RSS - PostsWith this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
Title 42, which may be in its last days, exacts a humanitarian toll
Between March 2020 and May 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) expelled 867,673 migrants whom the agency encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border. Often, this has meant sending them back to Mexico within an hour or two, even if they are not Mexican, with little or no opportunity to ask for asylum or protection in the United States.
This is due to a Trump-era order citing the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to expel migrants with minimal processing. The process is called “Title 42” after the section of the U.S. Code containing an old border quarantine authority. The Biden administration has kept Title 42 in place, though it has not expelled unaccompanied children and it has expelled a declining number of migrants who arrive as family units. (8,986 family members expelled in May, down from 17,795 in April and 21,423 in March.)
Citing “administration officials and others familiar with the discussions,” the Wall Street Journal got further confirmation that the Biden administration is moving toward lifting Title 42. Families requesting asylum at the border may be able to do so without expulsion by the end of July. Title 42 will continue, however, to expel single adults “for the next few months.” (This was first reported by Axios and the New York Times during the week of June 20.) The Journal notes that the change “is expected to come in conjunction with a phased reopening this summer of nonessential travel at ports of entry along the Mexican and Canadian borders.”
Some officials are concerned that lifting Title 42 will lead to a sharp increase in arrivals of migrant families at the border; the Journal reports that the administration is considering options to speed migrants’ asylum processes in order to minimize the length of their stay in the United States pending decisions. Measures may include allowing asylum officers—not just immigration judges—to rule on cases, and allowing asylum seekers to make appointments at border ports of entry using a CBP app.
Large numbers of expelled migrants, meanwhile, continue to accumulate in Mexican border cities, often in strikingly miserable conditions. In Tijuana, 2,000 mostly Mexican, Central American, and Haitian migrants are encamped outside the Chaparral pedestrian port of entry into the United States. (Many there were not expelled under Title 42, but believe they need to be near the border crossing before it reopens.) Mexico’s government human rights ombudsman (CNDH) is warning of numerous health risks at a site that lacks basic sanitation, and city authorities say they plan to clear the encampment soon.
Across from south Texas, in the notoriously organized crime-ridden city of Reynosa, over 1,000 asylum seekers are encamped at a plaza not far from the port of entry. Humanitarian workers from the Sidewalk School for Children Asylum Seekers told Border Report of an outbreak of COVID-19 among those in the plaza. Those who test positive for the coronavirus are being quarantined in one part of the park, while workers are racing to move many of those who test negative to an expanded area of Senda de Vida, an evangelical-run shelter not far from the port of entry.
More migrants arriving from “other” countries
As a recent weekly update noted, a sharply rising portion of migrants encountered at the U.S-Mexico border are neither from Mexico nor from Central America. Citizens of these “other” countries made up 23 percent of Border Patrol’s encounters with undocumented migrants in May, and 45 percent of Border Patrol’s encounters with migrant family members. The “other” countries whose citizens were most frequently encountered were Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and Romania.
The Associated Press reported on June 28 from Del Rio, Texas, a small border town that has seen a jump in arrivals of migrants from Venezuela. Though about 5.4 million Venezuelans have fled their country in recent years, very few have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico land border until recently. 7,484 were apprehended or showed up at ports of entry in May. That monthly number is nearly triple the 2,787 Venezuelans apprehended in all of 2020 and more than triple the 2,202 apprehended in all of 2019. Of those 7,484, 5,465 (73 percent) showed up in Del Rio. Nearly all are turning themselves in and seeking asylum in the United States.
The AP notes that the Venezuelans wading across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, to Del Rio tend to be more highly educated (“bankers, doctors, and engineers”), and many had first emigrated to elsewhere in South America, where they were living and working until COVID-19 collapsed the region’s economies. Most fly to Mexico City or Cancún, then contract with smugglers who take them to Ciudad Acuña. Their trip takes “as little as four days.”
The sharply increasing numbers of migrants from Venezuela and other unusual countries at the border, the AP notes, are “a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.”
Republican politicians focus on the border
Five days after Vice President Kamala Harris’s quick June 25 visit to El Paso, former President Donald Trump was in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region for a meeting with border authorities, a speech, and a Fox News “town hall” event. The visit was one of several ongoing efforts by Republican political leaders to challenge the Biden administration on border security and rising migration numbers.
From a lectern placed at a point where a section of border wall ends, Trump attacked Joe Biden for undoing his policies. “Biden is destroying our country,” he told the assembled crowd, which included former officials from his Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from Texas’s Department of Public Security (DPS), Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), and 31 Republican members of Congress.
“I used to go around in speeches and say, two things that will never get old are a wheel and a wall… The wall worked, really worked,” Trump said. “Within two months everything could have been completed. It would have been painted.”
Valerie González of the Rio Grande Valley Monitor noted that of 28 officials participating in a briefing with the former president, only three were from the local area: “Javier Villalobos, McAllen mayor; Benny Martinez, Brooks County sheriff; and Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council RGV 3307.” The only one who spoke was Martínez, whose county hosts a Border Patrol highway checkpoint around which migrants walk. A large number get lost in the surrounding ranch land and die of dehydration or exposure. The Sheriff said that this year has seen a 185 percent increase in migrant apprehensions in Brooks County, and a 490 percent increase in 911 emergency calls.
Brooks is one of about 28 Texas counties that agreed to be included in a disaster declaration that Gov. Abbott issued in late May to respond to a “border emergency.” The original declaration covered 34 border-area counties, but several—including those in the majority-Democratic Rio Grande Valley area—objected, citing a lack of evidence. On April 26, Abbott had sent letters to all 254 of Texas’s counties requesting estimates of their financial needs resulting from the border “disaster.” Only eight counties had responded as of June 18, the Monitor reported, and only two had provided monetary amounts, which totaled less than $25,000.
In Brooks County, Martínez said the disaster declaration would help authorities deal with grass fires set by lost migrants seeking to alert rescuers. In Culberson County, in west Texas near the border, Sheriff Oscar Carrillo told the Dallas Morning News’s Alfredo Corchado that authorities had signed the disaster declaration, “but not for political reasons. I’m just practical. We need to be reimbursed for the $30,000 we spent on the migrants who’ve died so far.”
Sheriff Carrillo called “just a show” another of Gov. Abbott’s initiatives: a request, issued with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) for other state governors to send law enforcement personnel to help secure the border. Abbott’s request appears to have attracted short-term visits of small contingents of state police or National Guardsmen from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee. All of these states have Republican governors.
“It’s unclear what these out-of-state forces will be empowered to do, and some states aren’t offering much detail,” a PolitiFact investigation finds. “Based on what we’ve gathered, they will be limited to investigative work and backing up highway patrols.” Lt. Col (Ret.) Geoffrey Corn, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, told the New York Times that National Guard troops’ role would be largely “ceremonial duties, though they will have the authority to make citizens’ arrests.”
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said it would cost his state $575,000 to send 30 guardsmen for 90 days. Idaho said its deployment would cost about $53,000.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) would not divulge how much it would cost to send 50 of her state’s 3,100 National Guard members to the border for 30 to 60 days—her office cited “security reasons” for the silence—but she came up with a controversial way to pay for it. The deployment’s price tag will be paid by a private donor: Willis Johnson, the Tennessee-based billionaire chairman of Copart, an automobile auction company, who describes himself as a “hardcore Republican.”
While the governor’s office insists that paying soldiers with private funds is legal in South Dakota while the guardsmen remain under the governor’s command, the New York Times described it as “a fuzzy area of the law that officials in the state said had never before been contemplated.” Roger Tellinghuisen, a former Republican attorney-general of South Dakota, told the Times, “I don’t have a clue if it’s legal. It’s a question in my own mind.”
“The military is supposed to be used to further our national security interests and ensure the safety of all citizens, not just the whims of a few private individuals with the means to pay for its services,” Dan Grazier, a military fellow at the Center for Defense Information’s Straus Military Reform Project, told the Guardian. “It’s basically money laundering, and it’s turning the state National Guard into a mercenary force,” Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer who teaches at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, told the New York Times.
Beyond hosting Trump, declaring a disaster, and inviting other states’ law enforcement, Texas Gov. Abbott—who is up for re-election in 2022 and may be eyeing a 2024 presidential bid—is active on other fronts. He continues to move toward stripping licenses for Texas childcare facilities that are housing migrant children who arrive unaccompanied. This would force the Biden administration to scramble to find shelter space for these kids, who have been arriving in record numbers since March.
Five Texas sheriff’s departments, meanwhile, have sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), citing a Biden policy that requires the agency to take into custody only migrants considered national security or public safety threats, when they are released from criminal custody. Nationally, ICE’s detained migrant population has risen this year from 14,000 to nearly 27,000; 80 percent of those adding to the population are single adults apprehended at the border, BuzzFeed notes. 4,000 of those in custody are asylum seekers who, for some reason, ICE has determined to be flight risks and required to be detained.
Republicans’ efforts to raise the border and migration and issue do not appear to be resonating beyond the party’s base, according to a June 11-17 Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 10 percent of 4,420 adult respondents ranked immigration as the United States’ top priority, down from 15 percent in April. Republicans who ranked immigration number one totaled 19 percent, down 10 points from April. President Biden, though, maintains a low approval rating for his handling of immigration: 40 percent of Reuters/Ipsos respondents approved and 47 percent disapproved.
Links
- The Biden administration is formalizing a process to allow U.S. resident military veterans who were later deported, often because they committed minor crimes, to return to the United States.
- In rural Culberson county, between El Paso and Texas’s Big Bend region, the sheriff’s office has already handled 13 migrant deaths so far in 2021, reports Alfredo Corchado at the Dallas Morning News.
- Between now and August 2, the Biden administration will be closing six of the large emergency shelter facilities it has set up to house migrant children who arrive at the border unaccompanied. Children stay in the austere shelters while awaiting placement with relatives or sponsors in the United States, with whom they stay while immigration courts rule on their protection needs. Facilities set to close include one at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas; a former oil worker camp in Midland, Texas; tent-based facilities in Carrizo Springs and Donna, Texas; and convention centers in Long Beach and San Diego, California. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said that the population of children at the largest and most notorious of these shelters, Fort Bliss, Texas, has dropped to 790 from around 4,800 two months ago. An average of 401 unaccompanied children arrived at the border every day in June. As of July 1, 14,416 were in shelters, approximately 6,100 of them temporary emergency shelters.
- At a July 1 hearing before the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, 32 organizations and the Mexico office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights argued that Mexico’s use of security forces for migration enforcement, including “pushbacks” of migrants, has exacerbated illegitimate use of force against migrants.
- Mexico’s human rights ombudsman (CNDH) found migrants being held in crowded conditions at a detention center run by the country’s National Migration Institute (INM) in the remote border town of Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, Texas. About 13 more migrants were being held in the Piedras Negras municipal jail in very unsanitary conditions, while unable to contact relatives, the CNDH reported. A coalition of mostly southern Mexican human rights groups (Colectivo de Observación y Monitoreo de Derechos Humanos en el Sureste Mexicano, Comdhse) denounced cases of torture by immigration and National Guard personnel in INM’s migrant detention centers nationwide, including “violence, beatings, threats, lack of food or rotten food.” The worst situation, the group claims, is at Siglo XXI, the INM’s largest detention facility, in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula.