August 15, 2024

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Developments

Border Report’s Salvador Rivera spoke to a Haitian woman who waited eight months, much of them in Tijuana, to obtain a CBP One appointment to seek asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego.

• Salvador Rivera, “Cbp One Appointments ‘Difficult to Get,’ Migrant Who Waited 8 Months Says” (Border Report, August 14, 2024).

MIT Technology Review covered Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to use facial recognition technology on migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border to improve these systems’ accuracy. The initiative raises ethical and privacy concerns, especially with regard to transparency—the plans are vague—and children’s ability to give informed consent. A staffer for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) called DHS’s plan “another stride toward a surveillance state [that] should be a concern to everyone who values privacy.”

• Eileen Guo, “Dhs Plans to Collect Biometric Data From Migrant Children “Down to the Infant”” (MIT Technology Review, August 14, 2024).

National Guard troops acting on the orders of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) have begun laying down additional layers of razor wire along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass and in El Paso. The wire in El Paso will be the third layer of state-government barrier in front of the border wall; across the border in Ciudad Juárez, the Hope Border Institute’s Clínica Hope has already treated many people, including children, with cuts and lacerations from Texas’s wire.

• Sandra Sanchez, “Texas Expands Razor Wire Along River Banks in Eagle Pass and el Paso” (Border Report, August 14, 2024).
• Jose Estrada, “Fotos: Texas Coloca Tercera Linea de Alambre de Navajas en el Bordo Fronterizo” (Norte (Ciudad Juarez Mexico), August 14, 2024).

Arizona’s Supreme Court will allow the state’s voters in November to decide on a proposal—similar to Texas’s S.B. 4 law, which is currently on hold pending legal challenges—making it a state crime to cross the border without inspection and empowering local police to arrest people suspected of doing so.

• Jim Small, “Az Supreme Court Rejects Bid to Block ‘Secure Border’ Measure From Going to the Ballot” (Arizona Mirror, The Tucson Sentinel (Tucson Arizona), August 14, 2024).
• Jacques Billeaud, “Proposal to Allow Local Police to Make Arrests Near Arizona Border With Mexico Will Appear on Ballot” (Associated Press, Associated Press, August 14, 2024).

Analyses and Feature Stories

The current decline in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border will be short-lived as migrants’ desperation remains unchanged, argues a USA Today column from Yael Schacher and Rachel Schmidtke of Refugees International. A longer-term policy would adopt “new approaches to adjudicating asylum claims and to reception of asylum seekers at the border and in destination cities,” while strengthening migration pathways like Safe Mobility Offices.

• Rachel Schmidtke, Yael Schacher, “‘I Can’t Go Back. The Us Is My Only Option’: Why Biden’s Border Policy Isn’t Working” (Refugees International, USA Today, August 15, 2024).

A Guardian column by High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi repeated some of these themes, noting that deterrence-based policies ultimately fail. A better response, Grandi argued, lies in building up asylum systems and creating “one-stop shops” that provide information and humanitarian assistance to better channel people on the move.

• Filippo Grandi, “Populist Politicians Will Never ‘Control’ Immigration. Here Are the Humane Alternatives” (The Guardian (Uk), August 14, 2024).

Washington Post data columnist Philip Bump noted that at least for now, migration at the border—along with crime and inflation—has declined in recent months, taking key lines of attack away from the Trump campaign.

• Philip Bump, “The Other Big Shift in the Presidential Race” (The Washington Post, August 14, 2024).

An NPR analysis of the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation” plans pointed to logistical and legal obstacles they would face, though it only briefly discussed Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s intention to elide those obstacles using the U.S. military, invoking emergency powers.

• Joel Rose, Sergio Martinez-Beltran, “Trump Touts Historic Deportation Plans, but His Own Record Reveals Big Obstacles” (National Public Radio, August 14, 2024).