Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Senate bill, December numbers, migration route updates, Texas, impeachment
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.
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Senators negotiating a deal that would restrict access to asylum at the border, as a Republican pre-condition for Ukraine aid and other spending, continue to insist that they are on the verge of making public the text of their agreement. Prospects for passage are growing ever dimmer, though. Donald Trump, House Republicans, and the rightmost wing of Republican senators are lining up against the deal because they don’t believe it goes far enough.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration through December, showing a record 302,034 migrant encounters border-wide in December. The top nationalities were Mexico, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. Encounters with members of family units rose to their second-highest level ever.
Among a variety of updates: A horrific number of sexual assaults recorded in the Darién Gap. Venezuela is halting U.S. deportation flights. ICE ran its first deportation flight to Mexico’s interior since May 2022. A “caravan” has almost completely dwindled in southern Mexico.
In addition to nearly throttling the Senate border deal, U.S. ultraconservatives have generated an avalanche of media coverage and political discussion around Texas’s challenge to federal authority at the border, and House Republicans’ effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said that as early as Friday, and “no later than Sunday,” the chamber’s leadership will post the full text of a spending bill including aid to Ukraine and Israel, border spending, and other priorities—plus a new section changing U.S. law to make asylum, and perhaps other legal migration pathways, more difficult to attain at the U.S.-Mexico border.
This section is the product of more than two months of talks between a small group of senators. Even on Thursday, Schumer said, “Conversations are ongoing, and some issues still need resolution, but we are getting very close.”
Over the January 27-28 weekend, President Joe Biden vigorously endorsed the Senate deal. Of the Title 42-style expulsion authority included within it (see below), Biden said “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.”
But prospects for the new border restrictions’ passage—and for that of the Ukraine-Israel appropriation—have dimmed sharply, as ultraconservative, mostly Donald Trump-supporting Republican legislators have lined up to oppose it.
The far-right contingent argues that the provisions in the deal, as reported by the media, do not go far enough. As noted more generally in WOLA’s January 26 Border Update, these include the following, which may be subject to change:
The agreement does not appear to include Republican demands for limits on the presidential authority to grant humanitarian parole to migrants at the border, though this is unclear. The agreement would not touch the CBP One program allowing 1,450 asylum seekers per day to make appointments at ports of entry.
These provisions outrage progressive legislators and immigrants’ rights defense organizations, who argue instead that investing in asylum processing, adjudication, and community integration would do more to guarantee an orderly border at a time of heavy hemisphere-wide migration. (See WOLA’s January 31 explainer, “ Five Questions and Answers About the Senate Border Deal.”)
The opposition posing the most immediate existential threat to the border deal, though, comes from the Republican right, which wants far stricter curbs on asylum-seeking and other licit migration.
Donald Trump called the proposed deal a “horrible open borders betrayal of America” and said he’d be happy to take the blame if it fails. Democrats and some pundits speculated that Trump and his supporters prefer to deprive the Biden administration of a legislative “win” on border policy as the 2024 election campaign heats up—even though the whole idea originated with a Republican demand for border language in the Ukraine funding bill.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who called the Senate deal “dead on arrival” in his chamber, criticized elements believed to be in the Senate agreement, while issuing a broader attack on the Biden administration’s border and migration policies, in his first floor speech as speaker on January 31. That day, the rightmost contingent of the Senate’s Republicans attacked the deal at what The Hill called “a contentious lunch meeting in the Capitol.” Reporter Alexander Bolton concluded, “the prospect of mustering 25 Senate GOP votes for the bill is dimming, raising the possibility that Republicans will abandon the effort altogether.”
Speaker Johnson tweeted on January 30 that President Biden could limit migration through executive action, using existing legal authorities like detaining all asylum seekers (for which no budget exists), or issuing highly controversial blanket bans on classes of people, like Donald Trump’s 2017 “Muslim Ban” executive order (which do not supersede the right to seek asylum at the border).
Even if the border deal’s language makes it into legislation, and that legislation then gets strong support among Senate Republicans—which is ever less likely—it is difficult to discern a path forward in the Republican-majority House of Representatives. The deal is “not dead yet, but the writing’s on the wall,” a Republican senator told Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio.
“Perhaps it’s chaos, not immigration per se, that upsets voters, and Mr. Biden can curb the chaos by letting more immigrants come to the United States legally,” wrote the Cato Institute’s David Bier at the New York Times. In the increasingly likely event that Congress fails to reach a border deal, Bier suggested that Biden expand use of humanitarian parole authority.
On January 26, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border through December, showing a record 302,034 migrant encounters border-wide in December. The top nationalities were Mexico (23%), Venezuela (19%), Guatemala (12%), Honduras (7%) and Colombia (6%).
52,249 encounters took place at ports of entry, and 249,785 people ended up in Border Patrol custody after crossing between ports of entry.
The Border Patrol total is probably a monthly record. It is at least the largest amount measured since October 1999, the earliest month for which Border Patrol makes monthly data available. Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions jumped 31 percent from November (191,112). Increased migration from Venezuela, which more than doubled, accounted for 41 percent of the border-wide month-to-month increase.
December also saw big increases in migration between ports of entry from the other three nationalities (in addition to Venezuela) whose citizens the Biden administration allows to apply for its humanitarian parole program: Cuba (+192 percent from November to December), Haiti (+1,266 percent), and Nicaragua (+91 percent). This may mean that the humanitarian parole program is saturated by demand and insufficient supply.
It was the first month since May 2022 that more than 1,000 Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry and ended up in Border Patrol custody.
At the ports of entry (official border crossings), encounters have been within a narrow band since July 2023, between 50,837 and December’s 52,249. Of December’s encounters, CBP’s release indicates, 45,770 (88 percent, 1,476 per day) had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app.
46 percent of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between ports of entry in December were members of family units (41 percent) or minors who arrived unaccompanied (5 percent). That is the 24th-highest child-and-family share of Border Patrol’s last 147 months, and probably ever: high, but nowhere near a record.
The overall number of children and families (114,192), however, was the second-most ever, nearly matching the record set in September 2023.
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw the second-highest-ever monthly total of family unit-member encounters: 123,512, just short of September 2023’s record total of 123,815.
Family-unit encounters rose 19 percent from November to December. Citizens of Venezuela arriving as families accounted for 38 percent of the month-to-month increase, and citizens of Mexico accounted for 28 percent.
When the pandemic-area Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect, Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults skyrocketed. The reasons were that (a) a large portion of adult migrants were seeking to evade apprehension, not turn themselves in to seek asylum; and (b) when Title 42 caused them to be expelled to Mexico after a very brief time in Border Patrol custody, many attempted to migrate again, leading to many more repeat apprehensions.
That was borne out in the months after Title 42 ended, when single adult apprehensions dropped sharply. However, even without a quick expulsions policy in place, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of single adult migrants between the ports of entry jumped 41 percent from November to December, from 96,478 to 135,593. This was the 8th largest monthly total of single adult migrant apprehensions of the past 147 months.
For more charts, see WOLA’s collection of border and migration infographics.
During January, however, migrant arrivals have dropped to about half of December’s totals, as discussed in WOLA’s January 19 and January 26 Border Updates.
Still, as WOLA noted on the 26th, the month’s mostly seasonal reductions have bottomed out or reversed in some sectors. The Twitter account of Border Patrol San Diego, California Sector Chief Patricia Mcgurk-Daniel reported 7,889 migrant apprehensions there during the seven days ending January 30, more than double the sector’s 3,598 apprehensions during the week ending January 2.
As mentioned above, messaging from Donald Trump, Speaker Johnson, and other figures on the Republican Party’s rightmost wing—echoed by social media and some cable networks—has nearly killed what they viewed to be an insufficiently right-leaning border deal in the Senate. In addition to that, ultraconservative voices have also generated gigabytes of political discussion this week on two other border-related fronts: the dispute over border access between Texas’s state government and the federal government, and House Republicans’ impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
On January 30, while the Homeland Security Committee was debating articles of impeachment for Mayorkas (discussed below), Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the House’s foremost border hardliners and a defender of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) state-led crackdown on migration, held a hearing about state versus federal jurisdiction in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, which he chairs.
Rep. Roy and other Republicans showed support for Abbott after the Supreme Court’s January 22 ruling allowing the federal Border Patrol, when necessary, to cut through razor-sharp concertina wire that Texas authorities have placed along the border. (See WOLA’s January 26 Border Update.) Texas’s state government had gone to federal court to prohibit this, and appeals are pending in the federal judiciary’s 5th Circuit. (The Supreme Court ruling allows Border Patrol to cut wire while the appeal proceeds.)
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said that his state is putting up wire “everywhere we can… If they cut it, we will replace it.” The Hill reported, “Patrick threatened a ‘confrontation’ with state authorities if the Biden administration sent Border Patrol to remove barriers.”
Twenty-six Republican state attorneys general, including those from “purple” states like New Hampshire and Virginia, signed a statement backing Texas’s border security efforts and confrontation with federal authorities, citing the state’s “duty to defend against invasion.” That term—seen as controversial a few years ago, but now in wide use among Republicans—conflates people seeking safety and employment with an invading army.
The state-federal dispute is “increasingly tense,” as a Washington Post timeline put it. It may grow more so over the February 3-4 weekend as a somewhat confused convoy of right-wing protesters heads to Eagle Pass, the epicenter of Texas’s border efforts and the site of a riverfront park where Texas authorities are now prohibiting most access to Border Patrol agents.
U.S. media have published a series of analyses from legal scholars and experts about the “extremely dangerous” constitutional implications of Texas’s challenge to federal authority to enforce immigration policy at the border. University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck explained to CNN that Abbott is not defying the Supreme Court’s decision, but “is interfering with federal authority to a degree we haven’t seen from state officials since the desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Meanwhile USA Today, Washington Post, and Slate reporters visited Eagle Pass and opted to talk to local residents, reproducing their concerned, exasperated, and in some cases supportive views of the situation in their town of 30,000.
Following a nearly 15-hour hearing on January 30, the Republican majority on the House Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15, on strict party lines, to advance the Mayorkas impeachment. “Republicans have not yet offered clear evidence that Mayorkas committed any high crimes and misdemeanors,” the standard that impeachment requires, a Washington Post analysis noted.
Republicans are angry at Mayorkas for declining to employ the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to continue Donald Trump’s border and migration policies. It is not clear, though, whether they have enough votes in their slim House majority to gain the 50-plus percent of votes necessary to send the impeachment to the Democratic-majority Senate, where Mayorkas’s acquittal is certain.
If they do manage to send it to the Senate, it would be the second-ever impeachment of a U.S. cabinet secretary, and the first since 1876.
“I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me,” Mayorkas wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tennessee).
Columns from people associated with past Republican administrations, like Bush-era DHS secretary Michael Chertoff and Trump-defending Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have urged House Republicans not to pursue the impeachment. Analyses from the New York Times’s Karoun Demerjian and The Atlantic’s David Graham also poked holes in the House Republicans’ case.
Taken together, though, the Senate deal opposition, the defense of Texas, and the impeachment push have dominated much political discussion and coverage, as the 2024 campaign gets underway at a time of very high migration at the border.
This ability to drive the narrative is reflected in a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll, released January 31, showing Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump by a combined 48-to-42 percent margin in 7 swing states. Of respondents, 13 percent identified “immigration” as the “single most important issue when deciding how to vote” for president—a distant second place to “the economy” (36 percent). But by a margin of 52-to-30 percent, respondents said that they trusted Donald Trump more to handle immigration.