Daily Border Links: May 29, 2024
Adam Isacson
Daily Border Links are following a sporadic publication schedule between May 3 and July 19. Regular daily updates will return on July 22.
Developments
Texas National Guard personnel fired at least one pepper irritant projectile on migrants at the Rio Grande in El Paso on Tuesday. The migrants, who included families with children, were separated from the soldiers by a mass of fencing and concertina wire and posed no apparent threat of death or injury, calling into question Texas’s use-of-force guidelines. Texas’s Department of Public Safety has not commented on the incident, caught on video from the Ciudad Juárez side.
“An unidentified Venezuelan man said two pepper balls struck him in the neck and side after he crossed the Rio Grande to plead with the soldiers to let families come across the razor wire,” Border Report reported. A Venezuelan mother and father told a videographer that they had “placed a piece of cardboard between two shrubs on the Mexican side of the river to protect their 1-year-old daughter from stray shots.” A photographer said that a guardsman shot at him twice while he filmed from the Mexican side.
- Julian Resendiz, “Asylum-Seeking Families Take Cover After Texas National Guard Fires Pepper Balls”(Border Report, May 28, 2024).
- Nick Mordowanec, “Migrants Run for Cover as Texas National Guard Shoots at Them” (Newsweek, May 29, 2024).
“The reality is that some people do indeed try to game the [asylum] system,” the Biden administration’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, told CBS News. “That does not speak to everyone whom we encounter, but there is an element of it, and we deal with it accordingly.”
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, “Mayorkas Says Some Migrants “Try to Game” the U.S. Asylum System” (CBS News, May 28, 2024).
- Adam Shaw, “Mayorkas Says Some Migrants ‘Try to Game’ Asylum System, as Border Crisis Remains Top Political Issue” (Fox News, May 28, 2024).
“The White House and a White House official told me that no final decisions have been made about an executive action that is potentially being considered” to shut down migrants’ access to asylum at the border at times of heavy migration, reported PBS NewsHour’s Laura Barron-Lopez. “But sources told me that this specific executive action could come as early as next week after the Mexican elections on June 2.”
- Ian Couzens, Laura Barron-Lopez, Shrai Popat, “Biden Considers Temporarily Closing Southern Border to Curb Flow of Migrant Crossings” (Newshour, PBS, May 28, 2024).
Analyses and Feature Stories
Upon this week’s 100th anniversary of the founding of Border Patrol, the agency’s chief, Jason Owens, looked back on his career and told CBP’s Frontline magazine website that people considering a career in the force should fully commit to it as a “calling.” Owens described tools using AI technology as a “force multiplier” for agents in the field. “It would be so much better if the migrants went to the port of entry,” Owens added. (CBP has capped port of entry capacity to receive asylum seekers at 1,450 people per day border-wide.)
- Kathleen Franklin, “A Frontline Interview With Chief Jason Owens on the U.S. Border Patrol’s 100th Anniversary” (Frontline, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, May 28, 2024).
The Southern Border Communities Coalition commemorated the anniversary with a press conference in San Diego with loved ones of people killed, wounded, or racially profiled by agency personnel, none of whom has been penalized.
- “Border Communities to President Biden: ‘Fight for Our Dignity’ & End 100 Years of Border Patrol Violence” (Southern Border Communities Coalition, May 28, 2024).
- Sarah Lapidus, “Families Demand Justice for Loved Ones Killed by the Border Patrol as Agency Turns 100”(The Arizona Republic, May 29, 2024).
“Revelations of some agents’ racist vitriol toward migrants, along with allegations of sexual misconduct against women employees, have rocked public trust in recent years,” noted a Christian Science Monitor analysis of Border Patrol’s centennial.
- Caitlin Babcock, Sarah Matusek, “How the Border Patrol Has Evolved Over 100 Years From Horses to AI”(The Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 2024).
The International Displacement Monitoring Center “recorded over 6.3 million total IDPs [internally displaced persons] in the Americas at the end of 2023, marking a 6% decrease from the end of 2022 but remaining on par with 2021’s figure of 6.2 million,” notes a summary of IDMP’s mid-May annual report at Jordi Amaral’s Americas Migration Brief. Conflict and violence displaced over 600,000 people in 2023.
- “The Silent Struggle of Internal Displacement” (Americas Migration Brief, May 29, 2024).