Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Heavy migration, no Congress deal, Texas law
by
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
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.
This will be the last Weekly Border Update until January 19. Best wishes for a happy holiday.
More than 10,000 migrants per day, mostly asylum seekers, have been arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol sectors seeing the most arrivals are Del Rio and El Paso, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; and San Diego, California. Some of the rush is likely the product of false rumors and misinformation. Notably, it is happening even though U.S.-bound migration through Panama and Honduras has been dropping sharply since October.
The U.S. Congress has adjourned for 2023 with no agreement on Republicans’ demands for new restrictions on asylum and other migration pathways—their main condition for supporting a $110.5 billion package of aid to Ukraine and Israel, new border spending, and other priorities. A small group of senators and senior Biden administration officials has been meeting regularly, but has produced neither legislative language nor a basic framework. They will resume consideration of the spending bill after Congress returns on January 8, amid a growing outcry from progressive legislators and migrants’ rights defense groups.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law S.B.4, which makes irregular border crossings into Texas a state crime. Upon arrest, migrants will be jailed if they do not agree to be returned to Mexico—but Mexico is refusing to accept returnees from the Texas state government. The ACLU, El Paso County, and El Paso-based rights groups quickly filed suit in federal court to block the law.
December 2023 has so far seen some of the heaviest arrivals ever of migrants, mostly asylum seekers, at the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol processed about 10,500 migrants on December 19, and 10,800 on December 18. Of the December 18 total, about 40 percent were reportedly families or unaccompanied children. As of Tuesday evening, CBP had 27,159 migrants in custody nationwide. With most days topping 10,000 in recent weeks, the U.S. border and migration system is at a “breaking point,” CNN’s Priscilla Álvarez reported.
In order to free up officers to assist Border Patrol with processing migrants, CBP’s port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona remains closed, as does one of two border bridges into Eagle Pass, Texas, and the PedWest pedestrian crossing at San Ysidro, between Tijuana and San Diego. On December 18, CBP closed railroad bridges in Eagle Pass and El Paso, which account for about 36 percent of train cargo between the United States and Mexico. Trains allegedly are crossing with migrants aboard, though railroad companies dispute that. In Chihuahua, Mexico, “We thought that the arrival of migrants had dropped significantly, but since last week it increased to about a thousand people on each freight train trip,” said state official Óscar Ibáñez Hernández, who cited criminal groups misinforming migrants about the need to travel now.
Ibáñez Hernández was alluding to false rumors circulating in Mexico that the U.S. government is about to close the border and shut down use of the CBP One app to make appointments at ports of entry. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico has circulated messages on social media seeking to debunk the CBP One rumor.
Another reason for the increase is a yearlong acceleration of arrivals of Mexican families, many of them fleeing parts of the country, like Pacific coastal states, hit hard by organized crime-related violence. The state government of Michoacán, Mexico estimated that 2,500 residents of the state, displaced by violence, are currently residing in shelters in Mexican border cities.
Acting CBP chief Troy Miller told CNN that unscrupulous travel agencies in some countries, like Senegal, are also to blame, as they have been offering travel packages to the U.S.-Mexico border.
In its analysis of CBP’s October migration data (the agency has not yet published November data), WOLA’s November 17 Border Update noted “a general westward shift” in migration, away from Texas and toward Arizona and California. While Arizona and California continue to receive heavy flows of people, there is no longer any westward shift, as Border Patrol sectors in Texas are seeing significant increases.
About 4,400 of Tuesday’s 10,500 migrants crossed in Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector in mid-Texas. There, in Eagle Pass, “I visited a (holding) facility with a maximum capacity of 1,000. There were nearly 6,000. I’ve never seen it this high,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R), who represents this area and much of the Texas-Mexico border, told Fox News. On Sunday, nearly half of migrants arriving in Eagle Pass were Venezuelan citizens.
This is especially notable because Eagle Pass has been an epicenter of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) “Operation Lone Star” border security buildup. Miles of barbed wire, fencing, police, national guardsmen, trespassing arrests, and a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande have not deterred asylum seekers from coming to the small Texas border city of 30,000.
Further west in Texas, in the El Paso Sector, thousands of migrants have been arriving atop trains in Ciudad Juárez, across the river, despite cold temperatures (see the above quote from the official from Chihuahua state, which includes Ciudad Juárez).
Near Lukeville, Arizona, smugglers have sawed through one segment of Trump-era border wall 41 times to let migrants pass through and turn themselves in to Border Patrol, the Washington Post reported. Lukeville is within Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which has been migrants’ number-one border destination since July. There, apprehensions during the week ending December 14 totaled a very high 18,400, down slightly from the week ending December 7 (18,900). Border Patrol processing facilities in the sector are at 130 percent capacity.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has ordered a deployment of National Guard personnel near the border. The New Yorker reported about the impact that the temporary closure of the Lukeville border crossing is having on tourism a short drive south, in Arizonans’ popular beachside vacation spot of Puerto Peñasco, Sonora. Arizona’s senators, Mark Kelly (D) and Kyrsten Sinema (I), wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials calling for new Shelter and Services Program funding for humanitarian services.
Further west in Jacumba Springs, California, in the San Diego Sector over an hour’s drive east of San Diego, hundreds of asylum seekers per day continue to arrive, seeking to turn themselves in. Border Patrol is having them wait for extended periods in an “open air detention site,” even as nighttime temperatures drop into the 40s (F). Several San Diego-area groups submitted a detailed complaint about this practice to the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador spoke on December 21 about migration, CNN’s Álvarez tweeted. Meanwhile, an increasing amount of punditry predicts that public perceptions of the border situation are providing the Trump campaign with momentum going into the 2024 election, even as the ex-president repeats “poison the blood” rhetoric paraphrasing Mein Kampf.
In Democratic-leaning El Paso, Politico found that the city’s Mexican-American population is getting fatigued with migrant arrivals. “Trump, he started rough. But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up,” a Juárez-born chef told reporter David Siders.
In an unusual turn of events, migration is increasing at the U.S.-Mexico border even as it decreases along the U.S.-bound migration route further south. Panama, Honduras, and Mexico have been reporting fewer people coming, after record-breaking levels in late summer and early fall.
Panama released statistics this week documenting a 24 percent decline in migration through the Darién Gap from October to November, and a 50 percent decline in migration from September to November. This would point to fewer people departing the South American continent by land.
Migration from Venezuela declined 35 percent from October to November—a possible short-term reaction to the United States’ resumption of deportation flights, plus end-of-year seasonal patterns—while migration from China increased 39 percent.
Still, Darién Gap migration in 2023 stood at a previously unimaginable 495,459 people as of November 30, and now exceeds half a million. The journey continues to be miserable and dangerous. During the first 10 months of 2023, Doctors Without Borders reported treating 397 migrants in the Darién Gap who survived sexual violence: “last month alone, there were 107 cases.”
Reporting mainly from the Darién Gap, the New York Times’s Julie Turkewitz found that “as migrants stream their struggles and successes to millions back home, some are becoming small-time celebrities and influencers in their own right” on social media. Following a visit to the Darién Gap’s gateway in northwestern Colombia, Dan Restrepo of the Center for American Progress recommended greater emphasis on “host community solutions” and “development finance tools” to integrate migrants in Latin American countries.
North of Panama, numbers have also been dropping. Registries of in-transit migration through Honduras shrank 41 percent from October to November. This means fewer people have been coming from South America and through an increasingly used aerial entry point in Nicaragua.
Mexico’s migrant apprehensions fell 4 percent from September to October; like the United States, Mexico has not reported November migration data yet.
Though CBP has not yet published November migration numbers, Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CNN that the agency apprehended about 192,000 migrants in November, a 2 percent increase over 188,000 in October.
It is unclear why trendlines are diverging between the U.S.-Mexico border and points further south. The population crossing into the United States now could be more Mexican and Central American—nationalities not captured in Panama’s or Honduras’s statistics—than in past months. Or it could be that Venezuelans and other non-Mexican, non-Central American migrants who have been waiting in Mexico for more than 1-2 months, in many cases for CBP One appointments, are giving up and deciding to cross now between the ports of entry.
The U.S. Senate, following the House last week, adjourned for 2023 without approving the Biden administration’s request for $110.5 billion in assistance for Ukraine and Israel, border items, and other priorities. Republican legislators are demanding restrictions on asylum and other migrant protections as the price for their support. Negotiations between a small group of senators have not yet produced either legislative language or a consensus framework.
Negotiations continue, and Congress will take up the funding request when its 2024 session begins after January 8.
The small group, joined by top Biden administration officials like White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, met through the December 16-17 weekend, claiming progress but no agreement. “Talks between the White House and key senators have not veered widely from three main areas of discussion,” the Associated Press reported. Those are “toughening asylum protocols for migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border; bolstering border enforcement with more personnel and high-tech systems; and deterring migrants from making the journey in the first place.”
According to partial, secondary news reports, Senate negotiators and administration officials had been discussing the following Republican demands for their support of the budget package:
White House officials met on December 16 with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), which has voiced strong opposition to weakening asylum. CHC members say they have been left in the dark about ongoing negotiations.
The non-governmental community of migrants’ rights defenders continues to urge Democratic senators to refuse concessions that might weaken the decades-old right to seek asylum when on U.S. soil. A letter from four leading members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warned against new asylum restrictions, warning that they “will lead to many more deaths of immigrants on the border.” Marisa Limón Garza, executive director of the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, called on senators not to treat migrants as bargaining chips. Lorella Praeli of Community Change urged President Biden not to “ cave to the MAGA immigration agenda.” Added America’s Voice, “ It’s like having taken one step forward and a thousand back.” RAICES paid for a seven-story billboard message in New York’s Times Square, showing four times per hour, displaying the Statue of Liberty behind barbed wire and buoys and the legend “we all yearn to be free.”
Border Patrol agents speaking anonymously to the conservative Washington Examiner said they doubted that the proposed changes would reduce migration at the border. Agents instead demanded more removals and deportations, which would either require Mexico’s acceptance of hundreds of thousands of removed migrants, or a multiplication of costly deportation flights at a time when both pilots and aircraft are in short supply nationwide.
The New York Times found that Democrats’ willingness to entertain some Republican demands on asylum and migrant protections reflects a “seismic shift” to the right in U.S. immigration politics. Many Democrats worry that it will hurt enthusiasm and turnout of Latino and progressive voters. Part of the United States’ rightward shift, Keegan Hamilton wrote at the Los Angeles Times, is greater participation in, and tolerance of, armed militia groups at the border.
On December 18, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law S.B.4, which makes unauthorized border crossings into Texas a state crime. Civil rights groups pledge to challenge what they’re calling a racial profiling or “show me your papers” law.
As of March, Texas judges will be able to jail migrants who decline to return immediately to Mexico. “When asked what Texas would do if Mexico does not accept migrants deported by the state,” the Texas Tribune reported, Abbott simply replied, “We’re going to send them right back to Mexico.”
The governments of Mexico and Guatemala voiced condemnation of the new law. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus called on the U.S. Department of Justice to challenge S.B.4. While possible federal action is unclear, the ACLU filed federal litigation on December 19 seeking to block the law, on behalf of El Paso County, Texas and the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and American Gateways.