August 7, 2024

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Developments

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris presented her chosen running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. The vice-presidential nominee, who served in the House of Representatives for 12 years, does not have a lengthy record on border and migration issues, but he has rarely diverged from standard liberal Democratic positions.

• In 2018, at the lowest point of the Trump administration’s family separations policy, he was one of 195 House members who co-sponsored the “Keep Families Together Act.”
• In 2015 Walz supported legislation backing stricter screening of refugees, but the New York Times reported that he has since changed this position.
• In 2008, following a visit to El Paso, he called “on Congress to increase funding for more Border Patrol agents, security cameras, technology and K-9 training,” MPR News reported at the time; these remain common positions among many Democratic legislators.
• Twitter user Tim Young (@Young25Tim) posted screenshots of tweets from Walz, going back to 2018, criticizing Trump’s family separation policy, opposing Trump’s use of Defense Department funds to build border wall, endorsing a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers,” and affirming that “Minnesota is stronger because of our immigrant communities.”

Republican opponents are playing up comments Walz made in a late July CNN interview, in which he was facetiously making a point about the futility of border wall construction: “I always say, let me know how high it is. If it’s 25 feet, then I’ll invest in the 30 foot ladder factory. That’s not how you stop this.”

In the same interview Walz endorsed the February 2024 “border deal” bill that Donald Trump successfully urged Senate Republicans to kill. That bill included a few immigration reform priorities but also would have blocked asylum access at busy times (something President Biden later did by executive order in early June) and increased ICE detention capacity by about 47 percent.

• Nur Ibrahim, “Did Tim Walz Say He’d Invest in ‘Ladder Factory’ to Help Migrants Over Border Wall?” (Snopes, August 6, 2024).
• Steven Nelson, “Tim Walz Previews Trump Border Wall Attack: ‘I’ll Invest in the 30-Foot-Ladder Factory’” (The New York Post, August 6, 2024).

CBP posted three notices on August 6 about deaths involving agency personnel:

• A January 24 pursuit in New Mexico, near El Paso, that ended in a rollover crash that killed a woman from Guatemala.
• The death of a newborn baby following delivery by caesarean section, after the February 25 apprehension of an eight-months pregnant woman from Angola near Lukeville, Arizona. The mother was taken to a hospital, where doctors “detected a defect in the fetus’ heartbeat.”
• A March 6 pursuit in Lukeville, Arizona during which two passengers exited a vehicle moving at about 45 miles per hour. A man from Mexico died of his injuries.

• “Woman Declared Deceased Following a Single Vehicle Rollover Accident” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, August 6, 2024).
• “Newborn dies at Arizona hospital after mother transported for care” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, August 6, 2024).
• “Man Dies After Exiting From a Moving Vehicle in an Apparent Human Smuggling Incident” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, August 6, 2024).

The chief of Border Patrol’s Del Rio, Texas sector reposted a very political Elon Musk tweet to the sector’s official Twitter feed. The message, which has nothing to do with border security, accuses Google of stifling news of Donald Trump’s July assassination attempt in its search results, and favoring Democrats against Trump, citing 2020 campaign donations. Chief Patrol Agent Robert Danley’s retweet, which remained atop the Del Rio Sector feed as of 8:00 Eastern on August 7, appears to run afoul of the Hatch Act, which prohibits executive-branch civil servants from engaging in political activity.

• “Adam Isacson on Twitter” (Twitter, August 7, 2024).

At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque revealed that CBP is keeping asylum seekers’ genetic profiles in “a massive criminal investigations database” without their knowledge, even when those asylum seekers are deported or expelled from the border. “The program disproportionately targets people of color,” said Stevie Glaberson of the Center on Privacy and Technology, which has investigated the program.

• Melissa del Bosque, “Many Asylum Seekers Are Being Expelled, but Not Before Giving Up Their Dna” (The Border Chronicle, August 6, 2024).

InsightCrime noted that CBP’s largest-ever fentanyl seizure, 453 kilograms (999 pounds) from a U.S. citizen crossing the Lukeville, Arizona port of entry on July 1, happened despite the Sinaloa Cartel’s widely cited order to stop producing the drug in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. “The size of this seizure,” equivalent to 7 percent of CBP’s entire border-wide fentanyl haul during the first 9 months of fiscal 2024, “suggests that fentanyl continues to be produced in other areas of Mexico,” like the border states of Baja California and Sonora, reported InsightCrime’s Henry Shuldiner.

• Henry Shuldiner, “Us Customs Makes Historic Fentanyl Seizure” (InsightCrime, August 6, 2024).

A study in the journal Trauma Surgery and Acute Care “identified 597 patients injured while crossing the US-Mexico border wall representing 38 different countries” in 2021 and 2022. Their mean age was 32 and 75 percent were male. Two-thirds were Mexican, followed by citizens of Peru, India, El Salvador, Cuba, and Jamaica. The study concludes: “The increased volume of trauma associated with the US-Mexico border wall is a humanitarian and health crisis.”

• Allison e Berndtson, Gabriella Waters, Jarrett Santorelli, Jay Doucet, Laura Adams, Laura Haines, Sarah Lagan, Todd W Costantini, “From Across the Globe – Traumatic Injuries Are an International Concern at the Us-Mexico Border Wall” (Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open, August 6, 2024).

The Texas Observer reported that a vocal Brooks County rancher who leads a paramilitary-style civilian patrol group, along with officials from two mid-Texas counties, have filed suit in a federal court in Corpus Christi, claiming damages from Biden administration policies that they say resulted in “the current, massive flood of illegal entries by foreign nationals from around the world.”

• Francesca D’annunzio, “A Rancher Who Leads a Paramilitary-Style Group Sues Biden Over Border Policies” (The Texas Observer, August 6, 2024).

Analyses and Feature Stories

Mother Jones has published a package of articles about “the Border Patrol’s growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment.” It includes Erin Siegal McIntyre on impunity for sexual violence within the force, including a 2019 rape at the Border Patrol Academy; Lauren Markham on border technologies and threats to civil liberties; Emily Green on the force’s pro-Trump politicization, led by its union; Isabela Dias on the Trump campaign’s mass-deportation plans; and Ian Gordon and Melissa Lewis on the extent of Border Patrol’s jurisdiction and law enforcement powers, including in areas far from borders.

• “No Boundaries” (Mother Jones, August 7, 2024).

Edgardo Molina, technical coordinator of the Guatemala-Honduras Binational Migration Project, told Honduras’s Criterio of a “worrying trend”: “the increase of stationary migrants, i.e. families who stay in Mexico waiting to cross to the United States and then return to Honduras out of desperation after six or seven months trying to cross.”

• Breidy Hernandez, “Ninez Migrante: Un Viaje de Peligro y un Retorno Sin Proteccion” (Criterio (Honduras), August 6, 2024).

On the Right

• Nolan Rappaport, “The Big Lie About the ‘Bipartisan Border Security Bill’” (The Hill, August 6, 2024).
• Ashley Papa, Michael Ruiz, “Kamala Harris’ Border Czar Record Called Out as Arizona Rancher Reports 100 Illegals Crossing His Land a Day” (Fox News, August 6, 2024).