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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.
Title 42 could finally end, along with the U.S. government’s COVID-19 public health emergency, on May 11. This new commentary lays out what may happen next.
According to what’s taking shape, migrants seeking protection in the United States may still face a hard time. The Biden administration may reject asylum seekers using a “transit ban” and expedited removal procedures, if Mexico takes deportees. The blow would be softened by two programs, humanitarian parole and use of the “CBP One” app, but both are deeply flawed right now and need a lot of fixes.
Just posted at wola.org, drafted by WOLA’s communications team with much input and edits from Maureen Meyer and me. As Title 42’s end date nears a Supreme Court showdown, here in 1,280 words are 5 reasons why it should terminate, as soon as possible.
Title 42 Must End. Here are Five Reasons Why (in <1,300 words):
It’s illegal
It wasn’t designed to protect public health
It creates a discriminatory system
It puts people in need of protection in further danger
It undermines the U.S. ability to promote a protection-centered response to regional migration
For the latest episode of WOLA’s far-too-infrequent podcast, three colleagues and I talked for nearly an hour about what we saw and heard during a week along the U.S.-Mexico border in mid-November. We’re definitely still processing it.
During a week in mid-November, WOLA staff visited both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, west through Tucson and Nogales, and on to Yuma and San Luis Río Colorado. We spoke to shelter personnel, advocates, experts, service providers, and many migrants.
The migrants we met were stranded in Mexican border cities, fleeing violence and state failure but unable to ask for protection in the United States, a right normally enshrined in U.S. law, due to ongoing Trump and Biden administration policies.
Many were from Venezuela, whose citizens the United States began expelling into Mexico, under the 33-month-old Title 42 pandemic authority, in mid-October. Many were from Central America and Mexico. Some were living in overwhelmed shelters, many others were living in a tent encampment where nighttime temperatures dropped to freezing.
In this episode, WOLA staff talk about what we saw and heard on this trip at a time when the largest obstacle to seeking asylum in the United States may be about to fall. A federal judge struck down Title 42 on November 15, while we were traveling. It could finally be lifted, and the right to seek asylum at least somewhat restored, by December 21. We discuss what may come next, and what new maneuvers the Biden administration is contemplating to deter migrants from seeking asylum after Title 42 ends.
Four WOLA staff members who visited the border in November participate in this episode:
I don’t host events very often, and I’ve wanted to do this one for a while.
There’s a few colleagues in Washington and at the U.S.-Mexico border whose work I really admire: people who take testimonies from migrants about abuse they say they suffered at the hands of U.S. border law enforcement agencies (CBP and Border Patrol), and people who doggedly follow the DHS complaints process and otherwise seek reforms to hold abusers accountable. It’s hard work.
I’m delighted that four of these colleagues accepted my invitation to talk about their work, what they’re finding, what happens when you try to achieve justice or redress after an abuse occurs, and how to bring about institutional and cultural change.
We’ll be talking at 1:00pm Eastern next Tuesday in this virtual event. I’ll share the video on YouTube (and embedded here) afterward. Please join, and share—here’s the WOLA event announcement.
Here’s highlights of a discussion Gimena Sánchez and I had with Héctor Silva at WOLA the other day.
The first round of the Presidential elections in Colombia was marked by the real possibility of a triumph of the political left, a stalemate in the peace process, the proliferation of armed groups, and growing violence.
Gustavo Petro, former senator and former mayor of Bogota, obtained 40 percent of the votes and Rodolfo Hernández, an emerging candidate, came in second with 28 percent. One of the big questions ahead of the second round on June 19 is whether Hernández will be able to capitalize on the 55 percent of voters who did not choose Petro.
In this interview, Gimena Sánchez, Director for the Andes at WOLA and Adam Isacson, Director for Defense Oversight at WOLA, discuss the main challenges the new president will face, the risks of electoral violence, and the implications of Colombia’s new political map for the bilateral relationship with the United States.
During the first week of May 2022 in San Diego and Tijuana, WOLA staff held 16 meetings and interviews with advocates, shelters, officials, and experts working on border and migration. We talked about the 300,000+ migrants in transit each year, post-Title 42 challenges, and the U.S. border law enforcement accountability issues covered on this site. On May 18, we published notes about what we learned.
We found:
In Tijuana, Mexico’s largest border city, the U.S.-Mexico border’s largest and best-established system of humanitarian shelters is holding up, though strained by a large population of migrants in transit, deported, or blocked from seeking asylum in the United States. The city’s security situation is worsening.
Advocates generally believe that this part of the border can manage a potential post-“Title 42” increase in migration. CBP’s smooth recent processing of 20,000 Ukrainian migrants showed that capacity to manage large flows of asylum seekers exists, when the will exists.
The termination of Border Patrol’s “Critical Incident Teams,” a product of advocacy that began in San Diego, is a step forward for border-wide human rights accountability. However, citizen monitors in San Diego have other human rights concerns regarding U.S. border law enforcement: misuse of force, dangerous vehicle pursuits, threats to civil liberties from surveillance technologies, deliberate misinformation to asylum seekers, and a steep increase in border wall injuries.
In our work at the U.S.-Mexico border, we regularly hear about abuses or improper law enforcement behavior by U.S. security agencies. But so often, whatever happens gets overtaken by the next events, forgotten.
I wanted to start damming up this steady, alarming stream going by us all the time. So, many months ago, I set up a new WordPress install, and my staff and I started throwing into it everything we’ve seen and heard since 2020 about abuses committed at the border.
The result is a database that we’re hosting at borderoversight.org. It has more than 220 entries so far, fully cited. We’ve captured these events and allegations, and organized them by category, place, agency, victim, and “accountability status.”
I’m not exactly “proud” of what we’ve created here. Actually, trying to read through it is a monstrous experience. There’s only so many use-of-force incidents, high-speed vehicle pursuits, spied-on U.S. citizens, Facebook slurs, non-return of belongings, dangerous deportations, and timid oversight that one can take in a single sitting. The picture is grim.
I don’t want this to be viewed, though, as an attack on the individuals who’ve chosen to build a career as a Border Patrol agent or CBP officer. I have met many agents and officers, and found nearly all to be decent and honorable people. But take CBP and Border Patrol as a whole, and something changes. Organizational cultures are powerful.
Our maintenance of borderoversight.org will be continuous: a database is never “done,” but we’ll use it to spin off a lot of other materials and carry out further work on what’s causing this problem and how to reform it.
I hope you find it useful as we work for greater accountability and cultural change at these agencies.
Of course, I get that nobody wants to read through a database. Here’s a 2,100-word commentary giving an overview of what the project is about and what we’re finding (español).
We added a page with links to reports about the border: from WOLA, from the U.S. and other governments, from non-governmental colleagues, and from the media. Organized by category. More than 270 of them so far are at borderoversight.org/reports.
Tomorrow we’re launching a big new WOLA oversight resource about the border. I’ve been working on it for a while. It’s a site presenting a database of hundreds of recent credible allegations of human rights abuse and other improper law enforcement behavior at the U.S.-Mexico border.
It will also include a library of recommended reports and reading about the border, and 50 infographics about the border that I’ve produced over the past couple of years.
No link yet—I’m spending the day doing finishing touches and combing for errors. Stay tuned for more tomorrow.
WOLA’s president, Geoff Thale, retired this week. Geoff has been doing citizen advocacy for human rights in Latin America, full time, since the early 80s—before this sort of work was even a “thing.”
The work looks vastly different today. We go over how the region, work in Washington, and the role of places like WOLA have changed in a reflective new podcast episode.
Geoff Thale has been with the Washington Office on Latin America since 1995, and has served as its president since 2019. Much has changed about advocacy and foreign policy since the beginning of his time in Washington. In this conversation, Adam and Geoff discuss the evolution of human rights advocacy towards Latin America, WOLA, and the opportunities and challenges for human rights advocates working on the region.
It looks like U.S. authorities encountered migrants 210,000 times in July at the U.S.-Mexico border. I think the number will increase. The pandemic is intensifying a pattern that we already saw in 2014, 2016, 2018-19: a jump in people fleeing several Latin American countries, punctuated by cruel, ineffectual crackdowns. It’s not just here: lots of countries in the region are absorbing migrants from Venezuela, Central America, Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere.
Maureen Meyer and I just published an explainer laying out why, as the Biden administration reckons with this foreseeable but large new migration event, it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t need another crackdown. This is a time to show the world how high levels of migration can be managed through increased processing and increased adjudication capacity.
We should be able to consider large numbers of protection claims, promptly and efficiently, without locking people up. The process should be so bureaucratic and boring that FOX News can’t even generate much outrage about it.
Anyway, this new, long-ish report explains the trends the border is facing right now, and lays out the outlines of how to handle it without freaking out or cracking down. It’s full of helpful graphics and we wrote it in the plainest English that we could manage.
Please share it—there’s a lot of nativist, even white supremacist garbage analysis out there, and we need to drown it out with facts.
We hammered out a new statement this morning about the situation in Colombia, which nearly six weeks after protests started is as tense as it’s ever been.
officials in the Biden administration have issued vague and insufficient pronouncements on the human rights violations that have taken place amidst the unrest.
This silence of the U.S. government is taking place even as the 2022 foreign aid request, issued May 28, includes approximately USD $140 million in new assistance for Colombia’s police. WOLA reiterates its call for a suspension of all U.S. sales of crowd control equipment to Colombia’s security forces, and a suspension of grant U.S. assistance to Colombia’s National Police, due to the high probability that such assistance might be misused while tensions continue to escalate.
To stop the ongoing violence, restrain further abuse by Colombia’s security forces, achieve justice for the victims, and prevent further damage, the U.S. government needs to take a bolder stance.
Many thanks to Camila Asano, the program director at the São Paulo-based think tank Conectas, for joining WOLA’s podcast. Her country is going through a historically difficult—tragic—moment, and she explains why civil society there is a last bulwark against authoritarianism. We must accompany and protect many very brave people during this dark moment.
Thanks as well to WOLA Program Assistant Moses Ngong, who is playing a bigger role in helping me put these podcasts out. Here’s the text of the podcast landing page at wola.org.
Brazil is the second largest country in the hemisphere, but its many complex issues rarely make news in the U.S. In this episode of the WOLA podcast, Camila Asano, Director of Programs at the Brazilian human rights NGO Conectas, joins Adam Isacson and Moses Ngong to discuss recent and ongoing attacks on human rights and democracy in Brazil.
The conversation covers a handful of key issues facing the country today, including:
How President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration has worked to antagonize and criminalize human rights defenders
What the impact of COVID has been on the country, and the government’s poor response
President Bolsonaro’s authoritarian actions attacking democracy and consolidating power
I recorded a very good conversation with my colleague Gimena Sánchez, who I don’t think has slept since Colombia’s protests—and the government’s crackdown—began on April 28. She does a masterful job explaining what’s going on. Here’s the text of the podcast landing page at wola.org.
Protests that began April 28 in Colombia are maintaining momentum and a broad base of support, despite a heavy-handed government response. Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, WOLA’s Director for the Andes, sees a movement coalescing—and a need for a more decisive U.S. approach.
This conversation, recorded on May 13, explains the different factors contributing to the crisis at the country enters its third week of protests and the number of dead or missing—almost entirely protestors—continues to increase. It also touches on the larger context of protests that were already taking place in Colombia’s more rural/indigenous area, paramilitary responses to the protestors, and contextualizes indigenous frustration in Colombia. The discussion ends with the prospect for change in Colombia, and how the Biden administration has responded so far.
You may have seen that Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal recently found that the country’s armed forces likely killed a shocking 6,402 civilians between 2002 and 2008. WOLA is putting on an event today at 4:00 Eastern to talk about it, and I’ll be presenting. Here’s the text of the announcement at WOLA’s website, where you can RSVP:
**Due to emergency security concerns, Sergeant Mora will not present during this panel**
The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) cordially invites you to our webinar:
Afro-Colombian Sergeant Carlos Eduardo Mora of Colombia’s 15th Mobile Brigade of Ocaña observed inconsistencies in the combat deaths that members of his battalion were reporting in their counterinsurgency statistics. In 2008, Mora denounced his colleagues for killing civilians and later passing them as enemy combats. These extrajudicial killings were widespread throughout the country and became nationally known—and erroneously termed as “false positives”—when a scandal involving 19 murdered young men from the southwestern Bogotá neighborhood of Soacha was undercovered.
Mora has suffered greatly for his role as a whistleblower, having faced multiple types of retaliation like public humiliation and death threats. His security situation became so serious that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a resolution in 2013 urging the Colombian state to protect Mora and his family.
In February, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP)—Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal devised in the 2016 peace accord—revealed that the Colombian armed forces committed at least 6,402 extrajudicial killings between 2002 and 2008. In light of these disturbing revelations, WOLA’s Director for the Andes Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli will moderate a panel to discuss the role of individuals like Sergeant Mora and hear from two human rights and U.S. military aid experts. Alberto Yepes, Coordinator for the Human Rights Observatory of the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination (Coordinación Colombia-Europa-Estados Unidos, CCEU) coalition, will discuss the implications of the JEP’s recent order on extrajudicial killings. Adam Isacson, WOLA’s Director for Defense Oversight, will discuss U.S. funding to Colombia’s armed forces and what actions can be taken to guarantee justice in these horrific cases.
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