March 25, 2024

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Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provided updated data late on Friday about migration through February at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Search this data at cbpdata.adamisacson.com.)

Some key points:

  • Border Patrol apprehended 140,644 migrants in February, up 13 percent from January but still the 7th-fewest apprehensions of the Biden administration’s 37 full months.
  • 49,278 migrants came to ports of entry, 42,100 of them (1,452 per day) with CBP One appointments. This is similar to every month since July 2023.
  • Combining Border Patrol and port-of-entry encounters, CBP encountered 189,922 migrants at the border in February. The top nationalities were Mexico (33 percent), Guatemala (13 percent), Cuba (7 percent), Colombia (6 percent), and Ecuador (6 percent).
  • Migration from Venezuela continues to drop, despite elevated numbers of Venezuelan migrant encounters measured in Mexico, Honduras, and Panama’s Darién Gap. U.S. authorities encountered 8,769 Venezuelan citizens in February, the fewest since March 2023. Of that total, 64 percent (5,585) reported to ports of entry; Border Patrol apprehended only 3,184.
  • Border-zone seizures of fentanyl totaled 1,186 pounds in February, the fewest fentanyl seizures at the border of any of fiscal year 2024’s five months. After five months, fiscal year 2024 fentanyl seizures total 8,021 pounds, 27 percent fewer than the same point in fiscal year 2023. This is the first time fentanyl seizures have declined since the drug began to appear in the mid-2010s. Ports of entry account for 85 percent of this year’s fentanyl seizures.

In late February, press reported that the Biden administration was considering new executive actions at the border, like limits on access to asylum or a ban on crossings between ports of entry. But then nothing happened: Politico reported that the White House has stood down “in part, to the downtick in migration numbers” so far this year.

Executive actions are not off the table, however. Axios reported that “President Biden is still considering harsh executive actions at the border before November’s election.” These actions, which may involve expelling migrants regardless of asylum needs, would stand on shaky legal foundations and be difficult to apply to migrants of many nationalities.

Officials in Panama reported that the number of migrants crossing the Darién Gap so far in 2024 has now exceeded 101,000. At the end of February, the number stood at 73,167; this means that the March pace remains, as in January and February, at a bit over 1,200 people per day. Of this year’s migrants, nearly two thirds (64,307) are citizens of Venezuela.

Texas police have begun firing rubber bullets at migrants, a Ciudad Juárez human rights activist told EFE. Texas authorities fired tear gas canisters at migrants camped on the El Paso bank of the Rio Grande, after they began pulling on the concertina wire that Texas has laid between the river and the border wall.

The Houston Chronicle reported that Texas state National Guardsmen threatened migrants on the Eagle Pass riverbank with deportation under Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law—even though the law is not in effect while judicial challenges continue.

Authorities in El Paso say they will not prosecute migrants arrested under S.B. 4 if their arrests are found to have resulted from profiling. In the Rio Grande Valley, sheriffs say they do not expect to arrest many people under S.B. 4 because they don’t expect to witness many illegal border crossings.

Guatemala’s government added its voice to international opposition to Texas’s S.B. 4 law.

“I think the migrants that we encounter, that are turning themselves in, yes, I think they absolutely are, by and large, good people,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CBS News’s Face the Nation. But “what’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known got-aways” so far this fiscal year.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has loudly complained about asylum seekers arriving in his city, canceled a trip to Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, citing unspecified “safety concerns” about the Mexico segment of his visit. Adams was responding to an invitation from Sr. Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a large respite center in McAllen.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The New York Times reported on the recent movement of migration away from the Texas border, with more people coming to California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Though the picture is complex, the Texas state government’s crackdown, especially the unknown consequences of the currently on-hold S.B. 4 law, is a factor. (However, migration has also been declining all year, even during the spring, in Border Patrol’s busy Tucson, Arizona sector.)

Ransom kidnappings and other attacks on migrants are worsening at the Mexico-Guatemala border, especially the central region where the Pan-American Highway crosses into Chiapas, reported Milenio.

At the New York Review of Books, Caroline Tracey documented an abandoned, unpopular plan to construct a massive Border Patrol checkpoint on I-19, the highway between Tucson and the border at Nogales, Arizona. The case highlighted the tension between security concerns and economic and human rights considerations.

  • Caroline Tracey, “Checkpoint Dreams” (The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2024).

As Mexican farmworkers migrate to the United States, often on temporary work visas, Mexico is facing its own farm labor shortages and is considering setting up its own guest-worker program for citizens of countries to Mexico’s south, the Washington Post reported.

On the Right

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