March 8, 2024

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Developments

As expected, President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last night referred to the situation of elevated migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Biden repeated his call on Congress to pass a border bill based on a bipartisan Senate compromise, that was defeated amid Republican opposition in early February. Among its provisions was an authority to expel asylum-seeking migrants when daily encounters reach 4,000 or 5,000 per day, which migrants’ rights defenders vehemently oppose.

Less expected was Biden’s unscripted exchange with Republican House members heckling his remarks. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called on the President to say the name of Laken Riley, a nursing student murdered in February, allegedly by a Venezuelan migrant who had been released into the United States after turning himself in to Border Patrol in El Paso in 2022, when the Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect.

Biden complied, referring to the victim as an “innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” using a pejorative term to describe undocumented migrants that his administration has discouraged.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), who left the Democratic Party in 2022 and helped negotiate the Senate border compromise, invited the head of Border Patrol’s union, an outspoken Biden critic, to be her guest at the State of the Union address. Brandon Judd had appeared alongside Donald Trump during his February 29 visit to the border in Eagle Pass, Texas. Sinema announced this week that she will not seek re-election in November.

Earlier in the day, the Republican-majority House passed a bill called the “Laken Riley Act,” mandating the detention of migrants who enter the country irregularly and are charged with committing theft, as Riley’s alleged killer was. Though this bill will not move in the Democratic-majority Senate, 37 House Democrats voted for it despite language sharply criticizing the Biden administration’s border and migration policies.

The government of Panama has suspended that activities of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which operates health posts at sites where migrants emerge from the days-long journey through the Darién Gap. The ostensible reason for the suspension is the lack of “a collaboration agreement in force” with Panama’s Ministry of Health. MSF stated that it “has been trying in vain to obtain such a renewal since October 2023.”

The suspension comes just a few days after MSF put out a statement denouncing a sharp increase in their encounters with victims of sexual violence along the Darién route: 233 cases in the first two months after 676 cases in 2023, of which a majority occurred during the final 3 months of last year.

A Journal of the American Medical Association article, covered in the Washington Post, found a sharp increase in drowning deaths of migrants in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego after the Trump administration replaced existing border barriers with taller wall segments.

A Wall Street Journal poll found majority support for tougher border security, including the Senate border compromise, and strong support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants who have been in the United States for many years.

A CBP statement provided more information about a Border Patrol agent’s fatal March 3 shooting of a man it identified as part of a gang robbing migrants at gunpoint along the borderline east of San Diego. A sniper killed an individual who “demanded money from the group, racked his pistol to chamber a round, and pointed the weapon at one of the migrants.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

A survey study by the UN Refugee Agency and non-governmental groups found that 56 percent of migrants who crossed Mexico in 2023 suffered some kind of abuse. Of 207 surveyed who had been deported by the United States, 139 were people “who may require international protection after “fleeing violence” in their countries.”

At Arizona Luminaria, John Washington reported on the long wait for CBP One appointments in Nogales, Sonora, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) makes only 100 appointments available each day at the port of entry. The nearest ports of entry offering appointments are hundreds of miles away in Calexico and El Paso. As a result, many migrants are tempted to cross in the desert and turn themselves in to Border Patrol.

Also reporting from Nogales, Todd Miller visited a garden tended by migrants at the city’s Casa de la Misericordia de Todas las Naciones shelter.

New York featured a collection of images from Alex Hodor-Lee, a photographer with a background in crafting images of luxury fashion goods, depicting objects that migrants abandoned after Border Patrol agents told them to throw away any “non-essential” belongings.

On the Right

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March 7, 2024

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Developments

Tonight President Joe Biden will give his last State of the Union address before the 2024 election. Los Angeles Times immigration reporter Andrea Castillo expects the President’s address to mention the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and related policy proposals, referencing his February 29 visit to Brownsville and his embrace of a Senate deal that would have allowed some expulsions of people seeking asylum. Because polling shows the border and migration to be a weak spot for Biden, though, press previews agree that his speech will probably not dwell on them for very long.

Members of Congress seek to draw attention to the border and migration situation by inviting relevant guests to view the speech from the House of Representatives’ gallery. These range from migrants’ rights activists and DACA recipients to Border Patrol agents, border-area sheriffs, and victims of crimes committed both by migrants and by people motivated by anti-migrant hate.

Citing “authorities in Mexico,” Breitbart reported that 50 migrants have died so far in 2024, mainly of drownings in the Rio Grande, along the border between Coahuila and mid-Texas. The number includes two men whose remains authorities recovered from the river this week in Eagle Pass. “The drownings come as rising water levels of the Rio Grande result in swifter, more dangerous currents.”

A migrant woman abandoned in the New Mexico desert by her smugglers died on Monday after being struck by a train.

Campo, California—about 50 miles east of San Diego, where the Pacific Crest Trail begins—has replaced nearby Jacumba Springs as the principal site in the central California border where migrants are crossing, usually to turn themselves in to Border Patrol to seek asylum. According to Border Report, the geographic shift owes to Mexican security and migration forces stepping up patrols across from Jacumba Springs.

Analyses and Feature Stories

CBP intercepted 1,171 southbound guns at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023, up from 173 in 2019, The Trace reported. But In the six years between 2017 and 2022 alone, Mexican authorities seized 83,000 guns at crime scenes that came from the United States.

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March 6, 2024

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Developments

Adding to a scoop reported yesterday by CBS News, NewsNation and Border Report published more detail about Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in February. CBS had reported 140,000 apprehensions last month, an increase over 124,220 in January but the 7th-fewest of the Biden administration’s 37 full months. The new reporting points to 140,709 apprehensions, with Tucson (49,474) and San Diego (31,570) the busiest of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.

As normally occurs in spring, migration is increasing. The first three days of March saw migrant encounters reach 7,000 per day, and 5,500 on March 4.

8,368 people applied for asylum in Mexico’s system in February, reported Mexico’s Refugee Assistance Commission (COMAR). That is fewer than in February 2022 (10,192) and February 2023 (11,321).

During the first two months of the year, COMAR is behind its 2023 pace but about the same as 2022, when it ended the year with 119,225 asylum applications. (They totaled a record 140,948 in 2023.) So far this year, at least 1,000 migrants have sought asylum in Mexico from Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, and El Salvador.

NBC News reported that, lacking congressionally appropriated funds, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been unable to install already-purchased scanners at border ports of entry that would be able to detect more smuggled fentanyl. The agency needs “approximately $300 million [to] actually put the technology in the ground,” said Acting Commissioner Troy Miller.

The Cato Institute’s David Bier reported that known successful evasions of Border Patrol, also known as “gotaways,” have declined—in the agency’s estimate—from 2,671 per day the week before the Title 42 policy ended last May to about 800 per day in fiscal year 2024.

Candidate Donald Trump and billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk posted outrage at a Daily Mail article “revealing” a “secret” activity to fly 320,000 “illegal” migrants to the United States. The activity is in fact the Biden administration’s very public humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who have U.S.-based sponsors. It is authorized by a 1950s law, and beneficiaries buy their own tickets on regular commercial flights.

The House of Representatives’ Republican majority has not yet officially sent to the Senate its articles of impeachment for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, because they apparently want assurances that the Senate—which is certain to acquit Mayorkas—will hold an actual trial. In a February 13, vote, Republican legislators accused Mayorkas of high crimes and misdemeanors for his management of the border and migration.

The Department of Justice has ordered members of the immigration judges’ union not to speak without approval to outside sources. The National Association of Immigration Judges has been critical of flaws in the immigration adjudication system and migrants’ rights protections. No constraints have been announced about the Border Patrol agents’ union, whose statements and social media issue constant and vociferous attacks on Joe Biden and his administration.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At the Christian Science Monitor, Whitney Eulich spoke to Father Pat Murphy of Tijuana’s Casa del Migrante, and other service providers in the city, about how border cities’ migrant shelters have adapted to the past ten years’ sharp changes in the size, nationality, and demographics of the population they serve.

New arrivals of migrants from China to New York have risen to their highest levels in more than a decade, the New York Times reported, amid growing numbers of Chinese citizens who have traveled overland on a route beginning in South America and passing through the Darién Gap to the U.S.-Mexico border.

A Bloomberg Law analysis recalled that federal courts repeatedly reject conservative state officials’ claims that large arrivals of migrants at the border meets the Constitution’s definition of an “invasion.” However, some judges on the federal judiciary’s deeply conservative Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas and Louisiana, and possibly on today’s more conservative Supreme Court, may sympathize with the “invasion” thesis.

Though Texas authorities are preventing most Border Patrol agents from entering Eagle Pass’s riverfront Shelby Park, they are granting access to “far-right media personalities,” reported Avery Schmitz at the Border Chronicle.

Tags: News Links

March 5, 2024

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Developments

Border Patrol apprehended about 140,000 migrants in February, up from 124,000 in January, CBS News reported. If that is the final number, February will end up being the 7th-heaviest month for migration at the border, of the Biden administration’s 37 full months.

CBS reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez noted that, as usually happens during spring, migration numbers are now increasing more rapidly: “On some days this past week, U.S. border officials processed more than 7,000 migrants in 24 hours.”

The Supreme Court has delayed the State of Texas’s implementation of S.B. 4 until March 13, while justices decide whether to allow the controversial state law to take effect while appeals continue. Passed in December and originally set to go into effect on March 5, the state law would empower Texas law enforcement to jail migrants, or deport them into Mexico, if they crossed the border irregularly; in the state’s interior, rights defenders fear that police may use their new powers profile non-White people.

The Biden Justice Department, the ACLU, and other organizations’ challenge to S.B. 4 is currently before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, after a lower-court judge temporarily blocked it on February 29.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) yesterday vetoed a somewhat similar law (the “Arizona Border Invasion Act”) that her state’s Republican-majority legislature sent to her.

3,000 people have departed Necoclí, Colombia since Friday to begin their journey through the Darién Gap, following a five-day stoppage by operators of the boats that ferry migrants across the Gulf of Urabá. The boat operators were protesting Colombian authorities’ late-February seizure of two vessels.

Passage through the Darién jungles is more treacherous than ever. Doctors without Borders, which maintains health posts in reception centers where the trail ends in Panama, reported treating 233 victims of sexual violence in January and February alone; the organization reported 676 cases in all of 2023. “In the latest assaults, the level of brutality is extreme. A dozen armed men are holding more and more migrant groups of between 100 and 400 people.”

Measured by the number of removal flights per weekday, February 2024 was ICE’s busiest month for aerial deportations of the past 12, according to the latest monthly report from Tom Cartwright at Witness at the Border. 99 of 137 planes went to El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras. 10 went into Mexico’s interior (Morelia, Guadalajara, Mexico City). The rest went to Colombia (7), Ecuador (4), Peru (3), the Dominican Republic (2), Nicaragua (2), and one each to Brazil, Jamaica, Cuba, Senegal, Nigeria, South Korea, Nepal, Bangladesh, Chad, and Egypt.

Border Patrol agents reportedly engaged in an exchange of gunfire on March 3 with “a crew aiming to rob migrants” along the border east of San Diego, the Los Angeles Times reported. Agents killed one person. The incident occurred in an area where asylum seekers have been waiting for hours or days outdoors to turn themselves in to agents.

A Pew Research Center survey found that, compared to the general U.S. adult population, Latino U.S. citizens are less likely to favor tough measures against asylum seekers, though they do share the view that high levels of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border constitute “a major problem or a crisis.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

At Arizona Luminaria, John Washington explained the asylum process and what it looks like right now at the Arizona-Mexico border, where CBP offers just 100 “CBP One” appointments per day. “In Arizona, the average wait time, as of early 2024, for a recently arrived migrant to have an asylum hearing in immigration court is 984 days, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.”

In Senegal, the Associated Press reported, social media has made it widely known that travel to Nicaragua, which does not require visas for those visiting by air, offers a way to migrate to the U.S.-Mexico border without having to pass through the Darién Gap. Smugglers charge about $10,000 for the trip.

The Guardian looked at Border Patrol agents’ continued use of the derogatory word “tonk” to refer to migrants (reported by the Huffington Post in February) and concluded that banning the language won’t make a difference: a “cultural change” is necessary.

Using a “virtual reality tour,” Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained U.S. border agencies’ deployment of surveillance technology along the border to reporter Monique Madan at the Markup. It raises civil liberties questions: “you start to see things like towers that are able to look into people’s back windows, and towers that are able to look into people’s backyards, and whole communities that are going to have glimpses over their neighborhood all the time.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center warned that “border calls to action,” like one issued by an extremist group calling itself the “United Patriot Party of North Carolina,” could facilitate violence against migrants and Border Patrol agents.

On the Right

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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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March 1, 2024

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Developments

President Joe Biden and ex-president and Republican candidate Donald Trump paid coinciding visits to the Texas-Mexico border yesterday.

Biden met with Border Patrol, law enforcement, and local political leaders in Brownsville, but did not reach out to the many nonprofits working with the migrant population in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

In his public remarks, the President maintained a “triangulation” stance, moving rightward on border and migration issues in an attempt to reduce Trump’s apparent polling advantage on an issue that election-year voters have identified as a top concern.

In Brownsville, Biden seized on Republicans’ rejection of a compromise Senate bill that, much to migrant rights’ advocates alarm, would have suspended the right to asylum at the border. Among its new bars to asylum, the bill would have imposed Title 42-style migrant expulsions when daily arrivals average 4,000 or 5,000 people. With that legislation now far from passage, the President is considering executive actions that might do something similar.

“Join me—or I’ll join you—in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill,” Biden said, addressing Trump. While he has moved toward Trump on the border issue, the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher pointed out, Biden is trying to distinguish his position with an argument about democracy: he would pursue these hardline changes through the institutional process, not through the authoritarian means that Trump promises.

Trump met with Texas state government and law enforcement, along with Border Patrol union activists, in Eagle Pass. Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) visited the city’s riverfront Shelby Park, where Abbott has ordered state forces to deny entry, under most circumstances, to the federal Border Patrol. “We have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages” was one of the ex-president’s many warnings about cross-border migration.

In Austin, Federal District Judge David Ezra blocked implementation of Texas’s controversial new law empowering state law enforcement to arrest people who cross the border irregularly and imprison them if they do not return to Mexico. S.B. 4 was to go into effect on March 5.

Texas is appealing the decision of Judge Ezra, a Reagan appointee, but this is a victory for the Biden administration and non-governmental plaintiffs including the ACLU.

When President Biden told him, in a recent meeting, that Mexico’s government would not agree to a renewal of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program for asylum seekers, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters that he replied, “Mr. President. We’re the United States, Mexico will do what we say.”

Fact checks by the Washington Post and NBC News debunked the notion that migrants increase crime. This has been a frequent conservative talking point following the February 22 murder of a Georgia nursing student, allegedly committed by a man from Venezuela.

A Mexican government crackdown has left about 800 migrants stranded in a tent encampment along the Suchiate River, at Mexico’s border with Guatemala near Tapachula. “People are being forced to wait up to seven days to get answers from the INM [Mexico’s migration agency] and be transferred to Tapachula or Tuxtla Gutierrez,” the capital of Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas, read a statement from local human rights defenders. “During this time, they do not receive any type of assistance.”

Authorities in Tijuana count four migrant deaths along the border with San Diego so far in 2024: two drownings, a hypothermia case, and a February 27 fall from the border wall.

Migrants are filling up the Colombian beach town of Necoclí, across the Gulf of Urabá from the entrance of the Darién Gap route to Panama, reported the Associated Press and Financial Times following a story published on Wednesday in the New York Times. The boats that take migrants cross the Gulf are on strike following the Colombian Navy’s seizure of two of them last week, leaving thousands stranded in Necoclí.

The Times reported yesterday from Colombia‘s airport, where an increasing number of migrants, many from Africa, change planes en route to Nicaragua, which does not require visas for most nationalities, via El Salvador. This route, for which they pay more than $10,000 per person, allows migrants to bypass the treacherous Darién Gap jungles.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Federal funding will run out on March 31 for Tucson’s Casa Alitas migrant shelter, which received more than 195,000 people released from CBP custody in 2023 in what is now Border Patrol’s busiest sector, wrote John Washington at Arizona Luminaria.

At the Texas Tribune, Uriel García and William Melhado talked to Texas migrant shelters and local leaders resisting the state government’s legal attacks on El Paso’s Annunciation House and conservatives’ rhetorical attacks on other charities helping migrants.

The Biden and Trump visits “were but another reminder of how the border is used for political theater,” wrote journalist Michelle García in a column at the New York Times, contending that much of today’s border debate recalls violence in Texas’s past.

In the Houston Chronicle, Mark P. Jones of Rice University looked at how the Texas state government’s hardline border and migration stances overlap with exceptionalist and even secessionist currents in the state’s politics.

On the Right

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Jenny L. Flores, et al. v. Merrick Garland, et al. Exhibit Index to Plaintiffs Motion to Enforce re Open-Air Detention Sites

Published by the United States District Court Central District of California Western Division on February 29, 2024.

Presents a troubling picture of the conditions faced by migrants, including children and families, detained between the primary and secondary barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tags: Asylum, Conditions in Custody, Human Rights, Litigation, Organizational Culture, Processing, San Diego

February 29, 2024

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Developments

President Joe Biden will be in Brownsville, Texas today for the second U.S.-Mexico border visit of his presidency. About 300 miles upriver along the Rio Grande, Donald Trump will be in Eagle Pass.

We can expect Trump to attack Biden’s border policies, and immigration in general, which is one of his campaign’s principal themes and, according to polls, an electoral vulnerability for the President. We can expect Biden to blame Trump and Republicans for blocking reforms, including a “border deal” that died in the Senate earlier this month even though it conceded significant parts of the Republican agenda by curbing migrants’ right to seek asylum.

We do not expect Biden to announce any new executive actions to implement new curbs on asylum, a step that the White House continues to consider.

The dual visits highlight the deadlock in Washington on any decisions regarding the border and migration: no change—whether a reform or a crackdown, or even a new budget—has passed the 118th Congress, which began in January 2023.

Budget shortfalls have limited the Biden administration’s effort to subject more asylum seekers to rapid screening interviews shortly after apprehension, in a process called “expedited removal,” the Associated Press reported. Asylum officers carrying out the credible-fear interviews “are too understaffed to have much impact,” able to interview a number of migrants equal to about 15 percent of those who were instead released with “notices to appear” in immigration court.

Colombia’s navy last week seized two of the many boats that take migrants—with the permission of local organized crime—across the Gulf of Urabá from the town of Necoclí to Acandí, where the treacherous Darién Gap route into Panama begins. As a result, the New York Times reported, all boat transportation has halted and Necoclí, a small beach resort, is filling up with hundreds of migrants arriving each day, who are now stranded there.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, met in Washington to discuss migration approaches with the foreign ministers of Mexico and Guatemala. They discussed addressing migration’s root causes and expanding legal pathways, and agreed to form a trilateral “operational cell” to share information and coordinate strategies.

The three governments agreed to launch a new “dashboard” of migration flows data, “which will enhance data-driven decision-making and coordination.”

U.S. officials praised Mexico’s recent increase in operations to control U.S.-bound migration flows, crediting them for some of the recent drop in migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, though some of the cause is seasonal.

Guatemala will host the next ministerial-level meeting of the 22 signatory nations of the 2022 Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. There is no date yet for that meeting.

A tweet from Border Patrol’s chief indicates that the agency apprehended about 136,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during the first 27 days of February. At that pace, the month-long apprehensions number will be about 146,000: 22,000 more than January, but the 7th-fewest of the Biden administration’s 37 full months in office.

Republican politicians, and a dramatic spike in Fox News stories, are promoting the idea of “migrant crime” as a Venezuelan man who arrived at the border in 2022 stands accused of murdering a nursing student in Georgia last week.

Analyses continue to point out that “migrant crime” is a myth, as migrants proportionally commit less violent crime than do U.S. citizens. The alleged perpetrator of the Georgia murder, meanwhile, arrived at the border during the height of the Title 42 expulsions policy, showing the irrelevance or futility of harsh curbs on asylum.

A 29-year-old Mexican man died after falling from a 30-foot-tall Trump-era segment of border wall east of San Diego on February 27. Mexico’s consulate, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, recorded 29 deaths and 120 injuries at the San Diego-area border in 2023 alone, down slightly from 42 and 124 in 2022 (not all were wall-related).

In 2009, Canada imposed visa requirements on arriving Mexican citizens, amid an increase in asylum applications. In 2016, Canada lifted those requirements. Yesterday, Canada reimposed those visa requirements; more than 25,000 Mexican citizens sought asylum there last year.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Bloomberg mapped out where asylum seekers are settling after they reach the United States, finding a remarkable dispersal to both urban and rural areas. On a per capita basis, states experiencing the largest numbers of migrant arrivals in 2023 were probably New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Colorado, and Illinois.

The Washington Post published a series of maps detailing Texas’s security buildup along the Rio Grande in the Eagle Pass area.

At the New York Times, Jack Healy visited the border near Sásabe, Arizona, where asylum seekers continue to turn themselves in to Border Patrol in large numbers, though they are fewer than they were in the record-setting month of December.

Diego Piña Lopez, the director of Tucson’s Casa Alitas network of migrant shelters, worried that federal funding is running out for non-profit facilities receiving migrants released from Border Patrol custody, which means street releases may come to Tucson next month. “It’s not going to be a trickle. You broke the faucet completely off.”

El Toque counted the deaths or disappearances of more than 800 Cuban migrants over the past 10 years at the U.S.-Mexico border, at sea, in Mexico and Central America, and in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands.

On the Right

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February 28, 2024

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Developments

President Biden will visit Brownsville, Texas tomorrow, the second U.S.-Mexico border visit of his administration. Republican candidate Donald Trump will be several hours’ drive west, at the border in Eagle Pass.

The President will not announce any new executive actions tomorrow, like new limits on asylum seekers’ ability to seek protection at the border, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Media reports last week indicated that the White House is considering such a step, despite a lack of firm legal footing for curbing asylum access.

Border visits, the New York Times noted, have “become a compulsory bit of political theater for leaders who want to show they care about immigration.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas are meeting today with counterparts from Guatemala and Mexico to discuss “actions to strengthen humane migration management, joint collaboration to address the root causes of irregular migration and displacement, and ways to expand lawful pathways in the Western Hemisphere.”

For the first time since 2019, a Gallup Poll found that immigration is what Americans regard to be “the most important issue facing the country.” 28 percent of respondents cited immigration, up from 20 percent a month ago.

PBS NewsHour analyzed the February 22 murder of a Georgia nursing student, allegedly committed by a Venezuelan man whom Border Patrol released from custody in September 2022, when the Title 42 policy was still in place. Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at U.C. Irvine, recalled: “across all this research, by and large, we find that immigrants do not engage in more crime than native-born counterparts, and immigration actually can cause crime to go down, rather than up.”

CalMatters covered the resumption of “street releases” of asylum seekers released from CBP custody in San Diego, where elevated numbers of migrant arrivals exhausted resources for a county-funded “welcome center,” which closed its doors last week. Confused migrants are now being left at a trolley station, as volunteers struggle to orient them. Advocates allege that the county’s money was not spent sustainably.

San Diego County supervisors voted down a motion asking the federal government to shut down the border temporarily at moments of large-scale arrivals of asylum seekers. (“Shutting down” the border would make little difference, as asylum seekers have already crossed the border onto U.S. soil where they have a legal right to petition for protection.)

Analyses and Feature Stories

A harrowing, in-depth report from Quinto Elemento Lab described criminal organizations’ trafficking of Honduran women in the dangerous southern Mexican border town of Frontera Comalapa, Chiapas, and the complicity of Mexican and Honduran government officials.

A judicial settlement for victims of the Trump administration’s family separations allows them to apply for temporary legal status, work authorization, and some services in the United States, but does not guarantee them legal representation for their applications, reported Isabela Dias at Mother Jones.

At the Guardian, Luke Taylor covered studies from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the UN Refugee Agency indicating that in South America, integrating Venezuelan migrants and refugees will contribute 0.1 to 0.25 percentage points to host countries’ economic growth every year between 2017 and 2030.

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