Developments
Mexico’s government deployed more than 200 immigration agents to Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, a border sector where migration has been increasing. The operation is to expand from the borderline to the southern parts of Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua, of which Ciudad Juárez is the largest city.
The agents are apprehending undocumented migrants and, when possible, transporting them away from Mexico’s northern border zone. Though just 6,500 of Mexico’s 240,000 January-February migrant encounters ended in deportations, its government has massively bused migrants to the country’s center and southern regions.
Agents are breaking up migrant encampments near the Rio Grande, where Texas state national guardsmen are preventing people from approaching the U.S. border wall and turning themselves in to federal Border Patrol agents to ask for asylum.
The Mexican government operation, La Verdad de Juárez recalled, was launched “five days after the one-year anniversary of the fire in a migrant detention facility in Juárez that killed 40 migrants and injured 27 others.” The detention facility fire, La Verdad recalled, happened two months after a similar deployment of over 200 INM agents to Juárez. Many of the migrants who died on March 27, 2023, had been rounded up in raids throughout the city.
- “Mexican Immigration Agents Conduct Migrant Raids in Ciudad Juarez” (La Verdad (Ciudad Juarez Mexico), El Paso Matters, April 2, 2024).
A much-circulated March 21 video from the El Paso side of the river had shown a group of migrants pushing past Texas state guardsmen in order to reach the border wall and seek to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. 214 people were arrested and booked into the El Paso County jail. Of those, all but 39 have been released into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Many are contesting criminal charges of “rioting.”
- Diego Mendoza-Moyers, “Migrants Arrested in el Paso for ‘Border Riot’ Remain in Custody After Judge’s Ruling” (El Paso Matters, April 2, 2024).
- Julian Resendiz, “Update: 222 Charged With Participating in Riot at Border Wall in el Paso County” (Border Report, April 2, 2024).
- Julian Resendiz, “DA on Migrant Riot: Violent Behavior Will Not Be Tolerated” (Border Report, April 2, 2024).
At a campaign event in Michigan, former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump launched into several minutes of baseless anti-migrant invective. “They have wrecked our country” was among the things that Trump, flanked by uniformed police, said of people who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Anjali Huynh, Michael Gold, “Trump Again Invokes ‘Blood Bath’ and Dehumanizes Migrants in Border Remarks” (The New York Times, April 2, 2024).
- Adriana Gomez Licon, Jill Colvin, Joey Cappelletti, “Trump Accuses Biden of Causing a Border ‘Bloodbath’ as He Escalates His Immigration Rhetoric” (Associated Press, Associated Press, April 2, 2024).
Trump addressed part of his remarks to “suburban housewives,” promising to keep them safe from “illegal aliens crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers.”
- Natalie Venegas, “Donald Trump Warns “Housewives” That Migrants Will Crawl in Their Windows” (Newsweek, April 2, 2024).
The ex-president said that he had spoken with “some of” the family of a Grand Rapids, Michigan woman who was murdered by an undocumented migrant, an acquaintance, in March. (The alleged killer entered the United States in 2020, when Trump was president and the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy was in place.) The family said that Trump had not contacted any of them.
- Ken Kolker, “Family of Woman Found Dead on Highway Angered by Trump’s Speech” (WOOD TV (Michigan), April 2, 2024).
Analyses and Feature Stories
A new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on migration through the Darién Gap finds fault with the Colombian and Panamanian governments’ failure to protect the more than 40,000 people per month who have been passing through the treacherous jungle route. The 25,000-word report, a follow-up to an earlier report published in November, finds that the two governments, whose territory includes the Darién, do not do enough to coordinate their response.
The report calls on the U.S. government and other international actors to establish other legal migration pathways including “a region-wide temporary protection regime that would grant all Venezuelans and Haitians temporary legal status,” and to fund humanitarian responses.
- “Neglected in the Jungle” (Human Rights Watch, April 3, 2024).
- “Colombia, Panama Fail to Protect Migrants in Darien Gap” (Human Rights Watch, April 3, 2024).
HRW Americas Director Juanita Goebertus called out Panama for its recent suspension of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which had been providing medical care at the Panamanian end of the Darién trail. MSF had been vocally calling for action about the rising number of cases of sexual abuse that its medical personnel had been detecting.
- Manuel Rueda, “Panama and Colombia Fail to Protect Migrants on Darien Jungle Route, Human Rights Watch Says” (Associated Press, Associated Press, April 3, 2024).
At The Progressive, human rights researcher Claudia Villalona published a report from the sites east of San Diego where asylum seekers spend hours or days in makeshift outdoor encampments as they wait for Border Patrol agents to allow them to turn themselves in. This practice, which advocates call “open-air detention sites,” is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit in federal court.
- Claudia Villalona, “The Open-Air Detention Camps of San Diego” (The Progressive, April 2, 2024).