With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

Due to upcoming staff field research travel, WOLA will not produce Border Updates on April 28 and May 5. Updates will resume on May 12.

This Week:

• March data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) found that migration at the U.S.-Mexico border increased by 23 percent over February. Some of the principal increases came from nationalities in South America and beyond the Western Hemisphere.
• With the Title 42 order approaching a possible May 11 end, Mexican border cities are seeing increasing migrant arrivals and the Biden administration is preparing to roll out new restrictions on access to asylum at the border.
• Details have yet to emerge about a two-month plan, agreed by the governments of the United States, Colombia, and Panama, to curtail migrant smuggling through the treacherous Darién Gap region.
• The U.S. Congress held six committee hearings relevant to border issues this week, while Republican legislators conveyed plans to impeach Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the situation at the border. The House Judiciary Committee passed a hard-line border and migration bill that may not even have enough Republican votes to pass the House, much less the Democratic-majority Senate.

Migrant encounters rise 23 percent from February to March

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data on April 17 about its “encounters” (regular apprehensions and Title 42 expulsions) with undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during March 2023. It revealed that CBP and its Border Patrol component encountered migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border 23 percent more often in March than in February.

Combining migrants taken into Border Patrol custody between land ports of entry (POEs, or border crossings), with migrants who came to the POEs, CBP counted 191,900 encounters with migrants in March, up from 156,138 in February. “Of these,” CBP reported, “single adult encounters increased by 19 percent compared to February, unaccompanied children increased 14 percent, and family unit individuals increased by 38 percent.”

Migrants whom Border Patrol itself encountered, between the POEs, totaled 162,317, up 25 percent from 130,024 in February. CBP pointed out that, though this is an increase, the March total was 23 percent smaller than in March 2022 (211,181) and 4 percent smaller than March 2021 (169,216).

This was the first month-to-month increase in migration since December. In January, the Biden administration and Mexico’s government expanded the number of nationalities whose citizens could be expelled into Mexico under the Title 42 pandemic authority; this caused a sharp drop in migration that month, which is now reversing.

U.S. border authorities used the Title 42 authority 87,661 times in March to expel migrants, usually into Mexico. That was the largest expulsion total, and the second-largest expulsion percentage (46 percent), since June 2022.

Much of the monthly increase owed to seasonal patterns, as March is usually a busier month at the border due to milder weather. The number of migrants increased for most nationalities from February to March, with Mexico, Colombia, India, Venezuela, and Peru all measuring increases of 2,500 or more.

For the first time, Colombia was the number two nationality of migrants encountered at the border. Citizens of Peru, who like Colombians are not subject to Title 42 expulsion into Mexico, rose to fifth place.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

Due to staff travel, we are publishing this week’s Border Update in an abbreviated format.

Biden administration to begin rolling out express asylum screenings

• The Biden administration is rolling out, on a pilot basis, a promised program to make asylum-seeking migrants defend their cases within days of their apprehension, while still in CBP’s or Border Patrol’s austere custody conditions, in “credible fear” screening interviews conducted over telephones with asylum officers.
• Critics (like the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind, whose analysis called it “phone booth asylum”) point out that this “expedited removal” process resembles two programs—Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP)—that the Trump administration had employed. About 75 percent of migrants subject to these programs failed credible fear interviews; under normal conditions, about 75 percent pass. President Biden had terminated PACR and HARP upon assuming the presidency in January 2021.
• Asylum officers, who would carry out these credible fear interviews, voiced dismay to CNN. “At this point, I can’t tell the difference between Biden immigration policy and Trump immigration policy,” one said.
• The administration is meanwhile pausing its slow rollout of a mid-2022 rule designed to speed the asylum process, the Los Angeles Times revealed. Officials said “the pause is a temporary measure designed to ensure that the country’s immigration agencies are prepared for a potential increase in border crossings after the end of Title 42,” the pandemic expulsion authority slated to terminate on May 11. It is possible that many asylum officers assigned to this 2022 process are about to be instead carrying out “expedited removal” credible fear interviews.

Darién Gap migration increases 55 percent from February to March; majority of migrants are Venezuelan

• New data from Panama’s government show that in March, 55 percent of migrants toiling through Panama’s notoriously dangerous Darién Gap region—671 people per day—were citizens of Venezuela. This is despite the Biden administration’s use, since October 2022, of the Title 42 expulsion authority to send Venezuelan migrants back to Mexico.

• Overall migration through the Darién Gap increased by 55 percent, from 24,657 people (881 per day)in February to 38,099 people (1,229 per day) in March.

Top U.S., Colombian, and Panamanian officials pledge a strategy in the Darién region

• Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Southern Command Commander Gen. Laura Richardson, and USAID Administrator Samantha Power paid an April 11 visit to Panama, to meet with Colombian and Panamanian counterparts. The situation in the Darién Gap was the central subject.
• The three countries agreed “to carry out a two-month coordinated campaign to address the serious humanitarian situation in the Darién.” One of this campaign’s goals is to “end the illicit movement of people and goods through the Darién by both land and maritime corridors.” The governments’ statement does not specify the measures they will take to achieve this strikingly ambitious goal.

Mexico’s migration agency leadership under criminal investigation for Ciudad Juárez detention facility tragedy

• Mexico’s National Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía General de la República, FGR) has announced charges and arrests of leaders of Mexico’s migration agency (Instituto Nacional de Migración, INM) for their responsibility for the deaths of 40 migrants locked inside an INM provisional detention center, in Ciudad Juárez on March 27. (See WOLA’s March 30 and April 6 Border Updates.) Those who will face charges include the INM’s director, Francisco Garduño. Garduño meets frequently with U.S. counterparts, and the INM receives significant amounts of U.S. training and other assistance.
• Before this week, Mexican prosecutors had been seeking charges only against three low-level INM employees in Ciudad Juárez, along with a private security guard and a migrant accused of igniting the fire.
• VICE reported on April 6 that the Ciudad Juárez detention facility had operated as a sort of “extortion center” where INM personnel held migrants until they paid $200 bribes.
• Alejandro Solalinde, a priest who has long run a migrant shelter in Oaxaca, met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Solalinde, a vocal López Obrador supporter, has been dropping hints about the INM’s possible replacement with a new “National Commission for Migratory and Foreigners’ Affairs.”
• Garduño, the current INM director, would not be a part of this new body, which is still pending López Obrador’s approval. López Obrazor has defended  Garduño and said he will remain in his post for now.
• Mexico’s government began repatriating remains of the tragedy’s victims to Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. WOLA has not seen reporting mentioning repatriation of victims to Venezuela.

Misinformation and inability to secure “CBP One” appointments lead migrants to gather, again, at Juárez-El Paso border crossing

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) closed the Paso del Norte bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso for nearly three hours on April 10, after a few hundred migrants unable to secure asylum appointments with the “CBP One” app gathered near the Mexican side of the bridge.
• CBS News reported that migrants have used the app to secure over 60,000 asylum appointments since its mid-January launch. Border Report, citing Tijuana migration official Enrique Lucero, found that Russians are by far the nationality that has had the most success in obtaining CBP One appointments at San Diego’s port of entry. “6,645 Russians have landed” CBP One asylum appointments, Lucero stated, along with “2,700 Haitians, 1,864 Mexicans and 1,844 Venezuelans.” The official said Russians have been more successful because they tend to “have better phones and can connect faster to the internet.”
• The El Paso Times visited an abandoned building in Ciudad Juárez that “has become an anteroom for dozens of migrants trying daily—most without success—to use the CBP One digital application to seek asylum at the Southwest border.”
• Border-wide, those stranded in Mexico and attempting to use CBP One include potentially “thousands” of citizens of Afghanistan, the Guardian reported. (Note above Afghanistan’s position among the top ten nationalities of migrants passing through the Darién Gap.)
• “I didn’t see a protest at the bridge,” tweeted longtime Dallas Morning News reporter Alfredo Corchado, who was in Ciudad Juárez. “I saw hundreds of migrants congregating, looking at their cell phones, confused, misinformed.” Corchado said that migrants with whom he spoke were “lured by false social media posts, including one by Breitbart news, that [the] US is processing migrants.”
• A Venezuelan migrant told Ciudad Juárez’s La Verdad, “The news was that supposedly starting April 10 they were going to do like a pilot plan in which they were going to let people in and they were going to do like a quick asylum for them.” (This may be a distorted version of the “expedited removal” pilot program discussed above, which some migrants are reportedly misconstruing as “expedited asylum.”)
• Some migrants who spoke to Corchado cited an April 7 Breitbart article, authored by retired 32-year Border Patrol agent Randy Clark. The article claimed that Mexico was refusing Title 42 expulsions of Venezuelan citizens from Border Patrol’s sectors in El Paso and Del Rio, Texas, and that as a result, “Venezuelan nationals… will now be allowed to apply for asylum instead of being swiftly returned.” In a Twitter exchange with WOLA staff, Clark said that Border Patrol may be moving Venezuelan migrants to other sectors, where Mexico continues to accept expulsions.
• The El Paso city government’s migration dashboard, which includes CBP data, shows no appreciable increase in CBP migrant encounters or releases of migrants into the city. It does, however, show sharp recent growth in the number of migrants in the custody of Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector. The cause of this increase is unclear; an inability to expel some migrants to Mexico could be an explanation.

Other news

• CBP released body-worn camera footage of a March 14 incident in Arizona, a notable step for transparency. It shows a Border Patrol agent shooting and killing the apparently unarmed driver of a car, at point blank range. (Existing policy allows use of lethal force if agents or others face “an imminent threat of death or bodily injury.”)
• Border Patrol agents shot and killed a man who had struck one agent with a “wooden club” on April 2 in rural New Mexico, CBP reported, citing a review of body-worn camera footage.
• Volunteers leaving water, canned food, and first aid materials to prevent migrant deaths in a wilderness area east of San Diego allege that Border Patrol agents may have destroyed some of the supplies.
• Among the thousands of children separated from their migrant parents by the Trump administration are “hundreds, and possibly as many as 1,000,” kids who are U.S. citizens, born in the United States, the New York Times reported.
• “Seven out of ten Central American migrants who crossed the U.S. border undocumented resorted to a guide or coyote, for an average payment of at least $4,500,” according to data from the Mexican government’s Migration Policy Unit reported by La Jornada.
• Mexico sent a delegation of cabinet-level officials to Washington on April 13 to discuss measures to combat northbound fentanyl trafficking and southbound weapons trafficking. Mexican media noted a mismatch in the level of seniority of the two countries’ delegations; the only U.S. cabinet official to meet them was Attorney-General Merrick Garland.
• USA Today reported on a bill moving through the Texas state legislature that would pursue migrants using “roving police units consisting, in part, of ‘law-abiding citizens’—raising the specter of armed vigilantes confronting asylum-seekers at the border.”
• During the first two months of 2023, migration continued to increase throughout the Americas, “in most borders except the United States,” which saw some decline, according to the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) April 1 Migration Trends in the Americas report.
• IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, which has monitored migrant deaths worldwide since 2014, recorded 1,433 deaths of migrants in the Americas in 2022, the largest annual amount since its program began.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

Due to staff travel, we will publish next week’s Border Update in an abbreviated format.

This week:

• The death toll now stands at 40 from a March 27 fire in a Ciudad Juárez migrant detention center. Three low-ranking employees, a security guard, and a migrant have been indicted for homicide and intentional injury. The event has multiplied calls for accountability for abusive conditions in Mexico’s migrant detention system.
• Mexico’s asylum system received more applications during the first quarter of 2023 than it has in the first quarter of any year. The most frequent nationality of applicants is Haiti. In January and February, citizens most frequently apprehended by Mexican migration authorities were from Ecuador and Venezuela.
• About 1,200 people per day migrated through Panama’s Darién Gap region in March. Of those making the hazardous 60-mile trip, 20 percent so far this year have been children. An average of five children per day have transited through the Darién Gap unaccompanied.

Fallout from Ciudad Juárez detention center fire

WOLA’s March 31 Border Update reported a death toll of “39 or more people” from a March 27 fire in a Mexican government provisional migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas. On April 3, Mexico’s public security department increased the count to 40 deaths: one of the men injured in the fire died while being flown to a hospital in Mexico City.

Not including this 40th individual, whose nationality was not reported, the fatal victims include 18 Guatemalan migrants (most from the country’s Indigenous-majority highlands), 7 Venezuelans, 6 Hondurans, 6 Salvadorans, 1 Colombian, and 1 Ecuadorian.

As of March 30, 24 migrants were hospitalized in serious or critical condition: 10 Guatemalans, 7 Hondurans, 4 Salvadorans, and 3 Venezuelans. Mexico turned down a U.S. government offer to provide medical treatment to some of the injured in the United States, arguing that they were “too ill to be moved,” the Associated Press reported. Still, Mexico has since sought to fly some to specialized treatment in Mexico City.

Troubling details about the tragedy continue to emerge. “Multiple testimonies” indicate that the facility had no emergency exits or fire extinguishers in its detention area, the daily Milenio reported. Some of the detainees had been there for several days, or even since February, though the legal maximum is 36 hours. In the United States, relatives of the victims are complaining that the Mexican government is not responding to inquiries or helping with the complicated repatriation of remains.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, paid a visit to Ciudad Juárez on March 31, where he said that the tragedy “hurt me a lot, it damaged me.” As the President’s white van, with him in the passenger seat, drove through Ciudad Juárez’s central square, it was detained for several minutes as mostly Venezuelan migrants surrounded the vehicle. López Obrador “opened the window and took the hand of a woman who pleaded with him as others pushed letters into his hand and cried for justicia, or justice, for the migrants,” the El Paso Times reported. One migrant reportedly said to him, “Don’t do what the United States does,” to which he replied, “we are not the same, my love, don’t confuse us.”

A Mexican federal judge ordered the indictment, for homicide and intentional injury, of five people accused of involvement in the tragedy: three employees of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), one private security guard, and a Venezuelan migrant, Jeison Daniel Catarí Rivas, accused of setting fire to mattresses in protest, after guards allegedly said that the men in custody would be deported. “None of the public servants, nor the private security guards, took any action to open the door for the migrants who were inside where the fire was,” said a federal human rights prosecutor cited by the New York Times.

The INM has come under fire for the tragedy, especially after security camera footage showed personnel leaving the facility without opening the doors of a detention area filling with flames and smoke. While no source appears to have a current count, Pie de Página reported that in 2019, INM was managing 30 detention centers throughout Mexico, plus an unknown number of provisional facilities like the one in Ciudad Juárez.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• A horrific tragedy at a Ciudad Juárez migrant detention center, in which 39 (so far) perished in a fire while locked inside, drew attention to the treatment that migrants in Mexican border cities are receiving as they remain stranded by new blocks on access to asylum.
• Organizations and individuals submitted over 50,000 public comments on the Biden administration’s draft rule banning asylum for most non-Mexican migrants who do not seek it in other countries along the way, or who do not opt for other narrow pathways. Below are links to dozens of organizational comments.

Tragic fire in Ciudad Juárez detention facility

As of mid-day on March 30, the death toll from a fire at a Ciudad Juárez, Mexico migrant detention facility stands at 39 or more people, with about 29 more injured.

The fire started at about 10:00 PM on March 27 at the Mexican federal government’s National Migration Institute (INM) provisional detention center, which sits along the U.S.-Mexico border at the foot of the Stanton Street bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

Mexico’s National Prosecutor’s Office reported on March 28 that the dead and injured included 28 people from Guatemala, 13 from Honduras, 12 from Venezuela, 12 from El Salvador, and 1 each from Colombia and Ecuador. Citizens of all of these countries, except for Colombia and Ecuador, are currently subject to rapid expulsion into Mexico, under the still-in-force Title 42 pandemic authority, if U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or Border Patrol encounter them in the United States.

At a March 28 news conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the detained migrants themselves started the fire, in protest after being told of their probable deportation back to their home countries. “At the door of the shelter, they put mattresses and set them on fire, and they did not imagine that this was going to cause a terrible misfortune,” the President said.

Later on the 28th, very troubling security camera footage from the detention center began circulating on social media. It depicts flames and smoke engulfing an area behind bars and doors, while guards exit the facility without unlocking or opening the doors. Mexican authorities confirmed the video’s authenticity.

The Associated Press reported that Jorge Vázquez Campbell, an attorney representing some of the victims, filed a complaint with Mexican federal investigators making an explosive allegation: that the INM’s delegate for the state of Chihuahua ordered subordinates to prohibit the detainees from leaving. The delegate, Salvador González Guerrero, is a retired Mexican Navy rear admiral.

The AP account further cited the attorney:

Campbell said his clients told him that one of the detained migrants asked a guard for a cigarette and a lighter and then five migrants who had been detained that day began to protest.

“The officials made fun of them, they got irritated, and two of them (migrants) set a mattress on fire,” Campbell said.

That was the moment, Campbell said, that immigration agents at the facility notified González of the fire and he “told them not to do anything and under no circumstances should they let them leave.”

The INM facility was already overcrowded. “A Mexican federal official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity” told the Los Angeles Times that “68 men were packed into a cell meant for no more than 50 people — with no access to drinking water.”

Mexican authorities had detained most or all of the migrants earlier on the 27th, on the streets of Ciudad Juárez. After a March 12 incident when hundreds of migrants massed at one of the border bridges between the city and El Paso (see WOLA’s March 17 Border Update), security and migration forces began taking a more aggressive stance toward the growing population of migrants stranded in the city by Title 42 and other policies.

After that incident, Ciudad Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar said, “the truth is that our level of patience is running out. We’re going to have a stronger posture.” Operations intensified against migrants—many of them Venezuelan—who have become a greater presence on the city’s streets, often begging or trying to earn cash selling food or washing windshields.

Even before that, on March 9, more than 30 local migrant shelters and advocacy organizations had written an open letter accusing authorities of “criminalizing” migrants and asylum seekers, using excessive force and carrying out sweeps to detain migrants off of the streets.

After the tragedy, Mayor Pérez Cuéllar denied that migrants had been rounded up. But migrants’ testimonies signaled otherwise.

• “I was at a stoplight with a piece of cardboard asking for what I needed for my children, and people were helping me with food” on the 27th, a woman migrant told the Associated Press, when “suddenly agents came and detained everyone.”
• Another, who told the El Paso Times that her family had legal permission to be in Mexico, said, “They didn’t ask if we were legal, if we had papers. They just said, ‘Are you Venezuelan? Let’s go.’”
• A Venezuelan man told AFP that agents tricked him into accompanying them to the facility with a false promise of a work permit.

Several dozen were brought to the INM detention facility, but women and children were later released. All of the fire’s victims were men.

In a statement, Mexico’s INM pledged to cooperate with official investigations and support the victims and their families. On March 30, a federal prosecutor issued arrest warrants for three INM officials, two private security guards contracted by INM, and the person accused of starting the fire.

International responses came from many quarters. UN Secretary General António Guterres stated that he was “deeply saddened” and called for a “thorough investigation.” Pope Francis called on people to pray for the victims. “The extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this,” said Felipe Gonzalez Morales, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants.

“Civil society organizations have repeatedly called for an end to the institutional harassment that the population in mobility contexts is suffering in Ciudad Juárez,” a statement from more than 200 Mexican organizations read, recalling that a September 2022 visit to the detention facility where the tragedy occurred found miserable conditions for those held within. The groups called for the resignation of INM Commissioner Francisco Garduño, who has a career in politics, including in Mexico’s prison system.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• As the Department of Homeland Security announced a new initiative against cross-border fentanyl trafficking, the synthetic opioid appears now to be transiting more through Arizona than through California. Mexico’s production of the drug has become a thorny issue in the bilateral relationship.
• Asylum seekers used the CBP One smartphone app 742 times per day in February to secure appointments at ports of entry, only a fraction of demand. Issues with the app remain so widespread that humanitarian workers in Mexican border cities are spending much of their time offering “tech support.”
• A rally, with strong words from one of San Diego’s congressional representatives, rejected CBP’s plans to build taller segments of border wall through “Friendship Park,” the only federally sanctioned place where friends and relatives on both sides of the fence can meet in person.

Cross-border fentanyl trafficking shifting from California to Arizona

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Mariposa port of entry in Nogales, Arizona on March 21 to commemorate the launch of “Operation Blue Lotus,” a “surge operation” targeting cross-border fentanyl smuggling, which is now increasingly happening in Arizona.

With an increase in targeted inspections and recent installation of a “multi-energy portal (non-intrusive inspection technology or NII)” scanner at the Mariposa port, Mayorkas said that the operation had led to 18 drug seizures during its first week (March 13-19), including “over 900 pounds of fentanyl, over 700 pounds of methamphetamines, and over 100 pounds of cocaine.” The “portal” is the first of two that DHS expects to install at the Nogales border crossing.

The 900 pounds of fentanyl seized in a week is equal to about 19 days’ worth of CBP’s Arizona seizures in February, when the agency confiscated 1,300 pounds of the potent opioid.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement administration considers 2 milligrams of fentanyl to be a “potentially lethal dose;” if the 900 pounds seized were one-half pure, then they would be about 100 million such doses. That traffickers ( reportedly dominated by Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels) are willing to risk losing so much product indicates how cheap fentanyl is to produce, and how compact and easy to smuggle it is.

Since October 2022 (the start of the government’s 2023 fiscal year, which is on pace to break past years’ records), 92 percent of U.S. border authorities’ fentanyl seizures have occurred at ports of entry, the official border crossings. The remaining 8 percent was seized by Border Patrol agents between the ports of entry.

Breaking down this seizure data by month and sector shows a significant shift, starting in the summer and fall of 2022. San Diego (blue and brown on the below chart) had long made up the overwhelming majority of border fentanyl seizures. Rather suddenly, Arizona (green, plus the small red bits) is now where more than half of the drug appears to be crossing.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, caused a stir over the past two weeks by repeatedly claiming, without evidence, that Mexico does not produce fentanyl. His own presidential security briefings, most recently on March 7, along with military press releases, document large-scale seizures of the drug. While López Obrador sought to clarify that Mexican organized crime only has pill presses and does not manufacture the drug itself, the Wall Street Journal was able to visit a fentanyl lab in Sinaloa in 2022.

CBP One’s bumpy adoption continues

The Biden administration’s most recent court filing (dated March 16), the result of a Republican states-led lawsuit to preserve Title 42, includes statistics about asylum-seeking migrants who were able to secure appointments at border ports of entry using the “CBP One” smartphone app in February.

20,778 asylum seekers, 742 per day, were able to secure appointments under a system of Title 42 exemptions. That is up from 706 per day in January (21,881 total), when DHS switched—on January 18—from a less-formal Title 42 exemptions system to full use of the CBP One app.

As noted in several past Border Updates, migrants seeking appointments continue to experience problems with the app, including lack of internet access while fleeing, frequent crashes, limited languages (error messages are in English), and a facial capture feature that is widely reported as not responding to people with darker skin. The largest issue, though, continues to be the small number of daily appointments available, a fraction of current levels of protection-seeking migration.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• U.S. data from February point to a sustained reduction in recorded levels of migration since January. This is likely a short-term result of the Biden administration’s expanded use of the Title 42 pandemic authority, which has put asylum out of reach for more nationalities of migrants. Migration from Cuba and Nicaragua plummeted 99+ percent from December to February.
• The Biden administration’s 2024 budget request would fund small increases in Border Patrol agents, CBP officers, and processing coordinators, along with scanning equipment for ports of entry, a border “contingency fund,” and more immigration judges. One budget document notes a 2022 jump in the number of what Border Patrol calls “got-aways”: migrants who evaded apprehension.
• Several hundred mostly Venezuelan migrants stranded in Ciudad Juárez, motivated by a false rumor, massed at a border bridge, leading CBP to close the route to El Paso for five hours. The episode underlined the desperation of migrants marooned in the Mexican border city and unable to secure asylum appointments via CBP’s smartphone app.

February migration remains near lowest levels of the Biden administration

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published data on March 15 showing that, after declining 40 percent from December to January, the number of migrants whom U.S. authorities encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border remained similar in February. (See WOLA’s February 17 Border Update for a discussion of the January decline.)

Border Patrol encountered 128,877 undocumented migrants in border zones between ports of entry in February, almost identical to the 128,913 migrants the agency encountered in January (a month that, of course, is 3 days longer). Another 26,121 undocumented migrants came to land-border ports of entry, most of them with appointments to seek asylum, adding up to a border-wide total of 154,998 migrants.

Of that total, 39,206—25 percent—were what U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) calls “repeat encounters”: individuals whom the agency or its Border Patrol component had encountered at least once in the past 12 months. The agency actually encountered 94,124 unique individuals in February, a 13 percent drop from January.

The drop made February 2023 the second-lightest month of migration since the Biden administration’s first full month, February 2021. In El Paso, CBS News reported, shelters are “no longer severely overcrowded.”

The likely reason for the lower numbers continues to be the near-impossibility of gaining access to asylum for citizens of Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. All of these eight countries’ citizens are subject to rapid expulsion back into Mexico—whose government accepts them—using the Title 42 pandemic authority.

That authority, which will be three years old on March 20, is set to expire on May 11. The Biden administration convinced Mexico to add Venezuelan citizens to the list of “expellable” nationalities in October 2022; Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua were added in early January 2023. The difficulty of accessing asylum appears to have discouraged numerous asylum seekers, regardless of the threats they may be fleeing.

CBP applied Title 42 to migrants 72,591 times in February, the most since October 2022. That means 47 percent of migrant encounters ended in expulsions, the largest percentage since March 2022. Since its inception in March 2020, CBP has used Title 42 to expel migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border 2,687,315 times.

Between the ports of entry where Border Patrol operates, migration plummeted from the four countries most recently subject to Title 42 expulsion into Mexico (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). Border Patrol encounters with citizens of Cuba fell 99.6 percent from December to February, from 42,616 to 176 (although maritime encounters saw a dramatic increase, as discussed below). Encounters with Nicaraguan citizens dropped 99 percent from December (35,361 to 402).

Venezuelan and Haitian citizens have arrived in increasing numbers at ports of entry, where most presumably have secured appointments to seek asylum. Since January 18, they have sought to do so using a feature in CBP’s smartphone app, CBP One.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• The Biden administration is considering a new measure to harden the border against asylum seekers: a revival of family detention facilities, which the administration shuttered last year.
• Four U.S. citizens were kidnapped, and two killed, in the Mexican border city of Matamoros. The tragedy highlighted crisis-level security conditions in Mexico’s state of Tamaulipas, a frequent site of U.S. deportations and expulsions of migrants.
• The Matamoros incident fed calls in Washington to add Mexican criminal organizations to the U.S. “terrorist list,” or even to intervene militarily. Neither proposal is likely either to be enacted, or to yield lasting results against organized crime or illicit drug supplies.

Biden Administration considering reviving family detention

The New York Times revealed on March 6 that the Biden administration is once again considering reviving a mechanism to harden the border against asylum seekers. Five “current and former administration officials with knowledge” of internal discussions said that “the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] is outlining what it would need to do to restart temporary family detention by May 11,” the day that the Title 42 pandemic expulsion policy is slated to end.

Apart from 2 pre-existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) family detention centers, the Obama administration opened three facilities, later closing one,  to detain asylum-seekers who arrived as families (parents with children). The Trump administration maintained the two large facilities in Texas. Families spent up to 20 days at the Dilley and Karnes centers, a maximum set by a federal judge overseeing the Flores settlement agreement, which mandates that migrant children be kept in the “least restrictive setting available.”

While in detention, families—under a procedure called expedited removal—underwent preliminary “credible fear” interviews with asylum officers to determine the validity of their protection claims. In the vast majority of cases, these interviews occurred without counsel present, as detention made access to attorneys difficult.

By 2019, the Trump administration was paying nearly $320 per family bed per night to detain up to 2,500 family members at a time at Dilley and Karnes. (Because of family configurations, ICE said, the actual number was usually closer to 1,500.) This was—and remains—a tiny percentage of the total family migrant population. Those not selected for detention were generally released into the U.S. interior, usually with devices or other methods of monitoring them, with dates to appear in immigration court.

The family facilities were harmful and controversial. One, in Artesia, New Mexico, was closed in 2014 “after complaints about the conditions there,” the Times recalled. In 2018 two experts contracted by the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties blew the whistle on detention conditions that they described as posing “substantial harm to children.” (Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson, now represented by the Government Accountability Project, issued a March 8 statement opposing renewed family detention.)

During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden tweeted, “Children should be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately. This is pretty simple, and I can’t believe I have to say it: Families belong together.” A February 2022 memo ordered that the Dilley and Karnes facilities be reconfigured to hold only adults.

Numbers of migrants arriving as families have averaged about 52,000 per month during Biden’s presidential tenure. As his administration prepares for a likely end of Title 42, a reversal of the President’s past positions is a distinct possibility.

Asked about it by PBS’s Christiane Amanpour, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas replied, “One thing that I promote in this department is to put all options on the table. Great, good, bad, terrible, let us discuss them, and many will be left on the cutting room floor… We haven’t made a decision yet.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answered a reporter’s question: “I’m not saying it’s being considered… I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it is not. I’m saying that I’m not going to speak to rumors.”

“One leading option under consideration,” the Washington Post reported, would be to reopen the larger Dilley facility, though another Post source disputed that Dilley was being considered. “The facilities also would need to be set up to provide educational programs and playgrounds,” the New York Times noted.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• The Biden administration’s proposed new asylum transit ban rule has divided opinions among Democratic lawmakers and could be related to two senior White House officials’ exit.
• The rule is leading Mexico’s refugee agency, which received 13,000 asylum requests in January, to rethink a plan for express asylum denials.
• The “CBP One” smartphone app’s rollout for asylum seekers remains troubled, amid glitches and a scarcity of appointments so acute that it is causing families to separate.
• A consequence of the Biden administration’s haste to place unaccompanied migrant children with U.S.-based sponsors is a “new economy of exploitation,” a New York Times investigation revealed.
• Onerous new rules that could force migrant shelters to close are among factors making Guatemala a difficult transit country for migrants, especially those from Venezuela who report widespread extortion by corrupt police.
• Migration is increasing again in Panama’s Darién Gap. The country temporarily suspended a troubled bus service that whisks migrants from the jungle region to the Costa Rica border.

Political fallout over the Biden administration’s new asylum transit ban rule

Analyses at CNN and the Washington Post highlighted divisions within the Democratic Party over the Biden administration’s proposed ban on asylum for migrants who passed through another country en route to the U.S.-Mexico border. (The administration calls the ban, discussed in WOLA’s February 23 update, a “rebuttable presumption of ineligibility” for asylum.)

“This is a racist policy,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) told the Post. On the other side, “If a person thinks that the immigration activists are the only part of the Democratic base, then they’re wrong,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told National Public Radio.

Two White House immigration policy advisors, Lise Clavel and Leidy Perez-Davis, are resigning, Politico reported. The article noted, “news of the impending exits comes days after the Biden administration announced its most restrictive border control measure to date.”

CNN and CBS News reported that administration officials considered an asylum transit ban in 2021, after migration levels at the border began a rapid increase. At the time, they ended up rejecting the idea because, the White House counsel argued, courts would be likely to block it.

The asylum ban rule is still officially a draft. People and organizations with views about it can submit comments—a key part of the federal government rulemaking process—until March 27. A coalition of migrants’ rights groups has published a guide and template for comments.

Transit ban’s impact on asylum in Mexico

In Mexico, the transit ban is causing the government’s refugee agency (Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, COMAR) to rethink a pilot project that had sought to speed up asylum denials for applicants who appeared likely to use their status in Mexico to travel to the U.S. border and seek asylum there.

The Biden administration’s proposed rule would not disqualify those who had their asylum applications rejected by other countries en route. COMAR director Andrés Ramírez told CNN that he “now worries that accelerating asylum denials could actually increase Mexico’s attractiveness as a pit stop for those ultimately aiming to request asylum in the US,” using their Mexican denials.

According to the agency’s February 16 release of statistics, COMAR received nearly 13,000 requests for asylum in January, a pace that, if sustained for the entire year, would bring a record 154,000 asylum applications in Mexico’s system in 2023. The number-one nationality of asylum applicants in January was Haiti, the nation that was also number one in 2021. Honduras was COMAR’s number-one asylum-seeking nationality in 2022 and prior years.

Afghanistan, for the first time, made COMAR’s “top ten” in January with 430 asylum requests. Afghanistan was the number-nine nationality of migrants passing through Panama’s Darién Gap region in January (291 migrants reported by Panamanian authorities).

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• The Biden administration released a draft rule that, if implemented, would deny asylum to many migrants who passed through other countries on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border, and did not first seek asylum in those countries. This is part of a controversial series of restrictions and alternative pathways that the administration expects to have in place after the Title 42 pandemic authority possibly expires on May 11.
• One of those pathways includes use of the “CBP One” smartphone app to schedule asylum application appointments at land-border ports of entry. The app, functioning for over a month as a means to obtain Title 42 exemptions, continues to have problems, particularly a very small number of available appointments.
• Application of Title 42 to Cuban migrants appears to have slowed their arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border, but it also appears to have caused a jump in maritime migration from Cuba to Florida.
• The Supreme Court canceled oral arguments, scheduled for March 1, on Republican states’ effort to prevent Title 42 from terminating. The Court did not take down its order keeping the pandemic expulsion authority in place, though, so Title 42 remains active at least until May 11, 2023.

The asylum “transit ban” rule is out

On February 21 the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice took a step that the Biden administration had first previewed on January 5. The administration introduced a draft rule ( “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking”) that would deny the legal right to seek asylum to many migrants who passed through other countries on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border and did not first seek asylum in those countries.

The rule would partially shut down, to a historic and legally questionable extent, the right to seek asylum upon reaching U.S. soil, as laid out in Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

This “transit ban” is part of an edifice of asylum limitations and alternative pathways that the Biden administration is building ahead of the Title 42 authority’s possible end on May 11, 2023, when the U.S. government’s COVID-19 public health emergency is to end. A February 17 WOLA commentary explains these new components.

• The new limitations on asylum include the transit ban, the placement of asylum seekers into expedited removal proceedings, and discussions  with Mexico’s government to take other countries’ citizens as deportees. To what extent Mexico might do that is unclear—the draft rule refers only to Mexico’s “willingness to accept the return of these nationals”—and appears to depend on the U.S. government offering other legal pathways.
• The pathways include two years of “humanitarian parole” in the United States, with work authorization, for some nationalities’ citizens who hold passports and have U.S.-based sponsors, along with use of a smartphone app, “CBP One,” to schedule appointments to request asylum at ports of entry (official border crossings).

The 153-page draft rule refers to a “rebuttable presumption of asylum ineligibility.” It has exceptions for some asylum seekers. The transit ban does not apply to:

• Migrants who make an appointment ahead of time to apply for asylum at a port of entry (official border crossing) using new features on Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) “CBP One” smartphone app.
• Unaccompanied children.
• Migrants who can prove that they face risk of a medical emergency, are a “victim of a severe form of trafficking in persons,” or face “an imminent and extreme threat to life or safety.”
• Migrants who can demonstrate that the CBP One app’s appointment-scheduling function was “inaccessible or unusable.”
• Migrants who, in an interview, can prove not just that they might qualify for asylum, but that they meet a higher standard of fear (“reasonable fear”).
• Migrants who can prove that they tried and failed to receive asylum in Mexico and other countries through which they passed.

Despite these exceptions, this rule could potentially turn away thousands of asylum-seeking migrants during its first months of operation. At the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact site, Dara Lind walked through the Kafkaesque “12 Not-at-All-Easy Steps” through which asylum seekers would have to pass once the transit ban rule goes into effect.

Immigration reform and advocacy groups quickly raised objections. Thirty groups (including WOLA) added statements to a #WelcomeWithDignity campaign warning that “Biden’s Asylum Ban Will Return Refugees to Danger and Death.” The American Immigration Council called it “one of the most restrictive border control measures to date under any president.”

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has litigated several Trump and Biden administration efforts to curtail asylum, said, “We will sue if this administration goes through with a transit ban, just as we successfully sued over the Trump transit ban.” (A 2019 Trump-era ban, with even fewer exceptions and alternate pathways, was struck down in federal court in 2020.)

Congressional Democrats voiced quick opposition. Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration) wrote, “The ability to seek asylum is a bedrock principle protected by federal law and should never be violated. We should not be restricting legal pathways to enter the United States, we should be expanding them.” Sens. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico), and Alex Padilla (D-California) wrote, “We have an obligation to protect vulnerable migrants under domestic and international law and should not leave vulnerable migrants stranded in countries unable to protect them.”

The proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on February 23. Members of the public have until March 27 to submit comments, to which the administration must respond before implementing it. The rule would go into effect the moment that the Title 42 authority expires, and last for two years, a period that could be extended.

CBP One issues persist

“When U.S. Customs and Border Protection introduced the CBP One mobile application two years ago,” the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff wrote on February 20, “it was largely geared toward commercial trucking companies trying to schedule cargo inspections.” Now, features on the app are essential to accessing the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for five nationalities, and to making appointments to request asylum at ports of entry, under a limited number of Title 42 exemptions.

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

This week:

• As January’s expansion of Title 42’s scope closed channels for asylum-seeking migration, the number of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border plummeted by 40 percent from December, according to newly released CBP data.
• Migration through Panama’s Darién Gap increased in January for the third straight month, while at least 39 migrants aboard a bus taking them away from the Darién region perished in a gruesome accident. A report from UN-affiliated experts documented serious allegations of abuse committed against migrants in Panama’s Darién region encampments. U.S., Colombian, and Panamanian officials visited the region and pledged more security-force presence.
• The Biden administration’s new “humanitarian parole” program admitted over 11,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in January. The need to obtain a passport and a sponsor has overwhelmed nations’ passport authorities and opened opportunities for fraud.
• Texas is considering a $4.6 billion, two-year outlay for its “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown, including the continued deployment of over 4,500 National Guard troops. Border Patrol, meanwhile, has asked Texas’s legislature for more power to enforce Texas state laws.

Migration to the U.S.-Mexico border declined 40 percent from December to January

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published data on February 10 revealing a sharp drop in the number of migrants whom the agency encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in January. The 40 percent decline in migrant encounters, to 156,274 in January from 251,978 in December, owes to the Biden administration’s January 5 expansion, from five to eight, of the number of countries whose citizens can be expelled immediately to Mexico under the “Title 42” pandemic authority. (Several recent WOLA Border Updates detail this expansion.)

This was the smallest number of CBP U.S.-Mexico border migrant encounters since February 2021, the first full month of the Biden administration. The agency “encountered” 115,226 individual people 156,274 times in January. Of those “unique individuals,” 27,864 arrived at land-border ports of entry, which would leave a remainder of about 87,362 individuals taken into Border Patrol custody between the ports of entry.

41 percent of encounters ended with Title 42 expulsions, the largest percentage since June 2022. Nationalities most frequently expelled were:

• Guatemala (63% of the 11,937 migrants encountered were expelled, up from 57% in December)
• Mexico (62% of 61,904; 54% in December)
• Nicaragua (59% of 3,377; 0.3% in December)
• Honduras (58% of 10,995; 50% in December)
• El Salvador (54% of 3,748; 49% in December)
• Cuba (41% of 6,433; 0.1% in December)
• Ecuador (26% of 9,012; 8% in December)
• Venezuela (23% of 9,097; 63% in December)
• Colombia (9% of 9,310; 6% in December)
• Peru (4% of 3,931; 0.4% in December)
• Brazil (1% of 1,093; 0.2% in December)
• Haiti (1% of 3,175; 0.0% in December)
• Other countries (1% of 12,712; 1% in December)
• China (0.4% of 1,084; 1% in December)
• Russia (0.2% of 4,509; 0.3% in December)
• India (0.0% of 2,657; 0.0% in December)
• Turkey (0.0% of 1,300; 0.0% in December)

Regardless of their susceptibility to expulsion, all nationalities’ migrant encounters declined from December to January except those from Mexico (+28%), China (+14%), and Venezuela (+12%); citizens of Mexico and Venezuela are subject to Title 42 expulsion, but for the first time, a majority of Venezuelan migrants were encountered at land-border ports of entry (official border crossings), instead of “in the field” between the ports, where Border Patrol operates.

This indicates that a significant number of Venezuelans were able to secure a limited number of Title 42 exemptions, many through use of a smartphone app (“CBP One”) that CBP began using in January to book appointments at ports of entry. CBP reported processing 21,661 Title 42 exemptions at ports of entry in January, including 9,902 who made appointments via CBP One between January 18 and 31.