Pre-election notes; Updates about migration in Mexico; Panama decrees fines for at least some Darién Gap migrants

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.

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

While border security and migration have been top issues in the too-close-to-call  U.S. presidential campaign, its last full week was not dominated by a single theme, narrative, or developing story. This section presents a series of links to coverage of incremental developments and links to substantial analyses of both candidates’ positions, likely outcomes if each is elected, views from swing states and border states, and how policy debates have shifted in 2024.

Along with the Biden administration’s June restrictions on asylum, a key reason why migration has declined during the 2024 election year is an unstated but vigorous Mexican government strategy of stepped-up interceptions of migrants, many of whom Mexican authorities then transfer to the country’s far south. This section presents links to several accounts of the impact this policy is having on people along the route through Mexico.

Panama’s recently inaugurated president issued a decree requiring migrants to pay fines for unlawful entry after they emerge from the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route. These fines may be waived or adjusted according to migrants’ “vulnerability.” President Raúl Mulino said he hopes to expand an ongoing program of deportation flights to include citizens of Venezuela. After rising sharply from August to September, the number of migrants transiting the Darién appears to have leveled off or increased slightly during the first half of October.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Pre-election notes

As the United States heads into a too-close-to-call presidential election on Tuesday, November 5, border security and migration were less prevalent among themes and controversies raised last week by the campaigns of Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. Media coverage of the border and the election tended to focus on incremental developments or broad thematic analyses. Some links follow.

Developments

  • At an Arizona rally, Trump said that policies admitting migrants have made the United States “a garbage can for the world.” (The word “garbage” came up often in campaign contexts over the past week.)
  • Fox News covered the Trump campaign’s pledge to take down billboards in Texas, posted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), reminding people with relatives in immigration custody that those relatives have recourse if they are being abused. Republican legislators have sought to defund and shut down OIDO, which was created in response to 2019 Democratic-led legislation.
  • Poking at Trump campaign claims that Joe Biden has released many migrants with criminal records into the United States, the Cato Institute presented data obtained via the Freedom of Information Act revealing that the 2017-2021 Trump administration “released nearly 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records, including 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers,” often to clear detention space for asylum seekers arriving at the border. Cato’s David Bier noted that the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy, which the Trump administration launched in March 2020, “removed consequences for convicted criminals who crossed the border illegally, enabling them to try again and again.”

General campaign analyses

  • At Foreign Affairs, veteran journalist Julia Preston found that, despite the Democratic candidate’s rightward turn on border security and immigration policy, Harris and the much harder-line Trump offer policy choices that differ in “stark and consequential” ways.
  • ProPublica published a deeply reported account from Whitewater, Wisconsin, a town that became a political flashpoint after several hundred Nicaraguan immigrants began to settle there, drawn by nearby food processing facilities and other employers in need of low-wage labor.
  • Anti-immigrant attitudes could affect the election outcome in swing-state Wisconsin, Alfredo Corchado and Dudley Althaus wrote at the San Antonio Express-News. However, they concluded that the state’s small Latino vote could counteract those attitudes.
  • The New York Times looked at how candidates in New York state have sought to gain electoral advantage from a large increase in migrant arrivals to New York City during the Biden administration.
  • A New York Times analysis concluded that regardless of who wins the 2024 U.S. presidential election, curbs on the right to access asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border are likely to remain in place or become even stiffer. As a result, many asylum seekers in North America and Europe “are finding themselves increasingly stranded in desperate, unsafe conditions like camps or crowded boats.”
  • At Caracas Chronicles, Carlos Rodríguez López wrote about how “unsustained allegations about an exponential rise of violent crime brought by Venezuelan gangs” have made Venezuelan migrants a “political football” in the 2024 election campaign. Only 35 percent of people of Venezuelan origin in the United States have U.S. citizenship, Rodríguez López pointed out: many are recent arrivals, and most cannot vote.
  • Border Report published an overview of electoral matchups in House of Representatives districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. Two—one in New Mexico and one in Arizona—are rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report.

Trump-focused analyses

  • CBS News’s 60 Minutes program aired a segment about Donald Trump’s plan to carry out a mass deportation campaign if elected. Tom Homan, who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s presidency, said that separating migrant families “needs to be considered, absolutely.” CBS looked at the last time the U.S. government carried out mass sweeps to deport people–during the Eisenhower administration, an example that Trump cites often–and found that “this short-term show-of-force did not stop the problem.”
  • At Vox, Nicole Narea evaluated Trump’s oft-repeated “mass deportation” campaign promise by examining past attempts to carry it out, and past challenges to the overuse of wartime powers.
  • At USA Today, Nick Penzenstadler and Lauren Villagrán examined how much the federal government might have to pay to carry out Trump’s plan, and how handsomely its private contractors would profit.
  • At Vox, Christian Paz pushed back on poll data showing over half of U.S. respondents favor “mass deportation.” Paz pointed out that pollsters’ questions fail to capture the complexity or the real-life consequences of such a campaign.
  • Writing for Mother Jones, Isabela Dias covered immigrant rights defense groups’ scenario planning and preparations for responding to a possible Trump victory in Tuesday’s elections. “Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness.”
  • The New York Times’s Miriam Jordan told the story of José, a sixth-grader living with his parents in Houston, whom Border Patrol agents had separated from his family in May 2018, at the height of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. “I don’t trust anybody,” the boy said. “I just trust my mom and dad.”
  • The Associated Press reported that some children whom the Trump administration separated from their parents are telling their painful stories in social media videos and pro-Kamala Harris campaign events. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt recalled that as many as 1,000 families remain separated over six years later.
  • At Washington Monthly, Bill Scher looked at the data and concluded that the Trump administration was more effective at curbing legal migration than reducing unauthorized migration to the United States.

Harris-focused analyses

  • At Rolling Stone, Lillian Perlmutter analyzed the harder-line turn in the Biden administration’s border policies, including strict limits on asylum access. “In their attempt to find a message that resonates with the American public,” Perlmutter wrote, “Democrats have forced hundreds of thousands of migrants into potentially deadly situations.”
  • Reporting from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Agénce France Presse noted how the Biden administration’s restrictions on asylum between ports of entry have reduced unauthorized border crossings and channeled migrants into long waits for CBP One appointments.

Updates about migration in Mexico

As the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has declined during this election year, analysts and observers have been drawing attention to the causes. One is the Biden administration’s June proclamation and rule eliminating most migrants’ ability to access the U.S. asylum system from between the border’s ports of entry. Another, though, is Mexico’s policy, begun in January, of blocking in-transit migrants and systematically transporting many to the country’s south.

Several reports and investigations over the past week covered this policy and other aspects of the dangerous route through Mexico. (Coverage of so-called “caravans” in the country’s far south, however, was sparse, which likely indicates that they are stagnating or reducing.)

  • Associated Press reporter María Verza reported from Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, where she found “migrants continue pouring into Mexico” but organized crime, which has vastly ramped up ransom kidnappings of recently arrived migrants, is doing more to “manage the flow” than Mexican authorities. Released kidnap victims say that criminals are holding about 500 people at a time at a ranch near the border town of Ciudad Hidalgo; they stamp people’s skin as proof of payment for their release, while often sexually assaulting those who cannot pay.
  • Reuters reported about Mexico’s crackdown on northbound migrants, particularly its undeclared but vigorous campaign of placing them on buses to the country’s southern states. Reuters revealed that Mexico’s migration authority has paid over $65 million to one charter bus company since last year.
  • At the New York Review of Books, John Washington profiled a woman who fled Guatemala but is stranded in Mexico’s northern border city of Nogales, Mexico, after being refused an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States due to Biden administration restrictions. She and her son have been kidnapped twice by criminal groups in Mexico.
  • At America: The Jesuit Review, David Agren covered the Mexican government’s 2024 crackdown. Agren pointed out that many people migrating in Mexico feel an urgency to obtain CBP One appointments before Donald Trump, if he wins the November 5 elections, terminates the program. Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest working in south Texas and Tamaulipas, Mexico, said that the wait for CBP One appointments is now often seven months for non-Mexican migrants and ten months for Mexicans.
  • “Keeping migrants stuck in southern Mexico–and points further south–has been a perpetual U.S. objective,” wrote Agren and two other reporters for the Daily Signal from Villahermosa, Tabasco, a top destination of Mexico’s buses.
  • At Mexico’s northern border, the Ciudad Juárez newspaper El Norte reported on a proliferation of “safe houses” where smugglers or kidnappers hold migrants, “packing them in like sardines.” In recent years, the report found, these houses are turning up in more central urban neighborhoods, not just on the city’s outskirts.
  • The population of Venezuelan migrants in Mexico City—many awaiting CBP One appointments at the U.S. border—may have increased 13-fold from 2021 to 2023, judging from a municipal welfare agency’s count of the number of people served, Milenio reported. Many are in the central district of Cuauhtémoc, finding work paying about $60-120 per week.
  • Eurasia Review spoke to Yale University sociologist Ángel Escamilla García, whose interviews with unaccompanied Central American minor children migrating through Mexico showed they had a significant level of knowledge of U.S. immigration law. A 17-year-old girl from Honduras said she decided not to reveal being raped during the journey “after learning that rape and other physical violence migrants suffer en route to the United States is irrelevant to their asylum applications.”

Panama decrees fines for at least some Darién Gap migrants

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, issued a decree establishing fines of $300 to as much as $5,000 for people who enter the country irregularly through the border with Colombia: the Darién Gap jungle route that nearly 800,000 migrants have traversed since 2023. The fine may be adjusted according to migrants’ state of “vulnerability,” but it is not clear how that will be determined. Those who do not pay may be prohibited from moving on to Costa Rica and subject to deportation.

The introduction of a penalty raises concerns, as it creates perverse incentives for corrupt officials to demand payments from migrants or smugglers in exchange for waiving or lowering fines, and opportunities for smugglers to offer transit through alternate, probably more dangerous, routes for fees that, though steep, may be cheaper than the fines’ amount.

Mulino, who was inaugurated in July promising to crack down on the tens of thousands who migrate through the Darién Gap each month, also said that he hopes to identify a third country or countries that would be willing to accept deported Venezuelan citizens. The Homeland Security attaché in the U.S. embassy to Panama told EFE that with U.S. support, air deportations of Venezuelans from the Darién may begin “in the next days, weeks at the latest.” Neither official named any possible third countries.

Panama has run nearly 20 deportation flights since early August, most of them to Colombia and Ecuador. EFE cited a U.S. embassy statement noting that the number of Colombians and Ecuadorians transiting the Darién Gap has fallen by 65 percent and 92 percent, respectively, since the flights began. (Migration from Venezuela, where the government has refused to recognize an apparent opposition victory in July 28 elections, rose 69 percent in the Darién from August to September.)

EFE reported that “as of October 13, 274,444 irregular travelers have arrived in Panama through the jungle” in 2024. That means 11,148 people migrated through the Darién during the month’s first 13 days, or 858 per day. That is a very slight increase over the 837 per day reported in September.

The human rights ombudsmen’s offices of Colombia and Panama meanwhile signed a “letter of binational understanding” pledging increased cooperation on humanitarian and human rights monitoring in the Darién Gap region, where large but untold numbers of migrants perish or are assaulted, robbed, and raped by criminal groups.

Reflecting in the Los Angeles Times about a recent visit to the Darién Gap, Human Rights Watch director Tirana Hassan called for more robust U.S. measures against Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his inner circle, and to do much more to “uphold the rights of migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the crisis in Venezuela.” Hassan laments that instead, the Biden administration “has put Venezuelans in further danger and undercut their access to asylum.”

Other news

  • WOLA has completed a 12-episode cycle of short, graphics-heavy, weekly videos examining trends and concerns about the border and migration. We’ve compiled them, dating from August 7 to October 30, on a web page and a YouTube playlist.
  • An October 30 WOLA-organized discussion of state forces’ human rights abuse at the Texas-Mexico border, with experts and advocates from Human Rights Watch, Hope Border Institute, Eagle Pass Border Coalition, and Alliance San Diego, is viewable on YouTube. Border Report published highlights of the event.
  • Writing for Puente News Collaborative and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, Alfredo Corchado profiled Arvin West, the sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, just east of El Paso. A prominent border hardliner, West has become disillusioned with the politicization of the national debate on border security and migration and now supports more pragmatic, local-first approaches.
  • Texas’s state government has made a second large land purchase along the border so that it might build border barriers on at least some of the properties. Following October 29 news about the purchase of a 1,400-acre ranch along the border in Starr County, in the southern part of the state, the Texas General Land Office revealed that it had bought the 353,785-acre Brewster Ranch, bordering Big Bend National Park. “The ranch had been listed for $245,678,330,” according to the Land Report.
  • On November 1, hospitals in Texas must begin collecting information about their patients’ citizenship status, under an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
  • By allowing states to carry out their own independent immigration policies, Texas’s SB4 law criminalizing border crossings could “upend immigration enforcement nationwide” if courts uphold the Texan state government’s argument that migrants constitute an “invasion,” Alejandro Serrano wrote at the Texas Tribune. The law passed in January and its implementation is currently on hold as it faces legal challenges.
  • Texas’s state government has named the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization, a “tier 1” gang threat, alongside “notorious prison gangs the Texas Syndicate and the Mexican Mafia, as well as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Crips, the Bloods, and the Latin Kings,” according to the Dallas Morning News.
  • In Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua, the state government’s security department established a police task force to track Tren de Aragua activities. At the federal level, the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch, said on October 25 that while security forces have arrested some Tren de Aragua members, “we do not have this group registered as the main generator of violence.”
  • “By mid-2024, more than 20.3 million forcibly displaced and stateless people were hosted in the Americas,” read a new “Americas Factsheet” from UNHCR, “including 5.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, 8.1 million internally displaced persons, and 5.8 million other people in need of international protection.”
  • The Honduran Congress is considering legislation that would permanently repeal a $240 fine charged to undocumented migrants for permission to remain in the country long enough to transit its territory. Since 2022, Honduras has waived this fee to encourage migrants to register with the government, which allows them to board public buses instead of turning to smugglers. The Congress must renew the waiver periodically; it next expires on December 31.
  • The South China Morning Post noted a 40 percent drop, from June to September, in U.S.-Mexico border encounters with migrants from China, according to data reported by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Beyond the Biden administration’s June asylum restrictions, the article noted that “in July, Ecuador suspended its visa-free program for Chinese travelers.” Ecuador had been the principal point of arrival on the Latin American mainland for Chinese citizens arriving by air, most of whom then traversed the Darién Gap.
  • Young people unable to find decent employment, many of them well-educated, are heavily represented in the population of Colombian citizens emigrating, according to a report from Colombia’s La Silla Vacía. Colombia was the number-six nationality of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2024. The article also cites a recent worsening of citizen security as an additional reason for Colombians choosing to leave.
  • Cochise County, a border county in southeast Arizona, held a dedication ceremony for a new multi-million-dollar “Border Operations Center” to support local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. At the ceremony, Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, criticized “the federal government’s failure to address” border issues.
  • A Border Patrol vehicle pursuit southeast of San Diego ended with a crash, killing two citizens of Mexico aboard, on October 22.
  • Leonard Darnell George, a CBP officer found guilty of taking bribes to allow drugs to cross the border through California ports of entry, was sentenced to 23 years in prison. “Prosecutors allege George was so entrenched with the drug traffickers that one trafficking associate took a selfie photograph of himself wearing George’s CBP uniform jacket,” reported San Diego’s NBC affiliate.
  • Jenn Budd, whose book Against the Wall recounts a traumatic experience as a former Border Patrol agent, has compiled a database of agents who have been arrested. “This data is an undercount,” Budd wrote at her site.