Category: News

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

Due to staff travel and commitments, News Links posting will be sporadic between May 3 and July 19, 2024. We will return to a regular, all-weekday schedule on July 22.

 

January 17, 2024

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Developments

After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) appeared poised to reject a possible bipartisan Senate deal to restrict access to asylum at the border—arguing that it doesn’t go far enough—Republican senators urged Johnson to reconsider. Senate negotiators have been discussing restrictions on asylum—including a possible Title 42-style expulsion authority—in exchange for Republican support of a White House request for funding for Ukraine, Israel, border operations, and other priorities.

In the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to move legislation forward, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), John Thune (R-South Dakota), and others argued that it will be impossible to get enough moderate Democrats to go along with migration restrictions in the future, if a Republican president is elected. “This is a unique moment in time. It’s an opportunity to get some conservative border policy,” Thune said. Senate Republicans’ lead negotiator, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), had a phone call with Speaker Johnson, who reiterated his support for the hard-line bill (H.R. 2) that passed his chamber on a party-line vote last May.

President Biden will meet with congressional leadership at the White House today to push for passage of his funding request.

“Maybe they [Border Patrol] could have prevented this because they would have seen what was happening” using their “scope trucks,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who was among the first to denounce the death of three migrants in the Rio Grande while Texas national guardsmen barred Border Patrol from accessing a riverfront park in Eagle Pass. Since Cuellar’s January 13 statement, a Border Patrol official clarified that the mother and two children had already drowned when Texas blocked agents from Shelby Park. Still, as a Department of Justice Supreme Court filing noted, it is “impossible to say what might have happened if Border Patrol had had its former access to the area.”

Texas officials granted NewsNation correspondent Jorge Ventura to the park yesterday, where he posted video of Texas guardsmen using riot shields to block a migrant from entering the park to turn himself in.

Texas Democrats held a press call at which some, like Rep. Joaquín Castro of San Antonio, demanded that President Biden federalize Texas’s National Guard. “I want to be very clear what is happening in Texas right now is incredibly dangerous,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso.

One state legislator, Eddie Morales of Eagle Pass, called on Biden to suspend access to asylum temporarily. “I spoke with multiple Reps who clarified that he [Morales] is alone in this position,” tweeted Pablo de la Rosa of Texas Public Radio.

Several Democratic senators, including some facing tough re-election races this year, introduced the “Stop Fentanyl at the Border Act,” which would increase funding for CBP officers, Border Patrol agents, scanners for ports of entry, and similar items.

Mexican authorities arrested in Cancún, and deported to Bogotá, Nelson Enrique Bautista Reatiga alias “Poporro,” who Colombia’s police chief called a “main coordinator” of smuggling Colombian migrants to the United States. He allegedly helped Colombian, Peruvian, and other South American citizens arrive at the U.S. border after flying to Mexico, which citizens of Colombia and Peru can mostly do visa-free.

Analyses and Feature Stories

“Moderate Democratic legislators can tell themselves and their constituents that reaching this type of deal is a way to stop abuse of the asylum system and won’t turn away ‘worthy’ claimants, but that’s simply a lie,” wrote Felipe de la Hoz at the New Republic.

At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque reports of encountering NewsMax reporter Jaeson Jones reporting from an Arizona site where asylum seekers had arrived, while accompanied by several masked, armed men “wearing hats marked with the logo of the Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence and Counterterrorism division.” The men confronted humanitarian volunteers in the area and identified themselves as providers of “intelligence for House committees, including the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.”

A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll finds that 30 percent of California Democratic voters believe that the U.S.-Mexico border is not secure.

On the Right

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January 16, 2024

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Developments

On Friday January 12, two days after Texas’s state government started blocking Border Patrol from a 2.5-mile stretch of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, three migrants—a woman and two children—drowned to death. The Department of Homeland Security stated that Border Patrol agents were aware that the migrants were in distress in the river, but were prevented from acting because Texas national guardsmen “physically barred” them from entering the area.

Texas is denying DHS’s account, claiming that the drownings had already occurred when Border Patrol sought to access the area. A Justice Department filing before the Supreme Court stated that the drownings had already happened when Border Patrol was blocked, but that it is “impossible to say what might have happened if Border Patrol had had its former access to the area.”

DHS sent a January 14 letter to Texas’s state attorney-general giving the state until Wednesday to reinstate Border Patrol’s access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass. If Texas refuses, the letter promises “appropriate action,” including referring the matter to the Department of Justice. DOJ is already litigating Texas’s placement of buoys in the river in Eagle Pass; Texas’s ban on Border Patrol agents cutting concertina wire along the river; and Texas’s controversial anti-migrant law known as S.B.4.

“I think it’s not an exaggeration that this is as direct a confrontation between a state and the federal government as we’ve seen since desegregation,” Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert at the University of Texas School of Law, told the Washington Post.

“I’m glad for what Gov. Abbott is doing,” the president of the Border Patrol agents’ union, Brandon Judd, told Fox Business, calling DHS’s statements “propaganda.”

Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border continue to be well below December’s record-setting levels, hovering above 3,000 per day after exceeding 10,000 per day in December.

In Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which is currently the busiest of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, Chief John Modlin reported 9,200 migrant apprehensions in the week ending January 11, down from 18,400-19,400 during each of the first three weeks of December.

In Jacumba Springs, California, Mexican authorities claim that daily arrivals have dropped to about 380 per day, from up to 1,200 last month.

“After a significant decrease in migrant encounters earlier this month, migrant apprehensions in the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector have increased since last week,” CNN reported. “About 1,000 migrant apprehensions took place Sunday in the Del Rio Sector, compared to between 500 and 600 earlier in the week.”

Temperatures are below freezing along the south Texas-Mexico border. On the Mexican side, Texas Public Radio reported, “Some migrants, more than 300 in Matamoros, still remain outdoors after authorities displaced more than a thousand individuals from encampments last month on the day after Christmas.”

A small group of senators continues to negotiate limits on asylum and other legal migration pathways, as a way to win Republican support for a budget package including aid to Ukraine and Israel and resources for border operations. It is possible, though far from certain, that legislative language could emerge this week. Negotiators appear to have agreed on a higher standard in asylum seekers’ “credible fear” interviews and Title 42-style expulsions of asylum seekers when migrant arrivals rise above a certain threshold. Republicans continue to insist on curbing the presidential authority to issue humanitarian parole, in particular to asylum seekers released at the border following “CBP One” appointments at ports of entry.

House Republican leaders are signaling that a deal coming out of the Senate could be “dead on arrival” (a phrase from Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana)) if it doesn’t include items that Democrats are very unlikely to agree to, like hundreds of miles more border wall and a revived “Remain in Mexico” program. At Semafor, Joseph Zeballos-Roig pointed out that any harsh new measures involving more deportations would require Mexico to be willing to accept many of them.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) posted a screenshot of what Fox News claimed were elements of a border deal with the words, “Absolutely not.” These included an increase in green card approvals and a threshold of 5,000 migrant arrivals per day that might trigger expulsions. Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), the Republicans’ lead negotiator, replied that the screenshot was false.

Lankford told Politico’s Burgess Everett that “If he can get 25 or more of the 49 GOP senators to sign onto something, he’s betting that it might be enough to get Speaker Mike Johnson to take up a big emergency spending bill with Ukraine aid—without losing the gavel to a conservative rebellion.”

Panama has acquired eight helicopters, among other measures to step up its patrolling of the treacherous Darién Gap migration corridor. The Panamanian government is calling the effort “Operation Chocó II,” and it is to last for at least six months.

Mexico’s foreign minister “ordered the 53 consulates in the United States and five in Canada to reinforce their media activity to defend the name of Mexico in the face of hate and fear speeches” during the upcoming 2024 U.S. electoral campaign, Milenio reported.

In 2022 and 2023, Mexico issued ‘oficios de salida’ to 33,695 citizens of Cuba. These “formally oblige them to leave the national territory, but in practice allow them to continue on their way to the northern border. …Meanwhile, 49,978 were granted visitor’s cards for humanitarian reasons, which allow them to remain in the country, travel freely and obtain employment for up to one year,” Reforma reported.

The state commission on missing persons in Baja California, Mexico reported that 30 migrants went missing in the Tijuana-San Diego area in 2023, but immigration officials and advocates assert that the true number of disappeared is much higher.

Homicides in Tijuana (pop. 1.7 million) dropped by 8 percent from 2022 to 2023, to a still very-high 1,884.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Policy changes that might come from a deal in the Senate, like enabling asylum seeker expulsions and weakening humanitarian parole, “are likely to drive more unauthorized migration to the border and make President Biden’s immigration challenges even worse,” wrote Andrea Flores of fwd.us, a former Biden White House official, at the New York Times.

“David J. Peters, a sociologist at Iowa State University who studies opioid addiction in rural areas, argued that the campaigns focusing on Mexico and border security are an easier sell than focusing on the underlying reason people take drugs, whether it’s unequal economic opportunities, family instability or mental health woes,” reported the Washington Post.

San Diego’s inewsource reported back after “reporters spent 48 straight hours, starting noon Jan. 2, in and around the encampments” where migrants are awaiting Border Patrol processing near Jacumba Springs, California.

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January 12, 2024

Developments

Texas’s state government has “indefinitely” taken over and sealed off the expansive riverfront park in the city of Eagle Pass and is prohibiting federal Border Patrol agents from accessing it to process asylum-seeking migrants. Texas state authorities have instead sought to arrest migrants and jail them for trespassing.

The mayor of Eagle Pass pointed out that migrant arrivals there have dropped to about 400 per day, from a peak of 4,000 per day at times in December.

Advocates had planned to hold a ceremony in Shelby Park on Saturday to commemorate the many migrants who died trying to cross the border in 2023—many of them drowned in the river near Eagle Pass.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) generated an outcry with comments in a Jan. 5 interview with right-wing radio host Dana Loesch: “The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

Congress is out of session until Tuesday, as negotiations drag on regarding a deal that might allow legislative approval of the Biden administration’s request for $110.5 billion in aid to Ukraine and Israel, border items, and other priorities. Republican legislators are demanding curbs on asylum, humanitarian parole, and other pathways to migrant protections as a condition for their support of the spending package.

In remarks, lead Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) took a hard line against Republican demands that any compromise limit the 70-year-old presidential power to grant migrants temporary humanitarian parole. Republican negotiators James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) criticized the Biden administration’s use of parole for asylum seekers released following appointments at ports of entry arranged via the CBP One app.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) urged Republican senators to “take this opportunity” and support what emerges from negotiations between a small group of senators. Negotiator Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) said that the small group is down to final items and close to presenting a compromise legislative framework or text. Sen. Lankford sounded optimistic about this compromise gaining as many as 70 votes in the Senate.

Several Democrats said that they would reject a funding bill if it included border wall spending and a renewed “Remain in Mexico” program, which House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) called for in a Wednesday radio interview.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas offered to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee, where the chamber’s Republican majority has launched proceedings to impeach him. Mayorkas turned down the Committee’s invitation to appear at its next hearing on Thursday the 18th, because he has to meet with a visiting delegation of Mexican officials. Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tennessee) accused Mayorkas of “putting the interests of Mexico ahead of the American people.”

Anabela Meza Cevallos, president of the Association of Ecuadorian Residents in Mexico (Ecuarmex), said she expected migration from Ecuador to rise further following a dramatic January 9 display of organized crime violence throughout the country. U.S. authorities encountered 122,841 Ecuadorian migrants at the Mexico border between December 2022 and November 2023, 6th among all countries during that period.

Before being kidnapped near the border in Tamaulipas, Mexico between December 30 and January 3, 26 Venezuelan and 6 Honduran migrants aboard a bus from Monterrey passed through 2 Mexican security checkpoints, at which they “were extorted by officials for 500 pesos, or $30, per person each time,” Reuters reported.

More than 100 animals died in an August wildfire in a south Texas wildlife refuge because they were trapped by a concrete levee-style border wall, the Guardian reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Restrictions on protection-seeking migration, like those urged by Republican legislators in ongoing negotiations, will “strengthen incentives for migrants to attempt border crossings between legal ports” and “drive up demand for the services of human smugglers,” wrote Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations at Time.

Amid declining birthrates in the United States, the foreign-born population may have reached an estimated 15 percent last year. The last time that happened, in 1910, “a nativist frenzy and sharp restrictions on immigration” ensued, Lauren Villagrán wrote in USA Today.

On the Right

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January 11, 2024

Developments

A small group of senators continues to negotiate a deal that might allow the Biden administration’s request for a big package of aid to Ukraine and Israel, border funding, and other priorities to move forward in the chamber. In exchange for supporting the bill, Republicans continue to demand restrictions on the right to seek asylum, as well as on other legal migration pathways. They appear to be near agreement on raising standards that asylum seekers must meet in “credible fear” interviews, and on expelling asylum seekers into Mexico, Title 42-style, when daily migrant numbers reach a certain threshold or when migrants do not specifically request asylum.

Democratic negotiators continue to resist Republicans’ insistence that any agreement include a numerical cap or other tight limits on the presidential authority—which dates back to the 1950s—to offer temporary parole to migrants on humanitarian grounds. It is not fully clear whether Republicans are targeting the Biden program to parole citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ukraine, or more specifically the use of parole to release asylum seekers from the border into the U.S. interior, following “CBP One” appointments at ports of entry, while their cases await adjudication.

CBS News reported that the Senate negotiations’ scope has expanded beyond asylum and parole to include “conversations about Afghan evacuees, the children of high-skilled visa-holders, and work permits for asylum-seekers,” items that could sweeten the deal for Democratic legislators.

Republican senators are sounding skeptical about whether a deal that might satisfy them can be reached, and cast strong doubt on whether any legislative language might emerge this week.

They pointed out, too, that whatever gets agreed must then go to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where demands for limits on asylum and legal migration may be even stiffer. “We cannot be involved in securing the border of Ukraine or other nations until we secure our own,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told a conservative radio host. “And so that border fight is coming, and we’re going to die on that hill.” Johnson called for more border wall and a revival of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program, which does not appear to have been a significant demand in Senate negotiations. Johnson and President Biden discussed border policy in a January 10 phone call.

House Republicans began their effort to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with a lengthy hearing in the Homeland Security Committee, at which they argued that Mayorkas has failed to do his duty to secure the border. A letter from a group of law scholars argued that the Constitution does not allow impeachment for alleged “maladministration,” only “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The first days of January have seen a sharp drop in migration through the Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama. The Panamanian government’s migration director said the drop could be caused by a bridge collapse near Necoclí, Colombia and by increasing use of aerial routes to Nicaragua, which avoid the Darién entirely.

Just over 1,000 migrants continue to participate in a “caravan” in southern Mexico, a regrouped remnant of a much larger migration and protest that began at Christmas. They are now in Oaxaca, having walked through Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas; Mexican authorities are allowing participants to walk but prohibiting anyone from transporting them in vehicles.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A report from the Migration Policy Institute called for significant investments in migrant processing and ports of entry at the border, federal mechanisms to help direct migrants to communities that wish to accommodate them, more diplomatic coordination with countries along the route, and vastly more investment in asylum adjudication, among other recommendations.

Reuters accompanied the difficult journey of migrants aboard a Texas state government-funded bus from Brownsville, Texas to Chicago.

“Today, liberals describe border-security measures that the Democratic Party once would have favored as severe, cruel or ‘Trump-era,’” wrote New York Times columnist David Leonhardt.

Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda asked why President Andrés Manuel López Obrador doesn’t demand more from the United States as a precondition for Mexico performing “containment” of U.S.-bound migrants.

Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy doubted, in a Forbes column, that Mexico might agree to some of the cross-border expulsions, deportations, and “Remain in Mexico” referrals that would result from Republican demands for stricter limits on asylum.

On the Right

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January 3, 2024

Staff are taking a few days off. Daily links will resume on January 11.

Developments

After breaking records before the holidays, arrivals of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped sharply, at least for the moment. Border Patrol apprehended 2,500 migrants on January 1, down from over 10,000 during several days in mid-December. On a call with reporters, unnamed U.S. officials praised Mexico for taking “enhanced enforcement actions” including deportation flights to Venezuela, which the officials said that they also expect to “ramp up.” With less need to divert personnel into migrant processing, by January 4 CBP will reopen its Lukeville, Arizona port of entry, as well as a temporarily shuttered PedWest pedestrian crossing south of San Diego, California, a pedestrian crossing in Nogales, Arizona, and one of two border bridges between Piedras Negras, Coahuila and Eagle Pass, Texas.

Congress begins its 2024 session on Monday, but a small group of Senate negotiators is already back in Washington, as they continue seeking a deal that would allow the body to move forward with the Biden administration’s emergency request for $110.5 billion in aid to Ukraine and Israel, more border measures, and other priorities. Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) met for 90 minutes yesterday, along with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Republican legislators are insisting on changes to U.S. law that would put asylum and other legal pathways out of reach for many more migrants. “We gotta do something. They ought to give me the money I need to protect the border,” President Biden told reporters yesterday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) will lead a delegation of more than 60 House Republicans today to the border at Eagle Pass, Texas. If senators manage to reach and approve a deal on a spending bill, House Republicans are likely to demand even stricter limits on asylum and other legal migration pathways once their chamber takes up the legislation. Speaker Johnson’s visit is under attack from the Republican far right. Leading border hawk Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said he will not be in Eagle Pass because “our people are tired of meetings,” while onetime Trump chief of staff Steve Bannon dismissed the trip as a “photo op.”

Mexican authorities are still searching for a group of 31 migrants, from a few countries, kidnapped from a bus in northern Mexico near the border on December 30. The mass abduction happened in Mexico’s easternmost border state, Tamaulipas, which is notoriously dangerous. Authorities freed a group of five Venezuelans, including two minors, who according to Reuters were not part of the bus group. Kidnappers in Tamaulipas “take 10 to 15 migrants a day who come to Reynosa or Matamoros for their CBP appointments,” Father Francisco Gallardo of the Diocese of Matamoros, a longtime shelter director, told Milenio.

The Biden administration Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court for an emergency ruling to decide whether Border Patrol agents have the right to cut through the hundreds of miles of razor-sharp concertina wire that Texas state authorities have laid along the Rio Grande. Texas had sued in federal court in late October to prevent agents from cutting the wire to access asylum seekers on the riverbank, except in emergency situations. (Once on U.S. soil, people have a right to ask U.S. authorities for asylum.) A district court judge denied Texas’s request, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Texas on December 19.

A “migrant caravan” that made U.S. headlines over Christmas has ended in the municipality of Mapastepec, about 75 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala, where remaining caravan participants have turned themselves in to Mexican migration authorities. According to La Jornada, activist and organizer Luis García Villagrán said “an agreement could be reached for the delivery of documents” allowing more than 3,000 migrants to stay legally and possibly to travel through Mexico.

Analyses and Feature Stories

“On a warming planet, migration is not the security risk. The security risk is the backlash to it,” Tom Ellison of the Center for Climate and Security wrote at Just Security.

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January 2, 2024

We’ll be posting updates on January 2 and 3, then staff are taking a few days off. Updates will resume a daily tempo on January 11.

Developments

Sources within CBP told Fox news that the agency encountered 302,000 migrants in December, a new single-month record. The number includes both Border Patrol apprehensions and arrivals of migrants at ports of entry. (The latter have averaged just over 50,000 in recent months). The largest monthly Border-Patrol-plus-ports-of-entry amount CBP had previously reported was 269,735 in September 2023.

2023 ended with a total of 520,085 people crossing the treacherous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, according to Panama’s Public Security Ministry. That is more than double the 2022 total, and 120,000 of them were under age 18. “Venezuelans 328,667, Ecuadorians 57,222, Haitians 46,558 and from China 25,344 were the most recurrent nationalities crossing,” the Ministry tweeted. Monthly passage of migrants declined from October (49,256) to November (37,231) to December (24,626), repeating what may be a seasonal pattern.

Thirty-one migrants are missing, presumed kidnapped, in Mexico’s organized crime-dominated border state of Tamaulipas, where armed men in five pickup trucks stopped a bus on a highway between Monterrey and the border city of Reynosa on December 30.

In Ciudad Juárez, following a large-scale mid-December arrival of migrants aiming to cross the border into El Paso, migrant shelters are down to about 60 percent capacity as new arrivals are declining. “We expect it to increase in 15 days or within a week,” said a Ciudad Juárez shelter network spokesperson.

Their numbers reduced, participants in a “migrant caravan” that got media attention in the days after Christmas have walked about 60 miles of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, since December 24.

Analyses and Feature Stories

“When a migrant does not have the resources” to pay Colombia’s Gulf Clan organized crime group for permission to cross the Darién Gap, the chief of staff of Colombia’s Navy told Caracol Radio, “we’ve had indications that women are forced to provide sexual services or they are also told that they must transport between 10 and 20 kilos of cocaine to have the right to pass through that region.”

UNHCR’s representative in Mexico says that 35,000 migrants—mainly asylum seekers—have contributed US$10 million per year in taxes to Mexico after settling in recent years in the country’s north, where employers report labor scarcity.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

December 28, 2023

This will be the last Daily Border Links post until January 2, unless events demand otherwise. Best wishes for a happy holiday.

Developments

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas led a U.S. government delegation that met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador yesterday for two and a half hours in Mexico City. The main topic was the large number of migrants currently crossing Mexico and arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Mayorkas called the meeting “productive.” Neither country’s officials announced resulting policy changes, though López Obrador made a vague reference to “important agreements.” An unnamed senior administration official told CNN that there was agreement on “the need to really crack down on the smugglers that are putting migrants on buses, putting migrants on trains. We’ve seen that really contribute to the increase that we’ve seen at the border and just in recent weeks.” The Wall Street Journal observed that “The U.S. has spent months trying to persuade Mexico to allow the State Department to process refugees in Mexico” and that Mexico may be willing to accept expelled migrants “if it ultimately lowers the number of migrants attempting the journey.”

“We were really impressed by some of the new actions that Mexico is taking, and we have seen in recent days a pretty significant reduction in border crossings,” the official said, according to Agénce France Presse. U.S. authorities apprehended about 6,000 migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border on December 26, down from an average of 9,600 per day earlier this month. Despite the recent drop, it appears likely that December will break Border Patrol’s record for most migrant apprehensions in a month.

With very little advance warning, officials in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across from Brownsville, Texas, forcibly dismantled a year-old tent encampment that was still housing about 200 migrants, many of them awaiting CBP One appointments. The city’s shelters are already saturated. “About 70 migrants flung themselves into the river Tuesday night and crossed into the U.S.,” the Associated Press reported. “They remained trapped for hours along the riverbank beneath the layers of concertina wire set up by orders of the Texas governor.”

A “migrant caravan” that began near the Mexico-Guatemala border on Christmas Eve has covered about 50 miles of Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas. The “caravan’s” numbers are dwindling as exhaustion sets in: from at least 7,500 from about 24 nationalities, to about 3,000 now. Rather than attempt to walk all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border, participants are mainly petitioning Mexican migratory authorities to give them “a document with which we can remain in the country,” one of the caravan’s principal organizers said.

Though Congress is out of session until January 8, the small group of senators negotiating a possible Ukraine aid-for-asylum-restrictions deal has resumed meeting, virtually, as of December 27.

Guatemala’s migration agency reported having expelled 23,711 northbound irregular migrants back into Honduras between January 1 and December 25, including at least 16,931 Venezuelans, 1,644 Ecuadorians, 1,558 Haitians, 907 Colombians, and 907 Hondurans.

New York Mayor Eric Adams issued an executive order that would issue criminal misdemeanor charges against bus companies—especially those contracted by Texas’s state government—that deliver migrants at non-approved hours and without giving city authorities at least 32 hours of advance notice. The measure “comes after 14 busloads of migrants arrived from Texas in a single night last week, the highest total recorded since the spring of 2022,” the New York Times reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

According to Colombia’s attorney-general’s office, the BBC reported, migrants are avoiding the Darién Gap by paying “between $1,500 and $5,000 for ‘tourist packages’ that include permission to enter the island and transportation in clandestine boats from San Andres to the port of Bluefields in Nicaragua.” The trip is at least as deadly as the Darién.

The Associated Press pointed out that the Texas state government’s campaign of arresting thousands of migrants, among other border security measures, has not deterred people from crossing the border irregularly into the state.

Lengthy analyses in two principal U.K. papers, the Financial Times and the Guardian, looked at the border and migration situation’s political impact as the 2024 election campaign year begins.

On the Right

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December 22, 2023

This will be the last Daily Border Links post until January 2, unless events demand otherwise. Best wishes for a happy holiday.

Developments

“Border Patrol made about 10,500 apprehensions along the southwest border on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the data,” ABC News reported. “Agents made roughly 10,600 migrant apprehensions along the southwest border on Wednesday. That was only a slight decline from Monday, and still high.” NBC News reported, “approximately 27,000 migrants were in CBP custody as of Wednesday night, another record.”

President Biden called Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador yesterday to discuss measures to manage very heavy current arrivals of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. They agreed that “additional enforcement actions are urgently needed,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. It is not clear what those actions might be. Biden is sending a delegation to Mexico, probably on December 27, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and White House Homeland Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.

Large numbers of people continue to cross from Piedras Negras, Coahuila into Eagle Pass, Texas. “They were telling me that there are about six thousand just today (yesterday) and last week about five thousand every day, thousands of people are crossing the river with their families and children,” the sheriff of Maverick County (which includes Eagle Pass), Tom Schmerber, told Mexico’s Milenio.

Visiting El Paso, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) tweeted that Border Patrol has about 4,500 migrants in custody in that sector, and claimed “a rise in Venezuelan gang activity in these U.S. processing centers. Venezuela’s largest criminal organization – Tren de Aragua has assaulted Border Patrol agents and harasses other illegal aliens.”

The head of Mexico’s migration authority reported that its migrant encounters have “increased considerably in the final stretch of the year.”

International aid agencies are warning that thousands of migrants could become stranded in Honduras if the country’s congress fails to prolong a suspension of a $261 fine charged to every irregular in-transit migrant. Honduras suspended the fine in May 2022 and has to renew the “amnesty” periodically; the next time is in January.

Analyses and Feature Stories

In Arizona’s borderlands, “the percentage of human-smuggling and drug-trafficking crimes committed by undocumented immigrants has gone down, whereas the number committed by U.S. citizens or others with lawful status has gone up,” Geraldo Cadava reported at the New Yorker.

On the Right

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December 21, 2023

This will be the last Daily Border Links post until January 2, unless events demand otherwise. Best wishes for a happy holiday.

Developments

Border Patrol processed about 10,500 migrants on Tuesday (December 19). The number for Monday (December 18) was 10,800, about 40 percent of them families or unaccompanied children. Including people who came to ports of entry, the Washington Examiner reported, the totals were 14,509 on Monday and 12,242 on Tuesday. As of Tuesday evening, CBP had 27,159 migrants in custody nationwide. With most days topping 10,000 in recent weeks, the system is at a “breaking point,” CNN’s Priscilla Álvarez reported.

About 4,400 of Tuesday’s 10,500 migrants crossed in Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector in mid-Texas. There, in Eagle Pass, “I visited a (holding) facility with a maximum capacity of 1,000. There were nearly 6,000. I’ve never seen it this high,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R), who represents this area and much of the Texas-Mexico border, told Fox News.

Though CBP has not yet published November migration numbers, Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CNN that the agency apprehended about 192,000 migrants in November, a 2 percent increase over 188,000 in October.

Acting CBP chief Troy Miller told CNN that unscrupulous travel agencies in some countries, like Senegal, are offering travel packages to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexican business associations are protesting CBP’s temporary closures of railroad bridges in Eagle Pass and El Paso, which account for about 36 percent of train cargo entering the United States from Mexico. Trains allegedly are crossing with migrants aboard, though railroad companies dispute that. In Chihuahua, Mexico, “We thought that the arrival of migrants had dropped significantly, but since last week it increased to about a thousand people on each freight train trip,” said state official Óscar Ibáñez Hernández, who cited criminal groups misinforming migrants about the need to travel now.

President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador are expected to speak this week about migration.

Near Lukeville, Arizona, where a large-scale arrival of migrants has led CBP to temporarily close the port of entry, smugglers have sawed through one segment of Trump-era border wall 41 times to let migrants pass through and turn themselves in to Border Patrol, the Washington Post reported.

Congress has gone home without a package of Ukraine and Israel aid, amid Republican demands that it come with restrictions to asylum and other migrant protections. “Talks between the White House and key senators have not veered widely from three main areas of discussion,” the Associated Press reported. Those are “toughening asylum protocols for migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border; bolstering border enforcement with more personnel and high-tech systems; and deterring migrants from making the journey in the first place.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

“Our country steps into humanitarian crises all over the world. Why would we not do it inside our own boundaries?” asked a forensic anthropologist in New Mexico, where migrant deaths in the desert have been increasing drastically, High Country News reported.

Since 2022, four percent of Cuba’s population has migrated to the U.S.-Mexico border. That is one of five key trends in Cuban migration documented in a new WOLA analysis.

On the Right

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December 20, 2023

Developments

The U.S. Senate is wrapping up business today and will shortly adjourn for 2023, with no deal on a $110.5 billion “national security supplemental” spending package, requested by the Biden administration, to aid Ukraine and Israel and to fund border operations. Republicans continue to demand restrictions on asylum and other migration pathways, and a small group of Senate negotiators has been unable to come up with either a framework compromise or legislative language. The group pledges to keep trying, even “in the time remaining this year.” Congress returns on January 8.

The ACLU filed litigation, on behalf of El Paso County, Texas the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and American Gateways, challenging the radical immigration law that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed on December 18. SB4 allows Texas police to arrest people on charges of irregularly crossing the border from Mexico, and to jail them if they don’t go back to Mexico. Statements from the governments of Mexico and Guatemala reject the new law.

A video shared by Texas Public Radio shows Texas National Guardsmen ignoring a migrant woman and baby crying for help in the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. “Eyewitnesses attested that both mother and child ‘went under for a while’ after several minutes of struggling, before resurfacing again.” A federal CBP airboat speeds by, a few feet away from the woman and child, offering no assistance.

According to data that the Washington Examiner obtained from CBP personnel, U.S. authorities encountered 14,509 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border on December 18. That’s probably about 13,000 Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry (official border crossings) and about 1,500 people reporting to the ports of entry, nearly always with CBP One appointments. It was the largest number of migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border in any day since at least 2000, and it may owe to rumors circulating in Mexico that the U.S. government is about to close the border and shut down CBP One. The past few weeks’ increases in migration are unusual because they come after sharp decreases in migration transiting the Darién Gap and Honduras in November.

Arizona’s senators, Mark Kelly (D) and Kyrsten Sinema (I), wrote a letter to DHS officials calling for new Shelter and Services Program funding for humanitarian services amid large-scale arrivals at remote parts of the state’s border.

Two children from Guinea (Africa), aged 10 and 13, spent days on their own in the Bogotá, Colombia airport after being abandoned there. Bogotá is one of a few airports where migrants from Africa change planes along an emerging route that leads to Nicaragua, which does not require visas of most of the continent’s nationalities. From Managua, they travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Reporting mainly from the Darién Gap, the New York Times’s Julie Turkewitz found that “as migrants stream their struggles and successes to millions back home, some are becoming small-time celebrities and influencers in their own right.”

Following a visit to the Darién Gap’s gateway in northwestern Colombia, Dan Restrepo of the Center for American Progress recommended greater emphasis on “host community solutions” and “development finance tools” to integrate migrants in Latin American countries.

An increasing amount of punditry predicts that public perceptions of the border situation might provide the Trump campaign with the momentum it needs to win the 2024 election, even as the ex-president repeats “poison the blood” rhetoric paraphrasing Mein Kampf.

On the Right

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December 19, 2023

Developments

Only 61 of 100 senators were present for a nominations vote yesterday, indicating that much of the body has already followed the already-adjourned House of Representatives and left Washington for the holidays. The probability is now virtually zero that the Senate might, before 2024, approve the Biden administration’s request for $110.5 billion in assistance for Ukraine and Israel, border items, and other priorities. Republican legislators are demanding restrictions on asylum and other migrant protections as the price for their support, and negotiations between a small group of senators continue to drag on. (See yesterday’s links for a list of the Republican proposals likely under negotiation.) While negotiators insist that they are making progress, they appear to be nowhere near an agreement.

Panama published November data showing a decline, for the third straight month, in migration through the treacherous Darién Gap. Darién Gap migration in November was 24 percent lighter than October, though the total for 2023 stood at a previously unimaginable 495,459 people as of November 30. Migration from Venezuela declined 35 percent from October—a possible short-term reaction to the United States’ resumption of deportation flights, plus end-of-year seasonal patterns—while migration from China increased 39 percent. During the first 10 months of 2023, Doctors Without Borders reported treating 397 migrants in the Darién Gap who survived sexual violence: “last month alone, there were 107 cases.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law S.B.4, which makes unauthorized border crossings into Texas a state crime. Civil rights groups pledge to challenge what they’re calling a racial profiling or “show me your papers” law. Judges may now jail migrants who decline to return immediately to Mexico. “When asked what Texas would do if Mexico does not accept migrants deported by the state,” the Texas Tribune reported, Abbott replied, “We’re going to send them right back to Mexico.”

Large numbers of asylum seekers—2,583 on Sunday alone, nearly half of them Venezuelan—continue to turn themselves in to Border Patrol in Eagle Pass, Texas, even though that town is at the epicenter of Gov. Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” border security buildup.

TRAC Immigration reported that U.S. immigration courts’ backlog has now reached 3 million cases—4,500 pending cases per judge. It broke 2 million cases in November 2022. (The Justice Department reported 2,464,021 cases as of October 12.)

The Secure Mobility Program, a pilot effort of small offices set up this year in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala, has now channeled 11,000 people to legal U.S. migration pathways, including 3,200 entries into the U.S. refugee program, EFE reported. Secure Mobility has channeled another 281 people to Spain’s refugee program.

The state government of Michoacán, Mexico estimates that 2,500 residents of the state, displaced by organized crime-tied violence, are currently residing in shelters in Mexican border cities.

Analyses and Feature Stories

WOLA yesterday released a brief report-back from a Mexico Program staff visit to the Arizona-Sonora border, where they found a large number of Mexican people fleeing organized crime violence and humanitarian workers assisting large-scale arrivals of asylum seekers. WOLA also published a brief video narrating what we saw during a late October visit to Necoclí, Colombia, the gateway to the Darién Gap.

The New Yorker reported about the impact that the temporary closure of the remote Lukeville, Arizona port of entry—officers have been pulled away to help Border Patrol process asylum seekers—is having on tourism a short drive south, in Arizonans’ popular beachside vacation spot of Puerto Peñasco, Sonora.

In El Paso, Politico found that the city’s Mexican-American population is getting fatigued with migrant arrivals. “Trump, he started rough. But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up,” a Juárez-born chef told reporter David Siders.

What makes Venezuelan migration different than previous nationalities’ arrivals in the United States, Charles Larratt-Smith and Howard Campbell wrote at Small Wars Journal, is their frequent lack of “a clearly defined destination, plan, or network to help enable this difficult transition.”

On the Right

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December 18, 2023

Developments

On Friday, Senate Democratic leadership sounded optimistic that by Sunday, negotiators would reach a basic agreement on compromises weakening U.S. asylum and other migrant protections. That is Republican legislators’ demand for supporting the Biden administration’s $110.5 billion request for Ukraine and Israel aid, border measures, and other priorities. White House officials, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and a small group of senators met every day this past weekend. While senators say they’ve “closed out” some items and are getting closer to a deal, by Sunday evening they remained far apart. The Senate is now unlikely to pass legislation before the week of January 8, and the House will not be coming back until then.

According to partial reports, negotiators have reached general agreement on:

  • A suspension of the right to seek asylum, with Title 42-style expulsions, once migrant arrivals reach a certain threshold.
  • A geographic and numeric expansion of expedited removal, which requires asylum seekers to defend their cases before an asylum officer in a very rapid manner.
  • Higher standards of credible fear that asylum seekers placed in expedited removal proceedings would have to meet.
  • Detention of asylum seekers while pursuing their claims.

Reports indicate that negotiators disagree on:

  • The threshold that would trigger the new Title 42-like expulsions authority.
  • The extent of the nationwide expansion of expedited removal.
  • Which asylum seekers would be subject to mandatory detention (and presumably whether they would include families with children).
  • A Republican demand to roll back much of the 1950s-era presidential authority to grant humanitarian parole, currently being used to admit Ukrainians and a combined 30,000 citizens per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
  • Republican demands to negotiate new “safe third country” agreements to send asylum seekers elsewhere, and perhaps a new “Remain in Mexico” program.

White House officials met on Saturday with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has voiced opposition to weakening asylum and whose members say they have been left in the dark about ongoing negotiations. Fifteen hard-right senators meanwhile sent a letter to the Senate Republican Conference demanding to be consulted on “rushed and secret negotiations with Democrats.” The large number of dissenters on both sides will make a majority hard to reach on any eventual deal.

Despite cold temperatures, thousands of migrants have been arriving atop trains in Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso. As of this morning, CBP is suspending border railway crossings into El Paso.

Border Patrol migrant encounters remained very high in the agency’s Tucson, Arizona sector during the week ending December 14 (18,400), though down slightly from the week ending December 7 (18,900). Border Patrol processing facilities in the sector are at 130 percent capacity. The large-scale arrivals caused CBP to close its port of entry in remote Lukeville to assist with processing. Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has ordered a deployment of National Guard personnel near the border.

Later today, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) will sign into law S.B.4, which makes unauthorized U.S.-Mexico border crossings a state crime punishable by prison if the captured migrant refuses to be returned to Mexico.

NewsNation reported that migrant deaths by drowning in the Rio Grande are worsening in Eagle Pass, Texas: “Currently, one trailer holds 24 deceased bodies, and officials say they need more trailers…‘This is where we store them… we encounter 2-3 bodies a day.’”

The United States has deported 52,192 Guatemalan citizens by air in 2023: 29,603 men, 12,849 women and 9,740 minors, both accompanied and unaccompanied; some were part of more than 7,000 family units.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The New York Times found that Democrats’ willingness to entertain some Republican demands on asylum and migrant protections reflects a “seismic shift” to the right on U.S. immigration politics. Many Democrats are upset and worry that it will hurt enthusiasm and turnout of Latino and progressive voters.

Part of the United States’ rightward shift, Keegan Hamilton wrote at the Los Angeles Times, is greater participation in, and tolerance of, armed militia groups at the border.

A letter from four leading members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warned against new asylum restrictions, warning that they “will lead to many more deaths of immigrants on the border.”

Reuters found a sharp increase in the number of Mexican people fleeing to the border after being displaced by organized crime-tied violence.

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December 15, 2023

Developments

The House of Representatives has adjourned for the year, and its Republican leadership is showing little willingness to come back before the body is scheduled to re-convene, during the second week of January. However, the Democratic-majority Senate, which was also scheduled to adjourn yesterday, remains in session. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is keeping the Senate open during the week of December 18. This would give more time to negotiators trying to hammer out a deal that would fund the Biden administration’s request for $110.5 billion in Ukraine and Israel aid (along with border funding and other priorities), while incorporating Republicans’ demand that it come with historic new restrictions on the right to asylum and other migrant protections at the U.S.-Mexico border.

No additional news has emerged about what these likely restrictions might be; as previous daily links posts explain, they appear to involve a new Title 42-like authority to expel asylum seekers, expansion of expedited removal with tougher screening criteria, and more detention of asylum seekers. Democrats appear to continue resisting Republican demands for a rollback of the 1950s-era presidential authority to grant temporary humanitarian parole, which currently benefits 30,000 people per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela plus Ukrainiains.

A small group of senators from both parties has been negotiating the migration restrictions, now with frequent Biden administration input—including a meeting yesterday evening with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and Legislative Affairs Director Shuwanza Goff. Democratic negotiators (and former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, I-Arizona) are sounding notes of optimism about reaching a deal next week, though Republicans not at the table sound more skeptical, and the possibility of the House passing a resulting bill before 2024 is very slim. “Many GOP senators, and maybe some Democrats, will not come to Washington next week because there’s no real expectation of a deal,” a Senate aide told the Messenger.

Democratic legislators not at the negotiating table, many of them Latino, are complaining about being in the dark about what is under discussion. Some of those quoted include Sens. Ben Ray Lujan (D-New Mexico), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Alex Padilla (D-California), and Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey). Durbin is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and longtime immigration-reform advocate, and Padilla chairs the Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety. Axios reported that senior White House officials have called some Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Progressive Caucus members.

Border Patrol agents speaking anonymously to the conservative Washington Examiner said they doubted that the proposed changes would reduce migration at the border. Agents instead demanded more removals and deportations, which would either require Mexico’s acceptance of hundreds of thousands of removed migrants, or a multiplication of costly deportation flights at a time when both pilots and aircraft are in short supply nationwide.

The San Diego-Tijuana migrant-rights defense group Al Otro Lado has documented 1,081 family separations, including 400 separations of spouses and 200 separations of adult children of parents, during Border Patrol’s recent processing of increased arrivals of asylum seekers in the San Diego Sector.

An intense gun battle between Mexican criminal factions close to the border wall near Sásabe, Sonora led Border Patrol to evacuate humanitarian workers and construction contractors in a remote part of Arizona on December 13.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At his Americas Migration Brief newsletter, Jordi Amaral laid out “Five Migration Trends in the Americas to Watch in 2024.” Spoiler alert: they are maritime migration, Haiti’s crisis, climate change, integration efforts, and upcoming elections.

Daniel González of the Austin American-Statesman visited the crowded segment of the Mexico-Guatemala border near Tapachula, finding that migrant deaths are surging, often due to road accidents involving unsafe transport vehicles.

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December 14, 2023

Developments

A group of senators met late into yesterday evening to negotiate a deal to approve the Biden administration’s $110.5 billion request for emergency funds for Ukraine, Israel, the border, and other priorities. The request is held up by Republican insistence that it come with new restrictions on asylum and other migration protections. The U.S. Congress is scheduled to adjourn for the year today, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) scheduled votes for tomorrow in order to keep the chamber in session if necessary. House leadership has indicated no schedule changes.

“We made progress today,” said top Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut). “We’re not there yet but we continue to head in the right direction. I think it’s more reason for everybody to stay in town, get this done.” Top Republican negotiator Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) said earlier Wednesday, “There has been movement on both sides.”

One of the negotiators, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), confirmed a December 12 CBS News scoop that the Biden administration was willing to consider a new presidential authority to shut off asylum and expel asylum seekers, Title 42-style, without a public health justification. Tillis said that the proposal would work on a “stadium is full” model: once a day’s Border Patrol apprehensions reach a certain level, asylum would be shut off. Tillis suggested a threshold of “south of 3,000” apprehensions per day, which is lower than any monthly average since January 2021.

Republican negotiators are also demanding expansion of “expedited removal,” a rapid screening procedure in lieu of immigration court, including for migrants in the U.S. interior. That would come with a requirement that migrants being screened prove a higher standard of fear of death, torture, or persecution. At Slow Boring, the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind explained why expanding expedited removal would have “no implications for short-term border security, or the handling of new asylum cases, and will in no way alleviate the logistical burdens the administration is wrestling with.”

Progressive legislators and migrants’ rights defense groups voiced outrage at signs of administration willingness to go along with such a deal. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus held a well-attended press conference outside the Capitol. “Alienating the progressive wing of the party is almost a necessary ingredient of finishing a border deal,” Politico observed.

Unnamed DHS officials told NBC News that mandatory detentions of migrants, one of the proposals under senators’ consideration, “would break the border” as detention facilities filled up.

Border Patrol apprehended 8,253 migrants border-wide on December 12, a high figure but down from over 10,200 7 days earlier. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared a slide showing that U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border increased from 53,016 during the first week of November to 69,462 during the first week of December, or 31 percent. The top Border Patrol sectors during December 1-7 were Tucson, Arizona (19,935), Del Rio, Texas (15,702), and San Diego, California (12,062).

In an effort to slow migrant arrivals in the Tucson Sector, Mexico’s national and state governments are launching a “Migration Containment Plan” in the state of Sonora, with increased military and police filters and road checkpoints at bus stations and on main roads.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Niskanen Center obtained data about the “Safe Mobility Offices” that the U.S. government has established this year in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Though operating so far at a small scale, these “SMOs” have referred 10,000 migrants to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and about 2,500 refugees have arrived in the United States so far.

Citing data from Honduras’s migration agency, UNHCR noted a sharp drop in migration through Honduras from October (a record 102,008 migrants registered) to November (59,787), the fewest in a month since July. Migrants from Haiti (35,529 to 5,438) decreased most sharply, though migration from number-one country Venezuela also fell (34,547 to 26,440). Of 187 migrants whom UNHCR polled, 96 percent got their information from WhatsApp and only 38 percent had eaten three meals the day before.

An NPR analysis of Republican presidential candidates’ positions on border and migration showed unanimity on most issues, but some disagreement over the harshest proposals.

The Associated Press debunked claims by Mark Lamb, an Arizona county sheriff running for Senate, that asylum seekers released into the United States are “being given a cell phone, a plane ticket to wherever they want to go in this country, so probably to a community near you, and a $5,000 Visa card.”

On the Right

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December 13, 2023

Developments

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning pleading for assistance included in a budget package currently stuck in Congress: Republican legislators are demanding, as the price for their support, new restrictions on asylum and other migration. “Has border simply been an excuse to kill Ukraine? Democrats are asking themselves that question,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

CBS News reported that the White House is signaling willingness to go along with changes in the law that would sharply restrict the right to seek asylum on U.S. soil, which dates back to the United States’s 1968 ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention and passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. The restrictions that the Biden administration might accept include:

  • “A new, far-reaching legal authority to allow U.S. border officials to summarily expel migrants without processing their asylum claims,” an item on Trump advisors’ wishlist that resembles the pandemic-era Title 42 expulsion authority—but without a public health justification. This proposal would require Mexico to be willing to take back expelled migrants, as it did for some nationalities during the pandemic.
  • A nationwide expansion, beyond the border region, of “expedited removal,” a process that requires asylum seekers to defend their claims without a court hearing, usually a few days after arriving, with little access to counsel or ability to prepare their cases.
  • Increasing the standard of “fear” that asylum seekers must meet in their initial screening interviews when placed in expedited removal.
  • Mandating “the detention of certain migrants who are allowed into the country pending the adjudication of their claims.”

The administration continues to resist restrictions to the 1950s-era authority to issue humanitarian parole, force asylum seekers to “remain in Mexico,” and other proposals Republicans have floated. It is unclear where the administration stands on the ideas of an annual cap on asylum applications or codifying a ban on asylum for people who could have sought it in transit through other countries.

The House and Senate are scheduled to adjourn their 2023 sessions on Thursday. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has said he would re-convene next week if negotiators reached an Ukraine-border deal, but sounded pessimistic about that happening. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said “it is practically impossible” to reach a deal before the holidays. The chief Republican negotiator, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), sounded a bit more optimistic, though he echoed that time is running out for a deal this year. Negotiator Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said he has “no confidence” in lead Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and called for deeper White House involvement.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spent about two hours on Capitol Hill meeting with Sens. Lankford, Murphy, Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), and Senate leaders’ aides. Sinema cited “substantive progress” and Murphy struck a similar note

A CBP release reported that a Guatemalan woman died on September 15 after falling from the 30-foot Trump-era border wall near Otay Mesa, southeast of San Diego. In mid-November, the New York Times reported that 350 victims of wall falls had been admitted in 2023 to the U.C. San Diego Health trauma center, up from zero in the 3 years before the wall’s 2019 renovation.

Mexico’s foreign ministry issued a statement calling on CBP to reopen the PedWest pedestrian crossing south of San Diego, one of two border bridges into Eagle Pass, Texas, and the entire Lukeville, Arizona port of entry. All are closed as CBP has diverted officers to help Border Patrol process large numbers of arriving migrants. People are waiting four or five hours in Tijuana to cross at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego. Arizona Senators Mark Kelly (D) and Kyrsten Sinema sent a letter urging President Biden to deploy the National Guard to help reopen the Lukeville crossing.

Migrants staying at southern Tijuana’s massive Agape shelter, many of them families, held a protest outside the U.S. consulate to demand more CBP One appointments.

A December 8 DHS statement noted that the Department has removed nearly 13,000 citizens of Venezuela from the United States. Some have been returned to Venezuela aboard eight deportation flights, the rest have been deported to Mexico under the Biden administration’s post-Title 42 asylum rule.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The directors of two UN agencies, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), published a column at Time arguing that efforts to deter migrants don’t work and that “the right strategy would tackle every stage of the journey, through a comprehensive and route-based approach of engagement.”

On the Right

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December 12, 2023

Developments

Senate negotiators voiced pessimism about reaching a deal before the end of the year that might grant the Biden administration’s $110.5 billion request for aid to Ukraine, Israel, the border, and other priorities in exchange for truncating asylum or other migration programs, as Republican legislators are demanding. (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will appeal for aid in this request this morning, in an in-person address before the Senate.) Some of a small group of Senate negotiators continue to meet, and White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients is more directly involved. Congress is scheduled to go out of session for the rest of the year on Thursday December 14. House Speaker Mike Johnson indicated that he could convene the chamber next week if necessary.

A host of human rights organizations (including WOLA) have vocally opposed a deal that would change U.S. law to limit the right to seek asylum or other migrant protections. On December 11, similar statements came from Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California), chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, and Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-California), chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; and from the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Tijuana’s municipal migration office estimates that about 5,000 migrants are staying in the city’s 40-plus recognized shelters. About 70 percent are citizens of Mexico fleeing from the country’s interior. Citing a need to help process a large number of migrants in Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, CBP has closed one of two pedestrian lines at the border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Mexico’s migration agency (INM) is facing a funding shortfall until at least the end of the year; an agent told the daily Milenio, “INM agents no longer even approach the migrants…in Ciudad Juarez, no Mexican authority is present for the dozens of migrants who wait, along the Rio Bravo, for a break in patrolling by the Texas National Guard to cross a barbed wire fence.”

Voice of America reports that shakedowns and harassment from corrupt Guatemalan police have made migrants’ transit through the country “hellish.” (See a longer mid-November investigation of this in Spain’s El País.)

On the Right

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December 11, 2023

Developments

In talks that resumed on December 7, Senate negotiators appear to have made little progress toward a deal that could win Republican support for the Biden administration’s request for $110.5 million for Ukraine, Israel, and other priorities. As the price for their votes, Republicans are demanding changes to U.S. law that would reduce access to asylum, humanitarian parole, and similar migrant protections.

“First thing’s first is asylum,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), the chief Republican negotiator on a possible deal, told Face the Nation. “Right now, people come in and say, I want to request asylum. There’s so many people, and the cartels know it, and the smugglers know, that they can throw thousands of people a day. There’s no way to process that.”

“Three sources with knowledge of the talks” told NBC News that, with White House involvement, negotiators are near agreement on raising the standard of “credible fear” that asylum seekers must meet in initial screening interviews at the border. This proposal outrages migrant rights defenders because of the risk that many asylum seekers may be sent back to danger. On Meet the Press, the Democrats’ chief negotiator, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), said, “We are willing to talk about tightening some of the rules, so that you don’t have 10,000 people arriving a day. Our resources are not equipped to be able to handle that number of people. So, let’s reduce the number of people who are coming here, but let’s not shut down the border completely to legitimate claims.”

“Three sources with knowledge of the talks” tell NBC News that Republicans are also calling to restrict use of the presidential “humanitarian parole” authority, which dates back to the 1950s, except for Cuban migrants. Other possible Republican demands, CNN reported, may include more electronic monitoring of asylum seekers, including children, released into the United States, and sending more asylum seekers to “safe third countries.”

CBP’s port of entry in remote Lukeville, Arizona remains closed, as the border crossing’s personnel have been pulled away to help process daily arrivals of asylum seekers and other migrants in Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, where agents apprehended 18,900 people during the week ending December 7 (2,700 per day). “Because Lukeville is so remote, Border Patrol staffing is light, so traffickers in the region controlled by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel steer people there,” the Associated Press noted.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) visited the Lukeville area and called for the border crossing’s reopening and pledging to deploy the state’s National Guard if the situation continues. Hobbs sent President Joe Biden a letter calling for “$512,529,333 in reimbursements for ongoing border operations resulting from the federal government’s failure to secure the Arizona border.”

The five-day average of migrant arrivals (3,407) is even higher in Border Patrol’s Del Rio, Texas sector where—despite a massive array of border security measures laid out by the state government’s “Operation Lone Star”—Border Patrol apprehended 17,034 people in five days.

Near Jacumba Hot Springs, California, just over an hour’s drive east of San Diego, “a total daily average of 800 people are in three camps,” Agence France-Presse reported.

A CBS News poll finds 20 percent of U.S. respondents naming “immigration and the Border” to be the “most important problem facing the United States.” Only “inflation” (27 percent) scored higher.

Although Mexico’s migration agency (INM) is reportedly out of money for deportations and travel for what remains of 2023, the agency returned 47 unaccompanied Guatemalan minors back to Guatemala over the December 9-10 weekend. Still, news of Mexico’s suspension of deportations may be encouraging migrants, like some interviewed by the daily Milenio, to speed their progress across the country.

San Diego U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw approved a court settlement, in litigation brought by the ACLU, that would prohibit any revival of a “family separation” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border for the next eight years.

Analyses and Feature Stories

CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility released an annual report, covering 2022, about internal investigations and employee accountability. The report found no increase in disciplinary actions taken against agency personnel compared to 2021. The National Use of Force Review Board looked at five serious use-of-force incidents and recommended no discipline.

The Ciudad Juárez-based La Verdad reported from several parts of Mexico about the severe toll that migrating across Mexico takes on women.

A Washington Post editorial called for more processing of migrants and more assistance to countries along the U.S.-bound migration route that could be giving in-transit migrants greater opportunity to settle there.

On the Right

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December 8, 2023

Developments

The Senate has adjourned for the weekend, but negotiations appear to be re-starting between a small group of senators as Republicans demand restrictions to asylum, and other tough border and migration measures, in exchange for passage of a bill to fund Ukraine and Israel aid, border priorities, and other items. This group is expected to meet through the weekend, and the White House now appears to be more directly or openly involved.

The Biden administration is signaling that it is willing to raise the “credible fear” standard that asylum seekers must meet when they are placed in expedited removal proceedings and screened by asylum officers, which would cause more asylum seekers to be rejected if unable to defend their claims while in custody within days of arriving. Republicans will probably want more concessions than that, including a return to family detention and limits to the nearly 70-year-old presidential humanitarian parole authority.

The Senate has one week left on its schedule for the 2023 session, though it could add the week of December 18. Lead Senate Republican negotiator James Lankford (Oklahoma) struck a flexible tone, saying he hoped that a bill can pass by the end of the year and that Republicans’ position isn’t “take it or leave it.”

Combining Border Patrol apprehensions and people who came to ports of entry, CBP encountered 9,990 people on Wednesday (December 6). That is down from over 12,000 on Tuesday.

In order to free up officers to help with migrant processing, CBP has closed its PedWest pedestrian border crossing at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego. The port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona and one of two bridges into Eagle Pass, Texas remain closed. South of Lukeville, authorities in Sonora, Mexico plan to install “checkpoints and ‘migration filters.’”

At a camp in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, where asylum seekers wait for days for Border Patrol agents to process them, ABC News reported, “The lucky ones have tents; however, most sleep on the gravel and use their clothes to shield them from the elements and their backpacks as pillows.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Deaths of women migrants increased sharply during a record year for migrant deaths in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector (far west Texas and all of New Mexico). Normally, men are the vast majority of recovered remains, but in New Mexico in 2023, of 78 bodies whose gender could be determined, 40 were female, the El Paso Times found.

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December 7, 2023

Developments

As expected, a Senate “test vote” failed, 49-51, on a $110.5 billion bill to fulfill the Biden administration’s request for additional 2024 money for Ukraine, Israel, the border, and other priorities. All 49 Republican senators voted “no,” along with Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who opposes military aid to Israel without conditions, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who had to vote “no” for procedural reasons.

Schumer scheduled the vote partly to reinvigorate negotiations, which stalled last week, between a small group of senators. Republicans are demanding that the bill come with language clamping down on the right to seek asylum at the border, limiting the 1950s-era presidential authority to offer humanitarian parole to migrants, and other restrictions on immigration.

“I am willing to make significant compromises on the border,” President Joe Biden told reporters. “We need to fix the broken border system. It is broken.”

Changes that Democrats appear inclined to adopt include expanding the number of asylum seekers placed in expedited removal proceedings after being encountered at the border, and requiring them to meet a higher standard of “credible fear” in initial interviews with asylum officers, usually while in custody days after crossing the border.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), the party’s main negotiator on a potential deal with Republicans, told National Public Radio “right now there are far too many people crossing the border and being released into the country, many of them don’t have a legitimate claim of asylum,” but “I don’t think it’s in the best traditions of this country to deny people with legitimate claims of asylum access to the United States.”

Border Patrol reported “8,000+ apprehensions” of migrants border-wide on December 5. Reporters for CNN, CBS News, and Fox reported the actual number as one of the highest daily migrant apprehension totals ever: “10,300,” “10,200+,” “more than 10,000,” and “more than 12,000” when including port-of-entry encounters.

Panama has now counted 500,000 migrants passing through the Darién Gap in 2023, EFE reported. The previous full-year record for migration through this dangerous jungle region, set last year, was less than half that (248,284).

Analyses and Feature Stories

“‘There is a fundamental shift in the Democratic Party on immigration’ over the past six months,” Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute told the Associated Press. Democrats have stopped avoiding discussions of adjusting border policy: “Their backs don’t go up when they see someone saying we want to make some changes in the policies at the border.”

Of nearly 500 mostly Haitian unaccompanied migrant children whom the U.S. Coast Guard apprehended at sea, in the Caribbean or Florida Straits, between July 2021 and September 2023, all but 12 were sent back to their countries of origin. “It’s often unclear where they go once they return,” reported a ProPublica / New York Times investigation by Seth Freed Wessler.

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December 6, 2023

Developments

In exchange for supporting Ukraine aid, Republican legislators continue to demand reduced access to asylum and parole, among other border-hardening measures.

A classified Senate briefing about the need for Ukraine and other aid in the Biden administration’s $106 billion supplemental funding request reportedly got ugly: Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) walked out early, after some screamed profanities in the presence of the secretaries of defense and state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Senate’s Democratic majority introduced a funding bill, which may come up for consideration today, reflecting the Biden administration’s request and including no tightening of immigration laws. The 49-seat Republican minority needs just 41 votes to filibuster the bill—to prevent cloture of debate and a final vote—so the bill is likely to fail a cloture vote.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) sent a letter to the White House demanding “transformative change to our nation’s border security laws,” starting with H.R. 2, a bill that the House passed in May, without a single Democratic vote. As WOLA explained in November, H.R. 2 would almost completely curtail access to the U.S. asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border. A chorus of Democratic Senate voices vehemently rejected including H.R. 2.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say H.R. 2 or nothing. And I’ve always smiled and said, House Republicans didn’t get a single Democrat on H.R. 2, and they’re asking us to get 20 on our side.OK, well, that’s not realistic,” acknowledged the lead Republican negotiator in Senate talks, Sen. James Lankford (Oklahoma). But Lankford’s side is seeking more concessions than higher standards for asylum-seekers’ initial credible fear interviews, something that some Democrats have said they are open to. According to the Wall Street Journal, Lankford mentioned “other options, including increasing detention bed space or adding a requirement that would allow the government to permanently send asylum seekers to third countries it deems safe for them.”

Arrivals of migrants in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector (far west Texas and all of New Mexico) have fallen since Title 42’s end, dropping sharply in October. Border Report reported, however, that arrivals have started to pick up again.

Colombia arrested 24 people, including 5 active Navy personnel, for allegedly participating in a migrant-smuggling ring facilitating U.S.-bound transit.

Asked by Sean Hannity whether he would “be a dictator” if re-elected, ex-President Donald Trump replied, “No, no, no—other than Day 1. We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Tom Cartwright’s latest monthly ICE deportation flights monitoring report for Witness at the Border counted 140 removal flights in November, up 39 percent over November 2022, the 3rd-highest monthly total of the past 12 months. Top removal flight destinations last month were Guatemala (57 flights), Honduras (40), El Salvador (14), Colombia (5), and Ecuador (4). Three went to Venezuela and one to Cuba.

At America’s Voice, Gabe Ortiz reported on House Republican backlash against new CBP guidance for LGBT migrants in custody, which instructs agents “to avoid using specific pronouns until they have more information about the individual, as well as to refrain from using derogatory speech, including stereotypes and offensive language.”

The Cato Institute’s David Bier compiled data indicating that Border Patrol’s estimated “got-aways”—migrants believed to have avoided apprehension at the border—fell by half after the end of the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy.

Mexico’s Milenio posits a link between a Sinaloa Cartel faction’s order to cease fentanyl trafficking and a modest recent drop in fentanyl seizures at the border.

On the Right

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December 5, 2023

Developments

Talks continue, haltingly, in the U.S. Senate as Republicans demand legal changes tightening asylum and other migration pathways, in exchange for supporting a $106 billion emergency funding request for Ukraine, Israel, the border and other priorities. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said that negotiations between a small group of senators were “on ice.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is not one of the negotiators, implied that the talks were more like blackmail terms than a search for a compromise: “This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.” The Democrats’ lead negotiator, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connectictut) replied, “Apparently I’ve wasted the last 3 weeks of my life since this was never a negotiation – just a take it or leave it demand. 🙃”

Semafor reported that Republicans triggered the current impasse in negotiations with a demand “to provide the president new authority to shut down the asylum system at will,” an authority similar to the pandemic-era Title 42 expulsions policy.

Some reports indicated that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) would demand that the funding bill include all of H.R. 2: a draconian bill, passed by the House on a party-line vote in May, that would all but shut down asylum. Republican negotiator Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) denied this: Johnson will “get what we send him.”

Sen. Schumer intends to put the appropriation bill up for a “test vote” on Wednesday; it is very likey to fail amid opposition from the chamber’s 49 Republicans, who only need 41 votes to filibuster the bill, keeping it from coming to a final vote.

Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) is running out of money for the year, and has suspended migrant deportations and other activities involving transport of personnel, the Associated Press reported. Mexican authorities encountered a record 588,626 migrants during the first 10 months of 2023.

While it considers the case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has prohibited Border Patrol from reaching asylum seekers on U.S. soil by cutting through concertina wire that Texas police and National Guardsmen have laid along the Rio Grande. This temporarily reverses a November 29 district court decision allowing federal agents to cut the razor-sharp wire. Texas’s state government had filed suit in late October seeking to stop Border Patrol from cutting the wire.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) voiced concern that large numbers of arriving asylum seekers could cause CBP to close other ports of entry in order to free up personnel to process migrants, as happened last week at the temporarily shuttered crossing in remote Lukeville. Hobbs did not rule out sending the state’s National Guard to the border, but is holding off for now.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The El Paso Times’ Lauren Villagrán visited Sololá, in Guatemala’s highlands, the home region of many of the 40 migrants who died in a horrific March 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez migrant detention facility.

“The average wait time for non-Mexicans is two months after making an account and requesting an appointment” with the CBP One app, a senior CBP official told Bloomberg. “For Mexicans, the wait time is currently a little over 3 months,” the official added, noting that Mexican citizens have daily limits to prevent them from crowding out other nationalities. This is curious, since the result is that Mexican asylum seekers are forced to wait in the same country where they face threats.

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December 4, 2023

Developments

The Washington politics website Punchbowl News reported that talks have broken down among a small group of senators discussing tightened asylum standards and other possible migration restrictions in exchange for Republican support for a big funding bill for Ukraine, Israel, and the border. The small group was to keep discussing a possible compromise over the December 2-3 weekend, but has not met since Thursday. The Senate’s Democratic majority may introduce the supplemental funding bill as early as December 7 without any of the migration curbs that Republicans are demanding; Republicans may filibuster it.

One of the Republican negotiators, Sen. James Lankford (Oklahoma), voiced optimism on December 3 that “we can get this done by the end of the year.”

The federal judiciary’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Texas on December 1 to remove the “buoy wall” that Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had ordered built in the middle of the Rio Grande in June near Eagle Pass. Abbott said he would appeal to the Supreme Court.

Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona Sector reported apprehending 17,500 migrants in the week ending December 1. If sustained over a month, that rate would hit a monthly threshold—70,000 apprehensions in a single sector—that has only been reached twice after 2000. CBPannounced that it will temporarily close its port of entry in remote Lukeville, Arizona so that officers stationed there may help Border Patrol to process the large numbers of asylum seekers turning themselves in nearby.

A group of 18 migrants from Mexico and Guatemala, including children, was kidnapped after flying from Tijuana to Matamoros for their “CBP One” appointments at the U.S. port of entry there. As of December 3, as many as 17 of the 18 victims may have been released after making ransom payments. The incident highlights the risks to migrants in Tamaulipas, the only Mexican border state to have a Level Four travel warning from the U.S. State Department.

Analyses and Feature Stories

For the second time in ten days, the New York Times published an analysis of Chinese citizens’ increased migration to the U.S.-Mexico border. “Every immigrant I interviewed this year who passed through the Darién Gap,” reporter Li Yuan wrote, “came from a lower middle-class background. They said that they feared falling into poverty if the Chinese economy worsened, and that they could no longer see a future for themselves or their children in their home country.”

Honduras’s ContraCorriente reported on the harrowing experience of Honduran women migrating in an attempt to flee domestic or gender-based violence.

WOLA’s Adam Isacson testified in a November 30 hearing of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee about “the U.S. Border Crisis and the American Solution to an International Problem.” WOLA has posted a page with video excerpts and the text of the written and oral testimonies delivered.

On the Right:

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November 29, 2023

Developments

Seven mostly Republican senators continue to negotiate the Biden administration’s request for supplemental 2024 funding for Ukraine, Israel, and the border. Republicans want tough restrictions on asylum and humanitarian parole in exchange for their support. The talks do not appear to be progressing.

It seems that negotiators are focusing on two Republican demands: for raising standards that recently arrived asylum seekers would have to meet in initial credible-fear interviews, and for weakening the presidential authority—part of immigration law since the 1950s—that allows temporary grants of humanitarian parole. Some Democrats appear willing to budge on the credible fear standards, but are more resistant to watering down parole, a program that, as applied to some citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Venezuela, has reduced arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I think it’s becoming less and less likely that we’ll have a deal by the end of the week,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), one of the seven negotiators.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent reported:

According to Democratic sources familiar with the negotiations, Republican demands began to shift soon after the New York Times reported that in a second Trump term, he would launch mass removals of millions of undocumented immigrants, gut asylum seeking almost entirely, and dramatically expand migrant detention in “giant camps.”

As one Senate Democratic source told me, Republicans started acting as though Trump and his immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller were “looking over their shoulders.”

Eleven Democratic senators, led by Alex Padilla (California), signed a statement opposing any deal that weakens asylum and doesn’t include “a clear path to legalization for long-standing undocumented immigrants.” Immigrants’ rights groups have added their voices in opposition to any deal that weakens asylum and other protections.

On the right, the “Heritage Action” organization opposed any deal that does not include the full Republican agenda represented in H.R. 2, the “Secure the Border Act,” which passed the House on a party-line vote in May 2023.

The Los Angeles Times reported on miserable conditions endured by asylum seekers awaiting Border Patrol processing outdoors, at times for days, at an outdoor “informal holding spot” near a gap in the border wall in rural Jacumba Hot Springs, California.

Agents in other Border Patrol sectors are being called to help process large numbers of arriving migrants in the Tucson, Arizona and Del Rio, Texas sectors. Some of that processing is occurring virtually, through video interviews with agents.

The federal judiciary’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing arguments in a longstanding case seeking to end CBP’s practice of “metering,” or restricting asylum seekers’ access to U.S. soil at ports of entry.

Analyses and Feature Stories

An analysis from the New York Times’ Miriam Jordan notes that U.S. asylum law offers little protection to people fleeing the effects of climate change.

The latest LAPOP AmericasBarometer survey found that 50 percent of Nicaraguan people intend to migrate, and that 23 percent are “very prepared” to leave Nicaragua in the near future. About 670,000 Nicaraguans—more than 10 percent of the country—have left since 2018.

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November 28, 2023

Developments

Six senators continue to negotiate the Biden administration’s supplemental budget request for Ukraine, Israel, and the border. As a condition for their support, Republican legislators are demanding legal changes that would sharply curtail access to asylum. “We’ve made progress on asylum,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), one of the negotiators, who added that Republicans continue to insist on limits to the presidential authority to grant humanitarian parole (which is not a border issue). “We have to get this done this week,” said Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee.

Yesterday ICE sent its sixth deportation flight to Caracas, Venezuela since October 18, following an October 5 agreement with the Venezuelan government to resume aerial deportations. “If averages hold that would be about 720 people deported to Venezuela,” wrote Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border, who closely tracks deportation flights.

Citing large numbers of arriving migrants, CBP is closing a border bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas and reducing vehicle processing at the Lukeville, Arizona port of entry so that personnel can assist Border Patrol with processing.

CBP is adding new barrier at the point where the Tijuana River crosses into California, a site where a migrant from West Africa died during a large group incursion earlier this month.

An Army National Guardsman assigned to the Texas state government’s Operation Lone Star “was killed from ‘a self-inflicted wound while on duty by a public park'” in Laredo, Texas on Thanksgiving morning.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Over 29 months, state authorities operating under Texas’s “Operation Lone Star” have participated in vehicle pursuits that killed at least 74 people and injured at least 189 more, according to a report from Human Rights Watch. Unlike many law enforcement agencies (including CBP) that have developed policies to govern risky chases on public roads, Texas’s Department of Public Safety continues to leave pursuits up to the discretion of individual officers, the New York Times reported last Friday.

The Arizona Daily Star reported from the Mexican border town of Sásabe, Sonora, where the population has shrunk from 2,500 to less than 100 amid intense fighting between two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. Closures of gaps in the border wall have made it difficult for people to flee into Arizona.

Criminals are using AI-doctored images and videos to defraud the families of missing migrants, portraying the migrants as kidnap victims and demanding ransom payments, EFE reported.

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November 27, 2023

Developments

Congress is considering a package of supplemental 2024 spending, including Ukraine aid and $13 billion in new initiatives at the border. Republicans are demanding some hard-line border measures as a condition of passage. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), one of a small group of senators negotiating a possible deal, appears open to the idea of tightening initial screening standards that asylum seekers must satisfy upon arrival at the border.

Volunteers are still doing most of the caring for more than 200 asylum seekers camped near a gap in the border wall in Jacumba Springs, in an “Open-Air Detention Center” along the central California border, as they await Border Patrol processing.

Factions of the Sinaloa Cartel are fighting over control of contraband and migration routes near Sásabe, Sonora, along the border with Arizona; residents who want to flee are trapped between criminals who control roads to the south and the border wall, and CBP officers denying access to U.S. ports of entry, to the north.

Things are so busy in Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona Sector—the part of the U.S.-Mexico border currently with the most migrants, about 15,000 per week—that the agency’s sector headquarters is minimizing its social media presence.

“The United States announced the implementation of Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) in Ecuador to process applications for regular entry to the country for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Colombia, who have been in Ecuador on or before 18 October,” reports a new UNHCR Ecuador Operational Update. “The SMOs operated in two phases, with the second one starting on 20 November for people from eligible countries to apply directly at www.movilidadsegura.org.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Even as CBP tones down the extremity of its dangerous high-speed vehicle pursuits, Texas police participating in “Operation Lone Star” have stepped them up.

“Chinese citizens are more successful than people from other countries with their asylum claims in immigration court. And those who are not end up staying anyway because China usually will not take them back,” reported the New York Times.

David Bier and Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute, writing in USA Today, criticize the Biden administration’s “arbitrary” caps and “truly bizarre” obstacles to humanitarian parole and CBP One asylum appointments.

85 percent of Mexican manufacturing businesses surveyed said they are having trouble finding workers, and more migrants from elsewhere in the Americas are settling in Mexico and taking those jobs, Reuters reported.

Amid a thawing of relations with Venezuela, Colombia has become less welcoming to Venezuelan migrants, La Silla Vacía reported, which could lead some to opt to cross the Darién Gap and migrate to the United States.

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