Fwd: Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: July 26, 2024
Molly Molloy
From: Adam Isacson <aisa...@wola.org>
Date: Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 12:40 PM
Subject: Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: July 26, 2024
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: July 26, 2024
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- With Asylum Out of Reach, Daily Border Patrol Apprehensions Near 1,500 Threshold
A double crackdown—Mexico’s stepped-up blocking of migrants and the Biden administration’s June 5 asylum-restriction rule—has brought a sharp short-term downturn in the number of migrants seeking to cross the border between ports of entry. Border Patrol apprehensions dipped below 1,500 on July 22, nearing the threshold under which the June 5 rule could be suspended.
- Death in the Darién Gap
Ten migrants drowned to death in a rain-swollen river while attempting to cross the treacherous Darién Gap in Panama. The country’s new president, who had pledged to stop Darién migration through stepped-up deportations, said that U.S.-backed repatriation flights would be voluntary.
- Kamala Harris’s Border and Migration Record Under Scrutiny
Shortly after Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential campaign, opponents took aim at the border and migration record of his virtually certain successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, widely referring to her as the Biden administration’s “border czar.” No such position existed, and Harris’s role encompassed only “root causes” of migration from Central America. Nonetheless, a resolution that passed the Republican-majority House of Representatives on July 25 “strongly condemns” Harris’s performance in the putative “border czar” role.
- Texas Updates
For the second time, a state judge ruled against a Texas state government attempt to prosecute a border-area migrant shelter. State government jailings of migrants under “Operation Lone Star” are costing counties like El Paso millions of dollars. The National Guard Bureau’s chief says that “Lone Star” deployments are hurting the force’s military readiness. And despite the “Lone Star” crackdown, Border Patrol apprehensions have dropped only slightly more in Texas than they have in Democratic Party-governed Arizona.
THE FULL UPDATE:
With Asylum Out of Reach, Daily Border Patrol Apprehensions Near 1,500 Threshold
Border Patrol apprehended an average of 1,650 migrants per day along the border during the week of July 15, CBS Newsreported. By July 22, that number had fallen to fewer than 1,500, according to U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazarand New York Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz, citing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources.
Salazar said this was the fewest in a day since 2018, which is inaccurate: the last month during which apprehensions averaged less than 1,500 per day was July 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. If all of July were to average the larger 1,650-per-day figure, it would be the month with the fewest Border Patrol apprehensions since September 2020, late in the Trump administration.
The Biden administration’s June 5, 2024 asylum restriction rule states that, should the weekly average of migrant apprehensions drop below 1,500 per day for 3 weeks, and should the average remain below 2,500, then U.S. border authorities will no longer automatically deny asylum access to people who cross between ports of entry to ask for protection. (The administration’s May 2023 rule, denying asylum to most who fail to seek it in another country through which they passed, would remain in effect.)
An American Immigration Council blog post recalled that the Biden rule is not the only reason why migration has dropped to its current relatively low level. As WOLA also noted in an April analysis, since January Mexico has pursued a crackdown with the goal of “wearing out” migrants.
The scope of Mexico’s crackdown, which involves mass busing of non-Mexican migrants away from the U.S. border deep into Mexico, was laid out in a July fact sheet by the Mexico-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) and a July report from two El Paso and Ciudad Juárez-based groups, the Hope Border Institute and Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción (DHIA).
While January through May saw Border Patrol apprehensions drop to about half of what they were in the record-setting month of December 2023, the new asylum restrictions caused a further drop in June—to 83,536 from 117,901 in May (-29%).
Visiting El Paso in mid-July, WOLA staff learned that Border Patrol was releasing only about 50 people, mainly asylum seekers, from custody each day (this doesn’t count people with CBP One appointments). Across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s migration authority (National Migration Institute, INM) is closing a tent shelter for migrants that it had established in late 2023. As of earlier this month, Border Report reported, Ciudad Juárez’s migrant shelters were more than half full, housing many families awaiting the 200 daily CBP One appointments at a port of entry across the Rio Grande in El Paso.
While the reduced numbers create political space for Democratic candidates as the 2024 election nears, putting asylum out of reach does place some fleeing migrants in danger. Under the Biden administration’s June asylum rule, for instance, Border Patrol agents no longer ask migrants if they fear deportation to their countries. Under what is called the “shout test,” asylum seekers must voluntarily speak up and hope that their apprehending agents listen to them. The practice of asking migrants whether they feared return dated back to 1997, the Associated Press reported. Some recently deported migrants told the AP’s Elliot Spagat that agents ignored their requests for protection.
A July 25 report from nine U.S. organizations presented more than 30 examples of due process and human rights violations suffered by asylum seekers at the border since the Biden administration’s June 5 rule restricting asylum went into effect. Abuses include arbitrary deportations without an opportunity to seek protection in the United States; obstacles to accessing legal representation; inhumane detention conditions; and family separations.
Death in the Darién Gap
Panamanian border police found the bodies of ten migrants, their nationalities not yet identified, who drowned in the Darién Gap while trying to cross a river swollen by seasonal rains. They had apparently sought to take a shorter route through the treacherous jungle region, involving more boat travel and less walking, for which smugglers charge a higher fee.
The border force (SENAFRONT) urged migrants who cross the Darién to use “the authorized passage for irregular migration leading to Cañas Blancas, where specialized patrols are available for their protection and humanitarian assistance.” Panama’s new government has sought to block some other routes with barbed wire.
Panama’s recently inaugurated president, José Raúl Mulino, meanwhile said that his government would only deport migrants from the Darién Gap if they agree to be repatriated voluntarily. This softens Mulino’s campaign pledge to halt Darién migration by flying migrants back to their home countries after they cross the 60-70 mile jungle trail. The Biden administration pledged to help Panama fund these flights.
Panama’s border service counted 11,363 migrants crossing the Darién Gap during the first half of July, one of the lowest daily averages since late 2022. The country’s migration service has not yet reported June data.
Kamala Harris’s Border and Migration Record Under Scrutiny
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s role in border and migration policy continues to receive scrutiny. Many media outlets have clarified that, as vice president, Harris had no direct border responsibilities, and that oft-repeated Republican claims that she was the White House’s “border czar” are false.
“In reality, the only role close to that of a ‘border czar’ under the Biden administration was held for only a few months by Roberta Jacobson, a longtime diplomat who served as coordinator for the Southwest border until April 2021,” recalledCamilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News. Harris’s critics note that she only visited the U.S.-Mexico border once during her term, and that she had not spoken to two of the Border Patrol chiefs who served since 2021. This would appear to confirm that she played little role in border policy.
Harris was tasked, however, with a diplomatic effort to address the root causes of migration in northern Central America. This included a campaign to encourage private companies to invest in the region, more than $600 million per year in assistance, and diplomatic messaging at key moments.
While it is hard to link this long-term effort to short-term migration impacts, Central American migrants are among very few nationalities whose numbers have declined since 2021 at the U.S.-Mexico border. Comparing an average month in fiscal 2024 to an average month in fiscal 2021, migrant encounters with Hondurans have fallen 50 percent, with Salvadorans 39 percent, and with Guatemalans 14 percent.
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All other major nationalities, except Nicaragua and Brazil, have increased during that period. Border encounters with all nationalities’ migrants are up 40 percent.
Still, Harris’s opponents are making heavy use of the “border czar” line of attack. “Joe Biden has now endorsed and fully supports his ‘Borders Czar’ Kamala Harris to be the Democrat candidate for president,” tweeted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), adding, “I think I will need to triple the border wall, razor wire barriers and National Guard on the border.”
On July 25, and with the votes of six Democrats from swing districts, the Republican-majority House of Representatives passed a resolution “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”
The legislation originally claimed that “on March 24, 2021, President Biden asked Vice President Kamala Harris to serve as the administration’s border czar.” After Democrats in the House Rules Committee pointed out that this was factually inaccurate, the language changed to “came to be known colloquially as the Biden administration’s ‘border czar.’”
Texas Updates
Catholic Charities: A Texas state judge ruled that Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a large shelter for migrants released from CBP custody in McAllen, does not have to give a sworn deposition to state prosecutors. Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R) has launched a legal offensive against charities that receive released migrants, accusing them of encouraging illegal migration. In early July, a judge in El Paso struck down a similar effort to prosecute El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter network, which is also associated with the Catholic faith. Paxton is appealing the Annunciation House ruling, and yesterday’s Catholic Charities decision only stops the deposition, not Paxton’s larger investigation. Paxton is now seeking to compel management of a third migrant shelter, Team Brownsville, to sit for a deposition.
Texas’s buses: By busing more than 120,000 migrants to Democratic Party-governed cities, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) reshaped migration patterns and drew national attention to the border and migration issue, a New York Times feature reported. Without the paid buses, it contends, Venezuelan migrants would have been more likely to join existing communities in Florida and Texas instead of coming to New York City. The number of migrants aboard Texas-funded buses is a single-digit percentage of the more than 3 million people, mostly asylum seekers, released into the U.S. interior since 2022. The busing program has cost Texas over $230 million, the Times reported; that would add up to nearly $2,000 per passenger.
Jailing migrants: When Texas’s state government arrests migrants on trespassing charges under its $11 billion “Operation Lone Star” border security crackdown, the state’s counties must pay the cost of those who end up in county-run jails. El Paso County’s commissioners unanimously approved sending a grant application to Gov. Abbott’s office to reimburse $8 million in costs incurred holding people arrested by Texas state forces. By the end of the year, Operation Lone Star incarcerations could end up costing El Paso’s Democratic Party-governed county $18 million.
National Guard: Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the outgoing chief of the U.S. National Guard Bureau, repeated earlier criticisms of the Texas state government’s large-scale deployment of guardsmen to the state’s border with Mexico. Hokanson argued that the long-term border mission is undermining the National Guard’s readiness to carry out more traditional military missions like warfighting.
An “analogy”: Discussing Hamas cross-border raids into Israel before an audience of Texas sheriffs, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) added, “You can use my analogy, not to the same magnitude of course, but you can use my analogy, something that Texas law enforcement deals with” at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The numbers: A look at Border Patrol apprehensions by state shows that “Operation Lone Star” has had little specific effect amid a border-wide drop in migration, and it has not pushed migration into other border states, as Gov. Abbott has claimed.
Since the record-setting month of December, after which Mexico began an aggressive campaign of blocking northbound migrants, Border Patrol apprehensions in Texas fell 82 percent by June—but they fell 70 percent in Democratic Party-governed Arizona and 67 percent border-wide.
Since January, migrant apprehensions in Arizona (-52%) have actually dropped more sharply than in Texas (-40%). From May to June, Texas fell 36 percent and Arizona 33 percent; the whole border fell 29 percent.
Other News
- Border Patrol has now found the remains of 140 migrants in its El Paso sector, a segment of the border stretching from the Arizona-New Mexico border to just east of El Paso, during fiscal year 2024. In all of fiscal 2023, the figure was 149 migrant deaths, a record for the sector that is certain to be broken, as the region’s scorching-hot summer is far from over. The organization No More Deaths announced a new update to its El Paso migrant death map for 2024.
- A “caravan” of migrants—estimates range from several hundred to about 2,000—has walked about 35-40 miles from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. A few have walked a bit further into Chiapas, more than 1,000 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Milenio reported it as “the fourth largest caravan so far this year.” The participants, mostly from Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, say they have been waiting for months to secure appointments with Mexican migration or asylum authorities. Many tell reporters that their goal is to reach a part of Mexico (from Mexico City northward) where they might be able to use the geo-fenced CBP One app to make appointments with U.S. authorities at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Some told the Associated Press that they feel some urgency to get to the U.S. border before a possible second Donald Trump term, when pathways like CBP One would probably shut down. No “migrant caravan” has reached the U.S. border, even partially intact, since early 2019.
- Attorneys for Border Patrol agent Dustin Sato-Smith succeeded in moving a prosecution against him from California state court to federal court, where they argue that he will be immune from prosecution. In February 2023, while performing an abrupt U-turn to respond to a report of undocumented migrants nearby, Sato-Smith collided with an uninvolved U.S. citizen aboard a motorcycle, killing him. (Despite reporting requirements, CBP did not release information about the fatal crash.) His attorneys claim that, because he was performing his federal duties at the time of the crash, the federal court should grant Sato-Smith immunity under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
- The Congressional Budget Office, an independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, published a reportfinding that recent years’ sharp increase in migration will reduce the U.S. budget deficit by $900 billion over the 2024-2034 period.
- Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, visited Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, to discuss fentanyl interdiction with U.S. and Mexican authorities. Only about 2 percent of border-wide fentanyl gets seized in the south Texas region that Kaine visited.
- CNN reported from the Tohono O’Odham Nation reservation, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora. Its people do not recognize the borderline and have long guarded their sovereignty, but border realities like migration, smuggling, and migrant deaths have placed stress both on the Nation’s autonomy and its uneasy relationship with Border Patrol and other U.S. authorities. That relationship grew more tense after agents shot and killed an O’Odham man, Raymond Mattia, outside his house in May 2023.
- At Foreign Policy, Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center and Channing Lee of the Special Competitive Studies Project punched holes into claims that large numbers of spies or saboteurs might be embedded in the increased number of migrants from China arriving at the border. Instead, they argue, the United States should view as a moral victory that so many people from a competing power are choosing the U.S. political and economic model.
- “You can have good faith disagreements about immigration and migration and especially around the border without resorting to dehumanizing the migrants themselves and without trying to say that they are all here to destroy us or that they are some sort of existential threat to the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council in an interview with Documented.
- Visit YouTube to view WOLA’s July 23 panel discussion about the new documentary Borderland: The Line Within, with filmmakers Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís, and Fernando García of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights.