Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Mexico blocks migration, U.S. legislation, migrant removals, nationalities
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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Mexican security and migration forces’ stepped-up operations to interdict migrants, especially in the northern border state of Chihuahua, have been suppressing the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, these have come with human rights complaints, and reductions are unlikely to last long as large numbers of people continue to migrate across Mexico’s southern border.
The House of Representatives’ April 20 passage of a Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan aid bill formally ended Republican legislators’ monthslong effort to tie strict border and migration controls to any aid outlay. That effort had foundered after a negotiated deal in the Senate failed in February. House Republican leaders allowed consideration of a separate hardline border bill on April 20; it failed but attracted five votes from centrist Democrats.
Panama reported removing 864 migrants, much of them with U.S. assistance, since April 2023. Guatemala has expelled over 7,900 migrants from other countries into Honduras and El Salvador so far this year. And Mexico has deported over 7,500 Guatemalans back to their country since January.
An upgrade to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report includes a list of the top 100 nationalities of migrants whom Border Patrol has apprehended since 2014. The data reveal that the apprehended migrant population was 97 percent Mexican and Central American a decade ago, but only 52 percent Mexican and Central American today.
Mexico’s ongoing efforts to block migration, which have stepped up considerably so far in 2024, continue to contribute to lower levels of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Mexican government reported encountering or apprehending 240,000 migrants during the first two months of 2024, a number more than 20 percent greater than its previous monthly highs. Mexico’s issuance of humanitarian visitor cards, which have allowed migrants to travel across the country, has declined from an average of 13,294 per month during the first 9 months of 2023 to 213 per month between November and February (a 98% drop).
Speaking to analysts about migration patterns, National Public Radio concluded that Mexico’s efforts won’t have long-lasting effects, as flows into the country from further south remain robust.
Panama’s government, for instance, posted data showing that 110,008 people migrated through the Darién Gap during the first 3 months of 2024. That is 26 percent more migration than Panama measured during the first 3 months of 2023, a year that ended with 520,085 people passing through the treacherous jungle region. 22 percent of this year’s Darién migrants were children. Of the adult population, 36 percent were women. 64 percent of this year’s total have been citizens of Venezuela, followed by Ecuador (8%), Haiti (7%), Colombia (6%), and China (6%).
The pace of Darién Gap migration has been unusually steady this year, averaging 1,161 migrants per day in January, 1,282 in February, and 1,188 in March. However, a Migración Panama press release reported an unusual drop during the first 17 days of April, to a daily average of 900. If sustained, that would mean somewhat fewer people migrating into southern Mexico in coming weeks.
Mexico’s migrant-blocking efforts have intensified this month in Chihuahua, the northern border state that includes Ciudad Juárez, which sits across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. In Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, migrant apprehensions ( 940 per day April 5-18) have edged up lately, to their highest levels of the 2024 calendar year.
Mexican migration agents pulled 400 migrants off of a cargo train in rural Chihuahua on April 22, leaving them stranded in the desert, the human rights organization Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción (DHIA) denounced. The group included 150 children and 7 pregnant women.
In Ciudad Juárez, guardsmen, immigration agents, and municipal police carried out an aggressive operation on April 24 to prevent a different group of 400 migrants who had arrived atop a cargo train from reaching the borderline.
In Chihuahua’s state capital, more than 200 miles south of Ciudad Juárez, Mexican national guardsmen detained 150 Central American migrants who were staying in a hotel.
In a third in-depth report about U.S.-bound migration published in the past two weeks, the Honduran digital outlet ContraCorriente reported on the increasing diversity of nationalities of migrants taking the very dangerous journey atop Mexico’s cargo trains, known as “La Bestia” (the Beast). It reported that a Red Cross-supported charity in Choluteca, Honduras, the Fundación Nueva Vida, has “implemented a program in Mexico and Honduras that over the past decade has treated almost 1,300 migrants who had limbs amputated by ‘the Beast.’”
Asylum seekers who do arrive in Ciudad Juárez are now seeking to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents at Gate 40 along the El Paso border wall on the bank of the Rio Grande, Milenio reported. This is east of Gate 36, where Texas state police and National Guard have set up a large presence, with several coils of razor wire, to prevent asylum seekers from approaching federal authorities.
On April 23 an El Paso County grand jury indicted, on misdemeanor rioting charges, 141 migrants who had breached the Texas state barrier on March 21. The ruling, at the behest of the county’s chief prosecutor, came one day after a county judge had thrown out the charges, finding insufficient probable cause. The March 21 incident, showing migrants pushing past Texas National Guardsmen to reach the border wall and Border Patrol agents, was caught on video and circulated widely on social media.
While Mexico’s efforts to frustrate migration continue, “uneven enforcement and widespread corruption” ensure that Mexico rarely “blocks” migrants: its actions instead “make migrants’ journey north riskier, costlier, and slower,” Christine Murray reported at the Financial Times.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) meanwhile alerted that its personnel in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras saw more cases of sexual violence against migrants during the first quarter of 2024 (over 250) than they did in all of 2023 (232). Most of MSF’s documented cases occurred in Mexico’s organized crime-influenced U.S. border state of Tamaulipas. Reporting from San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, a border city near Yuma, Arizona, the BBC’s Linda Pressly highlighted the powerful criminal organizations increasingly extorting and kidnapping migrants there. “These extortionists and hostage-takers are not only professional criminals—some are also law enforcement,” Pressly noted.
“The next administration in Mexico will inherit an incomplete and deficient action plan to deal with migration” from Central America, wrote Brenda Estefan of IPADE Business School at Americas Quarterly, calling for a renewed and more collaborative focus on “root causes” of migration after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leaves office at the end of the year.
Congressional Republicans’ effort to attach hardline border measures to Ukraine aid legislation formally ended on April 20, when the House of Representatives approved a Ukraine and Israel aid bill with no border or migration content. The bill became law on April 24.
The GOP demand to tie border measures to foreign aid—issued last fall when the Biden administration first requested aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan—spurred a months-long Senate negotiation process. (See most WOLA Border Updates from late November to mid-February.) These talks yielded a deal that would have changed the law to halt asylum access at the border when migration reached certain levels, among other provisions. That deal failed when Republican senators rejected it in early February.
In a gesture to border hardliners upset about a Ukraine aid bill without border provisions, House Republican leadership allowed a separate bill to come to a vote on April 20 that would have effectively shut down the right to seek asylum at the border. H.R. 3602, the “End the Border Catastrophe Act,” included most of the provisions of H.R. 2, a strict bill that the House passed in May 2023 without a single Democratic vote. Because it was rushed to the floor in suspension of the House’s rules and thus needed a two-thirds majority, H.R. 3602 failed by a 215-199 vote.
Unlike H.R. 2, though, it got five Democratic “yes” votes. Those five centrist Democrats—Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez (D-Washington), Jared Golden (D-Maine) Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), and Don Davis (D-North Carolina)—issued a statement on April 24 doubling down on their position. They called on President Biden to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy and to begin Title 42-style expulsions of asylum seekers, while full-throatedly endorsing the Border Patrol union’s hardline stance on border security.
Separately, Rep. Susan Wild (D-eastern Pennsylvania) penned a column endorsing the Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill that includes border and migration provisions that reflect some priorities of border hardliners and some priorities of migrant rights defenders.
Panama’s government reported removing 864 migrants—682 deported and 182 expelled—from the country between April 2023 and April 2024. These are nearly all aerial returns, usually funded and advised by the U.S. government. Of these 864 removals, Panama has carried out 232 since January.
Between January 1 and April 16, Guatemalan authorities expelled 7,735 mostly U.S.-bound migrants into Honduras, plus another 177 into El Salvador. In this respect, the new government of President Bernardo Arévalo has made no changes to its predecessors’ approach to in-transit migration. Of this year’s expulsions, 77 percent have been citizens of Venezuela. Other frequently expelled nationalities include Colombia (9%), Ecuador (6%), and Haiti (2%). Guatemala’s expulsions included 44 citizens of China and 18 citizens of Turkey.
So far this calendar year, Mexican authorities report having deported 5,689 Guatemalan citizens by land and another 1,831 by air. (As of February 29, Mexico was reporting 3,936 total deportations of Guatemalans.) U.S. authorities returned 22,887 Guatemalans so far this year.
In January, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) began producing a monthly report: a spreadsheet with numerous tabs offering about ten years of migration-related data, ending about three months before each edition’s publication.
The latest edition, issued on April 5, included an important upgrade: a tab listing, by month, the top 100 nationalities of migrants whom Border Patrol has apprehended since 2014. The expanded data reveal that these were the top 100 nationalities apprehended by Border Patrol in fiscal year 2023. Only the nationalities visible in boldface text were reported before:
The new data reveal a striking shift in the diversity of apprehended migrants’ nationalities.
Before this report, Border Patrol had listed all countries by year from 2007 to 2020, then stopped. Since 2020, CBP has shared monthly data about nationalities—but only for 21 countries, with a large and growing “Other Countries” listing.