March 4, 2024

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Developments

In Texas, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily reversed a district judge’s February 29 decision blocking S.B. 4, the Texas state government’s new law empowering local law enforcement to arrest people who cross the border irregularly, and to imprison them if they do not return to Mexico. S.B. 4 could now go into effect soon, though the Court gave plaintiffs in the suit against Texas—the Biden Justice Department, the ACLU, and other organizations—seven days to appeal to the Supreme Court. This case’s outcome may determine whether individual states can carry out their own independent immigration policies.

After a five-day pause, migration has resumed through the treacherous Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama. During the week of February 19, Colombia’s navy had seized two of the boats that ferry migrants across the Gulf of Urabá to Acandí, where the jungle route begins. Boat operators carried out a “strike,” ceasing operations and causing the beachside towns of Necoclí and Turbo, migrants’ departure point, to fill up with about 5,000 stranded people from many countries.

The strike has ended, and boats have resumed, following a meeting between boat operators, Colombian local and national government officials, and a representative of the U.S. embassy in Colombia. They agreed that from now on, all migrants aboard the boats must register on a mobile phone app.

At the other end of the Darién route in Panama, about 250 migrants staged a disturbance at the San Vicente Temporary Migratory Reception Station. Acts of vandalism damaged or destroyed about 10 modular buildings. Panama plans to prosecute 44 people.

At least 11 migrants were injured, 3 of them parents who were traveling with children, after falling from the border wall in San Diego on March 2. On February 27, a man from Mexico died from a fall off the wall elsewhere in San Diego County, in Otay Mesa.

In the camera frame with ex-president Donald Trump during his February 29 border remarks in Eagle Pass, Texas was a uniformed U.S. Air National Guard general, a situation that raised alarms about norms of civil-military relations in the United states. Gen. Thomas Suelzer, a 2-star general in Texas’s National Guard, heads the Texas state Military Department and oversees border operations.

Though he is under the command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R), Suelzer’s uniform is identical to that worn by federal troops, and the National Guard is often used for federal duty. As the general stood behind Trump, the candidate tore into President Biden and the governor of California, among others, in a politicized speech that Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) called “disgusting.” “racist and xenophobic.”

In a March 1 Twitter thread, Military Times reporter Davis Winkie explained the complex arrangements under which National Guard personnel operate, concluding that while Gen. Suelzer’s presence may have run afoul of norms, it was not illegal.

A letter from 17 Democratic Senators called on President Biden to include “robust funding for border security and drug interdiction efforts to stem the flow of fentanyl and similar illicit drugs” in the 2025 budget request that the White House will send to Congress on March 11.

“More than 8 million asylum seekers and other migrants will be living inside the U.S in legal limbo by the end of September,” up from 3 million in 2019, according to data obtained by Axios.

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, discussed migration in a March 1 phone call with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has vocally asserted that New York is unable to absorb the current flow of asylum seekers.

U.S. border authorities encountered migrants from Senegal 20,231 times between July and December 2023, according to data obtained by the New York Post. (Senegal is one of many nationalities that Customs and Border Protection does not specify in its monthly reporting, lumping it in an ever-expanding “Other” category.)

Analyses and Feature Stories

The latest quarterly “asylum processing” report from the University of Texas Strauss Center finds migrants waiting up to six months in northern Mexico to obtain CBP One appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, while “walk-up” appointments for the most vulnerable are exceedingly scarce. Human rights violations against migrants include a 70 percent rise in reports of sexual violence along with more kidnappings in Reynosa, and a Mexican government policy of busing migrants to the country’s interior that has caused some to miss their U.S. appointments.

At The Hill, Rafael Bernal noted that whether President Biden pursues an executive order curbing asylum access or a big expansion to the asylum system, he currently lacks the budget to do either.

“As long as the United States is a destination for migrants, we’ll need organizations like El Paso’s Annunciation House,” a non-profit shelter that has come under attack from Texas’s ultraconservative state government, wrote Laura Collins of Southern Methodist University’s George W. Bush Institute at the Dallas Morning News. At the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact blog, Dara Lind agreed that “Texas is trying to eliminate one of America’s strongest bulwarks against chaos at the U.S./Mexico border.”

Raúl Ortiz, who was chief of Border Patrol for about two years of the Biden presidency and is now retired, had critical words for both Texas Gov. Abbott and the Biden administration in a CBS News 60 Minutes feature about the situation at the Texas-Mexico border. “We’re gonna be barricading every area where people are crossing,” Abbott told reporter Cecilia Vega.

At the Atlantic, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote that with his alleged ability to control migration flows, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador may have the power to determine the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

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