Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Senate negotiations, migration trends

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 WEEK IN BRIEF:

• White House giving ground on asylum in Senate negotiations

With more input from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a small group of senators continues to negotiate a deal that might water down the right to seek asylum at the border, a Republican demand for passage of a $110.5 billion Biden administration request for Ukraine and Israel aid, the border, and other priorities. Migrant rights defenders are alarmed by reports that the administration and Democratic legislators might agree to a provision that would expel asylum seekers, Title 42-style, if daily Border Patrol apprehensions exceed a certain threshold. Congress was set to adjourn on December 14; the House gaveled out, but the Senate remains in session in order to give negotiators more time.

• Migrant arrivals remain high, though perhaps not for long

With nearly 10,000 Border Patrol migrant apprehensions per day, December 1-7 was one of the busiest weeks ever at the U.S.-Mexico border. Arrivals of asylum seekers are heaviest in Border Patrol’s Tucson, Del Rio, and San Diego sectors, where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has partially or fully closed three ports of entry. More recent data point to a modest slowdown in migrant arrivals compared to the first week of the month. So do reports of reduced, though still historically high, levels of northbound migration through Honduras and Panama.

THE FULL UPDATE:

White House giving ground on asylum in Senate negotiations

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on Capitol Hill on the morning of December 12, pleading for assistance included in a budget package currently stuck in Congress. Republican legislators are demanding, as the price for their support, new restrictions on asylum and other migration. “Has border simply been an excuse to kill Ukraine? Democrats are asking themselves that question,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

Later that day, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spent about two hours on Capitol Hill meeting with three senators among a small group trying to negotiate a border-for-Ukraine-aid deal (James Lankford, R-Oklahoma; Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut; and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Arizona.) Sinema cited “substantive progress” and Murphy struck a similar note.

The senators met late into the evening on December 13 and 14 as well, with further input from Mayorkas and the White House. The U.S. Congress is scheduled to adjourn for the year on December 14. The House of Representatives ended its 2023 session as scheduled, and its Republican leadership indicated little willingness to reconvene before the second week of January. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is requiring the upper chamber to remain in session during the week of December 18, in order to give negotiators time to work out a deal.

Some Democrats and the White House are signaling a willingness to give ground on parts of the hardline Republican border agenda. Under particular discussion are limits on the right to seek asylum on U.S. soil, which dates back to the United States’s 1968 ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention and passage of the 1980 Refugee Act.

The restrictions that the Biden administration might accept include:

“First thing’s first is asylum,” Sen. Lankford told Face the Nation on December 10. “Right now, people come in and say, I want to request asylum. There’s so many people, and the cartels know it, and the smugglers know that they can throw thousands of people a day. There’s no way to process that.” On Meet the Press, Sen. Murphy said, “We are willing to talk about tightening some of the rules, so that you don’t have 10,000 people arriving a day. Our resources are not equipped to be able to handle that number of people. So, let’s reduce the number of people who are coming here, but let’s not shut down the border completely to legitimate claims.”

The administration continues to resist restrictions to the 1950s-era authority to issue humanitarian parole, to force asylum seekers to “remain in Mexico,” and other proposals Republicans have floated. It is unclear where the administration stands on codifying a ban on asylum for people who could have sought it in transit through other countries.

Progressive legislators and migrants’ rights defense groups voiced outrage at what the administration appears willing to go along with in order to move the emergency budget request. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus held a well-attended December 13 press conference outside the Capitol. “Alienating the progressive wing of the party is almost a necessary ingredient of finishing a border deal,” Politico observed.

Many human rights organizations (including WOLA) have vocally opposed the asylum concessions. On December 11, similar statements came from Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California), chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, and Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-California), chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; and from the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

As the House and Senate near adjournment of their 2023 sessions, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has said he would reconvene next week if negotiators reached a Ukraine-border deal, but sounded pessimistic about that happening. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said “it is practically impossible” to reach a deal before the holidays.

Migrant arrivals remain high, though perhaps not for long

In a December 13 press conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared a slide showing that U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border increased from 53,016 during the first week of November to 69,462 during the first week of December, or 31 percent. At nearly 10,000 apprehensions per day, December 1-7 was one of the border’s busiest weeks ever. The top Border Patrol sectors during that week were Tucson, Arizona (19,935), Del Rio, Texas (15,702), and San Diego, California (12,062).

Captured from a Mexican Presidency video

Migration may have declined a bit since then, as it often does as the end-of-year holidays draw near. Border Patrol apprehended 8,253 migrants border-wide on December 12, a high figure but down from over 10,200 7 days earlier.

Migration is also reduced, though still high, further south along the U.S.-bound migration route. Citing data from Honduras’s migration agency, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) noted a sharp drop in migration through Honduras from October (a record 102,008 migrants registered) to November (59,787), the fewest in a month since July. Honduras registered 15,533 migrants during the first 10 days of December, so the per-day average has fallen from 3,291 in October, to 1,993 in November, to 1,553 in December.

Migrants from Haiti (35,529 to 5,438) decreased most sharply from October to November, an apparent consequence of U.S. action against charter flights from Haiti to Nicaragua, just south of Honduras. Migration from number-one country Venezuela also fell (34,547 to 26,440). Of 187 migrants whom UNHCR polled last month, 96 percent got their information from WhatsApp and only 38 percent had eaten three meals the day before.

Panama has yet to publicize November data about migration through the Darién Gap. A December 4 Foreign Ministry document, however, cited “more than 480,000” migrants passing through the treacherous region so far this year. That is under 30,000 additional migrants added to the  total as of the end of October (458,228); even if the actual November total was 40,000, it would be the lightest month in the Darién since June. UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on December 7 that Panama had counted its 500,000th migrant passing through the Darién Gap in 2023, more than doubling the record set in 2022.

Though numbers may decrease from current levels at the U.S.-Mexico border, right now Border Patrol is struggling to process arriving asylum seekers in its Tucson, Del Rio, and San Diego sectors. In order to free up officers to help with migrant processing, CBP, Border Patrol’s parent agency, has closed its PedWest pedestrian border crossing at the busy San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego. People are waiting four or five hours in Tijuana to cross at San Ysidro. Tijuana’s municipal migration office estimated that about 5,000 migrants are staying in the city’s 40-plus recognized shelters. About 70 percent are citizens of Mexico fleeing from the country’s interior.

One of two bridges into Eagle Pass, Texas remains closed for the same reason, as is the entire port of entry in tiny Lukeville, Arizona. “Because Lukeville is so remote, Border Patrol staffing is light, so traffickers in the region controlled by Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel steer people there,” the Associated Press noted. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) visited the Lukeville area and called for the border crossing’s reopening, pledging to deploy the state’s National Guard if the situation continues. Hobbs sent President Joe Biden a letter calling for “$512,529,333 in reimbursements for ongoing border operations resulting from the federal government’s failure to secure the Arizona border.” Arizona Senators Mark Kelly (D) and Kyrsten Sinema sent a letter urging President Biden to deploy the National Guard to help reopen Lukeville.

Mexico’s foreign ministry issued a statement calling on CBP to reopen the three temporarily closed facilities. In an effort to slow migrant arrivals in the Tucson Sector, Mexico’s national and state governments are launching a “Migration Containment Plan” in the state of Sonora, with increased military and police filters and road checkpoints at bus stations and on main roads.

Near Jacumba Hot Springs, California, just over an hour’s drive east of San Diego, “a total daily average of 800 people are in three camps,” Agence France-Presse found. “The lucky ones have tents,” ABC News reported. “However, most sleep on the gravel and use their clothes to shield them from the elements and their backpacks as pillows.”

Several organizations filed a detailed complaint on December 11 with the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, finding that in both San Ysidro and Jacumba, “Border Patrol agents are still detaining asylum seekers in dangerous, exposed conditions, and are failing to provide the adequate food, water, sanitation, shelter, and medical care required under the law.”

Other news

• A CBP release reported that a Guatemalan woman died on September 15 after falling from the 30-foot Trump-era border wall near Otay Mesa, southeast of San Diego. In mid-November, the New York Times reported that 350 victims of wall falls had been admitted in 2023 to the U.C. San Diego Health trauma center, up from zero in the 3 years before the wall’s 2019 renovation.
• Deaths of women migrants increased sharply during a record year for migrant deaths in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector (far west Texas and all of New Mexico). Normally, men are the vast majority of recovered remains, but in New Mexico in 2023, of 78 bodies whose gender could be determined, 40 were female, the El Paso Times found.
• The Ciudad Juárez-based La Verdad reported from several parts of Mexico about the severe toll that migrating across Mexico takes on women.
• San Diego U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw approved a court settlement, in litigation brought by the ACLU, that would prohibit any revival of a “family separation” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border for the next eight years.
• “Under the Biden administration (as in past administrations), children are ordered to appear in immigration court against trained government prosecutors, even if they have no lawyer to represent them,” finds a new report from the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.
• CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility released an annual report, covering 2022, about internal investigations and employee accountability. The report found no increase in disciplinary actions taken against agency personnel compared to 2021. The National Use of Force Review Board looked at five serious use-of-force incidents and recommended no discipline.
• Texas’s state Department of Public Safety (DPS) concluded its investigation into mid-2023 whistleblower claims that personnel were ordered to push asylum seekers back to the Rio Grande and deny them water and first aid. DPS reported that it found no wrongdoing.
• A December 8 DHS statement noted that the Department has removed nearly 13,000 citizens of Venezuela from the United States. Some have been returned to Venezuela aboard eight deportation flights, the rest have been deported to Mexico under the Biden administration’s post-Title 42 asylum rule.
• The directors of two UN agencies, UNHCR and IOM, published a column at Time arguing that efforts to deter migrants don’t work and that “the right strategy would tackle every stage of the journey, through a comprehensive and route-based approach of engagement.”
• A Washington Post editorial (citing WOLA) called for more processing of migrants and more assistance to countries along the U.S.-bound migration route that could be giving in-transit migrants greater opportunity to settle there.
• A CBS News poll found 20 percent of U.S. respondents naming “immigration and the Border” to be the “most important problem facing the United States.” Only “inflation” (27 percent) scored higher.
• An NPR analysis of Republican presidential candidates’ positions on border and migration showed unanimity on most issues, but some disagreement over the harshest proposals.
• Mexico’s migration agency (INM) is facing a funding shortfall until at least the end of the year; an agent told the daily Milenio, “INM agents no longer even approach the migrants…in Ciudad Juarez, no Mexican authority is present for the dozens of migrants who wait, along the Rio Bravo, for a break in patrolling by the Texas National Guard to cross a barbed wire fence.” Still, the agency returned 47 unaccompanied Guatemalan minors back to Guatemala over the December 9-10 weekend.
• Voice of America reported that shakedowns and harassment from corrupt Guatemalan police have made migrants’ transit through the country “hellish.” (See a longer mid-November investigation of this in Spain’s El País.)
• The Niskanen Center obtained data about the “Safe Mobility Offices” that the U.S. government has established this year in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Though operating so far at a small scale, these “SMOs” have referred 10,000 migrants to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and about 2,500 refugees have arrived in the United States so far.
• At his Americas Migration Brief newsletter, Jordi Amaral laid out “Five Migration Trends in the Americas to Watch in 2024”: maritime migration, Haiti’s crisis, climate change, integration efforts, and upcoming elections.