Category: News

Links to Recent Border and Migration News (get these in your email)

September 10, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Panama’s National Migration Service posted on the morning of September 9 that 244,243 people had migrated through the Darién Gap. That means 6,058 people passed through the treacherous region during the first 8 days of September: 757 per day, which is 41 percent more than August’s average of 536 per day.

The Harris-Walz campaign published a document outlining Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s policy positions. On the border and migration, the document backs the “Border Act,” the product of a compromise with Republicans that failed in the Senate in February, calling it “the strongest reform in decades.” It adds that this bill “would have deployed more detection technology to intercept fentanyl and other drugs and added 1,500 border security agents to protect our border.”

The document does not mention the Border Act’s intent to change U.S. law to place asylum out of reach between ports of entry at moments when migrant apprehensions are high. A June White House rule implemented a similar asylum restriction; the campaign document does not specifically mention that, but notes that Vice President Harris “and President Biden took action on their own—and now border crossings are at the lowest level in 4 years.”

In tonight’s presidential campaign debate, Donald Trump “is almost certain to lob many of his criticisms of Harris on the issue of border security,” observed a USA Today analysis.

On the Trump campaign’s side of things, the former president’s migration advisor, Stephen Miller, promised a “100% perfect deportation rate at the border,” using “Title 42/Safe 3rds/Remain in Mexico/Asylum Bars” if Trump is elected, in a Twitter exchange with billionaire Mark Cuban. The campaign and other Republican surrogates amplified false and racist rumors that Haitian migrants were consuming people’s pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority is holding two “Biden-Harris border crisis” hearings today: one on “victim perspectives” and one on “noncitizen voting.”

The Embassy of India in Mexico issued an advisory warning Indian citizens against travel in Mexico, citing the likelihood of prolonged detentions and deportations by Mexican forces, after three years of increasing numbers of Indian citizens passing through the country as they seek to migrate to the United States.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said that he would defy an International Boundary and Water Commission order to dismantle “sediment bridges” and concertina wire that the state’s security forces built on Fronton Island, which lies in the Rio Grande in Starr County, south Texas.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The dangerous, organized crime-dominated passage across Mexico leaves migrants with post-traumatic stress. Kidnappings are the biggest trigger, a Ciudad Juárez-based lawyer with Jesuit Refugee Service told EFE. An anti-kidnapping organization reported two mass kidnappings of a total of 36 migrants, and 196 migrant kidnappings overall, just in July in Chihuahua, the state that includes Ciudad Juárez.

“The preservation of borders in the face of climate catastrophe, global conflict, and regular economic crises will require ever greater internal and external violence,” warns Jake Romm in a Nation review of John Washington’s 2024 book The Case for Open Borders.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 9, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

For the first time in three months, Panama has updated official statistics about migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region.

  • 238,185 people migrated through the Darién Gap during the first 8 months of 2024. That is 29 percent fewer than during the first 8 months of 2023 (333,704).
  • The number of migrants transiting the Darién fell from 31,049 in June 2024, to 20,526 in July, to 16,596 in August. The August total was the fewest since June 2022.
  • 71 percent of migrants in August were citizens of Venezuela. During the first 8 months of 2024, 67 percent of migrants were from Venezuela.
  • In June, Ecuador suspended visas for arriving citizens of China. For now at least, the number of Chinese migrants passing through the Darién Gap has plummeted: from 1,074 in June, to 772 in July, to 53 in August.

The drop in Darién Gap migration is probably a short-term “wait and see” effect, as migrants and smugglers pause to evaluate the changes being implemented by Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who was inaugurated on July 1. Mulino has ordered barbed wire laid across some jungle routes, and has launched, with U.S. support, a deportation program that is sending a few planeloads of migrants back to their countries of origin every week.

Panama sent a U.S.-funded deportation flight to India, with 130 people aboard, on September 6. Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border cited a “believable” report that the flight cost $700,000 or “$5,400 per person.” On September 7, a smaller plane carried 29 people from Panama to Colombia, the fifth flight to Colombia since August 9.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a deportation flight to Cap-Haïtien, Haiti on September 6. It was the first such flight since July, and came the day after Secretary of State Anthsony Blinken visited the violence-plagued nation.

Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector reported 3,557 migrant apprehensions during the most recent week, right in the middle of the range reported since late June (3,063 to 3,958). Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector reported 2,700 migrant apprehensions last week, right in the middle of the range reported since late June (2,400 to 2,900).

Reporting from the border city of Cúcuta, Colombia, Santiago Torrado of Spain’s El País found no increase in migration from Venezuela following the Nicolás Maduro regime’s false claims to have won July 28 elections. Local authorities, however, are anxiously expecting “a new migratory wave.”

The late August expansion of the CBP One smartphone app’s geographic coverage to Mexico’s two southernmost states has saturated migrant shelters in Chiapas and Tabasco, La Jornada reported. The director of Tapachula’s El Buen Pastor shelter said that she is now serving 2,000 migrants per day, up from 600 to 700 before August 23, when people could begin using CBP One from Chiapas.

“This is the first time in my 20 to 22 years of government service that I see a state act in direct contravention of national interests,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) hardline border and migration policies in an appearance at the annual Texas Tribune Festival.

“In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state,” Donald Trump said at a Wisconsin campaign rally, apparently referring to since–debunked claims that members Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua organized-crime group who arrived over the southern border had taken over apartment buildings in the Denver suburb of Aurora. “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should never have been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.” Some analysts noted with alarm that the candidate promising “mass deportations” predicted that they would be “bloody.”

In California last Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance visited the borderline with local Republican politicians and Border Patrol agents. At “Whiskey 8,” the site along the border wall near San Diego where until recently many asylum seekers had been turning themselves in to U.S. authorities, the Ohio senator refused to disavow future migrant family separations under a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile in Santee, in San Diego county, House Judiciary Committee Republicans held a field hearing entitled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: California Perspectives.”

Mexican “children as young as nine, 11, and 16 were involved in separate drug seizures this week” at the San Luis port of entry near Yuma, Arizona, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At the Christian Science Monitor, Jody García explored whether the U.S. government’s new tactic of issuing indictments and extradition requests for migrant smugglers in Guatemala might affect smuggling organizations’ “business model.” A top official in Guatemala’s migration agency pointed out that “without international cooperation, arrests like these may not result in much, especially in a country where collaborations between criminal groups and local police are commonplace.”

CNN fact-checked Donald Trump’s claim that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years.” Peter Bergen noted that many more people on the FBI’s terror watchlist have entered from Canada than from Mexico.

At USA Today, Lauren Villagrán profiled Michael DeBruhl, a former Border Patrol agent who runs El Paso’s Sacred Heart Church migrant shelter. “As you rise in the organization [Border Patrol], the higher you go, the better the picture is on the larger issues,” he observed.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 6, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Two-month notice: Daily Border Links will discontinue after November 8, the Friday after the 2024 U.S. election. WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates. (This daily feature has been part of an election-year rapid-response effort that we lack resources to maintain indefinitely.)

Developments

In a big corruption case, federal prosecutors are accusing two Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers of receiving lavish payments from Mexican organized crime to facilitate shipments of drugs through the Otay Mesa and Tecate ports of entry southeast of San Diego, California. Their extravagant spending habits drew investigators’ attention.

La Verdad de Juárez spoke to the grieving parents of a four-year-old Venezuelan boy who died on September 3 when the cargo train on which his family was riding derailed in Chihuahua, Mexico, south of the border city of Ciudad Juárez. The boy’s mother suffered a severed foot. It was the third or fourth train that the family had boarded in their journey across Mexico.

Border Patrol is deploying a tethered “high tech surveillance blimp” near the Santa Teresa, New Mexico port of entry west of El Paso, Border Report reported. “This area is part of the Santa Teresa, New Mexico Border Patrol Station area of operation which has the largest number of migrant encounters in the El Paso Sector,” read a CBP statement.

The Santa Teresa area, near where the border passes from Texas to New Mexico, is at the epicenter of the El Paso Sector’s sharp rise in migrant deaths, mainly of heat exhaustion and dehydration. Until fiscal 2022, Border Patrol had never reported recovering more than 39 human remains in the sector, which encompasses far west Texas and New Mexico. As of August 27, according to the same article, the agency had found 168 remains of migrants in the El Paso Sector, up from 164 just 8 days earlier.

On September 1, Border Report had run a NewsNation story claiming that, due to lack of funds, this and other Border Patrol blimps would be shut down because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacked funds to maintain them.

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents a large border district in central and west Texas, told the conservative Daily Mail that, if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election—as he predicts—a large number of migrants will rush to the border before Inauguration Day.

Analyses and Feature Stories

An American Immigration Council analysis disputed the DHS Inspector General’s August 19 finding that 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children did not show up to their immigration court dates after crossing the border and entering U.S. custody. Much of the problem, it finds, has to do with paperwork and the byzantine bureaucratic requirements that children are expected to navigate, usually without attorneys. “The Inspector General’s analysis fails to explore any potential explanations for why the children were unaccounted for, recklessly suggesting that the children’s safety may be in question.”

As the six-year government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador draws to a close this month, the outgoing foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, told Spain’s El País that she “is trying to outline Mexico’s migration strategy for the coming years.” It “includes investing $133 million in countries of origin, creating two new care centers in Chiapas, and the safe transfer to the northern border of migrants with asylum appointments in the United States.”

“Joe Biden’s administration has agreed to manage 4,000 crossings a day, 1,500 through its CBP One platform” plus the 2,500-per-day threshold above which the Biden administration has shut down access to asylum, the article reads. “But no more than that, says Bárcena, who recalls December 18, 2023, when the United States announced the closure of seven of its border posts” in order to transfer personnel to help process a large number of arriving migrants.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 5, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

The Biden administration may alter the language of its June 4 proclamation and rule in a way that will place asylum further out of reach for most migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry.

U.S. law states that people on U.S. soil who fear return to their country may apply for asylum “whether or not” they arrived “at a designated port of arrival.” The June rule alters that—in a way that is now facing challenges in federal court—by “shutting down” asylum access whenever Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) migrant encounters at the border, not counting unaccompanied children and “CBP One” appointments, exceed a weekly average of 2,500 per day. (Asylum is currently “shut down.”) People who cross between ports of entry are placed into expedited removal, a rapid process that denies a hearing; if they specifically express fear of return, they may get an interview with an asylum officer but must quickly meet a very high standard of fear.

The June rule would reinstate the right to asylum between ports of entry if the daily average drops below 1,500 per day for a week, and remains there for two more weeks. (In August, the daily average appears to have been about 1,870 per day.) The changes that the Biden administration is reportedly considering would require the 1,500-per-day average to sustain for 28 days or even “several weeks,” and the daily count could expand to encompass unaccompanied minors. This new standard “would make President Biden’s tough but temporary asylum restrictions almost impossible to lift, people familiar with the plans” told the New York Times.

A cargo train derailed Tuesday night in Chihuahua, Mexico south of the border city of Ciudad Juárez. About 15 migrants were riding aboard. A 4-year-old Venezuelan child died, his mother’s foot was severed, and a 17-year-old boy suffered head injuries.

Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega said that fewer Nicaraguan citizens have been emigrating.

This is probably accurate: the average monthly number of CBP encounters with Nicaraguan migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border was 4,176 in 2021, 13,656 in 2022, 8,291 in 2023, and 3,389 so far in 2024. Another 95,000 Nicaraguans (5,000 per month) have arrived via the Biden administration’s offer of a two-year humanitarian parole status for citizens with passports and U.S.-based sponsors.

However, Mexico’s government, which has vastly stepped up efforts to block migrants this year, has measured a 2024 increase in encounters with Nicaraguan migrants: 1,290 per month in 2021, 3,411 per month in 2022, 1,637 per month in 2023, and 5,818 in January-July of this year.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Washington Examiner revealed that Texas’s state government gave transportation companies $221 million in taxpayer funds to transport 119,700 migrants to Democratic Party-governed cities in the U.S. interior. That adds up to $1,848 per bus ticket, more than a first-class one-way flight would typically cost.

Denverite published a thorough analysis of charges that members of the Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest organized crime group, are taking over apartment buildings in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. The story has reverberated through conservative media and social media in recent days, finding its way into some of Donald Trump’s remarks. Most local officials and residents deny that the gang has a major presence or control over the buildings.

The Associated Press reported that some migrants from China are deciding to settle in Mexico instead of the United States. Baja California state until recently was home to Mexico’s largest Chinese-Mexican population, but the largest number of Chinese immigrants are now in Mexico City.

The Times of London accompanied the Águilas del Desierto, an Arizona-based humanitarian group that searches for migrants in need of aid, and recovers the remains of some of the hundreds who perish in the state’s deserts each year.

A CNN review of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s social media posts found that “she criticized the border wall more than 50 times during the Trump administration, calling it, among other things, ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and a ‘medieval vanity project.’” As WOLA noted in a brief video yesterday, Harris now supports legislation that includes, as part of a compromise with Republicans, a commitment to spend remaining Trump-era border wall-building funds.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 4, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Border Report, Arizona Public Media, and Spain’s El País covered the Mexican government’s announcement last week that it would escort buses, from the southernmost states of Chiapas and Tabasco, to protect asylum seekers with “CBP One” appointments at U.S. border ports of entry. The mayor of Ciudad Juárez, Cruz Perez Cuellar, welcomed the announcement and said the city’s migrant shelters currently have ample space to receive those with appointments. (Customs and Border Protection (CBP) currently accepts about 200 appointments daily at the Paso del Norte bridge in El Paso, across from Ciudad Juárez.)

Border district Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is discussing with the Department of Defense the possible transfer of up to a dozen new, upgraded surveillance blimps that would be tethered along the border. NewsNation reported over the weekend that CBP’s blimp program was shutting down after being reduced to four aircraft last year. However, Cuellar told Border Report, “The Department of Defense has some newer aerostats that they’re willing to transfer,” though this might not happen until after 2025. “The monthly operational cost for one unit can cost $400,000,” Border Report noted.

Mexico’s Army and National Guard captured the boss of the organized crime group that dominates criminality in the dangerous border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, across from Laredo, Texas. Carlos Alberto Monsiváis Treviño, alias “El Comandante Bola,” has been the maximum leader of the Northeast Cartel, an offshoot of the once-powerful Zetas, since the 2022 capture of his cousin, Juan Gerardo Treviño. Monsiváis Treviño is a nephew of founding Zetas members Miguel Ángel and Omar Treviño Morales, who are currently imprisoned in Mexico.

As often occurs when a top organized crime leader is brought down, the already tense security situation in Nuevo Laredo may complicate further in coming weeks.

Residents of an apartment complex in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, held a press conference to deny reports—spread by local Republican officials and amplified by conservative U.S. media—that their buildings had been “taken over” by members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua organized crime group who had crossed the border in recent years. The residents blamed security issues on a neglectful absentee landlord.

Analyses and Feature Stories

From Witness at the Border, Thomas Cartwright’s latest monthly report on August’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation flights documented the second consecutive monthly drop in the planes’ operational tempo, from 7.2 removal flights per weekday in June to 6.3 in July and 6.1 in August.

Of 135 removal flights last month, 64 percent—similar to previous months—went to Mexico (13), El Salvador (8), Guatemala (37) and Honduras (29).

Cartwright also noted Panama’s U.S.-backed acceleration of removal flights, which began on August 20. The first four flights, between August 20 and 29, carried 117 people, 30 to Ecuador and 87 to Colombia. No announcement or other indication confirms Panama carried out an announced September 3 deportation flight to India. Cartwright pointed out that such a flight would be costly: “A charter to India would be extremely expensive with a large jet typical expense of around $20,000/flight hour and a small jet (16 passenger) at around $8,000/flight hour. It’s over 18 hours to Amritsar, India from Panama, each way.”

At Texas Monthly, Forrest Wilder authored an unflattering profile of Steve McCraw, the director of Texas’s Department of Public Safety, who is leaving his position after about 20 years of serving Republican state administrations. McCraw, Wilder wrote, amassed much power, making him “the J. Edgar Hoover of Texas” as he nurtured an “obsession with ‘spillover violence’ from Mexico.”

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 3, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Even as recent months’ migrant encounters have been declining in the United States, Panama, and Honduras, Mexico’s government released data showing that July 2024 was its 5th busiest month ever: 116,626 encounters with undocumented migrants. In the seven months since January 2024, when Mexico launched a crackdown on migration transiting the country, its reported monthly encounters have ranged between 113,839 (January) and 125,499 (May). Before this year, Mexico’s all-time monthly record was 97,969 (November 2023) and it never exceeded 70,000 apprehensions before July 2023.

In July 2024, for the first time, Mexico’s reported migrant encounters exceeded the United States’ encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border (116,626 compared to 104,116), combining Border Patrol apprehensions and CBP’s encounters at ports of entry, including CBP One appointments.

Following the Mexican government’s announced plan to transport people with “CBP One” appointments safely to the U.S. border, 100 people with confirmed dates at U.S. ports of entry lined up outside a migration facility in Tapachula, Chiapas. One man from Guatemala told EFE that he managed to secure an appointment in only four days; a recently published quarterly report from the University of Texas’s Strauss Center found that wait times for some are stretching to eight or nine months. A woman from Honduras told EFE that she began attempting to apply for an appointment last December.

Recent news about organized-crime violence in Mexico’s northern border states includes cattle ranchers telling the governor of Sonora that they feel unprotected and often unable to travel on the state’s roads; the forced displacement of hundreds of Indigenous people from Chihuahua’s Sierra Tarahumara; and a shootout and jewelry store robbery in a Ciudad Juárez shopping mall, in the same part of the city as the U.S. Consulate.

Analyses and Feature Stories

UNHCR surveys of 560 travel groups at Costa Rica’s northern border with Nicaragua during the first half of 2024 found 74 percent of respondents were from Venezuela, and 84 percent of them hoped to migrate to the United States. 92 percent said they left their countries of origin due to “lack of employment or income,” 79 percent cited fear of violence or insecurity.

At Costa Rica’s southern border with Panama, 82 percent of respondents had departed from Venezuela, 87 percent hoped to migrate to the United States, 83 percent left their countries of origin due to “lack of employment or income,” and 39 percent cited fear of violence or insecurity.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 2, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Border Patrol apprehended about 58,000 people between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry during August, the Associated Press revealed. After five consecutive months of declines, this is a slight increase over 56,408 in July. This likely indicates a bottoming-out of the drop in migration that followed the Biden administration’s early June rule restricting asylum access.

Reporting from Nogales, CBS News’ Camilo Montoya-Galvez noted that, three months after the Biden administration began implementing a rule restricting most access to asylum between the border’s ports of entry, deportations into Mexico have accelerated.

Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) announced that it will provide bus transportation from Mexico’s southern-border states of Chiapas and Tabasco to the U.S. border for asylum seekers who have pending CBP One appointments at U.S. border ports of entry. WOLA and other organizations have received numerous reports of people being kidnapped by organized crime while trying to travel across Mexico to attend appointments made using CBP’s smartphone app. INM calls the route an “Emergent Secure Mobility Corridor;” those being transported will receive a document granting 20 days’ permission to be in Mexico.

The University of Texas Strauss Center’s latest quarterly report on border asylum processing found that waits for CBP One appointments—which have held steady at 1,450 per day since June 2023—now reach 8 or 9 months in some cases.

The Associated Press reported that the growth of asylum seekers awaiting CBP One appointments has led to a proliferation of rustic migrant encampments throughout Mexico City.

The Washington Post published a profile of a Biden administration official who has been a driving force behind restrictive policies that have caused recent declines in arrivals at the border. “Data-driven technocrat” Blas Nuñez-Neto, who served as Assistant Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy before a recent move to the White House, “was laser-focused on border crossings, checking enforcement data daily.”

Venezuelan media outlets Efecto Cocuyo and La Nación reported on slight but notable increases in the number of people migrating away from Venezuela, as repression and uncertainty increase following the Nicolás Maduro regime’s false claim to have won July 28 presidential elections. The Cúcuta, Colombia-based Fundación Nueva Ilusión told Efecto Cocuyo that many of those fleeing are young people who say “they were marked by the authorities due to the political persecution.” In the border town of Pacaraima, Brazil, the overall cross-border flow is similar to before, but the number of Venezuelan crossers requesting protection has increased.

Milenio reported on a criminal group that is kidnapping U.S.-bound migrants for ransom as they cross into Mexico from Guatemala, in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas. One released Venezuelan migrant told of “25 criminals in charge and practically a hundred kidnapped people” being held in a wire cage near Mexico’s southern border. Chiapas’s state attorney-general’s office, which is charged with investigating and documenting kidnappings, “only had just two investigation files registered in 2023, one in 2019 and another in 2020,” the Mexican newspaper found.

Panamanian authorities discovered a jungle camp, with more than 55 huts, where what authorities called “transnational crime” sold food, Starlink internet connectivity, and other services to people passing through the Darién Gap migration route.

Migrants deported from the Darién Gap, who were aboard Panama’s first repatriation flight to Ecuador—on August 29, funded by the U.S. government—told local media of the dangers of the Darién migration route. “In the middle of the jungle some hooded men appear,” one said. “They ask you for money, they steal everything; they kidnap and rape women.”

“José,” deported on a different U.S. flight from Texas to Guayaquil, Ecuador with 90 other Ecuadorian citizens, said that he paid a smuggler US$30,000 to transport him, his partner, and his 8-year-old son, flying to El Salvador and crossing Mexico. “Ronald,” who reported paying his smuggler $8,000, said that even though U.S. authorities rejected his asylum request on June 25, he still spent the next two months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention.

Citing a lack of funding, DHS is discontinuing use of tethered blimps to carry out surveillance along the border.

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s federal child and family welfare agency (DIF) is reportedly to spend 250 million pesos (about US$12.6 million) on 4 shelters for migrants.

After a lack of response from Border Patrol and Mexican authorities left a 60-year-old man lying on the ground with a compound leg fracture for more than 24 hours after falling from the Mexican side of the border wall, firefighters from Arivaca, Arizona sawed through the wall to rescue him.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At a time of near-record high migrant deaths on the U.S. side of the border, an investigation by Tanvi Misra at High Country News explored the complexities of Border Patrol’s Missing Migrant Program: “some aid workers and border researchers see a conflict of interest between the agency’s primary mandate, which is to detain and deport migrants, and the humanitarian goal of saving lives.” Records show a surprisingly small number of 911 calls from migrants appearing to result in rescue missions.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 30, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

In a prime-time CNN interview alongside running mate Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, voiced support for stricter border enforcement and for addressing “root causes” of migration from Central America.

Harris reiterated strong backing for the “Border Act of 2024,” a bill that failed in the Senate in February after months of negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators. As it sought Republican buy-in, that bill included tougher provisions than Democrats would normally support, like severe limits on asylum access between ports of entry, more migrant detention capacity, and expenditure of Trump-era border wall money.

“I will make sure that it comes to my desk and I would sign it,” Harris said of the Border Act, recalling that Donald Trump pressured Republican senators to oppose the bill as it neared consideration.

“I believe there should be consequence” for crossing the border without authorization, Harris added. CNN interviewer Dana Bash compared that response to a moment in a 2020 Democratic primary debate when candidate Harris was among those who raised their hands indicating support for decriminalizing border crossings.

Introducing the border topic, Bash asked about the Biden administration’s June 2024 rule shutting down most asylum access between ports of entry, appearing to imply that this was an uncontroversial, common-sense step that they should have taken earlier: “Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?”

“After initially declaring the wall a ‘medieval vanity project’ in 2019 when she announced a run for president, Harris recently said she would seek to have hundreds of millions spent on the construction of the wall,” reads a comparison of Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s border-security positions at the conservative outlet NewsNation. Harris has not specifically said she would spend money on border wall-building, but in supporting the “Border Act”, she has backed a bill that—in one of several concessions to Republicans—would spend $650 million in previously appropriated funds on wall construction, enough to build about 26 miles.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) restarted registrations for the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, which had been suspended since the beginning of August due to potential fraud concerns. Since January 2023 this program has allowed up to a combined 30,000 citizens of these countries per month to apply for a two-year protected status in the United States, and to fly to U.S. airports instead of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. It has contributed into a sharp drop in unauthorized crossings of these countries’ citizens at the border.

Panama sent its second and third deportation flights in seven days, and fourth since August 20, of migrants apprehended in the Darién Gap. A flight carrying 30 Ecuadorian citizens—27 men and 3 women, 9 reportedly with criminal records—departed for Manta on Thursday evening, the first flight to Ecuador since Panama’s new government began increasing the flights’ tempo. It is the second flight to be funded by the U.S. government; Panama has paid for two others, the Associated Press reported.

A plane to Colombia, the third so far, appears to have departed on Friday morning with a reported 28 people aboard. That would make a total of 117 people deported since August 20. The flow of migrants through the Darién Gap is at its lowest point in over two years right now, but is still about 400 people per day.

DHS announced the allocation of a $380 million tranche of FEMA Shelter and Service funding to 50 nonprofits and state or local governments assisting migrants released from CBP custody.

A Texas state judge ruled that Team Brownsville, a short-term shelter that receives migrants released from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody, does not have to participate in a deposition demanded by Texas’s attorney-general, who has been carrying out a legal offensive against groups that assist migrants in the state. Judges have similarly slowed Ken Paxton’s (R) efforts so far against El Paso’s Annunciation House, Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, and the Houston-based immigrant rights defense group FIEL.

Searchers for disappeared victims of Mexico’s organized crime groups have found 14 sites with skeletal remains in the vicinity of Mexico’s northern border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, across from south Texas.

A former Alabama National Guard soldier, assigned in 2021 to a federal (not state) border-security mission in Texas, pleaded guilty in federal court to helping smugglers transport undocumented migrants.

Analyses and Feature Stories

WOLA has published a graphical commentary highlighting 12 trends happening right now at the U.S.-Mexico border and along the U.S.-bound migration route. It finds that overlapping crackdowns in Mexico and the United States have made asylum-seeking migration difficult, reducing numbers dramatically. The data indicate, however, that the reduction will be temporary, that the crackdowns are shutting out and bottlenecking many migrants who need protection, and that Texas’s separate crackdown has had little effect.

For the Christian publication Sojourners, writer Ken Chitwood visited Albergue Assabil, a Tijuana shelter for Muslim women founded in 2022.

Roll Call talked to former officials and security experts about how Donald Trump, if he wins, might use the U.S. military to carry out deportations and build up border security. Tom Homan, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and an enthusiastic Trump backer, raised the possibility of redeploying active soldiers from overseas to the U.S.-Mexico border.

At the Border Chronicle, Todd Miller recounted an August 14 Border Patrol vehicle stop in Arizona, during which an agent shut a filmmaker and an author, both Mexican-American, in the back of his truck while verifying their citizenship. They were accompanied by a local humanitarian worker, who is not Latino and was not asked for his identification.

Axios covered local Republican officials’ allegations that members of Venezuela’s “Tren de Aragua” criminal organization, believed to have arrived across the border in recent years, are “taking over apartment buildings” in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. Local police dispute those claims, calling the TdA influence “isolated.”

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 29, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) rejected a Fox News Freedom of Information Act request to identify the nationalities of migrants encountered at the border who come up on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Dataset. CBP has reported 139 such encounters during the first 10 months of fiscal 2024 (43 at ports of entry, and 96 Border Patrol apprehensions), but does not reveal where the people with suspected terrorism affiliations are coming from.

Republican critics of the Biden administration—including the authors of an August 5 Judiciary Committee report—have made much of data, omitting nationalities, that has been showing an increase in such encounters.

The official explanation for turning down the request for nationalities cites privacy concerns and the possibility of revealing investigative techniques, “allowing the terrorists to take countermeasures against the investigators and their investigations.”

(WOLA suspects, but is unable to prove, that many—perhaps most—individuals matching the dataset come from Colombia, a country that has seen a sharp recent increase in border encounters and has had five different groups this century on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, two of which have long since demobilized. While WOLA staff have not filed Freedom of Information Act requests—usually a very slow process without litigation—DHS officials and legislative staff have immediately refused past verbal suggestions to release even just the top nationalities.)

A hearing is scheduled today in U.S. District Court for a lawsuit brought by 16 Haitian citizens who allege abuse at the hands of mounted Border Patrol agents, who were caught on video charging at them on the banks of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas in September 2021. The hearing is to consider the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case.

Cronkite News covered CBP’s August 16 issuance of a new directive governing the agency’s handling of migrants’ personal belongings, which frequently get discarded or confiscated even when they are valuable or necessary for medical or legal purposes. Noah Schramm, who has worked on the belongings issue at ACLU of Arizona, characterized the policy change as an advance, but “remains concerned because the rules don’t explicitly ensure that migrants get their belongings back when they’re moved to another facility or released.”

A 60-year-old man from Mexico fell from the 30-foot border wall, on the Mexico side, near Sasabe, Arizona after midnight on Wednesday, the Tucson Sentinel reported. He lay on the ground with a compound fracture in his leg, aided through the wall by humanitarian volunteers on the U.S. side; medical workers treated his leg through the wall at 5:30PM, but the man remained in the desert awaiting rescue through Wednesday night.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Some election campaign analysis continues to discuss whether Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, “flip-flopped” on border wall construction—as an Axios story put it—when she endorsed bringing back the Border Act, a compromise Senate bill that failed, following months of bipartisan negotiations, last February. Among provisions in that bill on which Republicans insisted was language committing the U.S. government to spending out unspent border-wall money—estimated at about $650 million, enough to build about 26 miles—that was appropriated during the Trump administration.

At MSNBC, Steve Benen pointed out that Harris’s endorsement of the larger bill does not equate to endorsing “the merits of a border wall.”

“Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. are on edge expecting that family and friends who are still in Venezuela will flee their homes in the coming weeks and months” amid turmoil and repression following President Nicolás Maduro’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 elections, reported the Washington Examiner.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 28, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Scattered signs point to growing migration out of Venezuela, amid turmoil and repression following the Nicolás Maduro government’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 presidential elections. Yesterday the line to enter Cúcuta, Colombia from San Antonio del Táchira, Venezuela stretched for a kilometer, local media reported.

WOLA has seen a non-governmental update from this week (no link available) finding only a small post-election increase in migration along the Colombia-Venezuela border so far, with just over half of migrants surveyed planning to stay in Colombia to earn enough money to migrate somewhere else, and about one in twenty planning to migrate to the United States immediately.

At The Hill, Manuela Nivia of Albright Stonebridge Group lamented that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) has put on hold the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—pending adjustments to reduce potential fraud—at a time when Venezuelans may need to flee the country more urgently.

In the more than three years since Texas’s state government began implementing its border security crackdown, at least 17 Texas National Guard members participating in “Operation Lone Star” have died, Stars and Stripes revealed. While the Texas state Military Department has not shared this data, the number of deceased troops “came out during a hearing last week of the Texas House Committee on Defense and Veterans’ Affairs,” reporter Rose Thayer found.

Causes of death vary. They include at least four deaths by suicide, traffic accidents, an accidental shooting, and medical emergencies.

At its peak in 2021, about 10,000 Texas National Guard members were assigned to the border mission. The state refuses to share the deployment’s current size.

In remarks to NewsNation, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called for building barriers along Texas’s border with New Mexico because “There are people who cross from Mexico into New Mexico and then right over into El Paso.”

Near a border wall gap in a remote area of Arizona, men from south Asian countries hoping to turn themselves in to Border Patrol told the conservative Daily Mail about the beatings and theft they suffered at the hands of Mexican criminal organizations.

Guatemalan authorities arrested four police officers who had been demanding bribes from Cuban and Venezuelan migrants near the terminal in the country’s capital from where buses depart for the Mexico border.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s full-throated support of a bipartisan “border deal” bill, which failed in the Senate in February and May, drew a bit of media attention. The bill, the result of a political compromise, includes some measures that the Democratic Party would have opposed during the Trump era, like limits on asylum when the border gets busy and a commitment to spend about $650 million in remaining border wall construction money that had been appropriated during the Trump administration. Some media outlets portrayed Harris’s support for the bill as a “flip-flop” of previous opposition to building new border wall segments.

Senate Republicans’ lead negotiator on the border deal, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), told the Washington Examiner that the $650 million in unspent border wall money might no longer be available, and that the “border deal” bill is probably dead, unlikely to gain necessary Republican votes if it were ever to come up again in the Senate.

The “border deal” bill’s provision to shut down asylum access between ports of entry when Border Patrol apprehensions exceed a threshold is effectively in place right now, anyway (pending legal challenges): the Biden administration implemented a rule to do that on June 5. At the New York Times, Hamed Aleaziz noted that the restriction on asylum access has caused a sharp drop in Border Patrol apprehensions, but the Harris campaign is not drawing attention to it.

The reluctance owes to the reduction’s likely short-term nature; a desire not to raise the profile of the border and migration issue, which draws Republican attacks; and divisions within the Democratic Party about the wisdom of rolling back the legal right to seek asylum.

At Vox Christian Paz discussed progressive Democrats’ silence so far about Harris’s adoption of harder-line stances on the border and migration.

At his newsletter, Arizona-based journalist John Washington dug into Harris’s record on the border and immigration, going back to her time as San Francisco’s district attorney. He concluded that Harris “emphatically championed the politically palatable. Her commitment to the issues has never gone against the grain of partisan public sentiment or the overall inertia of the U.S. immigration system.”

At Los Angeles public radio, Gustavo Solis marshaled statistics and quotes from experts to recall that migrants commit crimes less frequently in the United States than do U.S.-born citizens.

At the Intercept, Sam Biddle reported on DHS’s intention, through its Science and Technology Directorate, to find ways to implement facial recognition scanning of all drivers and passengers approaching the Mexico border, even when their vehicles are in motion.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 27, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met yesterday in Cartagena, Colombia with the foreign ministers of Colombia and Panama to discuss greater cooperation to manage migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region through which about a million people have migrated since 2022.

The three nations committed to more repatriations (like U.S.-funded flights that Panama has begun to operate); greater information sharing; more dialogue and coordination; more development aid for communities along the migration route; more efforts to integrate migrants; and “a plan of action with concrete and realistic steps to strengthen Colombian and Panamanian state presence along their shared border.” The officials did not specify what those concrete steps would be.

The Ciudad Juárez-based human rights group Comprehensive Human Rights in Action (DHIA) revealed that for months, officials from Mexico’s migration agency (National Immigration Institute, INM) have been detaining migrants who arrive in the border city’s airport and placing them on buses bound for Villahermosa, Tabasco, in Mexico’s far south. Unaccompanied children were among those placed on the buses, in clear violation of government policy and human rights, DHIA alleged.

As repression intensifies in Venezuela following the Nicolás Maduro regime’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 presidential elections, video posted to Twitter appeared to show a long line of Venezuelans leaving the country along the border with Brazil.

Diplomats from Bolivia and Chile met to discuss border cooperation ahead of a possible new post-election wave of people fleeing Venezuela.

The chief of police of the Mexican border state of Chihuahua said that his department has received reports from U.S. counterparts warning that members of Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest organized crime group, have passed through the state en route to the United States.

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas has suspended a Biden administration initiative that would offer a pathway to residency and citizenship for up to half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. The temporary restraining order responds to a lawsuit brought by 16 Republican state attorneys-general, led by Texas and America First Legal, the hard-line litigation outfit managed by former Trump immigration advisor Stephen Miller. Similar Republican coalitions have challenged other Biden pro-immigration initiatives before the federal judiciary’s conservative Fifth Circuit, with mixed success.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A Texas Observer investigation revealed that the state’s Department of Public Safety has entered into a five-year, $5.3 million contract to use “Tangles,” a controversial AI-powered surveillance software platform that the agency first employed along the border for the state government’s “Operation Lone Star” security crackdown. The software essentially allows authorities to track the location of a person’s cellphone without obtaining a judicial warrant, using mobile advertising identification data.

Border Report noted that a bridge that Border Patrol has been constructing over the Tijuana River, which flows out of the Mexican border city into U.S. territory, could cause flooding in downtown Tijuana “if agents fail to open the gates fast enough during a storm or in the event of a malfunction.”

“Trump-style immigration restrictions have gone mainstream among 2024 voters,” concluded a grim analysis of public opinion about immigration by Nicole Narea at Vox. “More voters of all stripes now want to see immigration levels decrease than at any point since the early 2000s, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks fueled a rise in nativism.”

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 26, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Panama sent a second U.S.-funded deportation plane to Colombia on August 24, following a flight on August 20. The Colombian citizens aboard were detained after migrating through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle between the two nations. Panama plans flights to Ecuador on August 29, to Colombia on August 30, and to India on September 3.

Roger Mojica, the new director of Panama’s Migration Service (SMN), told local media that the country’s National Border Service (SENAFRONT) force is working with the U.S. government on “a plan to improve the profiling and biometrics of migrants” passing through the Darién route. Mojica voiced concern that an exodus of 4 to 5 million Venezuelan migrants could result from repression and turmoil following the Venezuelan government’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 elections.

According to EFE citing an August 25 Panamanian government statement, 231,089 people have migrated through the Darién Gap jungles so far in 2024. That is fewer than 333,704 during the first eight months of 2023. Of these migrants, 66.3 percent have been Venezuelan, while Colombian and Ecuadorian citizens have been nearly equal at 6.3 percent each. Chinese citizens are in fourth place with 5.2 percent of the total; 4.8 percent have been Haitian. Migration has been dropping: from 31,049 people in June, to 20,519 in July, to 9,497 so far in August. (Panama’s migration authority has not yet updated its presentation of official statistics.)

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is in Cartagena, Colombia for a meeting with the foreign ministers of Colombia and Panama to discuss “irregular migration and countering transnational criminal organizations.”

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on August 25, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance repeatedly evaded questions about whether a new Trump administration would seek to separate migrant families apprehended at the border, as happened in 2017-18.

During an August 22 campaign visit to the border in southeast Arizona, Donald Trump held a press conference alongside a stretch of border wall that was in fact built during the Obama administration, the Washington Post reported. “Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office,” the Post’s analysis continued. “The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling.”

Reports published last Friday by the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Sentinel fact-checked some of the inaccuracies in Trump’s claims about migrants’ participation in crime, the number of migrant apprehensions during his tenure, and the notion that Venezuela is sending the occupants of its prisons and mental institutions to the border.

The Trump campaign is presenting those claims at a website it calls “Kamala Border Bloodbath.”

A team of trainers from Spain and South America were in Ciudad Juárez to offer training to the Chihuahua State Police force’s SWAT team, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The New York Times’s Hamed Aleaziz examined the sharp drop in Border Patrol migrant apprehensions that followed the Biden administration’s early June imposition of a rule restricting access to asylum between the border’s ports of entry. While the rule has made the border quieter at a key electoral moment, “migrant activists say Mr. Biden’s executive order is weeding out far too many people, including those who should be allowed to have their cases heard.”

The Houston Chronicle looked at data showing that the “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown carried out by Texas’s Republican state government has not reduced migration to Texas any more than to other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.

At the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact site, Dara Lind published an explainer about the immigration provisions of “Project 2025,” a plan for a second Trump administration drawn up by a team of experts and officials close to the Trump campaign. The document contains “a clear plan to restrict legal immigration of all kinds, while laying the foundations for a potential campaign of mass deportation.” These “foundations,” however, do not include an actual detailed deportation plan.

At the Washington Post, columnist Eduardo Porter looked at the logistical obstacles that would stand in the way of Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations of several million undocumented migrants if elected. “Flying 11 million people out would require 58,201 flights in fully loaded Boeing 737-800s.”

The Democratic Party’s “overall message” on the border and migration—especially asylum—during the 2024 campaign and last week’s party convention “has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades,” noted a New York Times news analysis. Kamala Harris is expected to release a full immigration platform in a few weeks, the Times reported.

The New York Times profiled Juan Ciscomani, a Mexican-born Republican who represents southeast Arizona, a swing district, in the House of Representatives. Ciscomani’s support for the Republican House majority’s hardline border bill (H.R. 2, which passed the House on a party-line vote in May 2023) could cost him support against his Democratic challenger in November, the Times noted.

In Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, “The phenomenon of people migrating on bicycles“ along the searingly hot coastal route toward Oaxaca ”began about two years ago,” according to a report by Rogelio Ramos in Chiapas Paralelo.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 23, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

In her convention speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Vice President Kamala Harris called for more border security—including passage of a bill that would cement asylum restrictions in place—along with increased legal pathways for migrants. Here is the relevant text:

let me be clear, after decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.

Well, I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law. I know — I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump visited the border in Cochise County, southeastern Arizona, where he met with local law enforcement and representatives of the Border Patrol agents’ union. At an hour-long press conference, the ex-president drew attention to crimes committed by migrants, featuring some victims’ relatives. Trump falsely portrayed Kamala Harris as being a “border czar” who favored open borders, and inaccurately accused the Biden administration of allowing 20 million migrants to enter the United States.

(CBP’s migrant encounters at the border totaled about 8.2 million during the Biden administration, and about 4.1 or 4.2 million releases into the U.S. interior. Another 520,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan citizens entered—at airports, not the border—after applying for humanitarian parole.)

Standing between a tall stretch of border wall and a pile of unused steel beams, the new president of the Border Patrol agents’ union, Paul Perez, said, “To my right is what we call Trump wall. This was wall that was built under President Trump. To my left, we have what we call Kamala wall. It’s just sitting there doing nothing, lying down.”

Roll Call noted that the former president’s remarks often wandered away from the border and migration issue. While on site, Trump abruptly ended an interview with NewsNation reporter Ali Bradley, who had just asked him about the July assassination attempt in Pennsylvania: “We’re in danger standing here talking. So let’s not talk any longer.”

An expansion of the CBP One smartphone app’s geographic coverage goes into effect today, allowing asylum seekers to make appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry while in Mexico’s southern-border states of Chiapas and Tabasco. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not expanded daily appointments beyond the current 1,450 per day, even as new asylum access restrictions have made the app most migrants’ only path to the U.S. asylum system at the border.

A letter from numerous U.S. and Mexican civil society organizations, organized by the Mexico-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI), called on Mexico’s government to do far more to protect and accommodate people awaiting CBP One appointments. “People await appointments in Mexico’s territory for up to 7 months,” the letter observed. “The extended stay has generated overcrowding in shelters…which, together with authorities’ failure to provide decent and safe spaces for waiting, has forced many people to settle in informal camps.”

Following a U.S.-backed deportation flight carrying 28 migrants to Colombia on August 20, Panama’s government announced that it will soon carry out removal flights to Ecuador (August 29), India (August 30), and China (September 3), along with additional flights to Colombia. All of those aboard the planes are migrants captured after walking for days through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route.

Four men and two women from Colombia were taken to a hospital “for varying levels of injury” after falling from the border wall near Otay Mesa, southeast of San Diego, local television news reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

In an article at the Texas Observer, Brian Elmore, an El Paso emergency medical physician who co-founded the Hope Border Institute’s Clínica Hope facility in Ciudad Juárez, vividly described what it is like trying to save lives in a sector of the border that has seen Border Patrol’s count of migrant deaths—mostly from heat exhaustion and dehydration—more than quadruple since 2021. “El Paso is witnessing the convergence of two deadly trends: climate change and border militarization,” Elmore wrote.

Venezuelan migrants and Mexican shelter operators in Mexico’s northern border cities, especially Ciudad Juárez, told EFE that they fear an intensified exodus of Venezuelans following the Maduro regime’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28th presidential elections and subsequent political repression.

A UNHCR document reports that 63,672 citizens of Ecuador sought asylum in the United States between 2021 and 2023. Of 339 Ecuadorians the UN agency interviewed in countries along the U.S.-bound migration route, 63 percent said they were fleeing “generalized violence” and 56 percent said they were victims of violence.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 22, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

A few speakers addressed the border and immigration policy at the Democratic Party’s convention on August 21. Most of the messaging surrounded efforts to combat organized crime and fentanyl trafficking. Some, though, attacked Republican nominee Donald Trump for urging Republican legislators to kill the “Border Act,” a bill resulting from negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators that failed in February. That compromise legislation’s provisions included some items that Democrats would not have supported in the past, like a ban on asylum access at busy times and a big increase in ICE detention capacity.

Analysts and pundits saw some of the Democrats’ convention rhetoric calling for tougher border security measures and limits on asylum—language reflected in the party’s platform—as indicative of a rightward shift within the party on border and migration policy, responding to similar shifts in public opinion.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris addresses the convention this evening.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will make a campaign visit to the border today in Sierra Vista, Cochise County, southeast Arizona. It is a part of the border where voters trend Republican, leading Democrats in registrations by a two-to-one margin, unlike the much “bluer” Nogales area just to the west.

Trump’s event—with County Sheriff Mark Dannels, a longtime proponent of hard-line border policies, and representatives of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing most agents—will be closed to the public. Local Democrats are deriding the visit as a “photo op.”

At an event yesterday in Edinburg, Texas with “hundreds” of agents in attendance, the Border Patrol union offered its election endorsement to Texas’s arch-conservative Sen. Ted Cruz (R). (The National Border Patrol Council first endorsed Donald Trump during the 2016 primary campaign.) The crowd booed when Kamala Harris’s name was mentioned, Border Report reported. “Cruz said a Spanish curse word to the crowd when referring to the administration and drew cheers from the Border Patrol agents assembled.”

Brazil is suspending visa-free travel to citizens of some Asian nations, including India, Nepal, and Vietnam. Some of those travelers have been seeking asylum upon arrival in Brazil, then continuing their journey northward, through the Darién Gap and toward the United States.

The number of migrants passing through the Darién Gap in August totaled more than 8,000 by August 19 or 20, according to coverage of a U.S.-backed deportation flight from Panama to Colombia in Spain’s El País, which cited the new director of the country’s National Migration Service (SNM). That is about 400 people per day: a sharp drop from roughly 1,000 per day during the first half of 2024 and over 2,000 per day at times in late 2023. It would be the lowest daily average measured in the Darién in any month since April 2022.

The current drop in migration at the border led Texas’s Republican state government to pause, in late June, its program of busing some released migrants to Democratic-governed cities, the New York Times reported.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is continuing legal actions against the state’s charities assisting recently released asylum seekers and migrants. He is demanding that a representative from the Team Brownsville migrant shelter be deposed by the end of the month “to answer how the NGO assists migrants—among other things,” noted Aarón Torres of the Dallas Morning News.

In September, Mexico’s refugee agency (Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, COMAR) plans to open a new facility, or “Multiservice Center,” to attend to migrants in the country’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. A short drive from the Guatemala border, Tapachula’s perpetually overwhelmed COMAR office receives the largest number of migrants arriving and applying for asylum—two-thirds of Mexico’s applications so far this year.

Discussing the foreign policy of the administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who leaves office on September 30, Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena hailed what she called the “Mexican Human Mobility Model,” claiming, “We have changed the narrative even in the United States, which previously did not talk about structural causes, this has been achieved thanks to President López Obrador.”

Guatemalan police arrested seven people accused of being the smugglers who arranged the journey of some of the 53 migrants who died while locked in the back of an overheated tractor-trailer near San Antonio, Texas in June 2022.

Prosecutors in Mexico’s violence-plagued border state of Tamaulipas won convictions and long prison terms for 11 members of the once-powerful Zetas cartel responsible for killing 122 migrants, whom they pulled off of buses, tortured, and massacred in 2010 and 2011.

Hitmen attacked, and gravely wounded, the chief magistrate of the Tamaulipas state supreme court. The attack took place in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, which is distant from the border itself.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A document from UnidosUS (formerly known as the National Council of La Raza) endorsed “firm border enforcement,” particularly improvements to ports of entry and prioritizing asylum access for asylum seekers who come to ports of entry. Among other proposals is the creation of “an ‘immigration FEMA’ equipped with the funding and authority to respond to large-scale migration events.”

At the Washington Examiner, Anna Giaritelli looked at the policies that have led to the current drop in migrant encounters at the border, and at the Biden administration’s use of alternative migration pathways that avoid the border, like humanitarian parole.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 21, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Panama sent its first planeload of deportees from the Darién Gap under a new initiative supported by $6 million in U.S. government funding. About 30 Colombian adults, reportedly with criminal records, were repatriated aboard a plane to Medellín. One, according to the director of Panama’s migration agency, Roger Mojica, was an alleged sicario (hitman) for the Gulf Clan, the Colombian organized-crime group that controls territory at the entrance to the Darién route.

This official said that Panama is in talks with “Ecuador, India, and other nations” to coordinate deportation flights, but that there are no plans to return citizens of Venezuela—the majority of Darién migrants—due to a lack of diplomatic relations with Caracas. After passing through Darién reception sites, Venezuelans “are allowed to continue with the controlled flow,” said Mojica. (It is not clear, but this may mean that Colombia will not receive Venezuelans who have Temporary Protection Permit (PPT) documented status in Colombia.)

The early July announcement of deportations and the new Panamanian government’s other efforts to limit Darién migration has caused a moderate pause in the flow of migration through Central America. 24,133 refugees and migrants transited Honduras in July, a 15 percent decrease from June, according to a monthly update from UNHCR.

Of 191 migrants interviewed by the UN agency in Honduras last month, 99 percent intended to stay in Honduras for less than a month (usually, less than a week). 68 percent cited “access to employment” as a reason for leaving, 32% cited a lack of documentation in the country where they had sought to settle, 39 percent cited “generalized violence and insecurity,” and 4 percent said they had been victims of violence, threats, or intimidation. (People leave for more than one reason, which is why the totals exceed 100 percent.)

The number of migrant remains Border Patrol has recovered in its El Paso Sector (New Mexico and the far western edge of Texas) stands at a record 164 so far in fiscal 2024 (since October 2023), Border Report reported. This is the fourth straight year in which the El Paso Sector has set a new record (39 in 2021, 71 in 2022, and 149 in 2023).

The death toll comes at a time when overall migration has dropped, but when new federal restrictions on asylum and a Texas state security buildup near downtown El Paso have incentivized more migration through nearby deserts. Deaths appear to be concentrated in areas that are a short drive from El Paso and other populations where water and first aid would be available.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data reported last Friday show that the agency seized 17,312 pounds of fentanyl during the first 10 months of fiscal 2024. Extended to 12 months, that would be 20,774 pounds: a 22 percent drop from 2023. This appears certain to be the first year in which border fentanyl seizures end up fewer than the previous year, since the drug began appearing in the mid-2010s.

This Friday (August 23) is when asylum seekers in Mexico will begin being able to use the CBP One app from the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco. Until now, the app, with which people can make appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, has only functioned from Mexico City northward. Citizens of Mexico may use the app from anywhere in the country.

Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens tweeted that the agency has apprehended more than 63,000 “Special Interest Migrants” so far in fiscal 2024, 85 percent of them in its San Diego (California) sector.

The term refers to a person who “potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests” based on their travel patterns. The most common “travel pattern” is a migrant’s country of origin. Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not publish a list of its “special interest” countries, most appear to be majority Islamic nations—like Jordan, which is named in Chief Owens’s tweet.

A report from the DHS Inspector-General found that 448,000 unaccompanied migrant children were transferred to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement from 2019 to 2023, which then turned most of them over to relatives or sponsors. During those years, more than 32,000 unaccompanied children “failed to appear for their immigration court hearings.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

“The contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump illustrates what an important issue border security has become in this year’s presidential election, as Democrats and Republicans alike respond to polls showing that a growing number of voters want to stem new arrivals,” reads a mid-Democratic Convention news analysis from Andrea Castillo at the Los Angeles Times. It notes many Democrats’ pivot “toward tougher border messaging.”

Trump will visit the border in southeast Arizona on Thursday, the day Harris accepts the Democratic nomination.

At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque published a tribute to Eddie Canales of the South Texas Human Rights Center (1948-2024), who passed away on July 31. Canales maintained water stations and assisted identification efforts in Brooks County, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande Valley border region, an area where dozens if not hundreds of remains are recovered each year.

A proper legacy for Eddie, del Bosque wrote, would be the establishment of a center in Texas to identify migrants’ remains and provide closure to their loved ones: “one centralized facility where state-mandated fingerprinting and DNA sampling can be undertaken, and the cases can be managed and people ultimately identified.”

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 20, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

As the Democratic Party’s convention launched in Chicago, its platform, published Monday, includes language calling for changes in the law curtailing asylum access at the border during busy times, as is currently happening under the Biden administration’s June 4 asylum rule. Under a section entitled “Temporary Emergency Authority to Shut Down the Border,” the platform—a non-binding document—suggests:

When the system is overwhelmed, the President should have emergency authority to expel migrants who are crossing unlawfully and stop processing asylum claims except for those using a safe and orderly process at Ports of Entry. The authority should be accompanied by humanitarian exceptions for vulnerable populations including unaccompanied children and victims of trafficking.

In remarks to the Convention on Monday evening, President Biden hailed the drop in migration that took place in the first weeks after the asylum-restriction rule went into effect:

Then I had to take executive action. The result of the executive action I took: border encounters have dropped over 50%. In fact, there are fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office. And unlike Trump, we will not demonize immigrants, saying they’re the poison of the blood of America, poison the blood of our country.

A look at the Border Patrol sectors that report weekly data points to this initial drop in migration leveling off by mid-July; Border Patrol apprehensions have been largely flat since then.

Panama today will begin deporting some migrants aboard U.S.-funded deportation flights after they exit the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route from Colombia.

The U.S. government has reportedly allocated $6 million to support those flights. Assuming $500 per deportee, that would be enough to remove 12,000 people, equivalent to 6 percent of the migrant population in the Darién region during the first half of 2024.

At least the initial flights will go from Panama to Colombia, the country from which migrants entered. As Colombians are only about 6 percent of migrants passing through the Darién, most of those aboard the planes will probably be citizens of other countries, mainly Venezuela (65 percent of Darién migrants).

Analyzing Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) recently released data about Border Patrol apprehensions reveals that despite heavy investment in its “Operation Lone Star” crackdown, Texas has not experienced steeper migration declines than Arizona, where the Democratic governor has not pursued similar hard-line measures.

  • Between the record-setting month of December 2023 and July, Border Patrol apprehensions in Texas fell 86 percent. However, they fell 84 percent in Arizona and 77 percent border-wide.
  • Between January and July, Arizona’s Border Patrol apprehensions fell 74 percent, more than Texas’ 53 percent or the border-wide decline of 55 percent.
  • Between May and July, Arizona also leads with a 64 percent drop in Border Patrol apprehensions, well ahead of Texas’s 50 percent drop and a border-wide drop of 52 percent.
  • For the second time in the 2024 calendar year, Texas in July led all states in Border Patrol apprehensions.

These data are derived from CBP’s reporting of “U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations Encounters by State,” subtracting Laredo and El Paso Field Office port-of-entry encounters from Texas, Tucson Field Office port-of-entry encounters from Arizona, and San Diego Field Office port-of-entry encounters from California. (A small number of New Mexico port of entry encounters gets subtracted from Texas, as they fall under the El Paso Field Office; this makes Texas’s decline look slightly steeper than it is.)

A boy from southern Mexico seeking to migrate to the United States was killed, and eight people from Ecuador, Africa, and Mexico were wounded, when assailants opened fire on the vehicle in which they were traveling in Mexico’s border state of Sonora, across from Arizona. The attack may have been related to violent competition between migrant smugglers.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Migrant rights activist Abraham Monarez told Ciudad Juárez’s Norte that the number of migrants in the Mexican border city has plummeted because of the Mexican government’s operations to remove migrants to the southern part of the country, and because people find they can seek CBP One appointments from elsewhere in Mexico. Many who come to Juárez are staying in hotels instead of shelters, Monarez said. “Now, when they get their appointment at CBP, that’s when they move” north from places further south, like Mexico City.

“As Colombians try to settle down in Denver, they often feel overlooked” amid a larger number of asylum seekers from Venezuela who have received more attention from service providers, the Denver Post reported.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 19, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data late Friday about encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border through July. It found that Border Patrol apprehended 56,408 undocumented migrants between the border’s ports of entry last month.

  • That is a 32 percent drop from June, a 52 percent drop from May, and a 77 percent drop from the record-setting month of December 2023.
  • It was the smallest monthly total of Border Patrol apprehensions since September 2020, when Donald Trump was president during the height of the pandemic, and fewer than July 2019 and the monthly average for all of 2019.
  • Every nationality with over 100 apprehensions declined from June to July.
  • All nine of Border Patrol’s U.S.-Mexico border sectors saw a drop from June to July, as they did from May to June. The San Diego (California) sector was number one in apprehensions, followed by Tucson (Arizona) and El Paso (Texas-New Mexico).
  • Another 47,708 people came to border ports of entry, about 38,000 of them with appointments made using the CBP One app.

Combining migrants apprehended at and between ports of entry yielded a July total of 104,116 overall encounters with migrants in July, the fewest since February 2021. 32 percent were from Mexico, 12 percent from Venezuela, and 10 percent from Cuba. Of Venezuelan and Cuban citizens, 97 percent came to ports of entry, in most cases with CBP One appointments. Very few attempted to cross into Border Patrol custody, where the asylum rule and Mexico’s agreement to take those nationalities’ deportees would have made overland deportation very likely regardless of protection needs.

Much of the recent drop in apprehensions owes to the Biden administration’s early June rule (currently challenged in court) that almost completely cuts off asylum access for migrants apprehended between ports of entry. CBP reports deporting more than 92,000 people to over 130 countries since the rule went into effect.

As a result of the policy change, Border Patrol released just 12,106 people into the U.S. interior in July with notices to appear in immigration court, down from 27,768 in June and a record high of 191,782 last December.

Nearly half of those apprehended (27,313 of 56,408) were placed in expedited removal proceedings. Under the June rule, these proceedings required them to prove a higher-than-usual standard of “credible fear” in order to access the U.S. asylum system. The rule caused a sharp drop—from 55 percent to 24 percent—in the share of migrants expressing fear of return, Camilo Montoya-Gálvez of CBS News reported, citing an August 16 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) court filing.

Amid the reduced number of migrants being apprehended between ports of entry, Border Patrol most days is dropping off “single-digit” numbers of migrants at the El Paso area’s largest migrant shelter, USA Today reported. (Those released to the shelter after receiving CBP One appointments exceed 100 daily.)

Panama’s new president, José Raúl Mulino, said that U.S.-backed flights deporting migrants from the Darién Gap region are to commence on August 20 (Tuesday). “I sincerely regret it in my soul, because I know why many of them are fleeing,” Mulino told Univisión. “The political crisis in Venezuela is choking them”. Flights will go from Panama to Colombia.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will visit the border in Arizona on Thursday, the day that presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is to give her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He “is expected to engage with the border patrol union,” Bloomberg reported.

Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R), who has been investigating and intimidating border-area charities that shelter migrants released from CBP custody, is now going after the non-profit status FIEL Houston, an immigrant rights group. Paxton contends that FIEL, which criticizes the Texas state government’s hard-line migration policies, violates its tax-exempt status by being too vocal about legislation and electoral politics.

In Tijuana, organized crime extortion is so pervasive that even small businesses like sidewalk vendors must pay $100 per week or be violently forced out of business. The fees have jumped in 2024, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Los Angeles Times’s Andrea Castillo noted how down-ticket Democratic candidates for congressional seats are running ads featuring law enforcement personnel and attacking Republican opponents on the border issue, portraying them as obstructing legislative efforts to crack down on migration.

Republicans, meanwhile, spent over $247 million during the first half of 2024 on campaign ads with border and migration themes, nearly always as scare tactics. Of 745 ads surveyed, about 20 percent used out-of-context and outdated visuals, and a similar portion used derogatory terms like “illegals,” “aliens,” or even “murderers” or “rapists.” Ads were heavily focused in media markets far from the border, like Ohio, Indiana, and Montana.

The Washington Post looked at Kamala Harris’s record on the border and migration during her vice presidency, which consisted largely of an effort to address root causes of migration from Central America.

Politico looked at Harris’s experience launching a task force to fight cross-border gang activity during her tenure as California’s attorney-general. In doing so, “she engaged the very people and law enforcement unions and others that had opposed her” campaign for the post, her former campaign manager said.

The New York Times looked at how Donald Trump, if elected, might use the U.S. military on U.S. soil in ways without precedent in modern U.S. history, probably by invoking the Insurrection Act. They include using soldiers to carry out Trump’s promised mass deportation of undocumented migrants. The BBC looked at this, as well as what ICE’s cooperation with local law enforcement would look like in this “mass deportation” scenario.

An American Immigration Council fact sheet broke down the $409 billion that the U.S. government has spent on immigration enforcement since DHS began operations in 2003. It noted that, adjusted for inflation, Border Patrol’s budget has increased 765 percent since 1994.

Visiting small-town Ohio, the New York Times’s Jazmine Ulloa found widespread belief in the false conspiracy theory that Democrats are encouraging undocumented migration in order to enroll migrants as pro-Democratic voters.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 16, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Border Patrol statistics obtained by USA Today’s Lauren Villagrán point to 61,325 apprehensions of migrants in July, including about 5,000 people taken into custody at ports of entry without CBP One appointments. This number, which aligns with early-August reports of about 57,000 Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry last month, is the fewest recorded at the U.S.-Mexico border since September 2020. CBP has not yet posted July migration data.

Villagrán visited the largest shelter for released migrants in the El Paso area, where most occupants are people who had CBP One appointments at ports of entry. Border Patrol drop-offs of migrants who crossed the border without inspection—and are mostly banned from seeking asylum under a June 2024 Biden administration rule—are down to “single digits” per day.

Villagrán, Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner, and Didi Martinez and Laura Strickler of NBC News reported that the drop in migration has nearly stalled Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) program of busing released migrants, without advance coordination, to U.S. cities governed by Democratic mayors.

Border Report’s Sandra Sanchez covered a training in Eagle Pass of volunteers helping to identify deceased migrants. A mobile morgue run by the sheriff’s department in Maverick County, which includes Eagle Pass, currently holds over 40 unidentified remains; the county lacks a medical examiner. Some remains have been in the morgue since 2020.

President Biden spoke with Panama’s new president, José Raúl Mulino, on August 14. They “discussed joint efforts to address the challenges stemming from irregular migration through Panama, including the regularization of migrant populations and increased humane enforcement efforts.”

A host of senior Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials will be speaking at a “Border Technology Summit” in San Diego on September 24-25. The event encourages networking between border law enforcement management and private corporations seeking to sell technology and services. Admission for government and military employees is $49; the fee for foreign governments, academics, and non-profits is $1,195 (currently discounted to $995).

Analyses and Feature Stories

At the Border Chronicle, Todd Miller took stock of the Kamala Harris campaign’s recent tough talk about border security and migration, including pledges to maintain asylum curbs and hire more Border Patrol agents.

The BBC looked at Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportation of migrants from the United States, and at his running mate J.D. Vance’s suggestion, “Let’s start with one million.” The analysis pointed to many potential obstacles, from law to logistics to public outrage.

The Associated Press reported from Peru, Chile, and Colombia about those countries’ expectation of a new wave of Venezuelan migration following the July 28 presidential elections’ fraudulent and repressive result. The Miami Herald reported on an August 8-11 Meganálisis poll of 1,007 Venezuelans, which found more than 40 percent are considering fleeing. (It also found that 93 percent of Venezuelans do not believe that Nicolás Maduro won the election.)

Tags: News Links

August 15, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Border Report’s Salvador Rivera spoke to a Haitian woman who waited eight months, much of them in Tijuana, to obtain a CBP One appointment to seek asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego.

MIT Technology Review covered Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to use facial recognition technology on migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border to improve these systems’ accuracy. The initiative raises ethical and privacy concerns, especially with regard to transparency—the plans are vague—and children’s ability to give informed consent. A staffer for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) called DHS’s plan “another stride toward a surveillance state [that] should be a concern to everyone who values privacy.”

National Guard troops acting on the orders of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) have begun laying down additional layers of razor wire along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass and in El Paso. The wire in El Paso will be the third layer of state-government barrier in front of the border wall; across the border in Ciudad Juárez, the Hope Border Institute’s Clínica Hope has already treated many people, including children, with cuts and lacerations from Texas’s wire.

Arizona’s Supreme Court will allow the state’s voters in November to decide on a proposal—similar to Texas’s S.B. 4 law, which is currently on hold pending legal challenges—making it a state crime to cross the border without inspection and empowering local police to arrest people suspected of doing so.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The current decline in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border will be short-lived as migrants’ desperation remains unchanged, argues a USA Today column from Yael Schacher and Rachel Schmidtke of Refugees International. A longer-term policy would adopt “new approaches to adjudicating asylum claims and to reception of asylum seekers at the border and in destination cities,” while strengthening migration pathways like Safe Mobility Offices.

A Guardian column by High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi repeated some of these themes, noting that deterrence-based policies ultimately fail. A better response, Grandi argued, lies in building up asylum systems and creating “one-stop shops” that provide information and humanitarian assistance to better channel people on the move.

Washington Post data columnist Philip Bump noted that at least for now, migration at the border—along with crime and inflation—has declined in recent months, taking key lines of attack away from the Trump campaign.

An NPR analysis of the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation” plans pointed to logistical and legal obstacles they would face, though it only briefly discussed Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s intention to elide those obstacles using the U.S. military, invoking emergency powers.

Tags: News Links

August 14, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

The New York Times reported on a $45 million settlement that CBP has reached with about 1,000 female employees of its Office of Field Operations, who sued the agency for having “instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation” against employees who become pregnant. CBP must now draft a new policy for pregnant employees and train managers and supervisors.

The story conveyed recent statistics about the CBP workforce’s gender makeup: women are about 24 percent of employees, less than the FBI’s 30 percent. (Meanwhile, CBP’s Border Patrol component struggles to exceed 5 percent.) CBP hopes that its recruitment classes will be made up of 30 percent women by 2030, but new hires are currently 20 percent women.

Though Panama’s new government has yet to update official statistics about Darién Gap migration beyond May, a UNHCR update revealed that 31,049 people migrated through the treacherous jungle region in June. Of that total, 23,509 (76%) were citizens of Venezuela. That pace of roughly 1,000 migrants per day has been steady since January, but is a drop from well over 2,000 per day in August and September of 2023. (Preliminary data from July, gleaned from Panamanian government press releases, points to a drop in the flow to just over 700 per day.)

Migrant shelters in Tijuana have been seeing more arrivals of unaccompanied minors, municipal migration official Enrique Lucero told Border Report. Often, Lucero said, parents are “sending their children to the border ahead of themselves, hoping to reunite at some point in the future.” He also cited “a belief that unaccompanied minors are accepted into the United States immediately and given asylum.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement defending the work of Catholic migrant shelters, like Annunciation House in El Paso and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, being targeted by Texas’ state attorney general for allegations of facilitating illegal migration and smuggling. It reads, “Anti-Catholic bias, political motivations, and misinformation have long undergirded these claims. Assisting newcomers, however, is one of the Corporal Works of Mercy and integral to Catholic identity.”

The conservative New York Post lamented that DHS’s Family Expedited Removal (FERM) Program—a Biden administration initiative that puts some family asylum seekers through express adjudication processes, raising due process concerns—has deported just 2,600 of 24,000 migrants enrolled since May 2023.

Senior Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services asking for the number of “potentially dangerous adults in the United States” who have applied with the Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement to take custody of unaccompanied children who crossed the border.

In Kinney County, which occupies a small piece of the border between Del Rio and Eagle Pass in mid-Texas, Sheriff Brad Coe—a staunch supporter of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) Operation Lone Star—is now training deputies in the use of less-lethal weapons like pepper ball and tear gas launchers in order to “manage crowds” of migrants, NewsNation reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Three major media outlets published analyses of Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s role in the Biden administration’s border and migration policies. They generally conclude that Harris was in no way the administration’s so-called “Border Czar,” and that she had a mixed record leading its strategy for addressing root causes of migration from Central America.

Harris’s Central America role “was a decidedly long-term—and limited—approach to a humanitarian crisis, and it has allowed Republicans to tie her to the broader fight over the border,” the Associated Press noted.

Former Biden administration National Security Council official Katie Tobin told the BBC that Harris “deserves credit for ‘a good news story’ in Central America”: notable drops in migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since 2021.

“The Biden-Harris administration’s record on border enforcement is certainly mixed, but that should not distract from the progress made through Harris’ efforts to address the causes of immigration,” Wayne Cornelius of U.C. San Diego wrote at the Los Angeles Times.

In Arizona, Democratic Senate candidate Rubén Gallego, a House member with a record of progressive policy views, is now proposing “increased funding for border patrol, border technology, and more border agents while also ‘advocating for sane, comprehensive immigration reforms, things that would take care of our Dreamers,’” NBC News reported. Gallego leads Republican opponent Kari Lake in polls for the vote to replace retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I).

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 13, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Mexico’s northern border state of Chihuahua, which includes Ciudad Juárez, has seen a considerable decrease in migration flows but an increase in the number of migrants whom criminals are kidnapping or otherwise targeting for extortion, said the state government’s public security secretary.

On the Texas and New Mexico sides of the border, meanwhile, Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector is on pace to record a record number of migrant deaths despite recent months’ lower migration levels; Border Patrol’s count of recovered remains stood at 140 in July. Reporting from Yuma about humanitarian volunteers’ efforts to prevent deaths, Arizona’s Family noted yesterday that “at least 90 undocumented border crossers have died this year attempting to cross into the Arizona desert.”

The commissioner of Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM), Francisco Garduño, remains on trial, facing criminal charges for the March 27, 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez INM detention facility that killed 40 migrants locked inside. Yesterday, a judge in Ciudad Juárez denied Garduño’s lawyers’ request for conditional suspension of the proceedings against him. It was his legal team’s fourth unsuccessful attempt to have the case dismissed. Dozens of protesters had gathered outside the courtroom.

Migrant rights defenders in San Diego told Border Report that they have seen a sharp drop in the number of asylum seekers waiting to be processed at the border wall since the Biden administration’s June 5 rule banning asylum access for most migrants between ports of entry. The hot summer weather is also a factor slowing migration at the moment, said Pedro Ríos of American Friends Service Committee.

More than a dozen Border Patrol agents interviewed by the Washington Examiner said they would “never” vote for Kamala Harris “because they do not view her as supportive of the organization and its congressionally mandated mission.” One told reporter Anna Giaritelli, “We are screwed as a country if she becomes president. The border will never close.”

Despite this, the Harris campaign has been promising, including in advertisements, to increase hiring of “thousands” of Border Patrol agents. Asked by a Fox News reporter about this pledge, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blamed Republicans for blocking the Biden administration from funding the hiring of more agents. (The 2024 Homeland Security budget provides funding for a force of 22,000 agents, which is nearly 3,000 more than Border Patrol’s current staffing.)

Repeating his false claim that Venezuela’s authoritarian regime has sent criminals to migrate to the United States, Donald Trump told Elon Musk in a Twitter Spaces interview that Venezuela is now so safe that he might relocate there if he loses the November presidential election.

A Pew Research Center poll found 83 percent of U.S. respondents, including 76 percent of those identifying as Democrats, judging that the U.S. government is “doing a bad job dealing with migrants at the border.” Two thirds said that the Mexican government is also doing a bad job. Mexicans held more approving views of both migration policy and the United States in general.

A NOTUS investigation raised concerns that those aboard a recent deportation flight to China, most of them likely people apprehended at the border, may have included members of Muslim ethnic groups, like Uyghurs and Kazakhs, facing “genocide.” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and National Security Council (NSC) officials were repeatedly unresponsive to reporters’ inquiries.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is about to deploy a tethered surveillance blimp just west of the Santa Teresa, New Mexico port of entry, a short drive from El Paso, local legislators told Border Report.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At Voice of San Diego, Kate Morrissey visited Casita de U.T., a Tijuana migrant shelter housing trans women, all of them victims of violence, now waiting for CBP One appointments at the San Ysidro port of entry. The San Diego-Tijuana organization Al Otro Lado has supported a photography workshop to help them tell their stories during their months-long wait.

By exacerbating problems caused by the authoritarian regime’s economic mismanagement, Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector increased migration from the country, some of it to the United States, argued Isabela Dias in Mother Jones, adding to a finding reported in the July 26 Washington Post.

Also at Mother Jones, Mark Follman spoke to security experts concerned that Donald Trump’s “migrant invasion at the border” rhetoric could trigger disturbed individuals or white-supremacist groups to commit acts of violence.

Tags: News Links

August 12, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

At campaign rallies in Arizona and Nevada, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris again sought to “flip the script” on the U.S.-Mexico border issue, using it as a line of attack on Republican nominee Donald Trump. Harris called for “comprehensive reform that includes, yes, strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

Though reforms like a pathway to citizenship have stalled in the Senate for lack of 60 votes to break a filibuster, Harris is promising tougher border measures that would only require appropriations (50 votes), like hiring more Border Patrol agents.

At Salon, Adriel Orozco of the Migration Policy Institute explained why attacks on Harris’s vice-presidential role addressing causes of migration in Central America, misconstruing her as a “Border Czar,” are inaccurate.

Anticipating “a potential increase in migration flows” through treacherous deserts where hundreds of migrants die each year, Doctors Without Borders is resuming a medical mission along the border in Arizona.

In a Guardian photo essay from Colombia’s department of Norte de Santander, near the Venezuela border, Euan Wallace reported that migrants and shelters are bracing for a “new spike in migration” from Venezuela following authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro’s widely disputed claim to have won July 28 elections.

The DHS Inspector General published a report on January 2024 unannounced inspections of CBP facilities in Border Patrol’s mid-Texas Del Rio Sector. It found that agents were holding 23 percent to 31 percent of detainees longer than the 72-hour standard due to limited ICE bed space and prioritization of family units over single adults. All inspected facilities had lower-than-required medical staffing levels, and agents were not consistently logging meals and welfare checks.

Capacity was probably less of an issue: January 2024 was a less-busy month for Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, with 16,710 migrant apprehensions, down sharply from 71,050 in December 2023.

Mexico’s army destroyed 1,347 weapons confiscated in Tijuana. “Most” entered the border city from the United States, which has far more permissive gun ownership laws, the head of the city’s public safety office told Border Report.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At the New York Times, Lulu García-Navarro profiled Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), who led Republican efforts to negotiate border reform legislation with the Senate’s Democratic majority in late 2023 and early 2024. The “border deal” bill that negotiators came up with failed in early February amid vocal opposition from Donald Trump. Lankford said he resisted chief Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-Connecticut) demand that the bill include a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” because Republicans would have viewed it as a “bill-killer.”

The New York Times published a full-length obituary of Eddie Canales (1948-2024), the co-founder and director of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, who sought to prevent migrant deaths by leaving water stations on ranchland in Brooks County, north of the Rio Grande Valley border region.

The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier penned a column at the libertarian publication Reason warning that a temporary suspension of the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela could lead to more illegal entries of migrants from those countries at the U.S.-Mexico border. The authors call into question the Department of Homeland Security’s justification for suspending the parole program: suspicions of fraud in sponsorship applications. Of irregularities in applications, they contend, much are the result of human error in the filling out of online forms, not malice.

The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington looked at reasons why Tejano voters in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley borderlands are increasingly voting Republican. They include social conservatism and support for law enforcement and fossil fuels, along with support for stricter policies toward newly arriving migrants.

The Markup published an interview with Francisco Lara-García, a sociologist at Hofstra University who has studied border surveillance technology and its impact on civil liberties and everyday life in the borderlands. “Personally, the thing that is most unsettling is: the ways that you don’t know that you’re being surveilled.”

In a visit to El Paso, EFE found “barbed wire fences over the Rio Grande (the natural divide with Mexico), prison-style watchtowers, helicopters, motion detectors and the omnipresence of the Border Patrol.”

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 9, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

CBP has not yet published final numbers showing July’s sharp drop in migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border, a result of a Mexican government crackdown on in-transit migration and the Biden administration’s June 5 rule prohibiting most asylum access between border ports of entry. Some press coverage in the past 24 hours focuses on what the drop in migration looks like at the border right now.

At NBC News, Didi Martínez and Laura Strickler reported that populations have dropped by 60 percent or more at migrant shelters in border cities and in U.S. interior cities. The number of people waiting in makeshift encampments in Mexican border cities has also plummeted; this is in part because the Mexican government is systematically busing migrants to the country’s south, and in part because people using the CBP One app from Mexican territory to schedule port-of-entry appointments find that they can await their dates from elsewhere in Mexico.

At the Guardian, Justo Robles found that people are being sent back across the border into danger after fleeing threats. The article cites an August 7 report from six national and border-region organizations documenting U.S. border agents’ ignoring migrants’ claims of fear of return, and conveys concerns that the June asylum ban will lead more people to risk death migrating through borderland deserts.

A principal author of the August 7 report, Christina Asencio of Human Rights First, discussed its findings with Arizona Public Radio.

At the Washington Examiner, Anna Giaritelli reported that migrant apprehensions are dropping close to the 1,500-per-day average threshold that, if maintained for 3 weeks, would trigger a suspension of the June 5 asylum ban. The ban would go back in effect if the average climbs back above 2,500 per day; July’s average was under 1,850 per day.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order requiring the state’s hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status. The governor’s goal appears to be to collect data about the cost of providing health care to undocumented people, which the state government would then cite in litigation against the Biden administration’s border and migration policies. Advocates fear that the measure will discourage people who need urgent medical care from seeking it.

San Diego-area human rights defense groups filed a complaint with DHS about a pattern of sexual abuse and neglect at ICE’s Otay Mesa immigrant detention facility, which is run by private contractor CoreCivic.

In comments to reporters, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado warned that the Maduro regime’s theft of July 28 elections and subsequent repression will trigger sharply increased migration from a country that has already seen a quarter of its population flee. “If Maduro chooses to cling to power by force, we can only expect a migratory wave like we have never seen: three, four, five million Venezuelans in a very short time.”

Of 2,025 “caravan” participants who have been walking from Mexico’s southern border since mid-July and are now camped in the southern state of Oaxaca, over a quarter (552) are unaccompanied minors, Oaxaca state officials told Milenio.

Citing an internal bulletin from Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector, the New York Post reported that two Mexican criminal groups, Los Salazar and Los Pelones, are attacking each other with drones armed with explosives in northern Sonora state, not far from the Arizona border.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Of people arrested for fentanyl possession at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry between 2019 and 2024, 80.2 percent (7,598 of 9,473) were U.S. citizens, according to Freedom of Information Act data obtained by David Bier of the Cato Institute. (Similarly, at a July 2023 House hearing, a CBP official noted that U.S. citizens made up 73.1 percent of fentanyl arrests during the first 8 months of fiscal 2023, with the remainder Mexican citizens who mostly had permission to cross the border.)

The data punctures the evidence-free argument, promoted by many U.S. politicians, that migration and fentanyl smuggling are tied. Bier’s analysis also presents reasons to doubt that new detection technologies at ports of entry would solve the United States’ fentanyl challenge.

Newsweek covered an August 6 Border Network for Human Rights virtual event (follow the link to “5th Report from the Border” here) at which Texas-area human rights denounced troubling recent cases of Texas police and guardsmen abusing migrants and improperly using force along the borderline. (WOLA’s Adam Isacson, discussing federal forces’ behavior and rising migrant deaths, was among this event’s speakers.)

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 8, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Panama’s migration authority deported, on a commercial flight, 28 Colombian citizens detained in the Darién Gap region. Eleven of them, the agency said, had criminal records in Colombia. The operation took place “in support of the U.S.-Panama memorandum of understanding,” read a statement, referring to the U.S. government’s recent commitment to help fund Panama’s increased deportations of migrants from the Darién.

The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, was in Panama for a two-day visit. Gen. Richardson met with Panama’s new president, José Raúl Mulino, “to discuss bilateral security cooperation and strategies to contain the unprecedented irregular migration through the Darién jungle.”

Panama’s border force reported arresting 15 people who allegedly helped smuggle Chinese migrants through the Darién Gap through a so-called “VIP route” that is more costly but involves less walking through the jungle (about two days).

Due to the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and Mexico’s crackdown on migrants in transit, Tijuana’s migrant shelters are well below capacity, municipal migration official Enrique Lucero told Border Report.

Police in Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua encountered 10 migrants from Sudan and Morocco who had just been released by their criminal kidnappers after ransom was paid. They said they endured torture, and were taken to a shelter.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) installed a third layer of concertina wire barrier along the Rio Grande in El Paso, EFE reported. Pastor Francisco González of the Somos Uno por Juárez Shelter Network said that the additional barrier, by making crossing more complicated, “opens the door for the people who are dedicated to human trafficking, the so-called coyotes, to make a killing.”

As Venezuela’s regime deepens a crackdown following false claims of victory in July 28 elections, a leader of the country’s political opposition told the Miami Herald that a new wave of migrants fleeing the country is imminent.

A “caravan” that departed Mexico’s southern border about three weeks ago is now in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca. Exhausted, many are receiving medical attention in the town of San Pedro Tapanatepec.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Six national and border-region organizations released a new report on the human rights impact of the Biden administration’s June 5 rule restricting access to asylum at the border. The main finding is that U.S. border agents are frequently deporting people who express fear of return, even though the rule states that they are still entitled to credible fear interviews (though they now have to prove a much higher standard of fear).

Often, the report states, agents who refuse to honor fear claims are doing so with false and insulting statements. Examples include “there is no asylum anymore; we don’t care”; “there is no asylum and whatever happened to you is not our problem”; or “what if I went to your house and entered without permission? You’re entering my country without permission.”

  • “‘Don’t Tell Me About Your Fear’” (Hope Border Institute, Human Rights First, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, Kino Border Initiative, Raices, Refugees International, Human Rights First, August 7, 2024).

A New Yorker feature by Jack Herrera profiled Father Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest dedicated to assisting migrants in the violence-plagued border city of Reynosa, Mexico, across from McAllen. The area has seen a spike in already-high levels of migrant kidnappings since mid-2023. “As the country turns against migrants, Strassburger’s work has become more fraught.”

The University of New Mexico radio station interviewed Erin Siegal McIntyre, author of an August 7 Mother Jones investigation of sexual violence within Border Patrol, including a 2019 rape at the agency’s academy in Artesia, New Mexico. (The investigation was part of a package of reported pieces about the state of Border Patrol that Mother Jones ran on August 7.)

McIntyre said she obtained a CBP dataset of 186 sexual misconduct allegations over 20 years, but it has glaring omissions, including high profile cases: “So it’s clear you can’t trust the government’s numbers.”

Reuters reported on the Harris campaign’s “tough talk” on border security, as they launch attacks on Donald Trump for his February push to kill a “border deal” bill that failed in the Senate. That bill included a few immigration reform priorities, but also included Republican-friendly provisions like blocking asylum access at busy times (something President Biden later did by executive order in early June) and increasing ICE detention capacity by about 47 percent.

“Harris has made the border security bill a centerpiece of her platform,” Reuters noted, “and a digital campaign ad has cast the election as a choice between ‘the one who will fix our broken immigration system. And the one who’s trying to stop her.’”

On the Right

Tags: News Links

August 7, 2024

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris presented her chosen running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. The vice-presidential nominee, who served in the House of Representatives for 12 years, does not have a lengthy record on border and migration issues, but he has rarely diverged from standard liberal Democratic positions.

  • In 2018, at the lowest point of the Trump administration’s family separations policy, he was one of 195 House members who co-sponsored the “Keep Families Together Act.”
  • In 2015 Walz supported legislation backing stricter screening of refugees, but the New York Times reported that he has since changed this position.
  • In 2008, following a visit to El Paso, he called “on Congress to increase funding for more Border Patrol agents, security cameras, technology and K-9 training,” MPR News reported at the time; these remain common positions among many Democratic legislators.
  • Twitter user Tim Young (@Young25Tim) posted screenshots of tweets from Walz, going back to 2018, criticizing Trump’s family separation policy, opposing Trump’s use of Defense Department funds to build border wall, endorsing a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers,” and affirming that “Minnesota is stronger because of our immigrant communities.”

Republican opponents are playing up comments Walz made in a late July CNN interview, in which he was facetiously making a point about the futility of border wall construction: “I always say, let me know how high it is. If it’s 25 feet, then I’ll invest in the 30 foot ladder factory. That’s not how you stop this.”

In the same interview Walz endorsed the February 2024 “border deal” bill that Donald Trump successfully urged Senate Republicans to kill. That bill included a few immigration reform priorities but also would have blocked asylum access at busy times (something President Biden later did by executive order in early June) and increased ICE detention capacity by about 47 percent.

CBP posted three notices on August 6 about deaths involving agency personnel:

  • A January 24 pursuit in New Mexico, near El Paso, that ended in a rollover crash that killed a woman from Guatemala.
  • The death of a newborn baby following delivery by caesarean section, after the February 25 apprehension of an eight-months pregnant woman from Angola near Lukeville, Arizona. The mother was taken to a hospital, where doctors “detected a defect in the fetus’ heartbeat.”
  • A March 6 pursuit in Lukeville, Arizona during which two passengers exited a vehicle moving at about 45 miles per hour. A man from Mexico died of his injuries.

The chief of Border Patrol’s Del Rio, Texas sector reposted a very political Elon Musk tweet to the sector’s official Twitter feed. The message, which has nothing to do with border security, accuses Google of stifling news of Donald Trump’s July assassination attempt in its search results, and favoring Democrats against Trump, citing 2020 campaign donations. Chief Patrol Agent Robert Danley’s retweet, which remained atop the Del Rio Sector feed as of 8:00 Eastern on August 7, appears to run afoul of the Hatch Act, which prohibits executive-branch civil servants from engaging in political activity.

At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque revealed that CBP is keeping asylum seekers’ genetic profiles in “a massive criminal investigations database” without their knowledge, even when those asylum seekers are deported or expelled from the border. “The program disproportionately targets people of color,” said Stevie Glaberson of the Center on Privacy and Technology, which has investigated the program.

InsightCrime noted that CBP’s largest-ever fentanyl seizure, 453 kilograms (999 pounds) from a U.S. citizen crossing the Lukeville, Arizona port of entry on July 1, happened despite the Sinaloa Cartel’s widely cited order to stop producing the drug in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. “The size of this seizure,” equivalent to 7 percent of CBP’s entire border-wide fentanyl haul during the first 9 months of fiscal 2024, “suggests that fentanyl continues to be produced in other areas of Mexico,” like the border states of Baja California and Sonora, reported InsightCrime’s Henry Shuldiner.

A study in the journal Trauma Surgery and Acute Care “identified 597 patients injured while crossing the US-Mexico border wall representing 38 different countries” in 2021 and 2022. Their mean age was 32 and 75 percent were male. Two-thirds were Mexican, followed by citizens of Peru, India, El Salvador, Cuba, and Jamaica. The study concludes: “The increased volume of trauma associated with the US-Mexico border wall is a humanitarian and health crisis.”

The Texas Observer reported that a vocal Brooks County rancher who leads a paramilitary-style civilian patrol group, along with officials from two mid-Texas counties, have filed suit in a federal court in Corpus Christi, claiming damages from Biden administration policies that they say resulted in “the current, massive flood of illegal entries by foreign nationals from around the world.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Mother Jones has published a package of articles about “the Border Patrol’s growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment.” It includes Erin Siegal McIntyre on impunity for sexual violence within the force, including a 2019 rape at the Border Patrol Academy; Lauren Markham on border technologies and threats to civil liberties; Emily Green on the force’s pro-Trump politicization, led by its union; Isabela Dias on the Trump campaign’s mass-deportation plans; and Ian Gordon and Melissa Lewis on the extent of Border Patrol’s jurisdiction and law enforcement powers, including in areas far from borders.

Edgardo Molina, technical coordinator of the Guatemala-Honduras Binational Migration Project, told Honduras’s Criterio of a “worrying trend”: “the increase of stationary migrants, i.e. families who stay in Mexico waiting to cross to the United States and then return to Honduras out of desperation after six or seven months trying to cross.”

On the Right

Tags: News Links