Tag: News Links

October 9, 2024

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Developments

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump plans a Friday visit to the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, where he will draw attention to allegations that a Venezuelan organized crime group, the Tren de Aragua, has arrived mixed in with the migrant population and taken control of a run-down apartment complex.

Local officials, including the city’s Republican mayor, former congressman Mike Coffman, deny the allegations, acknowledging the Venezuelan gang‘s presence in Aurora but insisting that claims of its power are wildly exaggerated. Trump’s narrative of a migrant “invasion” of Aurora “is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination,” Coffman told NBC News in late September.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has named a new director of the country’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM). Sergio Salomón Céspedes, currently the governor of the state of Puebla, is a career politician who began in the once-dominant PRI political party. His resume includes some time administering the Mexican Red Cross, but he appears to have little background in migration policy.

In December, Céspedes will replace Francisco Garduño, a former prisons official who has headed INM since 2019. Garduño faces criminal charges related to a March 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez INM detention facility that killed 40 migrants. Garduño will stay on for two more months, Sheinbaum said, because “he is working on a comprehensive strategy that [previous] President [Andrés Manuel] López Obrador made for the migration issue, but there are still pending and important issues in the institute.”

Sheinbaum said that arrest warrants have been issued for the two Mexican Army soldiers who fired upon a vehicle carrying migrants through the southern state of Chiapas on October 1, killing six of them. Of surviving victims of the incident, most have been issued temporary documentation and are now near Mexico’s northern border, Milenio reported.

In Guatemala, elements of the Public Prosecutor’s Office—a separate branch of government whose leadership, unlike elected President Bernardo Arévalo, faces U.S. sanctions for corruption—raided five facilities run by the charity Save the Children. The prosecutors allege that the charity may be involved in trafficking unaccompanied migrant children.

Hinting at a larger political agenda, the prosecutor’s office has asked the Texas state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), to collaborate in its investigation of alleged trafficking of Guatemalan children at the U.S. border. Paxton has been on a legal offensive against Texas charities that assist recently arrived migrants.

“We reaffirm that we have never facilitated any transfer of children or adolescents out of Guatemala,” Save the Children, which has operated in Guatemala for over 40 years, told Agénce France Presse.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Mexican-born population in the United States “shrank by more than 1 million people from its peak of 11.7 million in 2010 to 10.7 million in 2022 but has started growing again,” informed a report from the Migration Policy Institute. “As of 2023, 10.9 million U.S. residents were immigrants from Mexico.” MPI estimated that, of the 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States in mid-2022, 5.1 million (45 percent) were from Mexico.

Axios pointed out that recently published FBI data covering 2023 showed “the average homicide rate of 11 border cities was lower than the national average”: 4.4 homicides per 100,000 residents, compared to 5.7 nationwide. The cities measured are Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and El Paso (Texas); Sunland Park (New Mexico); Nogales and Yuma (Arizona); and Calexico and San Diego (California).

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp analyzed the meaning of Donald Trump’s recent remark, referring to migrants in the United States, that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Beauchamp noted, “Immigration is an existential threat to America, per Trump, because it brings in people who are genetically incapable of assimilating into the American body politic.” This genetic determinism, he concludes, combines with nationalism to form a central ideological tenet of today’s Republican Party.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

October 8, 2024

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Developments

“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told a conservative radio host. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” apparently referring to migrants in the United States as genetically inferior.

At CBS News 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker asked Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whether it was “a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did” after Donald Trump left office. (The Biden administration left Trump’s Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy in place for over 27 months.)

Harris replied, “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions,” adding that the Biden-Harris administration’s recent asylum restrictions at the border have cut Border Patrol apprehensions in half. Whitaker sought to ask whether the administration should have acted earlier to restrict asylum, though the legal basis for the June ban on most asylum access between border ports of entry remains in dispute.

In Chiapas, Mexico, civilian prosecutors have begun investigating soldiers’ October 1 killing of six migrants aboard a vehicle. A prominent Mexican human rights organization, the Foundation for Justice, recalled that National Guard soldiers who killed migrants aboard a vehicle in Chiapas in 2021 still have not been brought to justice.

A “caravan” of migrants that departed Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas over the weekend now numbers about 1,000 people and has walked about 45 miles. A woman from Venezuela told Milenio that her family “decided to leave Tapachula due to a lack of employment and opportunities, and in addition to the delay in the response from CBP One, they are forced to remain stranded at the southern border of Mexico.”

At Border Patrol’s checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas, north of McAllen, agents arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor attempting to transport 39 undocumented migrants aboard a bus with a falsified manifest.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Three pieces probed reactions to two Biden administration policy changes, revealed last week, that shrink legal migration pathways: an adjustment making it harder to reverse a June asylum restriction at the border, and a decision not to renew the two-year humanitarian parole status granted to some citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Boston Globe columnist Marcela García argued that with these moves the Democrats, particularly Kamala Harris’s election campaign, are trying to preserve immigration pathways while simultaneously trying to minimize the lead that Donald Trump currently enjoys when voters are polled on the border and migration issue.

Times of San Diego spoke to local migrant rights advocates and service providers who don’t see recent harder-line policies having a long-term impact on migration flows. “I think it’s going to collapse like it’s collapsed in the past, and at some point we’re hoping that humane, sensible solutions will be taken more seriously,” said Margaret Cargioli of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “Our leaders are choosing politics over what’s right, and we cannot allow that,” added Lilian Serrano of the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

In a city with well over 100,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the Houston Chronicle spoke to local migration advocates and service providers who view the non-renewal of humanitarian parole as “electoral politics” and are urging community members to seek alternative protection pathways and “not to panic.”

Andrew Selee and Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute authored an analysis discerning the outlines of “a new architecture for managing migration” emerging from the Biden administration’s combination of legal migration pathways, increased regional cooperation, and tightened asylum access at the border.

On the Right

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October 7, 2024

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Developments

CBS News and the Washington Examiner reported preliminary Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data indicating that Border Patrol apprehended 53,881 migrants in September between U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. That would be the smallest total of the Biden administration, down from 56,399 in July and 58,038 in August. Another 48,000 in September came to the ports of entry, most of them with CBP One appointments.

The Border Patrol figure would be the fewest since August 2020, when Donald Trump was president, and less than the monthly average for 2019.

Fact-checks have debunked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claims that a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program to shelter recently released migrants has “stolen” funds that would relieve victims of Hurricane Helene. FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which helps keep migrants from being released onto border cities’ streets, is funded through a separate channel, through CBP, and is less than 2 percent as large as FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler noted that the only time that FEMA disaster funds were raided to fund migrant response was in 2019, when Trump was president.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated 105 removal flights in September, according to the latest monthly report from Witness at the Border. That is the fewest since July 2023; reduced apprehensions at the border are a likely factor.

The report’s author, Thomas Cartwright, has also been tracking Panama’s stepped-up deportation flights—most of them supported by U.S. funding—of migrants apprehended exiting the Darién Gap. Between early August and October 5, the report notes 16 flights, 12 to Colombia, 3 to Ecuador, and 1 to India. Those planes carried 634 people, which Cartwright notes is equivalent to 1.4 percent of total migration through the Darién during that period.

Two girls from Egypt, aged 18 and 11, were among the 6 migrants killed on October 1 when Mexican soldiers fired on a pickup truck that was transporting them in the southern state of Chiapas. “Three of the dead were from Egypt, and one each from Peru and Honduras. The other has apparently not yet been identified,” the Associated Press reported. Milenio cited a victim from El Salvador, but not Honduras.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said that Mexico’s Army (National Defense Secretariat or SEDENA) initiated the legal complaint against the two soldiers who allegedly fired on the migrants’ vehicle, and that the civilian Attorney General’s Office is investigating the incident.

About 800 migrants formed a “caravan” or protest in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. They began walking north in response to the October 1 incident in which Mexican soldiers killed six migrants, and because “migration procedures take months in the southern border region, and there are no jobs to sustain the wait,” La Jornada reported.

Migrants interviewed by EFE in Tapachula said they worry about failing to secure CBP One appointments before a possible election of Donald Trump.

President Sheinbaum has not yet named a successor to Francisco Garduño, the embattled head of its migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM), who faces criminal charges related to a March 2023 detention center fire that killed 40 migrants in Ciudad Juárez. Garduño, who has headed INM since 2019, remains at his post and has said he would be willing to stay on.

A U.S. federal government body that investigates inspectors-general submitted a report accusing Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General, of “substantial misconduct,” including reprisals against whistleblowers and providing misleading information to Congress. Cuffari, a Trump appointee, has come under fire from non-governmental watchdogs, particularly the Project on Government Oversight, for weakening oversight of a department that includes most U.S. border law enforcement agencies.

Texas state police carried out two separate pursuits of vehicles suspected of smuggling migrants in the El Paso area on October 2; both ended with crashes.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is asking the state’s legislature for an additional $2.88 billion to fund the state government’s border security crackdown, known as “Operation Lone Star.” The Dallas Morning News pointed out that this is “the largest ask in the Republican governor’s appropriations request for the 2026-27 budget cycle.” Operation Lone Star has already cost $11 billion since 2021; Border Patrol migrant apprehensions have not declined faster in Texas than they have in Arizona, which has no similar crackdown.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Jonathan Blitzer, at the New Yorker, and Jamelle Bouie, at the New York Times, published critiques of the Trump-Vance campaign’s view that “mass deportation” could be a policy solution to address problems ranging from housing costs to crime. Blitzer raised concerns about deporting beneficiaries of documented statuses that depend on presidential approval, like humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status.

Tyche Hendricks of California Public Media interviewed Haitians who have settled in the San Diego area, who are “on edge” about losing Temporary Protected Status if Donald Trump is elected.

The Washington Post noted that while some pro-immigration organizations are unhappy with Democrats’ rightward turn on issues like asylum access, they are muting their criticism during the campaign between Vice President Kalama Harris and Donald Trump, who promises a much harder line.

InSight Crime and Pirate Wire Services published analyses contending that the threat of the “Tren de Aragua,” a gang that emerged from Venezuela’s prisons and has the attention of U.S. law enforcement, is exaggerated. “Their reputation far exceeds their capabilities,” wrote Colombia-based reporter Joshua Collins at PWS. “The gang’s reputation appears to have grown more quickly than its actual presence in the US,” concluded InSight Crime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit.

Tags: News Links

October 4, 2024

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Developments

This month will mark two years since the Biden administration inaugurated a program allowing citizens of Venezuela to reside in the United States with a two-year humanitarian parole status. Now, CBS News revealed, the administration does not plan to allow Venezuelan citizens to renew their humanitarian parole. If they do not seek to adjust their status, Venezuelan parole recipients will find themselves in legal limbo, subject to removal should the government in Caracas allow deportation flights to resume.

The parole program allows people to apply online from elsewhere and arrive by air, avoiding the U.S.-Mexico border. It has been available for up to a combined 30,000 citizens a year of Venezuela and, after January 2023, of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, who have valid passports and U.S.-based sponsors. Mexico used the program’s existence to justify accepting up to 30,000 monthly land-border deportations of those countries’ citizens.

Venezuelans who arrived in the United States before July 2023 are eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status, a non-permanent but firmer documented status. As a result, for the next eight or nine months at least, most Venezuelans facing expiration of their parole have another option. It is unclear what might happen after that, or what might happen to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua whose two-year statuses will begin to expire in January. The outcome of the November 2024 election will be a big factor.

Mexico began reckoning with an October 1 killing of six migrants by Mexican Army soldiers in the southern state of Chiapas. Another 10 were wounded.

That evening, soldiers chased, then fired on, a pickup truck carrying 33 migrants about 50 miles inland from the Guatemala border. Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) claimed that the vehicle “evaded military personnel” and that soldiers heard “detonations.”

Mexico’s newly inaugurated president, Claudia Sheinbaum, called the incident “deplorable,” adding, “a situation like this cannot be repeated.” Sheinbaum said that civilian prosecutors are questioning the two soldiers who fired their weapons; they have not yet been charged with anything.

Mexico’s Senate began its Thursday session with a moment of silence for the shooting’s victims.

The Human Mobility Pastoral, part of the Episcopal Conference of Mexico’s Catholic church, condemned the shooting as “the consequence of the militarization of migration policy and a greater presence of the armed forces on the southern border.” Added a statement from numerous Mexican human rights organizations: “Mexico has chosen to implement a migration policy without a human rights focus, making use of military forces, such as the National Guard, the Navy or the Army, as mechanisms for migration control.”

At a September 30 meeting of the Texas House Committee on State Affairs, Texas Public Radio reported, a court administration official revealed that U.S. citizens were 72 percent of those accused of smuggling immigrants in the state between May 2023 and April 2024. Less than 10 percent were from Mexico.

The conservative news website The Center Square published unofficial data indicating that Border Patrol apprehended at least 1,525,210 migrants in fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 30. This number, however, seems slightly low: it would indicate that Border Patrol apprehended just 48,505 migrants in September (the agency’s reported October-August total was 1,476,705). Other sources have reported that September’s apprehensions totaled about 54,000.

Analyses and Feature Stories

In the first of a series about regional human rights and democracy challenges for the next U.S. administration, WOLA published five sets of principles to guide border and migration policy. They cover human rights and accountability, upholding asylum, comprehensive immigration reform, root causes, and regional cooperation and integration.

In a Wilson Center interview, journalist Molly O’Toole explored how global migration patterns are transforming due to U.S. policies, economic conditions, and environmental crises. That is the overarching subject of O’Toole’s forthcoming book The Route, which traces migration from Brazil to the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s very difficult to think of a policy that the U.S. could conceive of that could stop people who are willing to die in order to make it,” she pointed out.

By declaring Mexican and Venezuelan criminal groups to be “terrorist organizations”—something the federal government has not done—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is carrying out a parallel foreign policy, noted an analysis by Francesca D’Annunzio at the Texas Observer.

“Democrats have traveled a long arc in the last four years,” reads a New York Times newsletter from Hamed Aleaziz. “When Biden took office, he spoke warmly of migrants seeking asylum and even tried to pause deportations altogether. (A court said no.) As his political fortunes sank, he turned toward deterring migrants. Finally, in June, he took a hard line.”

  • Hamed Aleaziz, “A Crackdown” (The New York Times, October 4, 2024).

“The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off,” explained Rogé Karma in an Atlantic essay.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

October 3, 2024

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Developments

Mexican Army soldiers chased, then fired on, a truck carrying 33 migrants on the evening of October 1, killing 6 of them and wounding 12. The incident took place on the Pacific coastal highway in Huixtla, Chiapas, about 50 miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) issued a statement claiming that the migrants’ truck “evaded military personnel,” who suspected that it was tied to organized crime, which has become much more active in the state of Chiapas over the past year. That alone does not justify use of lethal force; the SEDENA statement contended that soldiers fired at the truck after hearing “detonations.”

The deceased victims were reportedly from Nepal, Egypt and Pakistan. Other migrants aboard the vehicle, including some of the wounded, came from Cuba, India, and what SEDENA called “Arab nationalities.” The Foreign Ministry of Peru claimed that one of the six fatalities was a Peruvian citizen.

SEDENA stated that the two soldiers who fired their weapons have been removed from their posts, and that both the civilian and military justice systems’ prosecutors are investigating. The incident heightens concerns about the Mexican government’s expanding placement of combat-trained soldiers in internal law-enforcement roles.

“People in mobility are exposed to great risks during their journey, that is why it is essential to have legal ways of access, transit and integration to avoid tragedies like this,” read a brief statement from UNHCR.

Border Report pointed out new FBI data showing that violent crime rates in Texas border cities are lower than the average for all cities. All Texas border communities have homicide rates below the 2023 U.S. national average of 5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) annual Homeland Threat Assessment document, released October 2, warned that “over the next year, we expect some individuals with terrorism ties and some criminal actors will continue their efforts to exploit migration flows and the complex border security environment to enter the United States.”

In Washington, DC district court, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the Biden administration violated environmental law when it halted border-wall construction in 2021. Judge Trevor McFadden argued that Biden’s border policies encouraged more migration, and migrants littered trash in border areas.

NewsNation reported, based on an internal Border Patrol alert, that the Northeast Cartel, active in parts of Mexico’s border state of Tamaulipas across from south Texas, has been using electronic devices to disrupt the agency’s surveillance drones.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The American Immigration Council (AIC) released a report about the potential cost of massively deporting undocumented migrants from the United States, which is a core campaign promise of Republican candidate Donald Trump.

It estimated that arresting, detaining, processing, and removing a million undocumented migrants each year would cost an annual total of $88 billion. It would total at least $315 billion for a one-time operation and $967.9 billion for a decade-long campaign.

Deporting about 4 percent of the U.S. workforce would cause the nation’s gross domestic product to “drop anywhere from 4.2% to 6.8%,” the AIC found; that is more than during the 2007-2009 “Great Recession.”

The report’s scope did not extend to the harder-to-quantify costs to human rights and democratic institutions that a mass-deportation campaign might entail, or the harm to U.S. civil-military relations if such a campaign were to mobilize Defense Department resources and personnel.

The ACLU has filed suit in federal court to obtain results of a Freedom of Information Act request about federal government capacity, and potential costs, of a “mass deportation” effort.

The Associated Press fact-checked a column graph of U.S.-Mexico border migrant apprehensions that Republican candidate Donald Trump frequently displays at campaign events; he was gesturing at it when a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear at a July campaign event. The chart includes errors and distortions, including a marker showing Trump leaving office in April 2020, the first full month of the COVID pandemic, when migration plummeted. Trump in fact left office in January 2021, after several months of increased migrant apprehensions.

Washington Post columnist Philip Bump rebutted claims, including those made by JD Vance in Tuesday’s vice-presidential candidates’ debate, that migrants are contributing to crime, fentanyl smuggling, and higher U.S. housing costs. PolitiFact, the Associated Press, and Melvis Acosta at Mother Jones addressed other spurious claims made in the debate, including Vance’s allegation that DHS has “effectively lost” 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

The Project on Government Oversight published allegations that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a key official for oversight of border security agencies, has engaged in a prolonged effort to undermine investigations into his own misconduct, especially claims of whistleblower retaliation. Cuffari is under investigation by the Integrity Committee, a federal panel that oversees inspectors-general, for retaliating against whistleblowers who reported delays in DHS reports, including a report on migrant family separations.

On the Right

Tags: News Links

Daily Border Links: October 2, 2024

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Developments

The border and migration were the third topic that CBS News moderators posed to candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz in last night’s vice-presidential debate.

Asked about the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation” plans, Vance replied that, if elected, Donald Trump would first focus on deporting migrants with criminal records in the United States; the Ohio Senator did not address the question’s inquiry about whether it would separate families. Vance blamed Walz’s running mate, Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden for “94 executive orders suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system, that has opened the floodgates,” and sought to tie that to fentanyl smuggling.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, repeated the Harris campaign’s charge that Donald Trump torpedoed a compromise bipartisan border-security bill in February 2024 by urging Republican senators to vote against it. That bill, the “Border Act of 2024,” failed in the Senate after months of negotiations between a group of Democratic and Republican senators. As it sought Republican buy-in, that bill included tougher provisions than Democrats would normally support, like severe limits on asylum access between ports of entry, more migrant detention capacity, and expenditure of Trump-era border wall funds. Vance did not address the “Border Act,” which he voted against.

Walz incorrectly claimed that Donald Trump built “less than 2 percent” of border wall (the net increase in fenced-off miles was about 4 percent, but Trump built new pedestrian fencing over 14 percent of the border). Vance incorrectly claimed that there are “20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country” (there were 11 million in 2022); that “we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost” (32,000 children—starting in 2019, when Trump was president—have missed immigration hearings but aren’t necessarily “missing,” while another 291,000 haven’t been issued Notices to Appear but aren’t “missing”); and that the CBP One program is illegal (it employs humanitarian parole, a presidential authority dating back to 1952). As has been documented by a Cato Institute review of obtained official documents, among other sources, the vast majority of fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens, or by non-citizens with border-crossing credentials who are not migrants.

The segment ended with CBS moderator Margaret Brennan fact-checking Vance’s claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are not legally in the United States (nearly all have documentation, mainly humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status). “The rules were that you guys were going to fact check,” Vance complained; the border-migration discussion ended when moderators muted the candidates’ microphones.

The Venezuelan daily Tal Cual reported that while in Mexico to speak on a panel, a Cuban vice minister of labor and social security got a CBP One appointment at the Arizona border, was released into the United States, and now has a date to appear in immigration court in August 2026.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Departed Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “control of the migration valve may have insulated his government from Washington’s meddling,” Eduardo Porter wrote at the Washington Post. “But that tense, unstable equilibrium is unlikely to survive under the government of López Obrador’s anointed successor Claudia Sheinbaum.”

On the Right

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October 1, 2024

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Developments

The Biden administration published a revised proclamation and a final rule tightening restrictions, first issued on June 4, on migrants’ ability to access the U.S. asylum system without making appointments at official border crossings (ports of entry). Since then, most who cross between the ports of entry and enter Border Patrol custody are ineligible for asylum.

The rule’s first version revoked asylum access whenever the daily average of Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions exceeds 2,500 over a 7-day period, and would have restored asylum when Border Patrol apprehensions fall below 1,500 over a 7-day period, excluding unaccompanied children.

The new version cements the asylum restrictions further: the daily average would now have to remain below 1,500 per day over 28 days—not 7—and unaccompanied children now count toward the total.

According to Border Patrol data from July, August, and (preliminarily) September, the agency averaged 1,831 apprehensions per day during those months, including 194 unaccompanied children per day (in July and August). That is well over the 1,500-per-day threshold below which apprehensions would need to fall, over 28 days, in order to “turn back on” the right to seek asylum again between ports of entry.

Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act guarantees the right to seek asylum to all who are physically present in the United States “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.”

The UN Refugee Agency voiced “profound concern” about the tightened asylum regulation, which “severely curtails access to protection for people fleeing conflict, persecution, and violence, putting many refugees and asylum seekers in grave danger without a viable option for seeking safety.”

CNN reported that Border Patrol was on track to apprehend about 54,000 migrants (1,800 per day) at the border during the month of September. That would be down slightly from 56,399 (1,819 per day) in July and 58,038 (1,872 per day) in August.

A criminal organization in the border city of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico—near Yuma, Arizona—placed 24 surveillance cameras on telephone poles, wiring them into power lines for electricity and into telephone lines for internet connectivity.

Migrants—some seeking or awaiting CBP One appointments—in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, participated in a procession organized by the local Catholic diocese. They called for protection from organized crime and faster asylum adjudication from the Mexican government’s Refugee Assistance Commission (COMAR).

Analyses and Feature Stories

In Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, where agents have recovered the remains of a local record 175 migrants in fiscal 2024, USA Today’s Lauren Villagrán reported on the mental health toll that deaths and unsuccessful rescues take on personnel.

Analyses from the Washington Post and CBS News explained how the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians have been distorting and misinterpreting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data released in response to an inquiry from border-district Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas). That data points to 13,099 immigrants with homicide convictions on ICE’s “non-detained” docket, which simply means that they are not in ICE’s custody though they may be imprisoned elsewhere.

The vast majority of these individuals did not cross the border during the Biden presidency. Still, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) told CBS’s Face the Nation that the Biden administration “released more than 13,000 convicted murderers who illegally entered this country.”

In recent days, Donald Trump’s “rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding,” wrote Mark Follman at Mother Jones. Migrants, he said at a Wisconsin rally, “are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

On the Right

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September 27, 2024

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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris is to pay her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic candidate for president. She will be in Douglas, Arizona, today, where she is scheduled to meet with CBP personnel at the port of entry and give a campaign speech.

Recent polls have shown Harris narrowly trailing Republican opponent Donald Trump in Arizona, a “battleground state” where competition for electoral votes is tight.

An unnamed senior campaign official told The Hill that Harris plans to “reject the false choice between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is safe, orderly and humane—arguing we must do both to protect our country’s security and enduring legacy as a nation of immigrants.”

Media reports indicate that Harris plans to attack Donald Trump for urging Republican members of Congress to defeat a compromise border-security bill that failed in the Senate in February. Harris will repeat a promise to sign a reintroduced “Border Act” if it reaches her desk. That bill included some common-sense border and migration provisions, like adding capacity at ports of entry and in the asylum system. But it also included harder-line measures like increasing detention beds and denying much access to asylum during busy periods.

A version of the asylum-denial provision is now in place, pending court challenges, under an early-June Biden administration proclamation and rule.

“Anything she says tomorrow, you know is a fraud because she was the worst in history at protecting our country,” Trump said in remarks yesterday in New York. “She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border.” The New York Times noted that after beginning with about 10 minutes of border content, Trump “appeared to grow bored” with his prepared remarks and veered off into other topics.

As early as Monday, CBS News and the New York Times revealed, the Biden administration plans to announce a toughening of its June rule banning asylum between border ports of entry at busy times.

The rule shuts down asylum access for those who cross the border without inspection whenever Border Patrol apprehensions, not counting unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries, average over 2,500 people per day for a week. It would restore asylum access after a weekly average drops below 1,500 per day, not counting unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries. (In August, it was about 1,870 per day.)

The administration’s likely adjustments would put a restoration of asylum further out of reach. Border Patrol apprehensions would have to fall below an average of 1,500 per day for 4 weeks—not 1 week—and unaccompanied children would count toward the total.

Texas’s attorney-general, Ken Paxton (R), is further broadening his legal campaign against non-profits in the state that serve migrants. Paxton has opened an investigation of the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which represents asylum seekers and advocates for migrants’ rights. That makes at least five migrants rights defense organizations or shelters targeted this year.

Las Americas and the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) responded yesterday with a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Paxton. “We’re witnessing a disturbing pattern in Texas in which immigrant legal services and voting rights are under a coordinated siege by the Attorney General under the guise of protecting voter integrity,” said TCRP’s Rochelle Garza.

The Washington Post noted that Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), the Democratic challenger to ultraconservative Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) re-election bid, has, like Harris, pivoted to tougher talk on the border and migration.

In the Darién Gap, migrants from Venezuela interviewed by Agénce France Presse say that they are migrating out of fear amid increased repression after authorities declared that the nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, won re-election on July 28. The Venezuelan government provided no proof to back up this claim.

Border Patrol agents found 72 migrants whom smugglers were keeping in a storage shed in south El Paso.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Human Rights Watch denounced disturbing recent incidents in Eagle Pass, Texas: Texas National Guard personnel continue to fire pepper-spray projectiles at migrants, including families with children, attempting to cross the Rio Grande. Soldiers are using force even though their targets are unarmed, posing no threat, and separated from them by concertina-wire barriers.

The New York Review of Books covered two recent volumes about the border and migration, John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders and Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.

“Immigration is a blessing the U.S. needs to nurture and manage,” wrote Andrés Marínez of Arizona State University at Time. “But our shared politicized narratives on the subject are veering so dangerously off course that a serious contender for the presidency can pass off talk of deporting millions of hardworking immigrants as a sensible proposal.”

Of migrants in their care shortly after arriving at the border in Arizona, Doctors Without Borders noted that most are suffering stress that is “not post-traumatic. They are still in a kind of traumatic reaction, which is a physical and mental state. And they should be. They are hyper alert, and ready to run at any moment after what many of them have gone through.”

Regardless of the election outcome, “the issue of immigration seems set to remain a political cudgel,” Aimee Santillán of the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute told the National Catholic Reporter.

On the Right

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September 23, 2024

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Note: staff are likely to be testifying in a congressional hearing on Wednesday 25. Preparation for that event will prevent us from posting daily updates again until Friday 27, and we will be unable to produce a Weekly Border Update.

Developments

Between June 5 (when the Biden administration’s restrictive asylum rule went into effect) and September 10, the U.S. government has returned “more than 131,000 individuals to more than 140 countries,” Luis Miranda, the Principal Deputy Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Communications, told the Venezuelan daily Tal Cual.

Panama sent two more deportation flights carrying migrants from the Darién Gap back to their countries of origin: one to Colombia on September 19 and one to Ecuador on September 20. Since the beginning of August, pointed out Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border, Panama has run 11 flights, most with U.S. support, that have deported 441 people. The Panamanian daily La Prensa counted 433 people, and a total cost of $900,000 for the 11 flights. That is $2,079 per deported person.

A front page New York Times story examined the presence of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan organized crime gang that may be gaining a toehold in parts of the United States. In the New York area, law enforcement sources told the Times that they first saw signs of the group’s presence in January 2024. Still, “migrants living in city shelters said they had not noticed the gang’s influence there.”

A sensationalistic New York Post story claimed that the Tren de Aragua has turned New York City shelters into “hubs” for their criminal activities.

At the Otay Mesa port of entry east of San Diego on September 18, a CBP officer shot and wounded a man who was advancing while holding a screwdriver and ignoring commands to drop the tool.

Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers told NewsNation of recent cases of migrant smugglers sedating children, usually with over-the-counter medications, when they take them across the border.

The chief of Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector tweeted that a large fentanyl seizure from a vehicle in the neighboring San Diego Sector was an example of what the agency could do “when agents aren’t processing coached asylum claims.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

CBS News’s 60 Minutes program covered trafficking in fentanyl, “the worst drug crisis in U.S. history.” Acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller recalled that about 90 percent of fentanyl crossing into the United States from Mexico comes in passenger vehicles. It is not brought by undocumented migrants; in fact, two-thirds of those arrested for smuggling the drug are U.S. citizens.

An El País analysis of the Trump campaign’s promise to carry out a “mass deportation” program found that it could cost between $265 billion and $481 billion to carry out. By removing 4.5 percent of the U.S. workforce, it estimates, the promised removal program would slow U.S. GDP growth by more than 9 percentage points while increasing inflation.

An Associated Press analysis of “mass deportation” looked at the legal authorities, like the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, that a re-elected President Trump might use to employ soldiers to remove both undocumented migrants and those whose status his administration would revoke.

“Trump’s bald embrace of xenophobia” in the election campaign leads to the discouraging conclusion that “overtly racist appeals,” well beyond euphemisms, do not harm a candidate’s standing in 2024, concluded an analysis of the current electoral moment by Caitlin Dickerson at the Atlantic.

Border Report’s Sandra Sanchez accompanied volunteers training, with Texas State University’s Operation Identification, to identify the remains of migrants who died near the border in Texas.

Reporting from El Paso’s outskirts, where migrant deaths have been surging, Morgan Lee of the Associated Press found that while the border and migration are big election issues, residents of this and other border zones tend to hold a “nuanced view” and are dissatisfied with perceived inaction from Washington.

At the Atlantic, Paola Ramos profiled Pedro Antonio Agüero, a Mexican-American social media influencer from El Paso who calls himself “Conservative Anthony” and “stalks and confronts people he suspects of being migrants while livestreaming the encounters on his website.”

On the Right

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September 20, 2024

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Developments

CBS News obtained unpublished post-2022 Border Patrol data about the number of remains of deceased migrants that the agency has recovered along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The number of migrant deaths recorded by Border Patrol increased to 568 in fiscal year 2021 and then soared to nearly 900 [890] in fiscal year 2022—an all-time high. In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, Border Patrol recorded 704 and 560 migrant deaths respectively.”

Chris Magnus, a former Tucson police chief who headed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for about a year early in the Biden administration, told Arizona Luminaria that he was troubled by a recent incident in Arizona, when Border Patrol failed to assist a man who fell from the wall, leaving him lying on the Mexican side of the barrier with a compound fracture. The incident, Magnus said, “speaks to a more significant cultural problem that’s not unique to the Border Patrol but deeply troubling anywhere in law enforcement when those sworn to protect forget that protecting lives must be their top priority regardless of politics, bureaucracy, burn-out, or fear of repercussions.”

After more than a week of baseless attacks on a Haitian migrant population in Ohio, the Trump-Vance campaign may shift focus to Venezuelan migrants in Colorado. Colorado Public Radio reported that Donald Trump plans to visit Aurora, a Denver suburb where—despite emphatic local police and government denials—rumors spread that Venezuela’s “Tren de Aragua” organized-crime group had taken control of an apartment complex.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) criticized Gov. Greg Abbott (R) of neighboring border state Texas for ordering National Guard troops to lay barbed wire along the borderline between the states. Texas’s state government billed the move as a measure to keep migrants who cross into New Mexico from entering Texas. “Gov. Abbott seems to be pushing to make Texas its own country without regard for his neighbors,” Lujan Grisham said.

At this moment of reduced migration, Texas’s state government is planning to close and consolidate some of its police and military deployment along the border. “Officials with the State National Guard revealed that two of the four operation base camps, one in Laredo and one north of Eagle Pass, will be shut down,” an Austin television station reported. “A base camp near Del Rio is also being downsized.” Some will be reassigned to a large base that Texas recently built near Eagle Pass.

“An unidentified foreign national” punched and bit a Border Patrol agent in an altercation on Mount Cristo Rey, on the western edge of El Paso, Border Report reported. Mexican police “have three people in custody.”

Three El Paso and New Mexico-area nonprofits petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus for four Venezuelan citizens who have been held for nearly a year at the Otero Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Chaparral, New Mexico. Venezuela’s government is refusing to allow deportation flights, and the detained people have voiced fear of deportation into Mexico.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Reporting from Sunland Park, New Mexico, an area near El Paso where migrant deaths are surging, Associated Press reporter Morgan Lee found that Democrats representing border districts “are promoting border enforcement as seldom before.”

Former Biden National Security Council official Katie Tobin published an article for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace upholding the 2022 Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which “largely” continues to guide many Western Hemisphere nations’ commitments to improve integration of migrants and coordination of migration policies. The article praises increased cooperation, increased reparations, and the U.S.-backed “Safe Mobility Office” initiative. It laments a lack of economic investment, some countries’ “lack of political will,” and persistent migration through the Darién Gap.

Dr. Belén Ramírez of Doctors Without Borders published an account of the organization’s work at an aid camp in Arizona where volunteers provide humanitarian assistance to asylum seekers waiting in the desert to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Many are now coming from countries in Asia and Africa, which presents new language barriers.

An analysis by photojournalist Adri Salido at the Guardian, reported from Guatemala, pointed to temporary work programs as a solution to reduce the number of people who make the dangerous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border.

On the Right

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September 19, 2024

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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, included a few paragraphs about the border and migration in remarks given yesterday to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Without mentioning specifics or referring to the Biden administration’s current imposition of asylum restrictions, Harris called for immigration reform, protection for “DREAMers,” an “earned pathway to citizenship” and ensuring that “our border is secure.”

Harris attacked Donald Trump for presiding over family separations and for his campaign’s plan to carry out mass deportations if elected. “Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How is that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?”

A Scripps News/Ipsos poll found that 39 percent of U.S. respondents, and 47 percent of Arizona respondents, ranked “immigration” second, after “inflation,” as one of the most important issues facing the United States.

  • Three in five said they “are closely following news around the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
  • 54 percent of respondents said they favored mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, though 68 percent favored a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers: undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
  • By a margin of 44 to 34 percent, respondents voiced a view that Donald Trump would “do a better job handling immigration.”

The Republican-majority House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee held a hearing yesterday entitled “A Country Without Borders: How Biden-Harris’ Open-Borders Policies Have Undermined Our Safety and Security.” Witnesses at the highly contentious proceedings included a former Border Patrol sector chief; a Republican member of San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors; the mother of a woman allegedly raped and murdered by a man from El Salvador; and the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, which includes Nogales.

By a vote of 266-158, the House of Representatives passed the “Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act,” a Republican-led bill that makes deportable any non-citizen convicted of “a crime of domestic violence or a sex offense.” Advocates like the Tahirih Justice Center worried that the bill could jeopardize immigrant victims of those crimes: “Abusers who better understand the U.S. language and laws can prevent victims from accessing safety by threatening to expose immigrant victims to the police, ICE, and the deportation machine.”

The House’s Republican majority failed to muster enough votes to pass a budget measure to keep the U.S. government open after fiscal year 2024 ends on September 30. The bill had language attached to it requiring states to demand that all who register to vote provide proof of citizenship. Next steps for avoiding a government shutdown are currently unclear.

Republican and Democratic legislators in both houses of Congress introduced the “Enhancing Southbound Inspections to Combat Cartels Act,” legislation that would increase inspections of outbound traffic from the United States to Mexico, seeking to combat flows principally of firearms and bulk cash.

Citing official figures, a UNHCR update reported that 272,168 people entered Honduras irregularly, most with the intention of migrating to the United States, during January-July 2024. Because “not all persons on the move who enter Honduras irregularly register” with Honduran authorities, UNHCR estimated that 340,000 people transited the country during those 7 months.

Panama reported a much smaller number (221,582) of people transiting the Darién Gap region during January-July 2024. Much of the difference is citizens of Nicaragua who pass through Honduras, plus citizens of other countries who avoid the Darién passage by flying to Nicaragua, taking advantage of the country’s less-restrictive visa policies.

October will mark two years since the Biden administration established a humanitarian parole program for citizens from Venezuela, and January will mark two years since that program expanded to include citizens of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. As the parole status expires after two years, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told Univisión that its beneficiaries need to adjust their immigration status before their deadlines.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Recently published analyses of the Trump-Vance campaign’s unfounded and racist attacks on Haitian migrants living and working legally in Springfield, Ohio included an in-depth investigation of the attacks’ origin at the Wall Street Journal; an Atlantic essay by Adam Serwer; a Washington Post column by Edwidge Danticat; an Isaac Chotiner interview at the New Yorker with white-supremacism expert Kathleen Belew; and a post to the American Council’s Immigration Impact site by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

A report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Texas warned that federal and state immigration checkpoints combine with a state-level abortion ban to make it impossible for undocumented migrants to leave Texas to obtain reproductive health services. CBP and Border Patrol maintain 19 federal checkpoints in the state of Texas, making road travel difficult for those without documentation.

NPR investigated the deployment of National Guard troops from Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) controversial “Operation Lone Star.” The three non-border, Republican-governed states have spent a combined $7.1 million to send troops to the border.

The El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights and the Texas Civil Rights Project held a news conference to report on numerous recent examples of Texas National Guard soldiers, working in support of Operation Lone Star, physically and verbally abusing migrants at the borderline. (WOLA published a September 13 commentary documenting similar credible allegations.)

Interviewed by Newsweek, the Cato Institute’s David Bier disputed the Trump campaign’s wildly inflated claim that 20 million migrants have been allowed into the United States during the Biden presidency.

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September 18, 2024

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Developments

In an article about Texas’s state government laying razor wire down along the state border with New Mexico, Border Report revealed Border Patrol’s latest count of migrant deaths in its El Paso Sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico: 171 remains recovered in fiscal 2024 (since October). That is up sharply from 149 in 2023, 71 in 2022, and 39 in 2021.

A letter from over 75 organizations, organized by the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute, calls for improvements to the CBP One app‘s feature allowing asylum seekers to make appointments at border ports of entry. These include increasing the number of appointments, and improving protections for applicants who must spend many months in Mexico awaiting appointments. Some miss those appointments because they’ve been kidnapped by criminal organizations.

A response to a Newsweek Freedom of Information Act request revealed that 211 CBP personnel are under investigation for serious misconduct. Accusations include “17 alleged cases of domestic violence, 11 cases of sexual assault, and 10 cases of smuggling migrants across the border,” along with 11 cases of physically abusing a detainee, and 13 cases of association with criminal gangs.

Charities that help migrants in Nogales, Arizona, were approached by an organization called “My Bright Horizon” that left brochures and offers to help migrants with transportation and lodging. At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque revealed that the group is actually “the latest phase of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s [R] controversial flight program to transport migrants into Democratic-led states.”

The U.S. Senate passed the “Southern Border Transparency Act,” which requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to report in more detail about paroles and releases of migrants. (DHS reporting on migrant custody and transfers has in fact improved since this bill was introduced in late 2023.) It is not clear whether this bill will move in the House of Representatives.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Of 1.8 million asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants who entered the United States in 2023—both at the border and elsewhere—12 percent settled in U.S. states considered “swing” or “battleground” states for the 2024 election, according to a Bloomberg analysis. Of these, 72 percent listed addresses in those states in counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

At Mother Jones, Isabel Dias noted Republican candidate Donald Trump’s use of the term “remigration” instead of “deportation” in a recent post to his social network. “The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship.”

Republican candidates’ racist comments about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio drew a response from Haitian-American author and professor Roxane Gay at the New Yorker. “Every five years or so, there is a renewed effort to lodge ridiculous, deeply racist and xenophobic accusations against Haitian people… Trump and Vance, with their comments, have brought a renewed and naked contempt for Haitians into contemporary American discourse.”

A report from the Niskanen Center looked at the causes of increased migration of citizens of India to the United States. They include religious persecution, political instability in some regions, and economic dislocations. Recently more Indian migrants have been apprehended at the border with Canada than at the border with Mexico. Routes often begin in El Salvador (which now charges a large fee for visas) and Nicaragua, but increasingly begin in Bolivia, which requires overland travel through the Darién Gap.

“I wish this entire year at the border was just a movie. I wish it was an improbable fiction that leaders from both major political parties are competing to see who can be the cruelest,” wrote Adriana Jasso, who spent a year working with asylum seekers at the border wall with American Friends Service Committee, at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Texas Tribune published a brief overview of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan organized-crime group that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated this week as a “terrorist organization.”

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September 17, 2024

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Developments

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration and enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border through August.

  • Last month, Border Patrol apprehended 58,038 people at the border. That is up slightly from July (56,399), but still the second-fewest since September 2020. It was the first time since February that Border Patrol’s apprehensions increased over the previous month. This may be a sign that the drop in migration at the border has “bottomed out” following a beginning-of-year crackdown in Mexico and a sweeping June Biden administration asylum-access restriction.
  • As it strictly enforced the Biden administration’s June 2024 asylum restriction rule, Border Patrol released fewer people with “notices to appear” (9,936) than in any month since February 2021.
  • Border Patrol’s fiscal year 2024 migrant apprehensions are on track to be 21 percent fewer than last year’s.
  • An additional 49,465 people were able to enter custody at ports of entry (official border crossings). About 44,700 of that total were people who had made appointments using the CBP One app. CBP continues to allow about 1,450 CBP One appointments per day; the monthly port-of-entry total has changed little since June 2023.
  • Combining Border Patrol and ports of entry, the nationalities most frequently encountered in August were citizens of Mexico (37,601), Venezuela (15,214), Cuba (10,423), Guatemala (7,099), and Honduras (6,943). Nearly all encounters with Cubans and Venezuelans took place at ports of entry.
  • Of the nine sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, San Diego, California (14,436) measured the most migrant apprehensions. El Paso, Texas-New Mexico (13,282) was in second place; it was last in the “top two” in April 2023. Tucson, Arizona (11,922) was third.
  • Combining Border Patrol and ports of entry, 34 percent (36,016) of August’s migrant encounters were with members of family units, and 7 percent (7,130) were unaccompanied children. 32 percent of families and 35 percent of unaccompanied children were Mexican.
  • CBP has seized 18,981 pounds of fentanyl at the border during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2024. For the first time since fentanyl first appeared in the mid-2010s, border seizures of the drug are almost certain to be fewer than they were in the year before (26,719 pounds in 2023). Fiscal 2024’s fentanyl seizures are on pace to be 23 percent fewer than in 2023.
  • As in previous years, 88 percent of fentanyl has been seized at ports of entry, and another 5 percent at Border Patrol’s interior vehicle checkpoints.

Asylum seekers interviewed by EFE in Ciudad Juárez said that while they disliked the several-months-long waits for CBP One appointments, the app offered a process for entering the United States and turning themselves in to U.S. authorities that is “more orderly” and “a little safer.”

11,023 Nicaraguans requested refuge in Costa Rica during the first 7 months of 2024, Nicaragua Investiga reported. While that is 9,280 fewer than the same period last year, it is not far behind the 17,868 Nicaraguan citizens whom U.S. authorities encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border during those 7 months.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, an organized crime group, a “terrorist organization,” calling them “an extreme version of the heinous MS-13 gang.” Border Patrol union representative Chris Cabrera, present at the announcement, said, “As a federal agent, we have no way of vetting these people other than the honor system. If they tell us their name, we can’t check against Venezuela’s database.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

The debunked, racist tropes that the Trump-Vance campaign issued in recent days are nothing new for Haitian migrants, wrote Nadra Nittle at the 19th: “Due to the unique ways race, religion and resistance have intersected in Haiti’s history, immigrants from the Caribbean nation have experienced a specific brand of xenophobia in the United States.”

“From what I’ve read and seen from Vice President Harris, I think she tries to take a balanced approach,” Adriel Orozco of the American Immigration Council told Mother Jones. “She tries to take a humanistic lens to migration, considering her background as a child of migrants, but she’s also a prosecutor.”

Australian journalist Prue LeWarne reported about encounters with migrants—and migration agents—after journeying on Mexico’s “La Bestia” cargo train.

On the Right

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September 16, 2024

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Developments

Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance stood by his repeatedly debunked, racist claims that Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio are consuming people’s pets. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated the false claims about Haitians. In a post to his “Truth Social” network, Trump promised to terminate use of the CBP One app for port-of-entry appointments, suspend the refugee resettlement program, and return migrants—apparently including people currently documented with humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, pending asylum claims, and other statuses—“to their home countries.”

The Washington Post covered “the merry-go-round”: Mexico’s ongoing effort, launched at the beginning of the year, to reduce migration to the U.S. border by massively busing about 10,000 non-Mexican migrants per month to the country’s south. “It’s unclear whether the results are sustainable. The number of migrants camped out in Mexican cities is rising.” In Villahermosa, Tabasco, where many southbound buses’ routes end, the city’s only migrant shelter is at double last year’s capacity.

In Mexico’s northern-border city of Ciudad Juárez, from where many migrants are bused back south, the municipal government has closed one large migrant shelter and is converting a few community centers into new migrant shelters.

The independent Venezuelan daily Tal Cual found that a “wave” of people leaving Venezuela has yet to materialize following stolen July 28 elections. Still, “it is clear that there is an increase in migratory movements compared to previous months.” Venezuela’s El Pitazo reported that about 1,500 people per week are crossing from the Venezuelan border state of Zulia into Colombia’s department of La Guajira, a portion of whom intend to migrate overland to the United States.

Analyses and Feature Stories

A report from the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which plays a role in overseeing treatment of children in CBP custody, found that of children surveyed in 2023 and 2024, nearly 4 in 10 reported verbal abuse from Border Patrol agents, including racist and derogatory language. One in ten reported physical abuse like being pushed, kicked, or handcuffed. Children frequently reported being denied medical care.

An Arizona Republic investigation found that nearly a quarter of human smuggling suspects arrested at Arizona’s border don’t get prosecuted “because Border Patrol agents failed to convey adequate probable cause before making a traffic stop or because migrants are unable to serve as material witnesses in a case.” It added, “countless others” have avoided prosecution due to COVID-19, lack of criminal history, or prosecutors’ “Tucson Sector guidelines” for prioritizing cases.

“I have worked in the humanitarian field for almost 20 years and I have never seen what I saw regarding women crossing the Darién Gap,” the director of Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan, told Spain’s El País while on a visit to towns in northwestern Colombia from which migrants embark on the dangerous journey into Panama. “Sexual violence is so prevalent that they carry the morning-after pill when they begin the journey.” HRW published the third of three reports on the Darién Gap last week.

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September 13, 2024

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Developments

Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Office of Professional Responsibility shared a report on Border Patrol agents’ participation in the delayed response to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, not far from the Del Rio-Eagle Pass border. As the New York Times described the report’s findings, “border agents had been just as confused and delayed as dozens of other state and local law enforcement agents inside the school by the chaotic and mostly leaderless response.”

The Haitian Times and Reuters reported about fear and threats spreading through Haitian immigrant communities around the United States after presidential candidate Donald Trump amplified false claims that migrants from Haiti were consuming people’s pets in an Ohio city. USA Today recalled that “pet-eating” is an old racist trope; the Intercept found a pattern of especially virulent discrimination against Haitian migrants in the United States.

U.S. law enforcement officials interviewed by Border Report confirmed a Mexican police claim that traffickers have been using drones to move drugs from the border state of Chihuahua, including between more densely populated areas along the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.

The House Homeland Security Committee’s Republican majority has scheduled a hearing for September 18 entitled, “A Country Without Borders: How Biden-Harris’ Open-Borders Policies Have Undermined Our Safety and Security.”

Analyses and Feature Stories

A new WOLA commentary amplified calls for a federal inquiry into Texas’s frequent use of soldiers (National Guard personnel) to confront unarmed asylum seekers, often violently. Because it involves military personnel on U.S. soil, appears to violate use-of-force standards and best practices for controlling disturbances, and is physically pushing protection-seeking migrants into Mexico, WOLA found this to be one of the most troubling aspects of Texas’s state “Operation Lone Star” border security crackdown.

Newsweek looked at the numbers and spoke to experts who questioned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) claim that Operation Lone Star has driven down the number of undocumented migrants there. The decline is border-wide.

In an interview with New York Times podcast host Ezra Klein, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the Biden administration’s border security and migration record, including its recent moves to restrict access to asylum at the border.

On the Right

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September 12, 2024

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Developments

Mexico’s migration agency posted video of the first bus transporting migrants across the country to their CBP One appointments at U.S. ports of entry. It departed Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, destined for the U.S. border-zone city of Reynosa. Security-force personnel are to accompany the buses, which pass through areas dominated by organized crime.

In Ciudad Juárez, the municipal government’s “Kiki Romero” migrant shelter is closing. The border city’s population of migrants needing shelter has shrunk due to a Mexican government crackdown making transit of the country more difficult; a June Biden administration rule placing asylum out of reach for people who cross the border without a CBP One appointment; and the possibility of awaiting appointments using the backlogged app in other, usually safer, parts of Mexico.

The U.S. State Department announced “visa restrictions on senior officials of a European charter flight company for facilitating irregular migration to the United States through Nicaragua.” Nicaragua’s dictatorship does not require many countries’ visitors to obtain visas before arrival, and many have used this aerial route to the Central American mainland as a way to request asylum at the U.S. border without having to pass through the Darién Gap.

Mexican soldiers and national guardsmen raided a stash house near the Suchiate River, along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, freeing 52 men, 58 women and 28 minors, mainly from Honduras, Ecuador and Venezuela. No captors were arrested.

Between October 2019 and July 2024, 9,885 Brazilian citizens—many of them encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border—were deported aboard more than 100 chartered flights to an airport in the state of Minas Gerais, sociologist Gustavo Dias wrote at Venezuela’s Tal Cual.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised that his government would “help take care of the situation of” Venezuelan migrants entering Brazil following the Caracas government’s false claim to have won July 28 presidential elections, EFE reported.

Analyses and Feature Stories

The Wall Street Journal reported on the U.S. presence of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan organized-crime group that has begun to receive the level of attention that El Salvador’s MS-13 gang did during the Trump administration. Some of the group’s members appear to be sprinkled in among the approximately 700,000 Venezuelan citizens encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border since fiscal 2021. A “high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] official” told the Journal that “there are now more than 100 investigations in the U.S. involving suspected members of Tren de Aragua.”

In April, Insight Crime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit had reported: “the few crimes attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in the United States appear to have no connection with the larger group or its leadership in Venezuela. And none of more than a dozen national, state, and local law enforcement agencies contacted by InSight Crime has reported any significant presence of Tren de Aragua.”

In the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, the Republican mayor and a Republican city council member put out a statement downplaying claims, amplified by Trump and other national Republican political leaders, that the city is suffering a wave of Tren de Aragua-related crime.

Several border and migration-related analyses followed the September 10 presidential candidates’ debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The New York Times reported that Republican candidate Donald Trump’s recurrence to anti-migrant “vitriol” has become even more frequent than it was in earlier campaigns. Reporters Hamed Aleaziz, Jazmine Ulloa, Michael D. Shear assert that Trump’s move into more extreme territory is, at least in part, a reaction to the Democratic Party’s own rightward shift on the immigration issue since 2021.

Ian Millhiser published an explainer at Vox about the “racist, cat-eating conspiracy theory” that Trump amplified.

Newsweek reviewed Trump’s false or misleading claims about pet-eating, crime committed by migrants, migrants taking jobs from U.S. citizens, Harris’s border-policy responsibilities within the Biden administration, and Harris’s alleged support for gender transition surgeries in migrant detention centers.

At Mother Jones, Isabela Dias lamented that Trump’s positions framed the debate’s vision of immigration: “The only political points made on immigration on stage were about enforcement.”

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September 11, 2024

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Developments

Migration was a principal topic at the September 10 presidential campaign debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.

Without offering much specifics, Harris portrayed herself as a former border-state prosecutor whose “tough on border security” credentials included past efforts against cross-border organized crime.

Harris reiterated support for a bill, which failed in the U.S. Senate in February even though Democratic and Republican senators had negotiated a compromise, that “would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border” and “would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl.” That bill also included restrictions on access to asylum similar to those that the Biden administration imposed in June; Harris did not mention asylum though it was part of the debate moderator’s question.

Donald Trump’s frequent, vitriolic, and often false comments about the border and migrants (whom he said “have destroyed the fabric of our country”) provided the debate with some of its most colorful and remarked-upon moments. The Los Angeles Times’ Andrea Castillo cited several occasions when the former president steered his remarks back to his antipathy toward migration, even when another topic was at hand. (Harris derailed Trump, though, during the migration discussion, leading him to use up much allotted response time responding to a comment about his public rallies.)

Trump leaned all the way into false claims, amplified earlier on right-wing social media, that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the dogs…eating the cats” of the town’s residents. Trump also raised allegations that migrants are contributing to rising violent crime in the United States. Debate moderators fact-checked both claims: nobody is eating pets in Springfield, and U.S. crime rates are actually falling.

NPR’s Jasmine Garsd found that racist anti-immigrant movements have a long history of accusing migrants of consuming house pets.

At the Intercept, Natasha Lennard lamented that Harris’s remarks didn’t include even standard liberal rhetoric about immigrants’ many positive contributions to the United States.

The Washington Post published an overview of what Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have said on the record about deporting undocumented people, pathways to U.S. citizenship, separating migrant families, and policy toward refugees and asylum seekers.

Texas state Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R), who has been on a legal offensive against charities that assist migrants released from CBP custody along the border, filed a new petition seeking to overrule an earlier judge’s refusal to order a sworn deposition of Sister Norma Pimentel, the director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque compared Attorney-General Paxton’s harassment of NGOs to those of authoritarian leaders elsewhere in the world who have sought to close down independent organizations, like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Guatemalan prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Human Rights Watch published a third report since November on the Darién Gap, this one focused on how migration policies in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru have complicated regularization and integration of Haitian and Venezuelan migrants, driving many to depart for the United States via the treacherous jungle route.

A study published in the journal Injury Epidemiology found that adults migrating toward the United States “are extorted on average $804 per research participant throughout the journey.” The most common extortion perpetrators that 85 respondents cited were police officers (80.6%), immigration officials (37.3%), organized crime (25.4%), and military personnel (20.9%). Extortion happened most often in Mexico (77.6%) and Guatemala (67.2%), two countries that seek to block, detain, and deport migrants as a matter of policy.

The Mexican government’s implementation of measures to facilitate migrants’ journey to the U.S. border for CBP One appointments “has been slow and chaotic,” reported the independent Cuban news outlet El Toque. “many migrants remain stranded in [Mexico’s southern border-zone city of] Tapachula without access to transportation or the necessary permits.”

On the Right

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September 10, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

On the Right

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September 9, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

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

On the Right

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September 6, 2024

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

Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

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

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 5, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

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

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

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

On the Right

Tags: News Links

September 4, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

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

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

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Tags: News Links

September 3, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

On the Right

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September 2, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

On the Right

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August 30, 2024

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Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyses and Feature Stories

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

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

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

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

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

On the Right

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