Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Texas Tragedy and Dispute, Senate Nears Asylum Limits, Migration Drops
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.
In the most recent escalation of its hardline border policies, the state government of Texas barred Border Patrol agents from a riverfront park in the border city of Eagle Pass. Two days later, a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande. Texas National Guardsmen prohibited Border Patrol from entering the park even in emergencies. The Biden administration sent Texas a cease-and-desist letter, and the state-federal jurisdictional clash will likely go to federal court.
Following a meeting between President Biden and congressional leadership, top senators said a deal could emerge next week that might allow the President’s request for Ukraine aid and other priorities to move forward. The price would be meeting some Republican demands for restrictions on asylum and perhaps other migration pathways, which a small group of senators continues to negotiate. Even if senators reach a deal, it could fail in the Republican-majority House, where demands for migration curbs are more extreme.
After setting records in December, migration encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped by more than half since the holidays. Biden administration officials claim that Mexico’s government has contributed to the drop with more aggressive migration control efforts. Numbers are also down significantly in the treacherous Darién Gap region between Colombia and Panama.
In Eagle Pass, mid-Texas, where migrant drowning deaths in the Rio Grande are frequent, Texas’s Republican-led state government moved on January 10 to exclude Border Patrol agents from the town’s 50-acre riverfront park. The federal agency had been using Shelby Park to process asylum seekers who crossed the river in large numbers in December.
Two days later—on January 12, the day before advocates were to hold a ceremony in the park to commemorate migrant deaths—a woman and two children from Mexico drowned in the Rio Grande near the park.
Texas’s highly unusual ban had left Border Patrol agents unable to access the area to detect or rescue the drowning victims. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated that Border Patrol agents were aware that the migrants were in distress in the river, but were prevented from acting because Texas national guardsmen “physically barred” them from entering the area.
Texas denied that initial account, claiming that the drownings had already occurred when Texas national guardsmen turned Border Patrol agents away at the park’s gate. A January 14 Department of Justice (DOJ) filing before the Supreme Court explained that the drownings had already happened when Border Patrol was blocked, but that it is “impossible to say what might have happened if Border Patrol had had its former access to the area.”
“Maybe they [Border Patrol] could have prevented this because they would have seen what was happening” using their “scope trucks,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who was among the first to denounce the drownings.
DHS sent a January 14 letter to Texas’s attorney-general giving the state until January 17 to reinstate Border Patrol’s access to the park, promising to refer the matter to DOJ. (Justice is already litigating Texas’s placement of buoys in the river in Eagle Pass; Texas’s ban on Border Patrol agents cutting concertina wire along the river; and Texas’s controversial anti-migrant law known as S.B.4.) In his January 17 reply, Texas state Attorney-General Ken Paxton refused to budge.
“The specter of our Border Patrol agents in a standoff with armed members of the Texas National Guard should scare the bejesus out of us. I think it’s not an exaggeration that this is as direct a confrontation between a state and the federal government as we’ve seen since desegregation,” Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert at the University of Texas School of Law, told the Washington Post.
In an unusual move, the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on January 17 to reconsider its December ruling ordering Texas to remove the 1,000-foot string of buoys that state authorities placed down the middle of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Texas had asked the court for an “en banc” hearing of all 17 of its active judges, a request that gets granted only about 1 percent of the time. That hearing will happen in May; in the meantime, the buoys may remain in the river. Most of the Circuit’s 17 active judges are Republican appointees, though the 3-judge panel that ordered the buoys removed included 2 Democratic appointees.
Texas officials granted NewsNation correspondent Jorge Ventura access to Shelby Park on January 16, where he posted a video of Texas guardsmen using riot shields to block a migrant from entering the park to turn himself in. Late on January 17, Texas authorities carried out their first arrests of migrants, on state trespassing charges, in the park since they began barring Border Patrol agents.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who leads the state’s hard-line border and migration policies, generated an outcry last week after comments circulated from a Jan. 5 interview with right-wing radio host Dana Loesch: “The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Texas Democrats held a press call at which some, like Rep. Joaquín Castro of San Antonio, demanded that President Biden federalize Texas’s National Guard. “I want to be very clear: what is happening in Texas right now is incredibly dangerous,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso.
“I’m glad for what Gov. Abbott is doing,” the president of the Border Patrol agents’ union, Brandon Judd, told Fox Business about the move to exclude agents from the park. Judd called DHS’s protests “propaganda.” The union tweeted, “By taking control of an area where so many illegal aliens are simply surrendering, he’s freeing up BP agents to patrol areas with high numbers of illegal aliens who attempt to escape arrest.”
In fact, the state crackdown does not appear to be deterring asylum seekers from crossing the river in the Eagle Pass area. “Smugglers are pushing large groups of migrants to cross the Rio Grande through residential areas and places west of Eagle Pass—which are outside the river area taken over by Texas,” a law enforcement source told CNN. As discussed below, Border Patrol’s daily migrant apprehensions in its Del Rio Sector, which includes Eagle Pass, have begun to increase again after plummeting, along with encounters along the rest of the U.S.-Mexico border, after Christmas.
A small group of senators continues to negotiate limits on asylum and other legal migration pathways, as a way to win Republican support necessary to approve a $110.5 billion emergency budget request, including aid to Ukraine and Israel and resources for border operations.
Following a January 17 meeting at the White House with President Biden, Senate leaders from both parties predicted that negotiators would finish their work soon, and might present legislative language by next week. House Republicans made no such promises.
Negotiators appear to have agreed to require that an increasing number of asylum seekers placed in “expedited removal” proceedings meet a higher standard of threat in their “credible fear” screening interviews. They also appear to have agreed on a Title 42-like authority to expel asylum seekers, regardless of protection needs, when migrant encounters exceed a daily threshold.
CBS News reported that the Senate negotiations’ scope has expanded to include “conversations about Afghan evacuees, the children of high-skilled visa-holders, and work permits for asylum-seekers,” items that could sweeten the deal for some Democratic legislators.
On the other hand, Democrats continue to resist Republican demands that the deal restrict the 70-year-old presidential authority to grant temporary humanitarian parole to some migrants. Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-South Dakota) said that parole is the chief Republican demand that remains unresolved. “If we don’t fix parole, there will be no deal,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), an occasional participant in negotiations. In particular, Republican senators want to stop the administration from paroling asylum seekers released at the border following “CBP One” appointments at ports of entry.
Analysts and advocates, including WOLA, remain alarmed by harms that could result from a Senate compromise that weakens asylum and parole. Such measures “are likely to drive more unauthorized migration to the border and make President Biden’s immigration challenges even worse,” wrote Andrea Flores of fwd.us, a former Biden White House official, at the New York Times.
A report by Joseph Zeballos-Roig at Semafor and a Forbes column from Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy cast doubt on whether Mexico would even agree to some of the cross-border expulsions, deportations, or “Remain in Mexico” referrals that would result from a deal.
Even if Senate negotiators do reach an agreement, it could fail in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority is likely to insist on even harsher measures that Democrats are very unlikely to support. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) highlighted demands for more border wall and a relaunched “Remain in Mexico” policy. Johnson did not appear to soften his position after meeting with President Biden on the 17th.
On Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told Speaker Johnson that ex-president Donald Trump told her he opposes the likely Senate deal and wants Johnson to oppose it too. As most House Republicans are tightly loyal to Trump, this is a severe blow to the funding package’s prospects.
The House’s demands are too extreme to pass in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to move legislation forward. Senate Republican leaders are urging Johnson and their House counterparts to go along with whatever deal they negotiate, warning that the chamber’s Democrats will not be so willing to make compromises on migration and asylum in a future scenario in which Republicans command the presidency or the Senate majority. “You either get the votes and get half a loaf, or you get nothing at all,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed a brief resolution on January 17 “denouncing the Biden administration’s open-borders policies.” Fourteen Democrats voted for it, including two representing south Texas border districts.
A delegation of Mexican government officials, led by the secretaries of foreign relations, defense, and navy, are coming to Washington on January 19 to discuss migration with the U.S. secretaries of state and homeland security. The visit comes after a December that set new records for the most migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border in a single month.
Since Christmas, though, migration has plummeted. CNN reported that encounters are hovering above 3,000 per day after exceeding 10,000 per day in December. DHS officials told CNN that the causes for the decline have much to do with Mexico’s policies:
In Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which is currently the busiest of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, Chief John Modlin reported 9,200 migrant apprehensions in the week ending January 11, down from 18,400-19,400 during each of the first three weeks of December.
In Jacumba Springs, California, Mexican authorities claim that daily arrivals have dropped to about 380 per day, from up to 1,200 last month.
The mayor of Eagle Pass, Texas pointed out that migrant arrivals there have dropped to about 400 per day, from a peak of 4,000 per day in December. However, CNN reported on January 15, “migrant apprehensions in the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector [which includes Eagle Pass] have increased since last week. …About 1,000 migrant apprehensions took place Sunday in the Del Rio Sector, compared to between 500 and 600 earlier in the week.”
The first days of January have seen a sharp drop in migration through the Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama. The Panamanian government’s migration director said the drop could be caused by a bridge collapse near Necoclí, Colombia and by increasing use of aerial routes to Nicaragua, which avoid the Darién entirely.
The drop continues a reduction in migration that Panama reported for December 2023: 24,626 people, the fewest since December 2022. Migration through this treacherous jungle region has tended to decline during the final months of each year.
Nonetheless, Panama reported an unprecedented 520,085 people migrating through the Darién Gap during all of 2023. Of that total, 328,650 of the migrants—63 percent—were citizens of Venezuela. More than 1 percent of Venezuela’s population walked through the Darién Gap’s dozens of dangerous miles in 2023 alone.
Panama has acquired eight helicopters, among other measures to step up its patrolling of the region. The Panamanian government calls its effort “Operation Chocó II,” and it is to last for at least six months.