Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Darién Gap, 2025 budget, Texas litigation, State of the Union
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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73,167 people made the treacherous northbound journey through the Darién Gap region straddling Colombia and Panama during the first two months of 2024. That is 47 percent ahead of the same period in 2023, a year that ended with over 520,000 people migrating through. Panama’s government suspended Doctors Without Borders’ permission to provide health services at posts where the Darién trail ends; the announcement’s timing is curious because the organization had been denouncing rapidly increasing cases of sexual violence committed against the people whom their personnel were treating.
The White House sent Congress a $62 billion budget request to fund the Department of Homeland Security in 2025. The base budget for Customs and Border Protection would decrease slightly, though the agency would share in a $4.7 billion contingency fund for responding to surges in migration. The administration proposes to hire 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP officers, 1,600 USCIS asylum officers, and 375 new immigration judge teams. The budget request stands almost no chance of passing this year, as Congress has not even passed the Department’s 2024 budget.
For at least a few more days, the Supreme Court has kept on hold Texas’s controversial S.B. 4 law, which allows state authorities to jail and deport migrants, while lower-court appeals continue. A federal judge threw out Texas’s and other Republican states’ challenge to the Biden administration program offering humanitarian parole to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A state judge blocked Texas’s legal offensive against El Paso’s Annunciation House shelter.
The Republican response to President Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address included a graphic, harrowing story of a woman being subjected to years of sexual violence at the border. Further scrutiny revealed that Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Alabama) account described crimes committed in Mexico during the Bush administration. President Biden voiced regret for using the term “an illegal” to refer to a migrant who allegedly killed a Georgia nursing student in February, in an off-the-cuff response to Republican hecklers during his address.
During the first two months of 2024, 73,167 people made the journey through the treacherous Darién Gap region, much more than the 49,291 who did so during January-February 2023, according to data reported by the government of Panama.
That puts this year 47 percent ahead of the pace set in early 2023, which ended with a once-unthinkable total of 520,085 people transiting the Darién jungles.
Of January and February’s migrant population, 64 percent were citizens of Venezuela, similar to 2023 (63 percent). The next four most frequent nationalities were Ecuador, Haiti, Colombia, and China—also similar to 2023.
In a March 9 video Samira Gozaine, the director of Panama’s Migration Service, said that more than 82,000 people had migrated through the Darién Gap so far this year, implying a continued pace of more than 1,000 people per day during the first days of March.
Of 2,600 migrants put on buses to Costa Rica on March 8, Gozaine said that about 2,100 were citizens of Venezuela, followed in number by citizens of Ecuador, China, Colombia, and Haiti.
There is no new word on Panama’s controversial decision during the week of March 4 to ban Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has been providing urgent health services at reception posts where the Darién trail ends. The ostensible reason for the suspension was the lack of “a collaboration agreement in force” with Panama’s Ministry of Health. MSF stated that it “has been trying in vain to obtain such a renewal since October 2023.”
The suspension came just a few days after MSF put out the latest in a series of statements denouncing a sharp increase in their medical personnel’s encounters with victims of sexual violence along the Darién route: 233 cases in 2024’s first two months after 676 cases in 2023, of which a majority occurred during the final 3 months of last year.
“When an organization leaves there is always a concern for the [remaining] organizations to be able to meet those needs,” said Panama-based UNICEF official Margarita Sánchez, about Doctors Without Borders’ (MSF) forced departure. “So, in this case, we hope that, surely, the Panamanian state can respond to that need.”
“Blocking the operations of MSF sends a chilling message to the international aid community to censor their communications,” International Crisis Group investigator Bram Ebus told the New Humanitarian. There is no word yet on whether Panama might reconsider.
The Biden administration sent its 2025 budget request to Congress on March 11. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) submission calls for $62.2 billion, a 2 percent increase over 2023, the last year for which Congress has passed a budget.
The White House request repeated many items that appeared in a supplemental funding request that failed to pass the Senate in early February. These include the hiring of 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP officers, 1,600 USCIS asylum officers, and 375 new immigration judge teams, along with “$849 million for cutting-edge [fentanyl and other contraband] detection technology at ports of entry.”
As in the 2024 budget request—which Congress still has not passed, with the next deadline coming up on March 22—the administration is seeking a flexible $4.7 billion “emergency fund” to deal with migration surges, to be distributed among DHS’s components (CBP, ICE, FEMA, and others) as needed. Republican legislators refused to support this proposal last year, calling it a “slush fund.”
The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) request foresees a reduction in the agency’s overall budget, from an enacted level of $20,968,070 in 2023 to a requested level of $19,764,120 in 2025. (This amount does not include whatever money CBP would receive from the above-mentioned contingency fund.)
The CBP request reported some notable performance metrics:
The 2025 DHS budget request is very unlikely to pass this year, and has zero probability of passing before Election Day (November 5). Congress has not yet approved the Department’s 2024 budget, even as the fiscal year nears its halfway mark. If the Republican-majority House of Representatives manages to pass a 2025 bill or even get it through the Appropriations Committee in the coming months, that bill will barely resemble the Biden administration’s proposal.
The Supreme Court extended until March 18 its stay on implementation of S.B. 4, Texas’s controversial new law that would empower state authorities to imprison or deport into Mexico people who cross the border irregularly, wherever in Texas those authorities encounter them.
The law was to go into effect on March 5. A federal district judge hearing a challenge from the Biden administration and rights advocates blocked it on February 29. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing the Texas state government’s appeal of that decision, and “un-blocked” it while it deliberates. So far at least, though, the Supreme Court is keeping the law on hold, though it could decide otherwise on March 18 and allow Texas to start implementing it.
Though the past few months have seen a shift toward Arizona and California, migration is rising in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico. CBP is averaging 1,113 migrant “encounters” per day, up from less than 700 in January, according to the El Paso municipal government’s migration dashboard. Migrant shelter occupancy across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juárez has increased by 30 percent since last week as more people arrive in the region, EFE reported.
The Spanish news agency indicated that the El Paso increase may be due to word-of-mouth spreading among migrants about federal courts delaying Texas’s implementation of S.B. 4.
On March 8 a federal district court judge in Texas threw out a lawsuit from Texas and 20 other Republican-led state governments that sought to block President Biden’s use of a 1950s humanitarian parole authority to give temporary documented status in the United States to citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with passports and U.S.-based sponsors. (The “CHNV” program has allowed 365,000 citizens of those countries—up to 30,000 per month permitted—to fly to the United States since late 2022.)
Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump nominee, ruled that Texas lacks legal standing to stop Biden’s use of the policy. The state government, Tipton reasoned, failed to demonstrate that it “suffered an injury,” particularly since the parole program is linked to a drop in arrivals of those countries’ citizens at the border. Texas and other Republican states announced on March 11 that they will appeal the ruling.
In a separate decision on a suit brought by Texas and other Republican-led state governments, Tipton temporarily blocked the Biden administration from stopping Trump-era border wall construction and redirecting money to environmental remediation. The administration can still appeal.
In El Paso, a Texas state judge blocked the state government’s legal attacks on Annunciation House, a decades-old shelter that receives migrants released from CBP custody. In early February Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton (R) demanded that the shelter turn over a large amount of records on very short notice or risk revocation of its operating license (see WOLA’s March 1 Border Update). In a hearing last week, State District Court Judge Francisco Dominguez’s written opinion called out “the Attorney General’s efforts to run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play,” alleging politicized motives.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s hard-right challenges to the Biden administration’s border and migration policies continue on many fronts. A March 12 Washington Post analysis summarized five: the “Operation Lone Star” buildup; S.B. 4; shutting Border Patrol out of a riverfront park in Eagle Pass; placing concertina wire along the river; and busing migrants to Democratic-governed cities.
In the televised Republican response to President Joe Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) told a harrowing story about migration and the border. Further coverage revealed that Britt left out key context and manipulated the narrative.
Speaking from her kitchen, the senator told of meeting a woman in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, who spoke of being a victim of human trafficking and suffering thousands of rapes from the age of 12.
Sen. Britt used the story as an example of the failure of Joe Biden’s border policies, but closer scrutiny—led by a TikTok video from former AP reporter Jonathan Katz— revealed that the crimes happened more than 15 years ago, during the Bush administration. The victim’s ordeal happened in Mexico, not the United States.
The victim, activist Karla Jacinto Romero, has spoken publicly about what was done to her, including in U.S. congressional testimony. “I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo—and that to me is not fair,” she told CNN on March 10.
Meanwhile, President Biden voiced regret about using the word “illegal” to refer to a migrant who allegedly killed a Georgia nursing student in February, in an off-the-cuff response to Republican heckling during the State of the Union address. The remark, Jose Antonio Vargas wrote at CNN, “does underscore the political reality that, in the Trump era, the country has veered right on immigration, and the language that shapes the anti-immigrant policies being pushed at almost all governmental levels reflects it.”