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April 25, 2024

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Developments

The chief of Border Patrol’s San Diego, California sector reported that agents there apprehended migrants 9,513 times over the seven days ending April 23. That is a 6 percent increase over the previous week and a 36 percent increase over two weeks prior. For the first time since the late 1990s, San Diego is almost certainly the busiest of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.

Volunteers providing humanitarian aid to asylum seekers waiting in open-air sites along the California border say that numbers are increasing there; donors are encouraged to contribute needed items on an Amazon wishlist.

Five centrist Democrats who had voted last Saturday for a very strict Republican-led border bill issued a statement yesterday doubling down on their position. The Democrats called on President Biden to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy and to begin Title 42-style expulsions of asylum seekers, while full-throatedly endorsing the Border Patrol union’s hardline stance on border security.

In Mexico’s northern border state of Chihuahua, national guardsmen detained 150 Central American migrants who were staying in a hotel in the state capital. In Ciudad Juárez—Chihuahua’s largest city, across from El Paso—guardsmen, immigration agents, and municipal police carried out an operation to prevent 400 migrants who had arrived atop a cargo train from reaching the borderline.

The Biden administration has paused court-ordered remediation of environmental damage caused by Trump-era border wall construction, citing litigation in a separate case involving the state of Texas. The Sierra Club, Southern Border Communities Coalition, and ACLU announced yesterday that they are seeking to intervene in the Texas case in order to restart remediation projects.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The National Immigration Forum and other centrist groups (Niskanen Center, Hispanic Leadership Fund, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, State Business Executives, Association of Equipment Manufacturers, Border Perspective) published a proposed “border security and management framework” document. It calls for creating a corps of asylum officers to adjudicate most protection claims at the border in less than two months, along with increased resources for U.S. border security agencies and drug interdiction technologies.

CalMatters reported on lengthening wait times at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego, amid increased cross-border traffic and longstanding CBP Field Operations staffing and infrastructure deficiencies.

Wait times for cargo at the busy commercial port of entry in Laredo, Texas have also been worsening, though Mexican government software glitches seem to be much of the cause.

On the Right

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April 24, 2024

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Developments

Mexican migration agents pulled 400 migrants off of a cargo train in rural Chihuahua, Mexico, leaving them stranded in the desert, the human rights organization Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción (DHIA) denounced. The group included 150 children and 7 pregnant women. Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) stepped up its operations in Chihuahua, the northern border state that includes Ciudad Juárez, at the beginning of April.

Asylum seekers who do arrive in Ciudad Juárez are now seeking to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents at Gate 40 along the El Paso border wall on the bank of the Rio Grande. This is east of Gate 36, where Texas state police and National Guard have set up a large presence, with several coils of razor wire, to prevent asylum seekers from approaching federal authorities.

A group of 141 migrants who had breached the Texas state barrier in El Paso on March 21 were indicted yesterday on misdemeanor rioting charges. The Texas state grand jury’s ruling came one day after a county judge had thrown out the charges, finding insufficient probable cause. The March 21 incident, showing migrants pushing past guardsmen to reach the border wall and Border Patrol agents, was caught on video and circulated widely on social media.

El Paso’s police have applied for a $2.8 million state grant to help it combat the Venezuelan-originated “Tren de Aragua” criminal organization. “We haven’t had contact with that gang (in criminal cases), but that’s not to say they are not here in El Paso,” a police spokesman told the El Paso Times.

So far this calendar year, Mexican authorities have deported 5,689 Guatemalan citizens by land and another 1,831 by air. U.S. authorities returned 22,887 Guatemalans.

A group of relatives of missing Central American migrants traveled to Tijuana to search for them. “It took more or less a year for them to add his file as a case for search in Mexico, because the communication from my country did not go through,” said the wife of a Guatemalan man whom she last heard from in Sonora in 2021.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it met with Mexico’s National Search Commission to seek improved exchange of forensic information about migrants who have gone missing in Mexico and Central America, especially fingerprints.

The Biden administration released the 771-page text of a final rule to govern the treatment of unaccompanied migrant children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A new data report from TRAC Immigration notes that U.S. immigration judges are ordering 50 percent more deportations now than in 2019, the peak year of the Trump administration. In the first half of fiscal year 2024, judges ordered 136,623 immigrants deported.

In 2019, 32 percent of migrants appearing in immigration court had attorneys; that has dropped to 15 percent this year.

38 percent of 2024’s rulings were asylum cases. Of those instances, only 21 percent were ordered removed; the rest received asylum or some other status allowing them to remain in the United States.

An explainer from the National Immigration Forum dug into existing efforts and pending proposals to have USCIS asylum officers—not immigration judges—adjudicate more asylum cases for migrants who arrive at the border.

The Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque interviewed Zachary Mueller of America’s Voice about the controversial and possibly illegal activities of “Border 911,” a pro-Trump group whose members include former top officials of Border Patrol, CBP, and ICE.

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April 23, 2024

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Developments

Panama’s government posted statistics showing that 110,008 people migrated through the Darién Gap during the first 3 months of 2024. That is 26 percent more migration than Panama measured during the first 3 months of 2023, a year in which 520,085 people ended up traveling through the Darién Gap.

22 percent of this year’s migrants were children. Of the adult population, 36 percent were women. 64 percent of this year’s total have been citizens of Venezuela, followed by Ecuador (8%), Haiti (7%), Colombia (6%), and China (6%).

The pace of migration has been unusually steady, averaging 1,161 migrants per day in January, 1,282 in February, and 1,188 in March. Last year, migration in the Darién jumped 55 percent from February to March.

Between January 1 and April 16, Guatemalan authorities expelled 7,735 mostly U.S.-bound migrants into Honduras and 177 into El Salvador. In this respect, the new government of Bernardo Arévalo has made no changes to its predecessors’ approach to in-transit migration. Of this year’s expulsions, 77 percent have been citizens of Venezuela. Other frequently expelled nationalities include Colombia (9%), Ecuador (6%), and Haiti (2%). Guatemala’s expulsions included 44 citizens of China and 18 citizens of Turkey.

Some of the migrants whom Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) paid to have flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts in September 2022 have been granted “U” visas, a status for victims of crimes that are currently being investigated or prosecuted, the Miami Herald reported. A U.S. district judge in Massachusetts also found recently that the private contractor Florida hired to run the flight, Vertol Systems, may have “participated in a scheme to recruit vulnerable individuals through deceit so they could unwillingly and publicly be used as a prop in an extremely divisive national debate,”

Eight dead bodies abandoned along a highway near Chihuahua, the capital of Mexico’s northern border state of the same name, may be related to turf battles between migrant smuggling organizations in the area, Border Report reported.

“Of Costa Rica’s 5.2 million inhabitants, one million are relatively recent migrants. Twenty percent of births are to Nicaraguan mothers and 20 percent of prisoners are of Nicaraguan origin,” said Costa Rica’s foreign minister, Arnoldo André Tinoco.

The independent Nicaraguan outlet Nicaragua Investiga reported on the two years of red tape and indifference that a family suffered as it tried to repatriate from Texas the remains of a young man who died of drowning in the Rio Grande in May 2022.

The jury was unable to agree on a verdict in the trial of Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly, who allegedly shot and killed Mexican migrant Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea on his property in January 2023. The judge in the case declared a mistrial.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Speaking to analysts about migration patterns, a National Public Radio piece concluded that Mexico’s ongoing efforts to block migration will not reduce arrivals at the U.S. border for long, as flows into Mexico from the south remain robust.

In a third in-depth report about U.S.-bound migration published in the past 10 days, the Honduran digital outlet ContraCorriente reported on the increasing diversity of nationalities of migrants taking the very risky journey through Mexico atop the “La Bestia” cargo train.

“The notion that there is a crisis caused by the border is fallacious,” economist James Gerber, author of the new book Border Economies: Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide, told Sandra Dibble at Voice of San Diego. “There is a crisis in U.S. immigration policy, that’s the crisis. People are going to migrate and they’re going to migrate in bigger numbers over time because of the climate crisis. This is something that we need to learn how to manage better.”

Even immigration restrictionist groups avoid using the term “invasion” to describe migration—as many Republican politicians are doing—because it is “inaccurate and incendiary,” reported Rafael Bernal at The Hill.

“When we encounter someone fleeing starvation, political repression and threats to their life and liberty, we should see ourselves in them,” wrote Shmuly Yanklowitz, a rabbi who often works at the border in Arizona, in a Passover reflection published by the Chicago Tribune.

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April 22, 2024

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Developments

Congressional Republicans’ effort to attach hardline border measures to Ukraine aid legislation formally ended on Saturday, when the House of Representatives approved a Ukraine and Israel aid bill with no border or migration content.

The GOP demand, issued last fall, spurred a months-long Senate negotiation process, yielding a deal that would have changed the law to, among other provisions, halt asylum access at the border when migration reached certain levels. That deal failed when Republican senators rejected it in early February.

In a gesture to border hardliners, House Republican leadership allowed a separate bill to come to a vote on Saturday that would have effectively shut down the right to seek asylum at the border. H.R. 3602, the “End the Border Catastrophe Act,” included most of the provisions of H.R. 2, a strict bill that the House passed in May 2023 without a single Democratic vote. Because it was rushed to the floor in suspension of the House’s rules, H.R. 3602 failed by a 215-199 vote on Saturday. Unlike H.R. 2, though, it got 5 Democratic “yes” votes.

Border Patrol’s San Diego, California Sector experienced a weekly jump in migrant apprehensions and now firmly leads the Tucson, Arizona Sector as the apparent busiest region of the U.S.-Mexico border. While both sectors saw increases last week, San Diego reported 8,959 apprehensions during April 10-16 (28 percent more than the previous week) and Tucson reported 7,500 during April 12-18 (12 percent more than the previous week).

An Albuquerque Journal report from New Mexico’s Cibola County Correctional Center noted an increase in the number of Venezuelan migrants being deported from the Center into Mexico.

Edixon Del Jesus Farias-Farias, a 26-year-old citizen of Venezuela and a detainee in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Conroe, Texas, died on April 18. “An autopsy is pending to determine the official cause of death,” reads an ICE release.

Though licensed cannabis is now legal in New Mexico, Border Patrol continues to seize the drug, which remains illegal on the federal level, at the agency’s interior checkpoints in the state, the Associated Press reported. This “prompted a discussion this week” between Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A greater share of this year’s reduced population of migrants is coming to the border in states west of Texas. The Texas Tribune examined Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) claims that his state government’s hardline border policies are causing the westward shift, concluding that the reasons “are much more complicated” and that the trend is probably temporary.

Gov. Abbott’s office reported busing 112,700 migrants to Democratic-governed cities since April 2022.

A significant cause of the border-wide decline is the Mexican government’s 2024 crackdown on migration transiting the country. However, “uneven enforcement and widespread corruption” ensure that Mexico rarely “blocks” migrants: its actions “make migrants’ journey north riskier, costlier, and slower,” Christine Murray reported at the Financial Times.

Despite rhetoric about terrorists potentially crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, “since 1975, the annual likelihood of an American being murdered in a foreigner-committed terrorist attack is about one in 4.5 million,” recalled the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh.

Ecuadorian migrants transiting Mexico who spoke to Agénce France Presse said that they were nervous about identifying themselves to Mexican authorities as citizens of Ecuador, two weeks after Ecuador’s government raided the Mexican embassy in Quito, triggering a breakdown in diplomatic relations.

While most of the thousands of migrants per week transiting Honduras pass through the country quickly, some need to stay and seek temporary work, medical assistance, and shelter, the Honduran online outlet ContraCorriente reported. While some formal shelters and humanitarian aid exist, many migrants rely on informal shelters provided by local citizens or stay in rented rooms in private homes.

“The next administration in Mexico will inherit an incomplete and deficient action plan to deal with migration” from Central America, wrote Brenda Estefan of IPADE Business School at Americas Quarterly, calling for a renewed and more collaborative focus on “root causes” of migration after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leaves office at the end of the year.

Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania) penned a column endorsing the Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill that includes border and migration provisions that reflect some priorities of border hardliners and some priorities of migrant rights defenders.

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April 19, 2024

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Developments

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) yesterday returned a planeload of 52 Haitian citizens to their country, even though governance has collapsed and violence is rampant there. The plane landed in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien because the airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is too unsafe.

During the first six months of fiscal 2024, Haiti was the number-fifteen nationality of migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry, well behind even China, India, and Turkey. 97 percent of Haitians seeking protection at the border in 2024 have instead reported to ports of entry, in nearly all cases using the CBP One smartphone app.

“Just where are these deportees supposed to go?” William O’Neill, the UN independent human rights expert on Haiti, asked the Miami Herald. “I would just ask the United States and all countries to halt immediately all deportations to a country that cannot guarantee anyone’s security, where 1.5 million people are facing famine and where embassies are evacuating most of their personnel.”

In March, a letter from 481 organizations (including WOLA) had urged the Biden administration to suspend deportation flights to Haiti.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) alerted that its personnel in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras saw more cases of sexual violence against migrants during the first quarter of 2024 (over 250) than they did in all of 2023 (232). Most cases occurred in Mexico’s organized crime-influenced U.S. border state of Tamaulipas.

MSF reported in March that it had counted 676 cases of sexual violence in the Darién Gap in 2023, and another 120 in January 2024. Shortly afterward, Panama’s government suspended the organization’s operations in the country.

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Communications Luis Miranda said that the average wait for a CBP One appointment right now is about 10 weeks. This contrasts with recent reports of appointments routinely taking six or even eight months at some border crossings.

“I am concerned that hate, bigotry and xenophobia are clouding our potential to prosper together,” Mexico’s foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, wrote in a Dallas Morning News column directed at Texas state authorities. Bárcena is currently visiting Texas border cities.

Interviewed by CBS News, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister said that his government would be willing to accept more than the current tempo of one U.S. deportation flight per month.

Colombia has fallen behind on regularizing the status of Venezuelan migrants who arrive without passports, and this is incentivizing many Venezuelans to migrate to the United States, reported Manuel Rueda at PRX’s The World.

Two South Texas legislators, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D) and Rep. Monica de la Cruz (R), alleged that Catholic Charities of San Antonio misused federal funding by paying for released migrants’ airfare to destination cities in the U.S. interior.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Reporting from San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, a border city near Yuma, Arizona, the BBC’s Linda Pressly focused on the powerful criminal organizations increasingly extorting and kidnapping migrants there. “These extortionists and hostage-takers are not only professional criminals—some are also law enforcement,” Pressly noted.

Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute told the Voice of America that “root causes” strategies have their limits: “For example, if Microsoft wanted to set up a hub in Guatemala, they would need not only to include money to build the building, to hire workers, provide training, but also a counterpart allocation from the Guatemalan government to build the roads, to have the infrastructure for the electricity, to have broadband internet.”

“A vast enforcement crackdown is likely to harm economic opportunity in the United States,” reads a column from the Peterson Institute for International Economics’ Michael Clemens, author of a new statistical study of how the availability of lawful pathways reduces unlawful border crossings. “A rational way out of this crisis would be to set up a system expanding legal access for immigrants to the United States while retaining some categories as unlawful.”

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April 18, 2024

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Developments

The San Diego, California Border Patrol sector may now be the number one destination for migrants coming to the border, according to a read of weekly data posted by Border Patrol sector chiefs. San Diego saw the most migration during much of the 1990s but has been surpassed by other parts of the border over the past quarter-century.

An increase in migrant arrivals there—8,959 Border Patrol apprehensions between April 10 and 16—had overwhelmed San Diego county efforts to receive released migrants, resulting in 24,000 CBP “street releases ” in San Diego since federal funding ran out in February. San Diego County has received $19.6 million in federal funding from the 2024 budget that Congress approved in March, but has not yet restarted migrant reception services, Border Report found.

In an effort to pacify conservatives angry that an Ukraine aid bill is headed to a vote this weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) introduced a new hard-line border bill. H.R. 3602, currently on the Rules Committee’s docket, includes most of the provisions of H.R. 2, which passed the House on a party-line vote in May 2023. Among other provisions, H.R. 2 would make it virtually impossible to access the U.S. asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The bill might come to a vote this week—or it may die a quiet death, as Republican hardliners are unhappy with the process.

As expected, the U.S. Senate voted to dismiss the House of Representatives’ effort to impeach Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The impeachment—spearheaded by House Republicans who oppose Mayorkas’s management of the border and migration—will not go to a Senate trial.

The dismissal passed by a 51-49 party-line vote in the Democratic-majority Senate. The most moderate Republicans voted to impeach, while the most conservative Democrats (or independents who caucus with Democrats) voted to dismiss.

More than 20 migrants, about half from Ecuador, were kidnapped by criminals in Ciudad Juárez last week after flying to the city. The criminals reportedly released five of them for a ransom of $8,000 each.

Mexican Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena is on a tour of Texas border cities, visiting consulates to help them prepare for—and to send a strong message of opposition to—Texas’s S.B. 4 state immigration law. The controversial measure is currently suspended as federal courts consider appeals.

Bárcena reiterated that Mexico will not accept any deportations, including of Mexican citizens, carried out by Texas state—not federal—authorities.

In the Darién Gap, Colombia reports capturing “98 members of different criminal organizations between August 7, 2022 and March 12, 2024,” reads an item at the U.S. Southern Command’s Diálogo website. The document does not state whether any of those captured held positions of importance in criminal organizations, as opposed to low-level figures.

A new update from the UN Refugee Agency noted that since September, Honduras has measured more in-transit migration than Panama has. “This trend is explained by air transit to Nicaragua, which allows people coming mainly from Haiti, Cuba, Guinea, and other extra-continental nationalities to subsequently take the route through Honduras without passing through the Darién. In addition, there is maritime transit from Colombia to Nicaragua.”

Monday is the deadline for public comment on CBP’s plan to install 25 miles of stadium-style bright lighting along the Rio Grande in west and south Texas. As the proposed lighting is “a major stressor to wildlife” and creates light pollution, the plan alarms environmental defenders.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A new WOLA analysis looks at the sharp drop in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border so far in 2024. Rather than U.S. policy changes or the Texas government’s crackdown, the main reason appears to be Mexico’s stepped-up interdiction of migrants, at U.S. urging. These efforts may falter as flows of new migrants into Mexico remain robust; if that happens and migration increases, the Biden administration will likely consider means to “shut down” asylum access. Those steps, too, would only have a short-term impact, the study concludes.

The Guardian examined the leading candidate in Panama’s presidential elections’ unrealistic vow to “close” the Darién Gap to migration.

A report from Jesuit Refugee Service USA and the Boston College School of Social Work looked at how digital tools are changing the migration experience, from the spread of misinformation to the challenges of using the CBP One app.

On the Right

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April 17, 2024

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Developments

The populist candidate leading polls for Panama’s May 5 presidential elections is promising to block migration through the Darién Gap. “We are going to close Darien and we are going to repatriate all these people as appropriate, respecting human rights,” José Raúl Mulino told reporters. Mulino did not specify how he would manage to close to migrants a 2,200-square-mile region of dense jungle.

Leaders of the Republican-majority House of Representatives formally delivered articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Democratic-majority Senate, more than two months after approving them by a single vote on their second attempt. The Republican legislators contend that Mayorkas’s management of the border and migration is grounds for impeachment; Senate Democratic leaders are likely to introduce a motion to dismiss the case without going to trial, and they appear to have the votes.

Mayorkas testified yesterday in the House Homeland Security Committee, which originated his impeachment process last year. “With the authorities and the funding that we have, it [the border] is as secure as it can be,” Mayorkas told a Republican questioner.

Mayorkas said he did not recall telling Border Patrol agents that “higher than 85 percent” of encountered migrants were being released into the United States. (Judging from CBP custody statistics, more than 70 percent of encountered migrants received “notices to appear” during the first six months of fiscal 2024.)

At the hearing, Republican legislators presented a flier, first promoted on Twitter by the Heritage Foundation, supposedly produced by a Jewish immigrant aid organization in Texas. The document, which urges migrants to vote for Joe Biden in November, is an obvious fake.

Brazilian fishermen discovered the remains of nine people in a boat drifting off the coast of the country’s northeast on Saturday. They appear to have been migrants from Africa, probably Mali and Mauritania.

A Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 35 north of Laredo, Texas is receiving $15 million in upgrades that will make it the largest interior road checkpoint in the United States, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

“Realistically speaking, having this [Biden administration] asylum ban applied to 100 percent could mean only a few hundred people more a month being ordered removed. Not a huge shift,” pointed out the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick in a factually dense interview with the Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque.

A Bloomberg analysis examined the drift of the Biden administration’s border and migration policies, noting inconsistencies and failures to anticipate new challenges. “The first year of Biden’s term felt like it was a series of good plans getting halted, with frequent leadership changes on the issue,” a former official noted.

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April 16, 2024

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Developments

An Indiana National Guardsman in El Paso, part of the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star” troop deployment, shot his weapon at a migrant who had allegedly stabbed two people on Sunday afternoon.

The incident occurred along the edge of the Rio Grande. The alleged stabbing took place on the U.S. side of the river, which is very narrow in El Paso; the attacker ran back into Mexico. Two migrants were treated for “superficial wounds.”

There is little other information. The Texas Military Department confirmed that a guardsman “discharged a weapon in a border-related incident.”

This is the second time that guardsmen have fired on a migrant allegedly wielding a knife. In August 2023, a Texas National Guardsman stationed near the El Paso side of the Paso del Norte bridge fired a shot into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, wounding the leg of a Mexican man on the opposite riverbank. The shooting occurred “after three men on the Mexican side of the border started attacking a group of migrants with a knife as the migrants attempted to cross the river,” the Washington Post reported at the time, citing a CBP official’s account.

In Nogales, Sonora, asylum seekers’ waits for CBP One appointments now often last seven or eight months, reports Christina Ascencio of Human Rights First. The Nogales port of entry, the only CBP One destination between Calexico, California and El Paso, Texas, offers only 100 appointments per day.

Texas’s state government has begun construction of a segment of state-funded border wall near the Rio Grande in Zapata county, on private land whose owner approved of it, Border Report reported. It is the first state border wall to go up in south Texas.

The House of Representatives’ Republican majority is expected to send its impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Democratic-majority Senate today. The measure, which passed the House by a single vote in February on a second attempt, is not expected to get a high-profile reception in the Senate.

“Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer is expected to quickly bring an end to the matter, which Democrats say is a politically motivated misuse of the impeachment process,” Reuters reported. Republicans allege that Mayorkas’s management of the border and migration constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”; the Senate is certain not to convict, and even an actual trial is looking unlikely.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the “customs enforcement” arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is launching an effort this week to build a separate identity from ICE, an agency more frequently associated with arresting and deporting migrants from the U.S. interior. “The makeover partly aims to appease senior HSI agents who have sought a breakaway because so many major U.S. cities have adopted policies limiting cooperation with ICE,” reported the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff.

The 2022 Homeland Security Act lashed HSI together with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) branch, which detains and deports migrants. While it would take an act of law to separate HSI from ICE, agents will henceforth carry a separate badge, and “independent branding” will de-emphasize the ICE affiliation.

Six moderate Democratic House members, led by Rep. Gabe Vasquez, who represents a New Mexico border district, introduced a resolution last week “Condemning Republican inaction to address comprehensive immigration reform and border security.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

The UN Refugee Agency published an update about Darién Gap migration, with the results of 109 interviews with migrants. 20 percent of them, it turns out, do not have the United States as their intended destination. 70 percent of respondents were Venezuelan, but only 44 percent of those came directly from Venezuela—the rest had already left their native country and had been living elsewhere in South America.

UNHCR also released a report summarizing its surveys of migrants transiting Guatemala in 2023. It found 42 percent of them were leaving their countries for reasons of “violence or conflict,” with 72 percent of Ecuadorian people giving that response. 65 percent said that they had suffered mistreatment or abuse on their journey, usually robberies, extortions, fraud, or threats.

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April 15, 2024

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Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data late Friday about migration and border security metrics at the U.S.-Mexico border in March. CBP’s Border Patrol component reported apprehending 137,480 people at the border last month, down 2.3 percent from February (140,638). Migration usually increases in spring; this is only the second time this century that apprehensions declined from February to March.

  • March was the seventh-lightest month of the Biden administration’s thirty-eight months in office.
  • The top three nationalities of Border Patrol’s apprehensions in March were Mexico (38%), Ecuador (11%), and Guatemala (11%).
  • The top three nationalities of Border Patrol’s apprehensions during the first six months of fiscal 2024 are Mexico (30%), Guatemala (14%), and Venezuela (11%).
  • 33 percent of March Border Patrol apprehensions were of members of family units. 6 percent were unaccompanied children. The remaining 61 percent were single adults.
  • 39 percent of Border Patrol apprehensions during the first 6 months of fiscal 2024 were members of family units. 6 percent were unaccompanied children. The remaining 55 percent were single adults.
  • The top three sectors where Border Patrol apprehended migrants in March were Tucson Arizona (31%), San Diego, California (25%), and El Paso, Texas-New Mexico (22%).
  • The top three sectors where Border Patrol apprehended migrants in the first six months of fiscal 2024 were Tucson Arizona (33%), Del Rio, Texas (19%), and San Diego, California (18%).
  • CBP encountered another 51,892 people at land-border ports of entry in March, about 44,000 (85%) of them with CBP One appointments. That is similar to recent months. The top nationalities at the ports were Mexico (27%), Cuba (24%), and Haiti (18%).
  • The total number of migrant encounters in March was 189,372, combining Border Patrol apprehensions and port of entry arrivals.

Migration continues to decline in April. Border Patrol has averaged 3,800 apprehensions per day over the past three weeks, Rep. Henry Cuéllar (D-Texas), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, said at a hearing last week reported in the Washington Examiner. That would set April on pace to be the third-lightest month of the Biden administration’s 39 full months.

As migration declines in Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona Sector, which has been the number-one sector since last July, the San Diego, California Sector may be surpassing it. Weekly tweets from Border Patrol sector chiefs showed more migrant apprehensions in San Diego April 3-9 (6,997) than in Tucson April 5-11 (6,700). San Diego has not been the busiest Border Patrol sector in any month during the 21st century.

Much of the decrease in migration at the border so far this year is the result of Mexican security and migration forces’ stepped-up migrant interdiction operations, including a record 120,000 migrant apprehensions in each of January and February. CNN reported on one example: greatly increased Mexican Army and National Guard patrols along the borderline east of San Diego, especially south of Jacumba Springs, California, where many asylum seekers had been turning themselves in to Border Patrol.

A migrant encampment near railroad tracks in Chihuahua, the capital of the Mexican border state of the same name, has grown to about 600 people, La Jornada reported. Chihuahua is more than 200 miles south of the state’s largest border city, Ciudad Juárez. The buildup at the encampment is a result of Mexican forces’ operations to prevent migrants from boarding railroad freight cars. NGOs cited by La Jornada “pointed out that the INM [Mexican government National Migration Institute] operations began last April 1, in Ciudad Juárez, and extended to the south of the state, registering dozens of aggressions against people in conditions of mobility.”

The Biden administration has not yet taken legally dubious executive action to restrict the right to asylum at the border because it “has been trying to find the right language to impose a crackdown without getting instantly shut down by courts—or facing an open revolt by his progressive base,” reads an Axios report, following up on an April 10 “scoop.” An executive order is “now expected within weeks,” Axios added.

The Washington Examiner reported that 464,922 unaccompanied children entered U.S. custody at the border during the Biden administration as of January 31 (the number through March 31 is 481,534). Conservatives interviewed blamed the large number on U.S. laws written to protect children who arrive at the border without parents, which mandate that they get due process for protection needs instead of being quickly deported.

The government of Colombia (population 52 million) estimated that 2,857,528 migrants from Venezuela were living in the country as of January 31. 47 percent of them are living in five cities (Bogotá, Medellín, Cúcuta, Barranquilla, and Cali). More than 2 million now have Temporary Protection Permits (PPT), notes a report from Bogotá‘s Universidad del Rosario.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will testify twice this week about the Department’s 2025 budget request. On Tuesday, the Secretary will appear before the Homeland Security Committee in the Republican-majority House of Representatives—the committee that launched impeachment proceedings against him. On Thursday, Mayorkas will testify in the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Last week, he testified in both houses’ appropriations committees.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A Washington Post feature reported on the sharp rise in migrant deaths, especially by drowning in the Rio Grande, in Maverick County, Texas, which includes Eagle Pass. Local authorities cannot keep up with the need for body bags, burial plots, and DNA collection capabilities. Bodies often get buried without being identified.

The migrant population in Mexico City is swelling, as Mexico’s 2024 crackdown is forcing more people to wait in the capital and arrange their documentation and CBP One appointments, reported David Agren at OSV News. At least 2,500 migrants are waiting in the capital, most of them in six tent encampments.

Initium Media, a Chinese-language publication, told the story of eight Chinese migrants’ late March death by drowning while trying to migrate along the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. The group had chosen the maritime route in an effort to elide the many checkpoints that authorities place along the highway through Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.

Allan Bu of the Honduras-based outlet ContraCorriente traveled to the Arizona-Sonora border and reported on migrants arriving and non-governmental humanitarian workers operating under conditions of difficult terrain and xenophobic backlash.

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April 12, 2024

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Developments

Migration appears to be declining fast in the Darién Gap, the treacherous jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama. A brief statement from Panama’s National Migration Service (SNM) reported that the agency registered 8,065 people in the first 11 days of April (probably the first 10 days, as the 11th wasn’t over when the SNM published its statement).

That would be a daily average of about 800—and on Wednesday, the SNM reported just 485 people. During the first three months of 2024, migration through the Darién Gap averaged 1,200 people per day, which itself was a stark drop from the record 2,643 people who passed through the Darién each day last August.

Reasons for the decline are not yet clear; we have heard no reports of policy changes being implemented or organized crime trends shifting in the past several weeks.

A decline in migration is also evident in Tijuana, where migrant shelters are down to 50 to 60 percent capacity, according to municipal migration office director Enrique Lucero, who added that the city is seeing far fewer non-Mexican migrants. However, the number of migrant apprehensions throughout Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, which borders Tijuana and much of Mexico’s Baja California state, is steady.

This may indicate that fewer migrants are choosing to endure the months-long wait in the city for CBP One appointments at the San Ysidro port of entry: they may be opting to cross and turn themselves in to Border Patrol instead.

Police in Ciudad Juárez found a Venezuelan man severely beaten and left for dead not far from “Gate 36,” a site along the Rio Grande in El Paso where many asylum seekers try to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. “Some Juarez news portals reported the migrant was beaten by smugglers and left near the river, given up for dead,” according to Border Report.

A man whose body was recovered from an irrigation canal in Socorro, Texas, is likely the 35th migrant whose remains have been found in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector since the October 1 beginning of fiscal year 2024.

A Meganálisis poll of Venezuelans living in Venezuela showed that 40 percent would consider migrating if Nicolás Maduro wins another term in what is expected to be an un-free, un-fair election on July 28. Only 16 percent said they were certain that they would not consider leaving their country.

House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tennessee) is to introduce legislation that would make it impossible for asylum seekers released into the United States to board commercial aircraft for domestic flights, unless they have the same identity documents that the general traveling public must present. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is sponsoring similar Senate legislation, the Washington Examiner reported.

The measure, which is certain not to become law this year, would increase the number of released asylum seekers present in U.S. border cities, as it would complicate their departures to destination cities in the U.S. interior.

NBC News reported that Border Patrol in March 2023 apprehended, then released, a 48-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who turned out to be on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) watchlist of people suspected of terrorist group affiliations.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A Migration Policy Institute article examined South American countries’ citizens’ migration to the United States, which has risen sharply since the pandemic. It noted that South American immigrants are generally more educated and participate more in the U.S. labor force than other nationalities.

“If we truly hope to ‘secure our border’ and rebuild a safe, orderly and humane immigration system, we need to realize that deterrence isn’t a solution,” wrote Houston Chronicle editorial board member in the third of a three-part series of columns about immigration. “To find solutions, first we need to take control of the narrative.” Lankenau notes the harmful effect of a hefty “Asylum Program Fee” being attached to employers’ applications for foreign-born prospective workers’ visas.

The Central American online outlet Expediente Público looked at a non-governmental study examining why citizens of El Salvador continue to migrate in large numbers despite reduced insecurity and a popular, if authoritarian-trending, president. The reasons remain the same as before Nayib Bukele’s presidency: violence in society and economic need. El Salvador has been the number-four nationality of migrants seeking asylum in Mexico’s system in 2023 and so far in 2024.

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April 11, 2024

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Developments

An Axios “scoop” adds detail to the Biden administration’s consideration of a possible executive order to limit migrants’ access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The legal justification for blocking asylum—presumably when daily migrant encounters exceed a certain number—could be Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a vaguely worded authority that allows the President to block certain classes of migrants whose entry is considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Donald Trump employed 212(f) during his presidency, but courts determined that the authority does not allow refusing asylum to people who are already on U.S. soil and asking for protection in the United States.

At a congressional hearing yesterday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas remarked that while the administration is constantly evaluating it, “executive action, which is inevitably challenged in the courts, is no substitute for the enduring solution of legislation.”

Mayorkas testified separately yesterday before appropriations subcommittees of the Republican-majority House of Representatives and the Democratic-majority Senate. He called for budget increases for DHS, including a Biden administration proposal for a $4.7 billion “Southwest Border Contingency Fund,” which would allow the Department to spend money as it sees fit to respond to surges. Republicans—who in the House will soon send Mayorkas’s impeachment to the Senate—refuse to give the Secretary that kind of flexibility.

Republicans in both houses criticized Mayorkas’s handling of the border and migration. In answer to questioning in the House, the Secretary acknowledged that he would use the word “crisis” to describe the border situation. That has been part of Mayorkas’s border commentary since February, but it was the first time he used the term under oath.

The Secretary repeated calls to pass legislation like the Senate “border deal” that failed in February, which would have increased DHS resources while adding a new authority to refuse asylum when daily migrant encounters exceed a threshold of 4,000 or 5,000 migrants.

Border-wide, migration continues to drop, sinking below the levels of January-March, which were among the lowest of the Biden administration. Camilo Montoya-Gálvez of CBS News tweeted that Border Patrol apprehended about 4,000 migrants on April 8; the daily average for the first quarter of the 2024 calendar year was just over 4,400.

The chief of Border Patrol’s San Diego, California Sector reported apprehending 6,997 migrants during the week of April 3-9. That is similar to the sector’s weekly apprehensions in March—but it is greater than the number of apprehensions reported by the chief of the Tucson, Arizona Sector during March 29-April 4 (6,600). Tucson has been the number-one sector for migrant arrivals since July 2023, but numbers have been dropping. While one week’s data is not enough to go by, it is possible that San Diego may be supplanting Tucson as the number-one sector.

iNewSource reported that the San Diego Sector is receiving a much greater number of unaccompanied minors than before.

Guatemala’s migration agency reported that the United States has returned 21,294 of its citizens on 179 deportation flights so far this year. Aerial deportations to Guatemala are on pace this year to match or exceed levels reported before the pandemic-era Title 42 policy. Title 42 reduced aerial deportations because it allowed U.S. authorities to expel most Guatemalans directly into Mexico.

Mexican national guardsmen and immigration agents detained 700 migrants who arrived aboard a freight train in Torreón, Coahuila on April 8. “At least 55, including women and children, reported that the agents detained them for several hours, beat them, and stole money, cell phones, and documents before releasing them,” reported La Jornada.

42 percent of Latino adults surveyed support building a wall or fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, according to a new Axios-Ipsos Latino Poll. That is up 12 points from a December 2021 poll. 38 percent said they support deporting all undocumented immigrants. Support for wall-building was 15-20 points higher among people of Cuban descent than among people of Mexican or Central American descent.

Iowa passed a law that, echoing Texas’s S.B. 4 law currently facing federal court challenges, would make it a misdemeanor for an undocumented person to enter the state if they had been deported or denied entry to the United States.

Officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the launch of a new fentanyl interdiction operation, which they are calling “Operation Plaza Spike.” Data from the first five months of fiscal year 2024 show CBP’s fentanyl seizures down 27 percent compared to the first five months of fiscal year 2023.

The operation is beginning in Nogales; CBP’s Tucson field office, which includes the Nogales port of entry, currently seizes the most fentanyl of all 13 U.S.-Mexico border CBP field offices and Border Patrol sectors. One new tactic would be “releasing the name of the plazas’ senior ranking cartel officials, the ‘plaza bosses,’ to increase public and law enforcement pressure on them.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

Spain’s El País reported about Haitian migrants who are starting new lives in Mexico City after applying for asylum in Mexico’s system. More than 70,000 Haitians (including children born in Brazil or Chile) have applied for Mexican asylum since 2022.

A visual report from the Financial Times illustrated the Darién Gap’s transformation from an impenetrable jungle barrier straddling Colombia and Panama, to an organized crime-dominated route used by over 520,000 migrants in 2023.

The New York Times published a report from an outdoor encampment along the border near Campo, California, where asylum seekers wait for hours or days to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. The camp, in a very remote area of the border, formed this year after Mexico placed National Guard personnel at more accessible breaks in the border wall near Jacumba Springs, California. The article features 22-year-old volunteer Peter Fink, who is coordinating humanitarian relief efforts there.

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April 10, 2024

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Developments

President Joe Biden told a Univision interviewer that he is still exploring executive actions to limit access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

A measure to “shut down” asylum when daily migrant encounters cross a certain threshold was part of a “border deal” that failed in the Senate in early February.

Without such a measure in the law, it is not clear what legal backing Biden could have for using executive authority to deny the right to seek asylum, which the Refugee Act of 1980 guarantees. “There’s no guarantee that I have that power all by myself without legislation,” Biden said. “And some have suggested I should just go ahead and try it. And if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court.”

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is to testify about his department’s budget today in hearings before the House and Senate appropriations committees. Mayorkas is likely to endure criticism—and perhaps insults—about the Department’s border and migration policies from Republican legislators, especially in the Republican-majority House, which narrowly voted to impeach him in February. Next week (April 16), Mayorkas will appear before the House Homeland Security Committee, where the Republican leadership spearheaded its effort to impeach him.

The Democratic-majority Senate planned to spend a few hours on Thursday debating the Mayorkas impeachment while using procedural measures to “dispose” of it without going to a formal trial (which would have zero possibility of convicting Mayorkas). House Republicans, however, decided yesterday to delay their presentation of impeachment charges to the Senate for another week.

Recent years’ sharp rises in migrant deaths continue in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which includes the border in far west Texas and all of New Mexico. After a record 149 remains recovered there in the 2023 fiscal year, the death toll stands at 34 halfway through the 2024 fiscal year, and the hot summer months are yet to come. Dehydration, heat exhaustion, and drowning are the principal causes of death.

The Border Chronicle published an interview with Bryce, a volunteer with No More Deaths who led the project that produced a report and database, published in March, documenting migrant deaths in the El Paso sector. In June 2023, he said, “something like 40 percent more people died in Doña Ana County in New Mexico than the entire state of Arizona. Most of these deaths were close to the highway or close to a town.”

Guatemala’s La Hora reported on the Trump-era border wall “improvements” that contributed to the fatality of migrant Heidy Poma Pérez’s March 21 fall from the border wall near San Diego. Friends and relatives have set up a GoFundMe to pay for the repatriation of her remains.

The House of Representatives’ Rules Committee cleared the way for prompt consideration of a resolution, introduced by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), “Denouncing the Biden administration’s immigration policies.”

The resolution from Gonzales, who represents the largest congressional district along the border and is facing a primary runoff challenger on his right wing, states that “the Biden administration has allowed at least 6,400,000 illegal aliens from the southwest border to travel to American communities.” In fact, the latest (April 5) report from the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, current through December, shows a total of 3,356,380 CBP releases since January 2021.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The American Immigration Council’s Adriel Orozco shared an overview of what is in the U.S. government’s 2024 Homeland Security appropriation, which became law on March 23. It recalls that the budget package includes substantial increases for CBP and ICE. It cuts funding for the Case Management Pilot Program, which helps keep released migrants in the immigration system without GPS surveillance, and the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which supports nonprofits that receive migrants released from custody.

The cuts to the SSP will deal a blow to cities receiving migrants, both at the border and in the U.S. interior, reported a second American Immigration Council post, from Juan Avilez.

The Texas state government’s military “Forward Operating Base” under construction near Eagle Pass could cost up to $400 million to maintain by 2026, recalled Bob Libal at Human Rights Watch.

The conservative talking point about young migrant men being “military age males,” and thus threatening, can be traced back to Obama-era use of the term to describe civilian men killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On the Right

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April 9, 2024

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Developments

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department announced that as of April 20, the Mexican government will begin requiring visas of citizens of Peru arriving in the country, by air or otherwise.

Mexico has taken this step before to stop the flow of South American migrants flying to the country and traveling to the U.S. border to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities. It changed visa procedures for Ecuadorian citizens in August 2021; Venezuelan citizens in January 2022; and Brazilian citizens in August 2022.

Each time, the Mexican visa restriction caused a short-term drop in that nationality’s migration to the United States. In the case of Ecuador and Venezuela migration recovered to previous levels, however, as sharply increased numbers of those countries’ citizens opted to take the dangerous route through the Darién Gap straddling Colombia and Panama. We can expect to see an increase in the number of Peruvian citizens migrating through the Darién Gap.

The restriction on visas for Peru is unusual because Peru, like Colombia, is part of a four-country arrangement (the “Pacific Alliance” uniting Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) that allowed visa-free travel.

Mexico’s decision may owe to a U.S. suggestion, but also to souring relations between Mexico and Peru. Relations between Mexico and Colombia remain cordial, and Colombian citizens may still fly to Mexico visa-free (though they must demonstrate that they have activities planned during their stay in Mexico).

  • Visas (Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (Mexico), Friday, April 5, 2024).

Panamanian security and migration authorities held a press conference yesterday to dispute the findings of an April 3 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report that found the Colombian and Panamanian governments failing to protect the hundreds of thousands of migrants passing through the Darién Gap.

  • According to a release, National Migration Service director Samira Gozaine “assured that this report does not reflect reality and has a hidden purpose that only they know.”
  • The director of Panama’s border police (SENAFRONT) said that since 2021, his forces have dismantled 170 jungle encampments and arrested 321 people for crimes against migrants.
  • Public Security Minister Juan Manuel Pino said that Panama’s government has chartered five flights next week to deport people whom biometric exams revealed to have criminal records.
  • The officials said that over 114,000 migrants have passed through the Darién Gap since January 1, up from 109,069 as of March 31 (it is not clear what the cutoff date is for the 114,000 figure).

Thanks in large part to the establishment of U.S.-backed “Safe Mobility Offices” in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has already—six months into fiscal 2024—broken its full-year record for the number of refugees admitted from Latin America and the Caribbean.

California’s attorney general visited the San Diego border to discuss fentanyl smuggling. CBP’s San Diego Field Office was the number-one location for fentanyl seizures until mid-2022, when the agency’s Tucson, Arizona field office began to exceed San Diego most months.

During the first five months of fiscal 2024, fentanyl seizures at the border are 27 percent behind where they were during the first five months of fiscal 2023. Nationwide, including ports, airports, and the Canada border, fentanyl seizures are down 24 percent. This is the first notable decline in fentanyl seizures since the drug first appeared.

At the U.S.-Mexico border so far in 2024, as usual, about 86 percent of fentanyl seizures have occurred at ports of entry. Border Patrol seized an additional 6 percent at interior vehicle checkpoints.

The Heritage Foundation, a longtime conservative think-tank now closely associated with former president Donald Trump, has notified Republican senators that it will keep score of any votes against holding an impeachment trial for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A story at Border Report expanded on the finding of a report about migrant deaths in El Paso, published last month by No More Deaths: that CBP routinely undercounts the actual number of migrants who die on U.S. soil.

A Sacramento Bee analysis noted that many Latino immigrants in the United States, some of whom have lived for years undocumented, voice “frustration” with asylum seekers being released at the border and given a temporary documented status by “an immigration system pitting immigrant Latinos against each other.” A January 2024 UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll found 63 percent of Latino respondents in California considered undocumented immigrants to be a major or minor “burden.”

The Miami Herald reported on the Tren de Aragua, an organized crime group that emerged in recent years from Venezuela’s prisons. A Venezuelan opposition-aligned intelligence analyst told the Herald that members of the group “have been quietly entering different areas of the U.S., including Florida, Chicago and New York.”

Voice of America profiled Chinese asylum seekers who, after taking long and expensive journeys to the United States via the U.S.-Mexico border, are opting to return to China, either after failing credible fear interviews while in custody, or due to “loneliness, deceit [including labor exploitation], or family pressure.”

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April 8, 2024

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Developments

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that the U.S. and Chinese governments are discussing increasing the currently very small number of Chinese citizens whom Beijing allows to be aerially deported back to China.

The latest monthly report on ICE deportation flights from Witness at the Border noted that a plane did take migrants back to South Korea and China in March. With eight Chinese nationals aboard, NBC News noted, this flight was an example of “expensive and logistically challenging ‘Special High-Risk Charter’ flights, sometimes via South Korea.”

Mayorkas added that Texas’s use of razor-sharp concertina wire along the Rio Grande is a problem. “We do not consider concertina wire to be effective. It impairs Customs and Border Protection’s ability to do its job, and we’re also seeing migrants rather easily cutting concertina wire,” the Secretary said.

The Texas state National Guard has now extended its coils of concertina wire to the very edge of the Rio Grande in El Paso, to prevent asylum seekers from reaching U.S. soil and trying to turn themselves in to the federal Border Patrol farther up the riverbank. At parts of the El Paso border, asylum seekers have been encamped on the U.S. bank of the river, awaiting a chance to turn themselves in despite the heavy presence of Texas soldiers and police.

In California, San Diego County authorities said that CBP had released 24,000 mostly asylum-seeking migrants onto the city’s streets since late February, when county funding for migrant reception shelters ran out.

A “Migrant Via Crucis” caravan that began the week before Easter has now walked through much of Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas, with some arriving in Oaxaca. While the original participants have dwindled, more migrants have joined the procession. Human rights defenders said that some participants had an altercation with vehicles full of armed men, likely members of an organized crime group.

In Empalme, Sonora, Mexican soldiers threatened humanitarian workers who were offering assistance to migrants near the local railroad tracks. The director of the town’s Casa Franciscana shelter said a soldier told her, “You are on the list,” adding “It’s the first time that we encountered the Army doing something like this. We had a very good dialogue before.”

House Republicans’ impeachment of DHS Secretary Mayorkas, alleging that his management of the border and migration constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors,” is likely to end quickly in the Senate as the U.S. Congress reconvenes this week. An actual conviction, which would require a two-thirds vote in the Democratic-majority Senate, is impossible, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) will probably use other procedural maneuvers to prevent an actual trial from happening.

Former top border and migration agency officials, including Rodney Scott, who was chief of Border Patrol for the first several months of Joe Biden’s administration, flanked Donald Trump during a campaign event with a non-profit called “Border911.”

The foreign ministers of Panama and Colombia met on April 5 for a discussion of issues including migration through the Darién Gap region that straddles their common border. The two governments’ discussions of migration cooperation have been uncommon.

The foreign ministers said they disagreed with an April 3 Human Rights Watch report documenting both governments’ lack of coordination and governance in the Darién region.

“Five men were killed early Friday, bringing the total to 21 homicide victims in the first five days of April” in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, noted Border Report.

Analyses and Feature Stories

An Associated Press analysis looked at Democrats’ election-year effort to neutralize the border security issue, seeking to convince voters that Republicans “playing games” with the border are to blame for current challenges.

The Christian Science Monitor and Time, in an article by NYU professor Kevin Kenny, examined how the Texas state government’s actions at the border are challenging federal control over migration policy.

Violent crime is dropping in the United States, and is lower in states with so-called “sanctuary cities” than elsewhere, wrote Caitlin Bellis in an analysis puncturing the “migrant crime” narrative for the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild.

At Semafor, Jordan Weissman highlighted data indicating that the increase in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border may be buoying the robust current level of U.S. economic growth.

The Los Angeles Times profiled iACT, a nonprofit that has organized soccer activities for children of asylum seekers stranded in northern Mexico border cities.

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April 5, 2024

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Developments

Following a hearing last Friday, a federal court ruled that Border Patrol must care for children who are among the groups of asylum seekers whom the agency forces to wait for hours or days to be processed at the borderline in California. District Court Judge Dolly Gee ruled that conditions at the “open air detention site” encampments east of San Diego—where food, water, sanitation, and medical care come from volunteers, not agents—violate the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, which governs the treatment of child migrants in U.S. custody.

Border Patrol and CBP had been arguing that the children and other migrants at camps between border wall layers in San Diego and near Jacumba Springs, California, are not yet in the agency’s custody: they are still free to go back to Mexico. The court found otherwise: the children count as “in U.S. custody” and must receive care and be processed quickly. By May 10, CBP’s juvenile coordinator must provide a report about the number of children present at the outdoor camps and the steps the agency is taking to care for them.

The decision is a victory for the National Center for Youth Law, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, and Children’s Rights, which filed a motion before Judge Gee’s court, and for groups that have been providing aid and filing complaints, like Al Otro Lado, American Friends Service Committee, Universidad Popular, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

CBS News and the Washington Examiner confirmed reports that Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants declined by 2 percent from February to March at the U.S.-Mexico border. This springtime drop is very unusual: available monthly data since 2000 only show this happening once before, in 2017.

“One of the reasons for the decrease was the government of Mexico’s continued significant enforcement efforts to disrupt some of the transportation networks moving people up to the border,” a CBP official told CBS.

In a video posted to Twitter, the top U.S. diplomat in Nicaragua called out “permissive Nicaraguan authorities who irresponsibly encourage migration” of West African countries’ citizens. Large numbers from Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, and nearby nations have been arriving in Managua by air. Nicaragua does not require that they secure visas in advance; the authoritarian government instead charges steep fees upon arrival.

The number of Russian and Ukrainian citizens requesting asylum or residence in Mexico has increased 170 percent since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Milenio reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A WOLA feature, based on a series of interviews with service providers, documented a sharp increase in kidnappings and attacks on migrants, including sexual assaults, in Mexico’s organized crime-dominated border state of Tamaulipas. Corrupt Mexican officials allegedly facilitate these crimes. U.S. policies, the report finds, are not taking the danger into account: deportations into Tamaulipas are heavy, access to ports of entry is heavily restricted, and the state concentrates 43 percent of the insufficient number of border-wide CBP One appointments.

The New York Times’s Julie Turkewitz highlighted worsening levels of sexual violence that criminal gangs commit against migrants passing through the Darién Gap. The report features an evasive answer from a U.S. diplomat in Panama, and questions the Panamanian government’s March decision to suspend Doctors Without Borders, the non-governmental organization that had most consistently been documenting rising sexual violence. Panamanian government officials, meanwhile, are facilitating the work of far-right U.S. social media influencers visiting the region.

Reporting from the Colombian side of the Darién Gap, InsightCrime pointed out that the current route requiring boat travel across the Gulf of Urabá is not migrants’ most direct path to the Panamanian border. Other land routes are shut off, however, by the “Gulf Clan,” the organized crime group that controls the region, which reserves them “for other types of activities,” mainly cocaine trafficking.

Under current U.S. immigration law, “If a person from a high-demand place such as Mexico, India, and China were to ‘get in line’ for residency today, they might be waiting anywhere from two to eight decades.” This is pushing people into the U.S. asylum system, Regina Lankenau observed in the Houston Chronicle.

“Six months ago, we had never seen somebody from Bangladesh or Africa in this part of the desert,” Pastor Randy Mayer of Arizona’s Green Valley Samaritans told PBS NewsHour.

At the Huffington Post, Matt Shuham looked at some Republican politicians’ easily disprovable claim that the Biden administration’s well-publicized humanitarian parole initiative for four nationalities is a “secret flight program.”

Washington Post data columnist Philip Bump refuted Donald Trump’s claims that increased migration of Chinese citizens owes in part to the Chinese government “building an army from within” made up of “very healthy young men.”

A Slate column by David Faris criticized the Biden administration for extending Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelan citizens without proper “follow-through,” like providing assistance to help with their integration into U.S. communities. It would be possible to transfer funds for these priorities, Faris argued, if Biden were to declare that a national emergency exists.

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April 4, 2024

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Developments

In an hour-long hearing in New Orleans, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments about Texas’s controversial state law S.B. 4, which would allow state officials to arrest, imprison, and deport migrants for illegal entry. The law raises the specter of states enforcing their own immigration laws, and of Texas law enforcement profiling people and demanding they prove their status anywhere in the state.

“Now, to be fair, maybe Texas went too far,” the state’s solicitor-general surprisingly said. “What Texas has done here, they have tried to develop a statute that goes up to the line of the Supreme Court precedent but allows Texas to protect the border.”

The Texas official, Aaron Neilson, said that when arrested migrants are found guilty and agree to be deported instead of jailed, Texas authorities will hand them over to U.S. officials at border ports of entry, rather than carrying out their own deportations into Mexico. Neilson “then stumbled to explain how that is different from what is happening at the border now,” the Associated Press reported.

It is not clear when the appeals court will rule on S.B. 4’s constitutionality; the same three-judge panel already stayed the law while its deliberations continue. Regardless of the outcome, the challenge to the law—led by the federal Justice Department, joined with a suit brought by the ACLU and local organizations—is almost certain to go to the Supreme Court.

A CNN analysis recalled that Texas’s goal is probably to get a now more conservative Supreme Court to revisit a 2012 ruling that struck down a harsh law that Arizona passed in 2010.

A San Diego NBC affiliate added more detail to the account, summarized in a March 29 CBP release, of a 24-year-old Guatemalan woman’s fatal March 21 fall from the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego. The woman had been hanging from the wall and yelling for help for about 24 minutes before she let go and fell to her death from the 30-foot, Trump-era structure.

A fire truck initially showed up at the wrong side of the wall, and was unable to arrive at the woman’s location in time. The woman fell before fire department personnel arrived and about a minute after a Border Patrol agent left the scene “to meet with other agents and coordinate the transportation of other migrants apprehended in the area.”

A spokesperson for the San Diego Fire Department said, “CBP did the right thing by telling us the height of the wall at that initial location, but CBP did not provide SDFD with the best access point to the patient.” CBP will release body-worn camera footage of the incident.

Migrants are reporting abuse at the hands of Mexican National Guard personnel whom Mexico’s government recently deployed to sites east of San Diego where asylum seekers attempt to cross and turn themseves in to Border Patrol. A woman from Ecuador told Border Report that guardsmen separated women from the group with which she was traveling, groped them, and demanded bribes of $2,500 per person. Others spoke of demands for $800 and theft of belongings.

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” said the relative of a Michigan woman killed earlier month, apparently by an undocumented individual, whose case was part of an April 2 Donald Trump speech. The candidate told a Michigan crowd that he spoke to Ruby García’s family, but the family says that is false.

Trump’s repeated citing of “migrant crime,” Greg Sargent observed at the New Republic, “is straight from the authoritarian playbook. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has noted: ‘The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from [far-right Hungary Prime Minister] Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.’”

A Texas National Guard soldier participating in “Operation Lone Star” is in custody after a March 31 arrest for attempting to smuggle a migrant in his vehicle near Eagle Pass.

EFE reported that a drought has reduced to a trickle the Suchiate River, which forms part of the border between Guatemala and Chiapas near Tapachula, Mexico, easing migrants’ crossings.

Analyses and Feature Stories

PBS NewsHour spoke to a smuggler in southern Mexico who “charges up to $21,000 per person for longer journeys and says his network has moved 50,000 people into the U.S. since 2021.”

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April 3, 2024

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Developments

Mexico’s government deployed more than 200 immigration agents to Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, a border sector where migration has been increasing. The operation is to expand from the borderline to the southern parts of Mexico’s border state of Chihuahua, of which Ciudad Juárez is the largest city.

The agents are apprehending undocumented migrants and, when possible, transporting them away from Mexico’s northern border zone. Though just 6,500 of Mexico’s 240,000 January-February migrant encounters ended in deportations, its government has massively bused migrants to the country’s center and southern regions.

Agents are breaking up migrant encampments near the Rio Grande, where Texas state national guardsmen are preventing people from approaching the U.S. border wall and turning themselves in to federal Border Patrol agents to ask for asylum.

The Mexican government operation, La Verdad de Juárez recalled, was launched “five days after the one-year anniversary of the fire in a migrant detention facility in Juárez that killed 40 migrants and injured 27 others.” The detention facility fire, La Verdad recalled, happened two months after a similar deployment of over 200 INM agents to Juárez. Many of the migrants who died on March 27, 2023, had been rounded up in raids throughout the city.

A much-circulated March 21 video from the El Paso side of the river had shown a group of migrants pushing past Texas state guardsmen in order to reach the border wall and seek to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. 214 people were arrested and booked into the El Paso County jail. Of those, all but 39 have been released into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Many are contesting criminal charges of “rioting.”

At a campaign event in Michigan, former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump launched into several minutes of baseless anti-migrant invective. “They have wrecked our country” was among the things that Trump, flanked by uniformed police, said of people who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump addressed part of his remarks to “suburban housewives,” promising to keep them safe from “illegal aliens crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers.”

The ex-president said that he had spoken with “some of” the family of a Grand Rapids, Michigan woman who was murdered by an undocumented migrant, an acquaintance, in March. (The alleged killer entered the United States in 2020, when Trump was president and the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy was in place.) The family said that Trump had not contacted any of them.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on migration through the Darién Gap finds fault with the Colombian and Panamanian governments’ failure to protect the more than 40,000 people per month who have been passing through the treacherous jungle route. The 25,000-word report, a follow-up to an earlier report published in November, finds that the two governments, whose territory includes the Darién, do not do enough to coordinate their response.

The report calls on the U.S. government and other international actors to establish other legal migration pathways including “a region-wide temporary protection regime that would grant all Venezuelans and Haitians temporary legal status,” and to fund humanitarian responses.

HRW Americas Director Juanita Goebertus called out Panama for its recent suspension of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which had been providing medical care at the Panamanian end of the Darién trail. MSF had been vocally calling for action about the rising number of cases of sexual abuse that its medical personnel had been detecting.

At The Progressive, human rights researcher Claudia Villalona published a report from the sites east of San Diego where asylum seekers spend hours or days in makeshift outdoor encampments as they wait for Border Patrol agents to allow them to turn themselves in. This practice, which advocates call “open-air detention sites,” is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit in federal court.

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April 2, 2024

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Developments

For the second consecutive month, Ali Bradley of the right-leaning NewsNation outlet published leaked CBP migration data from March to her social media accounts. (Bradley’s early-March leak of February data turned out to be very close to the final count released weeks later.)

Bradley reported 137,557 Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants at the border in March, which would be a 2 percent decrease from February—only the second time, in the 25 years for which we have data, in which migration declined from February to March.

The leaked data point to migration increasing since February from three countries (Mexico +5%, Venezuela +88%, Ecuador +35%) and decreasing from two (Guatemala -35%, Cuba -4%).

This would be an important increase in migration from Venezuela: during January and February, U.S. encounters with Venezuelan migrants lagged far behind Mexico’s, indicating that a large number of Venezuelan migrants have been stuck in Mexico.

The leaked data indicate increased migration in two Border Patrol sectors (San Diego, California +7% and El Paso, Texas +27%) and reduced migration in another two (Tucson, Arizona—the busiest sector— -15%, Del Rio, Texas -20%).

Mexican authorities yesterday surged police, immigration agents, and national guard personnel to their side of the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Border Report reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At the American Prospect, Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council calls for investing in the U.S. asylum and refugee systems, expanding support for humanitarian migrants, and not abandoning the post-World War II commitment to the Refugee Convention at a time of record-high global migration. “America still loves a refugee,” Lind concludes. “It’s just not clear whether the American government is up to the task.”

Two attorneys from the WilmerHale firm, writing for Bloomberg Law, find zero basis for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) claim that migration to his state meets the constitutional definition of an “invasion.”

An essay from the Niskanen Center’s Gil Guerra draws attention to increasing migration from Colombia, Ecuador, China, and India.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Will Freeman warned that worsening political turmoil and corruption in Peru portend further increases in migration of that country’s citizens to the U.S.-Mexico border, which is already at a historic high.

Despite some recent reporting and rhetoric giving the opposite impression, an InsightCrime analysis finds that Venezuela’s fast-growing “Tren de Aragua” organized crime group “appears to have no substantial U.S. presence and looks unlikely to establish one.”

An article in the medical journal Cureus found “lower extremity” and “lumbar spinal” injuries to be common in a sample of 108 people who had fallen from the border wall between 2016 and 2021.

“A lot of people living in the world’s borderlands experience what scholars refer to as a human rights encounter,” wrote Arizona-based journalist John Washington at High Country News. “In such an encounter, you meet someone who has crossed the border despite being legally barred from doing so, in which moment you’re presented with a choice: You can help the person with water, shelter or a ride—but if you do so, you risk being arrested, prosecuted, and even imprisoned.”

An Associated Press analysis asserts that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant message, which failed to appeal to swing voters in 2018, 2020, and 2022, could land harder this year because migrants with economic needs have been arriving in more areas in the U.S. interior.

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April 1, 2024

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Developments

From the first to the fourth week of March, the number of migrants whom Border Patrol apprehended in its busiest border sector—Tucson, Arizona—dropped by 5,000 or 41 percent, according to regular Twitter updates from the sector chief. Tucson agents apprehended 12,200 migrants during the week of March 1-7; that number has declined during each subsequent week, reaching 7,200 during March 22-28. The reason for the sharp drop is unclear.

At the end of the first quarter of 2024, the number of people who have migrated through Panama’s Darién Gap stands at 109,069, up from 87,390 during the same period in 2023. The month-to-month trend is flat, though: 36,001 people in January, 37,165 in February, and 35,903 in March. Of this year’s migrants, 69,568 (64 percent) have been citizens of Venezuela, a proportion similar to 2023.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees the Flores settlement agreement governing the treatment of children in CBP custody, presided over a March 29 hearing about Border Patrol’s practice of requiring asylum seekers to wait outdoors for long periods at the borderline in order to turn themselves in. Children are among those subsisting in makeshift encampments in Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector. Government attorneys argued that migrants at the camps are technically not in U.S. custody and don’t require care.

Eight people from China died off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico after the boat in which they were migrating capsized.

A CBP release documented the death of a Guatemalan woman, who fell from the border wall after pleading for help on the evening of March 21 east of San Diego.

An AP-NORC poll found majorities of U.S. respondents favoring the hiring of more Border Patrol agents and more immigration judges. Only 42 percent supported building a border wall. 58 percent ranked immigration “as an extremely or very important issue to them personally.”

42 percent of people in Ecuador surveyed by Cedatos declared an intention to migrate; of that number, 55 percent named the United States as their desired destination.

The number of people whom Texas’s state government has placed on buses to Democratic-governed cities now stands at 108,600 since April 2022, a small fraction of the population released from CBP custody during that period. Over two-thirds of the buses have gone to New York and Chicago. Texas also claims that its law enforcement forces have arrested 41,200 migrants “with more than 36,700 felony charges,” usually for trespassing.

An El Paso magistrate judge released some of the migrants caught on video on March 21 pushing past Texas national guardsmen in order to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents at the border wall.

On the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande, separated from El Paso by Texas state authorities’ concertina wire, migrants bearing flags of several nations staged a “stations of the cross” ceremony on Good Friday.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Many asylum seekers with disabilities cannot access the CBP One smartphone app to make appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry, according to a complaint that the Texas Civil Rights Project and Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center filed last week.

CNN profiled volunteers doing humanitarian work along Arizona’s border with Mexico. This has involved using private vehicles to transport people in distress to Border Patrol custody, which is technically a federal crime.

Together with a working group of legal experts and advocates, the International Refugee Assistance Project developed a document laying out a legal action agenda for individuals displaced by the effects of climate change.

Of the 545,043 people documented as migrating through Honduras in 2023, 47 percent were women, girls, and boys, reported the UN Refugee Agency. Of 1,381 interviewed by UNHCR and partners last year, 45 percent said they were “in need of international protection as they were forced to leave their country of origin due to violence and persecution.”

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March 29, 2024

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Developments

The New York Times reported from an open air holding site in the mountains east of San Diego, California, where asylum seekers often must wait outdoors for days for the opportunity to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Agents provide no shelter, food, water, and medical care; that is up to volunteers. The situation threatens the migrants’ health, and “a Federal District Court judge in California could rule as early as Friday on whether the government is legally required to shelter and feed the children as they wait.”

Ten humanitarian organizations in Mexico City warned of the increasingly precarious situation of migrants from many countries stranded in Mexico’s capital. Most are attempting to secure online CBP One appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry.

Nicaragua Investiga covered the Migrant Via Crucis march and protest in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. At least 2,000 migrants stranded near Mexico’s southern border began walking through the state on Monday, though their numbers have since dwindled. “Some of the participants in the mobilization claim that their goal is to reach Mexico City, but these marches generally disintegrate as they become too strenuous and as the authorities hand out [travel] permits while they are en route.”

The House of Representatives’ Republican leadership will send the Senate articles of impeachment for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on April 10. The move comes nearly two full months after the House impeached Mayorkas, by a one-vote party-line margin on their second try. Republican leaders allege that Mayorkas has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by not carrying out border and migration law to its fullest extent (which would cost far more than the amount of money that Congress appropriates). The Democratic-majority Senate could dismiss the case without going to a trial.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Jonathan Blitzer’s recent book about Central America, U.S. policy, and migration “effectively illustrates the timidity and opportunism of the US political class, which has repeatedly blocked reforms that would allow an orderly and safe flow of workers and their families across the border,” reads a lengthy review by Hector Tobar in the New York Review of Books.

Jacobin published an adapted excerpt of Petra Molnar’s book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The deployment of military-grade surveillance technologies along the border, Molnar argues, treats a humanitarian issue like a security crisis and ends up diverting migrants to more remote and dangerous areas, inflating an already high death toll.

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March 28, 2024

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Developments

A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel decided, by a two-to-one margin, to maintain a stay on Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law, preventing it from going into effect while the Court considers legal challenges. The law would empower Texas law enforcement to arrest people anywhere in the state on suspicion of having crossed the border improperly; if found guilty, defendants would have the choice of prison or deportation into Mexico. (Mexico’s government has declared that it will not permit state-government deportations.)

The court will hear arguments on S.B. 4’s constitutionality on April 3. At stake is whether states can devise and implement their own independent immigration policies, and whether there is any validity to the claims of politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) that asylum seekers and other migrants meet the constitutional definition of an “invasion.”

In Ciudad Juárez, the Casa del Migrante, one of the city’s principal migrant shelters, “has been filling up in recent days as families and single adults looking for an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States are again arriving in Juarez in large numbers,” according to Border Report. Rev. Francisco Bueno Guillen, the shelter’s director, said it “went from being 20 percent full a couple of weeks ago to 75 percent capacity as of Monday.” The city’s municipal shelter is also three-quarters full.

The Los Angeles Times reported from “Gate 36” in the border wall south of El Paso, across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez, where Texas national guardsmen have been confronting asylum seekers hoping to turn themselves in to the federal Border Patrol.

481 organizations sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants in the United States, to halt deportation flights and maritime returns to Haiti, and to increase the monthly cap on access to Humanitarian Parole for people still in the country, where governance is near collapse.

Participants in a “Migrant Via Crucis” march through Mexico’s southernmost state, Chiapas, told EFE that they reject Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s offer of $110 per month, six-month stipends for citizens of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela who return home.

Asked during his visit to Washington whether he believes that border walls work, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo told CBS News, “I think that history shows they don’t. What we need to look for is integrated solutions to a problem that is far more complex than just putting a wall to try to contain.”

The six construction workers presumed dead in the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge were people who had migrated from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A jump in Mexican encounters with Venezuelan migrants contrasts with low numbers of Venezuelan migrants on the U.S. side of the border, indicating that many Venezuelan citizens are stuck in Mexico right now. The Associated Press confirms that Mexico’s increased operations to block migrants have many Venezuelan citizens stranded in the country’s south, including in Mexico City, which is within the geographic range of the CBP One app and its limited number of available appointments.

NBC News highlighted the dilemma of migrant women who were raped by criminals in Mexico while en route to the United States, and now find themselves in states like Texas where, following the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision, it is illegal to obtain an abortion. Often, the rapes occur while migrants are stranded—usually for months—in Mexican border cities as they await CBP One appointments.

At the London Review of Books, Pooja Bhatia combined a narrative of Haiti’s deteriorating security situation with an account of the challenges that Haitian asylum seekers face at the U.S.-Mexico border. Bhatia reported from the dangerous border in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and highlighted the role of humanitarian workers and service providers, including staff of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

  • Pooja Bhatia, “Leaving Haiti” (London Review of Books, March 28, 2024).

Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh and Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute explained that many of today’s proposals to restrict asylum access and otherwise crack down on migration will not work because the U.S. government can no longer “go it alone.” Reasons include the diversity of countries migrants are coming from, as well as the policies of other governments, such as varying visa requirements, refusals to accept repatriations, and the Mexican government’s unwillingness to receive expelled migrants from third countries.

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March 27, 2024

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Developments

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, revealed some U.S. data from March about migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) probably won’t share March data until the second half of April.)

Slides posted at López Obrador’s March 26 morning press conference indicated that CBP encountered 6,307 migrants per day during the first 21 days of March. Removing the approximately 1,450 per day who get CBP One appointments at ports of entry shows Border Patrol apprehending less than 5,000 people per day during the month’s first 3 weeks.

Though migration usually increases in springtime, these revealed numbers show that is not happening this year. In February, CBP averaged 6,549 migrant encounters per day (4,890 per day in Border Patrol custody). In other words, it appears that slightly more migrants per day came to the border in February than so far in March. If the trend continues, this would be only the second time that March migration is less than February migration in the 25 years for which we have data (since 2000).

The March data show that U.S. encounters with migrants from Venezuela continue to be far fewer than the past two years’ average. The United States’ encounters with Venezuelan migrants dropped sharply in January and have not recovered: they totaled 20,364 in January and February. On March 25 Mexico updated its own migrant encounter numbers, which show 56,312 encounters with Venezuelan citizens in January and February—almost 3 times more than the U.S. figure. That points to a strong likelihood that the Venezuelan population in Mexico is increasing sharply right now.

Mexico’s data show that its migration authorities encountered almost exactly 120,000 migrants in February, for the second straight month. Before January, Mexico’s monthly record for migrant encounters was about 98,000. This is evidence that Mexico’s government has stepped up efforts to interdict migrants in its territory so far in 2024.

At his press conference, López Obrador added that he is seeking to expand to citizens of Colombia and Ecuador a program that would pay US$110-per-month stipends to citizens of Venezuela who agree to return to their home countries. The program would depend on the cooperation of Mexican corporations with a presence in South America.

Mexico’s National Guard has increased patrols in an area of Tijuana, not far from the Pacific, where smugglers frequently help migrants climb the border wall to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents.

An annual Easter week march of migrants near Mexico’s southern border—not exactly a “caravan,” but an organized “Migrant Via Crucis”—has walked over 10 miles through Chiapas, the country’s southernmost state, and plans to cover a similar distance today. Its numbers have reportedly dwindled to about half of the approximately 3,000 participants with which it began.

Texas’s state government deployed about 200 members of its National Guard’s “Texas Tactical Border Force” to El Paso. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said, “It’s something that we didn’t request, and we won’t request from the state of Texas.”

The head of Guatemala’s migration agency, who worked in the government that left power in January, resigned yesterday. While the reason for Stuard Rodríguez’s departure is not known, it is notable that it takes place while the new president, Bernardo Arévalo, is in Washington and discussing migration with U.S. officials.

“Rodriguez made several reports during his administration of the increase of migrant expulsions, especially of Cubans and Venezuelans,” noted the Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre.

In Tucson, Arizona, local authorities now believe that federal funds—made possible by Congress passing a budget over the weekend—will arrive in time to prevent closure of shelters that receive migrants released from CBP custody. The prospect of “street releases” in Tucson and other Arizona border towns is now unlikely.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Conservative politicians and media outlets are going after the non-profit shelters that receive migrants released from CBP custody in U.S. border cities, along with other humanitarian groups, noted Miriam Davidson at The Progressive. Tucson’s Casa Alitas and El Paso’s Annunciation House have been subject to aggressive misinformation and legal attacks so far this year.

On the Right

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March 26, 2024

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Developments

Guatemala’s reformist new president, Bernardo Arévalo, visited the White House yesterday, where he met separately with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Migration was a central topic in both of Arévalo’s conversations.

Arévalo and Harris reportedly discussed “providing lawful pathways to migrants, increasing cooperation on border enforcement, and… U.S. support for Guatemala’s migration management efforts.” A White House release stated that the Biden administration plans to provide Guatemala with an additional $170 million in security and development assistance, pending congressional notification.

Vice President Harris touted the administration’s “Root Causes Strategy,” which she claimed has created 70,000 new jobs, helped up to 63,000 farmers, supported 3 million student’ education, and trained more than 18,000 police officers and 27,000 judicial operators in Central America.

The leaders announced no changes to the U.S.-backed “Safe Mobility Office” (SMO) in Guatemala that links some would-be migrants to legal pathways. The prior administration of President Alejandro Giammattei (whose U.S. visa has since been revoked amid corruption allegations) had reduced the SMO’s scope to serve only citizens of Guatemala.

Despite a crushing backlog of cases, the number of U.S. immigration judges actually declined in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, from 734 to 725. That means “each judge has 3,836 cases on average,” pointed out Kathleen Bush-Joseph of the Migration Policy Institute. (That number is greater if one uses TRAC Immigration’s higher estimate of the immigration court backlog.)

In less than three years, Texas state law enforcement has arrested 13,000 migrants under the framework of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) so-called “Operation Lone Star.” About three quarters of the arrests are for misdemeanor trespassing. Texas has carried out these arrests and imprisonments even without S.B. 4, a pending law that—if courts allow it to proceed—would empower Texas law enforcement to arrest, jail, and deport people on suspicion of crossing the border improperly.

Now that Congress has approved a 2024 federal budget, Arizona community leaders are wondering when funds will arrive to help non-profits receiving migrants released from CBP custody at the border. Those funds are about to run out, which could lead to CBP leaving released migrants on the streets of Tucson and other Arizona border-zone cities.

As Easter week begins, about 2,000 migrants participated in a “Migrant Via Crucis” march, what has become an annual event in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula.

In a Twitter response to comments that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made in a 60 Minutes interview, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) accused Mexico’s president of “coddling cartels and demanding the United States bankroll even more mass migration into our country.” Johnson called for a revival of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Mexico’s government’s ability and willingness to help control migration flows make it a key player on an issue with the potential to sway the election,” a New York Times analysis found. However, “behind closed doors, some senior Biden officials have come to see [Mexican President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador as an unpredictable partner, who they say isn’t doing enough to consistently control his own southern border or police routes being used by smugglers.”

At Lawfare, Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute dismantled an argument that has become increasingly mainstream among Republican politicians: that asylum seekers and other migrants crossing the border constitute an “invasion” and that states have a constitutional right to confront them with their own security forces. Somin warns that the “invasion” idea, if upheld, could allow border states “to initiate war anytime they want,” and permit the federal government to suspend habeas corpus rights.

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March 25, 2024

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Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provided updated data late on Friday about migration through February at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Search this data at cbpdata.adamisacson.com.)

Some key points:

  • Border Patrol apprehended 140,644 migrants in February, up 13 percent from January but still the 7th-fewest apprehensions of the Biden administration’s 37 full months.
  • 49,278 migrants came to ports of entry, 42,100 of them (1,452 per day) with CBP One appointments. This is similar to every month since July 2023.
  • Combining Border Patrol and port-of-entry encounters, CBP encountered 189,922 migrants at the border in February. The top nationalities were Mexico (33 percent), Guatemala (13 percent), Cuba (7 percent), Colombia (6 percent), and Ecuador (6 percent).
  • Migration from Venezuela continues to drop, despite elevated numbers of Venezuelan migrant encounters measured in Mexico, Honduras, and Panama’s Darién Gap. U.S. authorities encountered 8,769 Venezuelan citizens in February, the fewest since March 2023. Of that total, 64 percent (5,585) reported to ports of entry; Border Patrol apprehended only 3,184.
  • Border-zone seizures of fentanyl totaled 1,186 pounds in February, the fewest fentanyl seizures at the border of any of fiscal year 2024’s five months. After five months, fiscal year 2024 fentanyl seizures total 8,021 pounds, 27 percent fewer than the same point in fiscal year 2023. This is the first time fentanyl seizures have declined since the drug began to appear in the mid-2010s. Ports of entry account for 85 percent of this year’s fentanyl seizures.

In late February, press reported that the Biden administration was considering new executive actions at the border, like limits on access to asylum or a ban on crossings between ports of entry. But then nothing happened: Politico reported that the White House has stood down “in part, to the downtick in migration numbers” so far this year.

Executive actions are not off the table, however. Axios reported that “President Biden is still considering harsh executive actions at the border before November’s election.” These actions, which may involve expelling migrants regardless of asylum needs, would stand on shaky legal foundations and be difficult to apply to migrants of many nationalities.

Officials in Panama reported that the number of migrants crossing the Darién Gap so far in 2024 has now exceeded 101,000. At the end of February, the number stood at 73,167; this means that the March pace remains, as in January and February, at a bit over 1,200 people per day. Of this year’s migrants, nearly two thirds (64,307) are citizens of Venezuela.

Texas police have begun firing rubber bullets at migrants, a Ciudad Juárez human rights activist told EFE. Texas authorities fired tear gas canisters at migrants camped on the El Paso bank of the Rio Grande, after they began pulling on the concertina wire that Texas has laid between the river and the border wall.

The Houston Chronicle reported that Texas state National Guardsmen threatened migrants on the Eagle Pass riverbank with deportation under Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law—even though the law is not in effect while judicial challenges continue.

Authorities in El Paso say they will not prosecute migrants arrested under S.B. 4 if their arrests are found to have resulted from profiling. In the Rio Grande Valley, sheriffs say they do not expect to arrest many people under S.B. 4 because they don’t expect to witness many illegal border crossings.

Guatemala’s government added its voice to international opposition to Texas’s S.B. 4 law.

“I think the migrants that we encounter, that are turning themselves in, yes, I think they absolutely are, by and large, good people,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CBS News’s Face the Nation. But “what’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known got-aways” so far this fiscal year.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has loudly complained about asylum seekers arriving in his city, canceled a trip to Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, citing unspecified “safety concerns” about the Mexico segment of his visit. Adams was responding to an invitation from Sr. Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a large respite center in McAllen.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The New York Times reported on the recent movement of migration away from the Texas border, with more people coming to California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Though the picture is complex, the Texas state government’s crackdown, especially the unknown consequences of the currently on-hold S.B. 4 law, is a factor. (However, migration has also been declining all year, even during the spring, in Border Patrol’s busy Tucson, Arizona sector.)

Ransom kidnappings and other attacks on migrants are worsening at the Mexico-Guatemala border, especially the central region where the Pan-American Highway crosses into Chiapas, reported Milenio.

At the New York Review of Books, Caroline Tracey documented an abandoned, unpopular plan to construct a massive Border Patrol checkpoint on I-19, the highway between Tucson and the border at Nogales, Arizona. The case highlighted the tension between security concerns and economic and human rights considerations.

  • Caroline Tracey, “Checkpoint Dreams” (The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2024).

As Mexican farmworkers migrate to the United States, often on temporary work visas, Mexico is facing its own farm labor shortages and is considering setting up its own guest-worker program for citizens of countries to Mexico’s south, the Washington Post reported.

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March 22, 2024

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Developments

Mexico filed an amicus curiae brief in federal court in support of the ongoing challenge to Texas’s state immigration law, S.B. 4. The brief argues that the law, which would allow state law enforcement to arrest, imprison, or deport people suspected of crossing the border improperly, would do significant harm to Mexican citizens living in Texas.

Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena told the Washington Post that her government would place “increased vigilance and controls” along the Texas border to prevent Texas state authorities from carrying out their own deportations without Mexico’s permission.

Across Texas’s 254 counties, sheriffs are unclear about how they are meant to enforce S.B. 4 if courts give the strict law a green light, the Associated Press reported. “If we start going and talking to everybody and asking for papers, where do we stop?” asked the president of the Texas Sheriff’s Association.

In El Paso, a group of migrants on the U.S. bank of the Rio Grande pushed their way past Texas state National Guard personnel blocking access to the border wall, where they hoped to turn themselves in to federal Border Patrol agents. Video showed a chaotic scene.

S.B. 4 is “not going to stop us from doing our job,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said in a CBS News interview, adding that there is “no better partner for the Border Patrol than the Texas Department of Public Safety.” Owens called for “jail time” for more migrants who cross the border between ports of entry, and cited a “need to take a look at the asylum laws and make it where only people that have a legitimate claim can claim asylum.”

CBP released body-worn camera footage of the February 17 death, apparently by suicide, of a man in a holding cell at a Laredo, Texas checkpoint. The footage does not show the exact circumstances of how the man died because “the video recording system at the Border Patrol checkpoint was not fully functioning at the time of the incident.”

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was in Guatemala. With President Bernardo Arévalo, the Secretary reviewed nine topics including migration. The migration talks focused on information sharing and “coordinated operational plans” against smugglers.

Arévalo will be in Washington Monday, where he will meet Vice President Kamala Harris. Mayorkas noted that the “Safe Mobility Office” established in Guatemala in mid-2023 has “already helped more than 1,500 Guatemalans safely and lawfully enter the United States” via legal pathways.

Speaking to Guatemala’s Prensa Libre, Assistant DHS Secretary for Border Policy and Migration Blas Nunez-Neto said that organized crime has taken over the migrant smuggling business all along the U.S.-bound route: “The cartels that previously had no direct participation in the movement of people in an irregular manner are increasingly controlling these flows.”

So far in 2024, the U.S. and Mexican governments have deported 20,018 citizens of Guatemala back to their country by air, more than 5,000 above the total at the same time in 2023. The United States has returned 18,437 people on 154 flights, while Mexico has returned 1,632 on 15 flights.

Mexico’s government reached an agreement with Venezuela’s government to facilitate aerial deportations of Venezuelan citizens back to Caracas. As part of the deal, some of Mexico’s largest corporations, would employ Venezuelan deportees, paying them a “stipend” of US$110 per month for a six-month period. “We’re sending Venezuelans back to their country because we really cannot handle these quantities,” said Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena.

Criminals have kidnapped a group of 95 Ecuadorian migrants in the Pacific coastal region of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.

Federal authorities arrested a historic leader of the MS-13 gang at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego on March 7.

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