In the early years of the “Plan Colombia” security buildup, Montoya was the “can-do” general whom the U.S. and Colombian governments frequently featured when they gave reporters access to military operations supported by big U.S. aid packages starting in 2000.
We now know that Montoya had a darker side of collusion with death squads, tacit backing of right-wing paramilitary groups, and—later, as Army commander—overseeing a spike in murders of civilians through relentless encouragement of high body counts. The State Department sanctions announced today further confirm this.
None of this is news to Colombia’s human rights defenders, who had been warning about Montoya’s record, and the rising number of extrajudicial killings, for years before either government began to respond.
This is yet another reminder of the importance of listening to human rights defenders.
Migrant family separation proponent Tom Homan is to be Trump's "border czar," a made-up position that doesn't need Senate approval.
Thomas Homan was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Donald Trump’s last administration. He’s an extreme pro-deportation hardliner and was a key proponent of the 2017-2018 policy of separating migrant families at the border.
In October, CBS’s 60 Minutesasked Homan, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”
He replied, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
“I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country. You better start packing now,” Homan told the Republican National Convention in July.
Donald Trump just announced that Tom Homan will be his administration’s “border czar,” a made-up position, presumably in the White House, that doesn’t require Senate approval. Homan will have responsibilities “including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security” and “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he told a July conference of so-called “National Conservatives,” adding, “They ain’t seen sh*t yet. Wait until 2025.”
If there's a central message to this first-days conversation, it's that the path back to democracy runs through a robust, creative, inclusive civil society.
I recorded this late Friday with WOLA’s president, Carolina Jiménez, and our vice president for programs, Maureen Meyer. We walk through some of what that awaits us in Latin America during the second Trump administration: democratic backsliding, closing civic space, brutal crackdowns on migrants, old-school war on drugs, a collision course with Mexico.
We don’t have the blueprint yet for opposing the “authoritarian playbook” in the Americas. But if there’s a central message to this first-days conversation, it’s that the path back to democracy runs through a robust, creative, inclusive civil society. WOLA has been defending civil society partners throughout the region since 1974, and we’re going to continue doing that—now, here at home, too—during the coming storm that is no longer coming, it’s here.
We recorded this episode three days after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. It brings together WOLA’s president, Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, Vice President for Programs Maureen Meyer, and Director for Defense Oversight Adam Isacson. Together, they possess a combined seven decades of experience working on human rights, democracy, and U.S. policy toward Latin America. All worked on these issues, plus borders and migration, through the first Trump administration.
Maureen, Carolina, and Adam discuss what Trump’s win means for democratic backsliding and relationships with authoritarian governments region-wide, as well as for migration policy, drug policy, cooperation with Mexico, and U.S. foreign aid and security programs.
Both Maureen and Carolina emphasize the importance of journalists, human rights defenders, advocacy groups, and other elements of civil society. Their role in protecting checks and balances and promoting accountability has never been more crucial. The civic space that they need to do their work is at great risk of closure amid attacks on independent media, disinformation, and threats of retribution emanating from the president-elect and his allies.
They note that a Trump presidency will probably reverse the U.S. government’s uneven but improving record as a force helping to shore up democratic rule, which has been eroding in the region and worldwide. Guatemala—where the presence or absence of U.S. support has been crucial for fair elections and anti-corruption efforts—is a key example. The incoming administration’s transactional, ideological stance risks withdrawing support for democratic rule, empowering autocrats with severe consequences for basic rights.
While the Biden administration curtailed access to asylum and did little to improve accountability for U.S. border forces’ human rights abuses, Maureen, Carolina, and Adam warn that Trump’s plans for the border and immigration could indelibly stain the United States. The president-elect’s proposed policies—closing migration pathways, “mass deportation,” militarization of border security—threaten to cause mass suffering and greatly complicate U.S. relations with Mexico and other regional governments.
Humanitarian organizations on the border, migrant shelters, and legal service providers, they point out, are especially in need of solidarity as they are now at risk of being targeted on a federal level, as Texas’s government has sought to do at the state level.
Carolina recalls that “WOLA has survived for over 50 years because we are part of an ecosystem that is under threat but resilient… It’s time to stick together and support each other and to do our work with more commitment and more energy than ever.”
Adam adds, “Times like these are the reason we exist… Stay with us.”
Thank you for listening, and take care of yourself and your community.
Mexico has stepped up its migrant interdiction efforts so much that its "encounters" with migrants now rival those of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In July, absolutely for the first time ever, Mexico reported “encountering” (apprehending, blocking, turning back, detaining) more migrants in its territory than U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which includes Border Patrol) reported encountering at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Citing a “restructuring process,” Mexico’s authorities say their reporting of September data will be delayed, but at least through August, the two countries’ migrant encounters remain nearly equal for the first time in history. And, of course, the U.S. figure includes Mexican citizens, and Mexico’s does not.
Much has been written about Mexico’s undeclared but vigorous policy of redirecting other nations’ migrants to the country’s south and cutting way back on humanitarian visas, even as detention and deportation have grown less frequent. It’s been called the “chutes and ladders” or “merry-go-round” policy, shipping people south when they try to come north.
The Biden administration toughened its restrictions on migrants' access to asylum at the US-Mexico border. What does that mean? We explain in a new WOLA video:
The Biden administration toughened its restrictions on migrants’ access to asylum at the US-Mexico border.
What does that mean? We explain in a new WOLA video.
WOLA has just published a report about migration to, through, and from Colombia, based largely on fieldwork that colleagues and I did in the Colombia-Ecuador and Colombia-Panama border regions in October and November 2023.
(Did I have to go on work sabbatical to find the time to finish this report and get it out the door? No comment.)
I think it turned out great: it’s loaded with facts and images, and had a lot of reasonable policy recommendations for a situation that promises to remain extremely challenging for quite some time.
For this report, WOLA staff paid a two-week research visit to Colombia’s borders with Panama and Ecuador in late October and early November 2023. Here are 5 key findings:
1. Organized crime controls the migrant route through Colombia. From the informal crossings or trochas at the Ecuador border to every step of the way through the Darién jungle border with Panama, violent criminal groups are in control. That control is dispersed among many groups near Ecuador, and concentrated in a single, powerful group—the Gulf Clan—in Colombia’s Darién region. Their profits from migrants now sit alongside cocaine and illicit precious-metals mining as a principal income stream for Colombia’s armed and criminal groups, some of which the International Committee of the Red Cross considers parties to armed conflicts. [1]
2. The Colombian state is absent from both border zones, although this is a reality that we have observed in past fieldwork in many of Colombia’s zones of armed conflict and illicit crop cultivation. The national government is not doing enough to manage flows, determine who is passing through, or protect people at risk. At all levels of government, responsible agencies are poorly coordinated and rarely present. Checkpoints, patrols, and detentions are uncommon, but so are humanitarian services and access to protection. Despite ambitious plans to “introduce the state” to conflictive areas—most recently, Colombia’s 2016 peace accord—key points along the migration route are vacuums of governance that get filled by armed and criminal groups.
3. Colombia faces challenges in integrating Venezuelan refugees and migrants. Amid Venezuela’s collapse, Colombia’s humanitarian response to fleeing Venezuelans remains more complete and generous than those of much of South America. However, the Colombian government’s recent trajectory is troubling. It is now harder for Venezuelans—especially more recent arrivals—to get documentation and to access services in Colombia. Pathways to permanent residency, including asylum, barely exist. As those efforts lag and people fail to integrate, more are joining in-transit migrants, attempting the dangerous journey north.
This reality has a differentiated and more severe impact on the more than a quarter of people transiting Colombia, or seeking to settle in Colombia, who are adult women—especially women heads of migrant households—and the nearly a quarter who are children. The risk of physical harm including sexual violence, or of enduring hunger or lack of access to health care, is much more challenging for women, Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ migrants.
4. At the same time, U.S. supported initiatives to help Colombia integrate migrants, to open up legal migration pathways for some who wish to come to the United States, and to encourage greater cooperation and collaboration between states seeking to manage this moment of heavy migration are promising. However, we note that at the same time, the U.S government orients much of its diplomatic energy and security programs toward minimizing the flow and discouraging Colombia and other states from making the journey more orderly, for fear that it might encourage more to travel. As a result, governments and migrants receive a muddled, unclear message from Washington that, for migrants, can be drowned out by poor-quality information gleaned from social media.
5. Resources to help Colombia and other nations along the migrant route are scarce, meeting only a fraction of projected needs—and they are shrinking as wars elsewhere in the world draw humanitarian resources away.
Countries like Colombia that are experiencing large amounts of U.S.-bound migration have a very difficult needle to thread. Blocking migrants is a geographic impossibility and would violate the rights of those with protection needs. Providing a managed “safe conduct” and an orderly transit pathway with robust state presence would prevent today’s immense harms and loss of life while cutting organized crime out of the picture—but the impression of “green-lighting” migration alarms the U.S. government. While some states do something in between: some measure of blocking, detaining, and deporting that dissuades few migrants but creates robust opportunities for organized crime, human traffickers, and corrupt officials who enable them, Colombia is leaning into an additional option: do little to nothing, with minimal state presence, leaving a vacuum that armed and criminal groups are filling.
This poor menu of options for managing in-transit migration leads WOLA to recommend some version of “safe conduct,” even a humanitarian corridor—but with an end to Colombia’s hands-off, stateless approach. Creating a safe pathway through Colombia must come with vastly increased state presence, far greater implementation of migration policies from a protection and human rights approach, dramatically improved cooperation between governments, and strongly stepped-up investment in integrating people who would rather stay in Latin America.
Until it expands legal migration pathways and vastly improves its immigration court system’s capacity, much migration will be forced into the shadows. This situation will worsen further as the Biden administration implements a June 5, 2024 ban on most asylum applications between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry. In that context, the United States must be more tolerant of efforts to provide safe conduct to migrants. U.S. tolerance of such approaches, though, would hinge on big changes to the “neglect migrants in transit,” “de-emphasize integration,” and “cooperate minimally with neighbors” status quo in Colombia and elsewhere.
Commentators backing the Biden administration's asylum rollback fail even to mention the obvious alternative: "undoing backlogs by fixing the asylum system."
When coming out in support of rolling back a decades-old human right, it’s best to at least make it look like you considered the alternatives.
Some prominent centrist and center-left commentators have published pieces supporting last week’s Biden administration imposition of severe restrictions on the legal right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. Some viewed it as an unfortunate but necessary step; some were downright celebratory.
“I’m conflicted, finding myself caught between pro-refugee instincts and a practical recognition that the system wasn’t working,” wroteNew York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Couching it as an “open borders” question, not a “right to seek protection” issue, he concluded, “we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.”
Also at the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt called the right to enter the U.S. asylum system, which was created after the United States’ 1968 accession to the Refugee Convention and 1980 passage of the Refugee Act, a “loophole.” It may be true that some people are applying for asylum because they know the backlogged U.S. system will let their cases drag on for years, but Leonhardt does not discuss options for fixing that.
At his Liberal Patriot Substack, Democratic Party-adjacent demographer Ruy Teixeira excoriated the “progressive left” for holding Joe Biden “prisoner” on migration policy, and celebrated the new asylum curbs as a “jailbreak” for the President.
These columnists are entitled to their views. They may be right that inaction on the border could cost Joe Biden with some swing voters. And as noted, they may be right that the asylum system’s slowness and inefficiency could be a “pull factor” for some migrants.
These opinion pieces fail, though, by refusing to recognize that another option exists: an option that isn’t “swinging the doors open” (Kristof’s phrase). If the asylum system is broken (of course it is), then the Biden administration could fix it. This would be an administrative challenge—a fair amount of hiring and training—but hardly a moon shot for the U.S. federal government.
None of these columns talks about making the U.S. asylum system viable, and faster, adjusting it to a new era of historic worldwide migration. They don’t even mention it as an option to be discarded. Their analyses treat the asylum system as a fixed and immutable variable that we can’t do anything about. (So, incidentally, does the text of the administration’s interim final rule laying out the new asylum restriction: it laments the system’s backlog but scarcely mentions ways to address it.)
The new rule focuses only on the asylum system’s initial entry point: the U.S.-Mexico border. That makes it yet another in a ten-year-long series of efforts to deter asylum seekers at the borderline itself, or just before it. Like the others, from family separation to Remain in Mexico to Title 42 to Mexican government crackdowns, it will hurt people in the short term but will fail to move the numbers in the long term.
Where change is most urgently needed is further along in the asylum process. The backlog isn’t at the border: it lies in what happens afterward.
Imagine if it took less than a year to hand down most people’s asylum decisions, with full due process and without locking them up in detention. Imagine it being rare and unusual for cases to take longer than a year, because the system had enough judges, asylum officers, processors, case managers, and access to legal representation.
Right now—a full ten years after the first wave of Central American child and family asylum seekers surprised the Obama administration—the U.S. government is very far from that. With 725 immigration judges—9 fewer than in October!—and much fewer than 1,000 asylum officers available to attend to 1.3 million asylum cases and about 2 million other immigration cases, asylum decisions commonly take many years. In 2022, TRAC Immigration estimated an average of 4.3 years.
People who may not have understood the intricacies of U.S. asylum requirements when they came here—they just learned about the backlog’s effects via social media—end up in the United States, living their lives and awaiting a decision, for a very long time.
In many cases, such a long stay could be a good outcome because of the contributions people make while here. But it is insanity to require them to hire smugglers to get through the Darien Gap then run Mexico’s predatory organized-crime gauntlet just to touch U.S. soil, suffering abuse along the way.
Along with opening up other legal pathways, then, the goal should be to slash asylum backlog wait times while respecting and expanding rights. Fewer people who are unlikely to qualify would opt for the asylum system if the normal wait was shorter.
All that stands in the way of that is the hiring and training of a few thousand judges and asylum officers. A hiring expansion along these lines ($110m for new immigration judges, 4,338 new asylum officers) was part of the “border deal” legislation that failed in the Senate earlier this year.
What the Biden administration did last week is not that solution. Far from it. They decided to shut things down on the front end, rather than move to reduce the backlog.
Instead of shoring up and rebuilding the system to match an era of historic protection-seeking migration, they have made the system itself harder to access, in a way that is likely to endanger people and is almost certainly illegal.
We need an explanation for why the administration chose not to pursue the “reduce the backlog” option (and why that hasn’t been an important part of DHS budget requests since 2021). Defenders of last week’s “asylum shutdown” should at least add a sentence somewhere saying, ”We considered this but decided against it because X.”
The opinion columnists defending the “shutdown” fail even to mention action to reduce the asylum backlog. None even glance at building up asylum processing and adjudication capacity to get those ridiculous wait times down.
They don’t even raise it in order to shoot it down. They don’t say “this is impractical,” “this costs too much,” or “this might be a good way forward, but it’s gradual and can’t move the needle between now and November.” Instead of engaging this viable alternative, they blame “the left” for constraining the President from cracking down on asylum seekers.
Others have pointed out factual inaccuracies in these widely read pieces. But the most unsatisfying part of what they wrote is the failure even to acknowledge the “reduce the backlog” option, even just to dismiss it.
The United States is watering down a human right granted in past generations. This shouldn’t be done lightly, by blithely ignoring widely proposed, doable alternatives.
Ecuador took delivery of two big U.S. military and police aid items this week. The U.S. government’s security assistance program has been ramping up following a January 9 outbreak of organized-crime violence around the country and subsequent state-of-emergency declaration from President Daniel Noboa.
A “mobile police barracks” for use along Ecuador’s side of its border with Colombia, consisting of eight converted storage containers, a sewage tank, and an electric power plant. “An estimated 80 police officers trained for border control tasks, from the Unit for the Fight against Organized Crime (ULCO), will patrol nearby roads and border zones, then spend nights and eat in the containers, which have a kitchen, dining room, dormitories, and meeting areas, among other spaces,” reportedEl Universo.
A C-130H Hercules cargo aircraft that the U.S. government had originally scheduled for a 2026 handover to Ecuador, but reprioritized in light of the security situation. The plane, valued at over $12 million, was built in 1974. In 1988, the U.S. government gave it to Afghanistan’s Air Force; following the 2021 Taliban takeover in Kabul, the U.S. Air Force reconditioned and modernized the plane.
Ecuador is now almost certainly the number-two recipient of U.S. security assistance in the Western Hemisphere after Colombia, surpassing Mexico.
After more than two months of internal discussions, we're about to see the text of the "asylum restrictions for Ukraine aid" deal that Senate Democratic and Republican negotiators have drawn up.
After more than two months of internal discussions, we’re about to see the text of the “asylum restrictions for Ukraine aid” deal that Senate Democratic and Republican negotiators have drawn up.
What do we know about what’s coming out of the Senate asylum-restrictions-for-Ukraine-aid negotiations? What's the human cost? Would it actually deter migration? What do Republican hardliners want? What would a better policy look like?
Last October, the Biden administration asked Congress for a package of funding for Ukraine, Israel, border security, and other priorities. In the Democratic-majority Senate, where it takes 60 votes to move legislation forward, Republicans refused to support this request unless it included changes to U.S. law that would restrict the right to asylum, and perhaps other migration pathways, at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A small group of senators has been negotiating those changes since November. A bill may now be forthcoming.
Video: With Elizabeth Oglesby of the University of Arizona and Diego de Sola of Glasswing International, we talked about the causes of migration away from Central America, and the good and bad of U.S. policies, past and present.
(Not sure why I’m making that facial expression.)
Many thanks to New York-based Network 20/20, an organization “that bridges the gap between the private sector and foreign policy worlds,” for inviting me to participate in a virtual panel last Thursday. With Elizabeth Oglesby of the University of Arizona and Diego de Sola of Glasswing International, we talked about the causes of migration away from Central America, and the good and bad of U.S. policies, past and present.
I like this Washington Post editorial (not only because I’m mentioned) because it wrestles with one of the thorniest questions facing Latin America.
When large numbers of migrants are passing through your territory, how do you manage it in a way that’s not so “zero tolerance” that it strands thousands and creates a bonanza for organized crime, but that’s not so tolerant that the U.S. government comes down hard on you for “green-lighting” migrants passing through?
I struggled with those options a bit in a post here a couple of months ago, and it makes up much of the “recommendations” section of a report I’m writing right now about my recent research trip to Colombia (first draft complete this weekend even if it kills me). I appreciate the way the Post editorial lays out these lousy choices and what countries can do (integration of migrants, coordination with each other) to “make the U.S. government OK with it” if they legalize and manage in-transit migration instead of pushing it into the shadows.
Republican legislators have dug in and have given the Biden administration a list of demands. Aid for Ukraine and other items in the White House’s supplemental budget request will not get their approval, they say, unless the law is changed in ways that all but eliminate the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Here, at WOLA’s site, is an analysis of this proposal and the unspeakable harm that it would do. We urge the administration and congressional Democrats to stand strong and reject it.
From the conclusion:
If the Senate Republicans’ November 6 proposal were to become law, it would deny asylum to almost all protection-seeking migrants, unless:
That migrant sought asylum and received rejections in every country through which they passed en route to the United States.
That migrant presented at a land-border port of entry (official border crossing), even though CBP strictly limits asylum seekers’ access to these facilities.
The U.S. government could not send that migrant to a third country to seek asylum there.
In an initial “credible fear” interview within days of apprehension, that migrant met a higher screening standard.
If an asylum seeker clears those hurdles, the Republican proposal would require them to await their court hearings in ICE detention—even if they are a parent with children—or while “remaining in Mexico.”
This proposal is extraordinarily radical. Congressional Republicans’ demands to attach it to 2024 spending put the Biden administration in a tough position. It is a terrible choice to have to secure funding for Ukraine and other priorities by ending the United States’ historic role as a country of refuge, breaking international commitments dating back to the years after World War II.
This can’t be the point Sen. Graham wanted to make, but:
Immigration judges, after rigorous procedures, are finding that 1 out of 4 people coming to the U.S.-Mexico border would be likely to die or be imprisoned if deported.
That’s a high likelihood of sending people back to severe harm if we deny them due process. It’s a strong argument for giving asylum seekers in the United States a fair hearing and to invest heavily in our asylum system.
Here’s an 1,100-word statement recalling and highlighting some of the basic principles underlying our border and migration work. Backed up with lots of numbers and data, of course.
The main points:
Most migrants arriving in the United States are exercising their right to seek asylum
The United States needs to invest in managing, in a humane and timely manner, migrants and asylum seekers—NOT in more border security
Legislative proposals from “border hawks,” like the “Secure the Border Act” (H.R2), would endanger thousands of lives
In a conversation with reporters whose transcript has not yet been posted online, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for border and immigration policy, dropped an important and rarely publicized statistic.
Since the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy ended in May, Mexico has accepted the U.S. deportation into its territory of 17,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. These are people denied access to asylum under the Biden administration’s “transit ban” rule.
17,000 over nearly 5 months is far fewer than the rate of Title 42 expulsions during the pandemic, when Mexico agreed to accept nearly a million land-border expulsions of citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Today, Mexico just accepts citizens of the latter four countries. But 17,000 is still a lot of people, some with protection needs denied because, under the “transit ban” rule, they crossed the border improperly.
The last time we saw this number reported was July 27, when Nuñez-Neto mentioned 4,000 deportations of those countries’ citizens into Mexico. So there have been another 13,000 in the succeeding 10 weeks, or nearly 200 deportations into Mexico each day.
Why isn’t this statistic shared more often, for instance in CBP’s monthly data updates? My guess is that Mexico doesn’t like to see it publicized, and the U.S. government respects those sensibilities. (DHS would probably be happy to share news about its deportations into Mexico, out of a belief that it might discourage some migrants.)
Extraordinary and temporary conditions continue to prevent Venezuelan nationals from returning in safety. …Venezuela continues to face a severe humanitarian emergency due to a political and economic crisis, as well as human rights violations and abuses and high levels of crime and violence, that impacts access to food, medicine, healthcare, water, electricity, and fuel, and has led to high levels of poverty.
The United States is announcing today that it will resume direct repatriations of Venezuelan nationals who cross our border unlawfully and do not establish a legal basis to remain. This announcement follows a decision by authorities from Venezuela to accept the return of Venezuelan nationals.
This chart comes from a September 27 Congressional Research Service report, by Peter Meyer, about U.S. aid to Latin America and the Caribbean, going through the 2024 appropriations request (which Congress hasn’t funded yet).
When you adjust for inflation, nothing comes close to the amount of U.S. assistance the region received in the 1960s, during the Alliance for Progress, an aid program the Kennedy Administration launched in large part to prevent other countries from turning to Communist revolution like Cuba did.
The next biggest peaks are the 2010 response to Haiti’s earthquake just as the Mérida Initiative aid package was getting underway in Mexico; the Reagan administration’s Cold-War funding of civil wars in Central America; the Plan Colombia years of the 2000s; the Central America strategy that the Obama administration started (and Trump did not continue) after a 2014 wave of child and family migration; and the onset of the Drug War in the late 1980s.
My own career started during that deep trough of assistance during the post-Cold War Clinton 1990s. (I graduated college in 1992 and grad school in 1994.) Ironically, it was right at the absolute nadir that I co-founded a project to monitor U.S. security assistance in the Americas. (The data from that project, going back to 1996, is still part of the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor.)
An investigation by four veteran Reuters reporters finds a link between the Biden administration’s use of an app that makes asylum seekers wait for weeks in Mexico, and an increase in attacks on migrants, especially rapes of migrant women, in Mexico’s organized crime-dominated northern border state of Tamaulipas.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration in May moved to a new system that required migrants to secure an appointment—via an app known as CBP One—to present themselves at a legal border crossing to enter the United States.
Nine experts, including lawyers, medical professionals, and aid workers, told Reuters the new system has had unintended consequences in the two cities, contributing to a spike in violence.
The high risk of kidnapping and sexual assault in Reynosa and Matamoros is one of the factors pushing migrants to cross illegally, four advocates said. Crossings border-wide surged in September.
Tamaulipas border cities like Matamoros and Reynosa have been notoriously dangerous for years. They’re home to the decades-old Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel (an heir of the Zetas), and other splinter groups that compete violently.
These regional cartels have less-solid control of their territory than do larger national cartels like Sinaloa. This makes them more prone to use violence against newcomers and outsiders—including U.S. citizens, four of whom were kidnapped, two killed, in March when they came to Matamoros for a cosmetic surgery procedure. These criminal groups also make somewhat less money from the drug trade than the larger cartels; such “poorer” criminal groups are more likely to fund themselves by preying on vulnerable people, including migrants.
The Mexican state, especially the hyper-corrupt local government in Tamaulipas, is no protection. Officials often collude with organized crime.
So in recent months, when an asylum seeker uses CBP One, they can travel from elsewhere in Mexico to the border and show up at a U.S. port of entry at their appointed time. They do not need to hire a smuggler. That’s great.
What’s less great is that, when the port of entry is in south Texas (Laredo, McAllen-Hidalgo, and Brownsville, which make up 42 percent of CBP One appointments border-wide—605 out of 1,450 daily spots), the asylum seeker must travel through Tamaulipas territory under organized crime control. In order to be sure not to miss their appointment, they may even stay in this territory, near the port of entry, for days or weeks.
When they do that, the cartels—whose eyes and ears in the region are thorough enough to rival Cold-War East Germany—often find them and demand money. Reuters explains:
[C]riminal groups are still demanding these migrants pay to enter their territory, the experts said.
“Rape is part of the torture process to get the money,” said Bertha Bermúdez Tapia, a sociologist at New Mexico State University researching the impacts of Biden’s policy on migrants in Tamaulipas.
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.
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![Hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, November 8, 2023
(https://bit.ly/3FTZvC8)
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina): You're the head of DHS and you can't tell me how many asylum claims are approved versus denied.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: Generally, generally speaking across the board on a macro basis, it's approximately 75% [denied asylum].
Graham: Okay.](https://i0.wp.com/adamisacson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/CleanShot-2023-11-10-at-07.19.40.jpg?ssl=1)
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