Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: April dip in migration, drug seizure data, investigations published
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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Preliminary numbers published by CBS News and the Washington Post indicate that Border Patrol agents apprehended 129,000 or 130,000 migrants in April, a slight decline from February and March. U.S. officials continue to credit Mexican efforts to block migrants, which were the subject of a phone conversation between Presidents Biden and López Obrador. Migration through Panama’s Darién Gap also appears to have declined in April.
With fiscal year 2024 half over, CBP’s border drug seizure data points to notable declines in opioids, including the first-ever drop in fentanyl seizures. Cocaine and methamphetamine are increasing compared to 2023, while seizures of cannabis—which decreased precipitously after U.S. states started regulating its use—remain at a low level. Except for cannabis, at least 82 percent of border drug seizures occur at land-border ports of entry.
Human Rights Watch published a report on how the CBP One app denies access to asylum through “digital metering” at the U.S.-Mexico border. ProPublica and the Texas Tribune examined the relationship between U.S. border policies, including encouraging Mexico to interdict migrants, and tragedies like the March 2023 detention facility fire that killed 40 people in Ciudad Juárez. A consortium of journalists published a series on how organized crime, with corrupt officials’ collusion, transports migrants across Mexico in tractor-trailer containers.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions in April totaled about 129,000 people, CBS News correspondent Camilo Montoya-Gálvez reported. The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported “about 130,000” April apprehensions in a front-page Washington Post story.
That would represent a decline from 140,638 reported in February and 137,480 in March. A drop in migration is very unusual in the spring, when milder weather usually means more people attempting to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Data table
The Washington Post cited U.S. officials’ belief that the Mexican government’s crackdown on migration is “the biggest factor” explaining the pattern. “The next several weeks will be a key test” of Mexico’s interdiction operations, the officials told Miroff.
Keeping border crossings down was the subject of an April 28 phone conversation between U.S. President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which took place at Biden’s request. “The two leaders ordered their national security teams to work together to immediately implement concrete measures to significantly reduce irregular border crossings while protecting human rights,” read a joint statement.
The statement did not specify what these new measures might be. Still, an unnamed senior Biden administration official told the New York Times that possibilities included efforts “to prevent railways, buses, and airports from being used for illegal border crossing and more flights taking migrants back to their home countries.” The AP later cited White House national security spokesman John Kirby reiterating that the likely measures will be more transportation interdiction and more deportation flights.
USA Today covered Mexican forces’ strategy, intensified so far in 2024, of busing migrants away from the U.S. border zone and into the country’s interior, often Mexico’s far south. Analysts told reporter Lauren Villagrán that the busing has done more than Texas’s state crackdown to reduce recent migration into Texas. The Mexican government is relying less on international deportation or long-term detention: Mexico reports 359,697 “encounters” with migrants, but a relatively few 8,612 deportations, during January through March.
Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) top official, Troy Miller, testified on April 30 before the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. Questioning noted that Border Patrol’s apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border had fallen recently to about 3,900 per day; members of Congress credited Mexico’s stepped-up migrant interdiction operations. Miller noted that he has “a senior advisor assigned to [him] that is solely dedicated to working with Mexico.”
Though the ongoing Mexican crackdown is a widely cited reason for 2024’s relative drop in irregular migration at the border, Border Patrol chiefs’ weekly updates have noted increases in migration to San Diego and (more modestly) Tucson, and recent days saw large numbers of migrants arriving, primarily by train, in Ciudad Juárez across from El Paso.
The chief of Border Patrol’s San Diego, California Sector—the westernmost of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors— reported that agents there apprehended 10,023 migrants during the week of April 24-30. That is 50 percent more than the last week of March in this region, and it cements San Diego’s current status as the border’s busiest sector, a position it has not held since the late 1990s.
San Diego’s county supervisor said the sector’s Border Patrol agents apprehended 2,000 people on April 23 alone. CBP has released more than 30,000 migrants onto the city’s streets since February, when a county-run reception center shut down for lack of funding.
Border Patrol agents had already been making asylum seekers wait for hours or days in the open air at the sector’s California borderline before being able to process them. The Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli reported, based on a leaked internal document, that some migrants are hiking into rural California seeking to turn themselves in directly to Border Patrol stations or other law enforcement facilities. (Local volunteers say that this has been happening for months.)
Across from El Paso, over 1,000 migrants arrived in Ciudad Juárez atop train cars during the April 27 weekend, despite Mexico’s months-long operations to block northbound migration. According to Border Report, “Some U.S. officials are attributing the surge to a concerted effort by transnational criminal organizations” in Mexico to move migrants northward.
Many of those who arrived in Ciudad Juárez headed to the Rio Grande to seek to turn themselves in to Border Patrol to seek asylum, but Texas state authorities have blocked most of them on the riverbank. Some told EFE that Texas state National Guard personnel aggressively pushed them back into Mexico even though they were on U.S. soil, which requires that federal authorities process them.
The mostly Venezuelan migrants added that they fear Mexican organized crime more than Mexican migration authorities. Still, their fear of those authorities mistreating them—or even handing them over to criminals—prevents them from asking for help.
Many more people continue migrating into Mexico from further south, but that number is also anomalously decreasing. Migration through the Darién Gap, the jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama, has declined in April, a surprising development confirmed by an April 29 press release from Panama’s migration authority.
That release reported that 136,523 people had migrated through the treacherous region since January 1. This number stood at 110,008 on March 31. That means the average daily traffic through the Darién was 947 people per day during the first 28 days of April, the second-lowest daily average of any month since February 2023.
Similarly, Honduras’s statistics show a daily average of 1,281 over the first 24 days of April, also down significantly from 1,473 in March and 1,701 in February.
U.S. border authorities report data according to the government’s fiscal year, which started on October 1. For CBP and Border Patrol, then, 2024 hit its halfway point on March 31, giving us an idea of the direction in which the year’s trends are headed at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The border agencies’ seizures of illicit drugs show a mixed picture. Opiate drugs are turning up less often than in recent years. But cocaine and methamphetamine are both up.
Fentanyl seizures are declining for the first time since the drug started appearing in the mid-2010s. It is not clear why, though an alleged Sinaloa Cartel “ order” to stop producing the drug could be a factor.
CBP seizes 87 percent of fentanyl at ports of entry. Ninety-two percent gets seized in California and Arizona. Arizona now accounts for a larger share than California.
Border drug seizure data reflect how fentanyl has almost entirely displaced heroin in U.S. illicit drug markets. Seizures continue to drop. CBP is seizing 82 percent of heroin at ports of entry. Fifty-seven percent gets seized in California, and 31 percent in Arizona.
Coca and cocaine production has reportedly been increasing in the Andes since the mid-2010s, but border-area seizures have not been rising at a similar pace. That appears to be changing so far in fiscal 2024, as cocaine seizures have jumped. CBP is seizing 82 percent of cocaine at ports of entry. Sixty percent gets seized in California, 34 percent in Texas or New Mexico, and the remainder in Arizona.
Methamphetamine seizures had been dropping from a high in 2021, but this year, they are on pace to reverse much of the previous two years’ slide. CBP is seizing 93 percent of methamphetamine at ports of entry. Sixty-three percent is seized in California, 29 percent in Texas or New Mexico, and the remainder in Arizona.
Regulation of legal cannabis in many U.S. states has long since caused the bottom to fall out of illicit markets, curtailing incentives to import the drug from outside the United States. Seizures are on pace to be similar to last year, but more than 90 percent fewer than as recently as 2018. CBP is seizing only 40 percent of cannabis at ports of entry; it is the only drug for which Border Patrol seizes a majority at the border. Seventy-eight percent gets seized in Texas, 16 percent in Arizona, and 6 percent in California, where recreational cannabis is legal.
It was a robust week for non-governmental and journalistic investigations about the border and U.S.-bound migration. All of them presented alarming findings.
A report from Human Rights Watch detailed how rules mandating the use of the CBP One app restrict access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing many to wait for months in precarious and vulnerable conditions inside Mexico. The report included examples of people kidnapped for ransom by Mexican criminal groups while awaiting appointments.
It found that CBP personnel routinely turn asylum seekers away from ports of entry, even when they say they are in danger, because the asylum seekers did not use the app to make appointments. The report called on DHS to stop making the app’s use mandatory and instead increase processing capacity at border ports of entry while increasing adjudication capacity to reduce asylum case backlogs.
HRW adds a novel argument: making large numbers of vulnerable people wait in Mexico increases the viability of their asylum claims. Because they are a “socially distinct group” inside Mexico—easily identifiable and frequently falling prey to violent criminals—people forced to await digital appointments may meet a central criterion for asylum eligibility under U.S. law: membership in a “particular social group.”
A ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation drew a straight line between years of U.S. border and migration policies—including “outsourcing” of enforcement to Mexico—and the March 2023 detention facility fire that killed 40 migrants in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Nothing has changed about U.S. policy since; “If migrant deaths would lead to policy change, we would have changed policies a long time ago,” migration expert Stephanie Leutert told reporter Perla Trevizo.
“The Right Way,” a video accompanying the ProPublica–Texas Tribune project, profiled a Venezuelan family who had to wait for five months in Ciudad Juárez for a CBP One appointment during the 2023 period when 40 migrants died in a detention center fire in the city.
A collaborative effort among several Latin American journalistic outlets documented migrant smugglers’ dangerous but widespread use of tractor-trailers as a critical vector for moving people through Mexico to the U.S. border.
A report from the Center for Migration Studies called for deep, long-term reforms to the U.S. immigration court system’s staffing and infrastructure, along with other reforms to the immigration system, to reduce the system’s backlog of more than 2.5 million cases. Because of that backlog, most asylum seekers released into the U.S. interior from the border can expect to remain in the immigration court system for years. An accompanying “BacklogPredictor” tool helps estimate future backlogs and resource needs based on different assumptions.
