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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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

Some campaign coverage considered Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s support for a February 2024 “border deal” legislative compromise to be a “flip-flop” on the border wall, since that bill required spending past years’ wall-building funds. Other analysis looked at the obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations if elected.

Amid turmoil and repression following the government’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 presidential elections, there is no massive wave of people fleeing Venezuela, at least not yet. However, numbers do appear to have risen slightly.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met in Colombia with the foreign ministers of Colombia and Panama; the officials signed commitments to collaborate further on territorial control and migration management in the Darién Gap region. Panama is proceeding with U.S.-funded deportation flights, the expected tempo appears to be about three or four planes per week.

CBP turned down a Fox News Freedom of Information Act request to identify the nationalities of migrants encountered at the border who appeared in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Dataset. Republicans have cited a recent increase in such encounters in criticism of the Biden administration, but we do not know where the people showing up in the database of people with alleged terror ties are coming from. Colombia, where two groups on the U.S. list have demobilized this century, is a strong possibility.

THE FULL UPDATE:

2024 campaign notes

The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, has given full-throated support for a bipartisan “border deal” bill that failed in the Senate in February and again in May. (See WOLA’s August 23 Border Update, and several updates from earlier this year about the bill, the “Border Act of 2024.”)

The result of a political compromise, the bill included some measures that the Democratic Party would have opposed during the Trump era, like limits on asylum when the border gets busy, increased migrant detention capacity, and a commitment to spend about $650 million in remaining border wall construction money (enough to build about 26 miles) that had been appropriated during the Trump administration.

Some media outlets, most notably Axios, portrayed Harris’s support for the bill as a “flip-flop” of previous opposition to building new border wall segments. Republicans asserted that Harris has never supported building a border barrier. At MSNBC, Steve Benen pointed out that Harris’s endorsement of the larger compromise bill does not equate to endorsing “the merits of a border wall.”

Senate Republicans’ lead negotiator on the “Border Act,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), told the Washington Examiner that the $650 million in unspent border wall money might no longer be available, and that the “border deal” bill is probably dead, unlikely to gain necessary Republican votes if it were ever to come up again in the Senate.

In fact, the “border deal” bill’s provision to shut down asylum access between ports of entry when Border Patrol apprehensions exceed a threshold is in place right now (pending legal challenges). The Biden administration implemented a rule halting most asylum between the ports on June 5.

At the New York Times, Hamed Aleaziz noted that the rule restricting asylum access has caused a sharp drop in Border Patrol apprehensions, but the Harris campaign is not drawing attention to it. The reluctance owes to the reduction’s likely short-term nature; a desire not to raise the profile of the border and migration issue, which draws Republican attacks; and divisions within the Democratic Party about the wisdom of rolling back the legal right to seek asylum.

Other media analyses continue to probe the Democratic Party’s apparent rightward drift on the border and migration, especially asylum. A New York Times news analysis found that the party’s position, voiced at the convention, “has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades.” Harris’s campaign is expected to release a full immigration platform in a few weeks, the Times reported.

At Vox Christian Paz discussed progressive Democrats’ silence so far about Harris’s adoption of harder-line stances. “Trump-style immigration restrictions have gone mainstream among 2024 voters,” concluded a sober analysis of public opinion about immigration by Nicole Narea, also at Vox. “More voters of all stripes now want to see immigration levels decrease than at any point since the early 2000s, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks fueled a rise in nativism.”

At his newsletter, Arizona-based journalist John Washington dug into Harris’s career record, going back to her time as San Francisco’s district attorney. He concluded that Harris “emphatically championed the politically palatable. Her commitment to the issues has never gone against the grain of partisan public sentiment or the overall inertia of the U.S. immigration system.”

Harris’s Republican opponents’ position, of course, is far more hard-line. At the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact site, Dara Lind published an explainer about the immigration provisions of “Project 2025,” a plan for a second Trump administration drawn up by a team of experts and officials close to the Trump campaign. The document contains “a clear plan to restrict legal immigration of all kinds, while laying the foundations for a potential campaign of mass deportation.” These “foundations,” however, do not include an actual detailed deportation plan.

At the Washington Post, columnist Eduardo Porter looked at the logistical obstacles that would stand in the way of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out mass deportations of several million undocumented migrants if elected. Among them: “flying 11 million people out would require 58,201 flights in fully loaded Boeing 737-800s.”

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on August 25, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance repeatedly evaded questions about whether a new Trump administration would seek to separate migrant families apprehended at the border, as happened in 2017-18.

The Washington Post revealed that Trump’s August 22 press conference alongside the border wall in southeast Arizona featured a segment of barrier that was actually built during the Obama administration. (Local advocates say it was in fact built in 2008, while George W. Bush was president.)

Reports published on August 23 at the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Sentinel fact-checked some of the inaccuracies in Trump’s claims, made during his visit, about migrants’ participation in crime, the number of border crossings during his tenure, and the notion that Venezuela is sending the occupants of its prisons and mental institutions to the border. The Trump campaign is presenting those claims at a website it calls “Kamala Border Bloodbath.”

Signs of slight increase in migration exiting post-election debacle in Venezuela

Scattered signs point to growing migration out of Venezuela, amid turmoil and repression following the Nicolás Maduro government’s illegitimate claim to have won July 28 presidential elections. There is no wave of people fleeing yet, but the flow appears to be slightly greater than it was before the vote.

On August 26 the line to enter Cúcuta, Colombia from San Antonio del Táchira, Venezuela stretched for a kilometer, local media reported. Video posted to Twitter that day appeared to show a long line of Venezuelans leaving the country along the border with Brazil. A chart from the International Organization for Migration depicts migration into Brazil’s Pacaraima border crossing increasing to a level not measured since November 2023, though some of the movement may be Venezuelans returning to Brazil after voting in their home country.

WOLA has seen a non-governmental update from this week (no link available) finding only a small post-election increase in migration along the Colombia-Venezuela border so far. In that document, just over half of migrants surveyed said they planned to stay in Colombia to earn enough money to migrate somewhere else, and about one in twenty planned to migrate directly to the United States.

Venezuelan migrants and Mexican shelter operators in Mexico’s northern border cities, especially Ciudad Juárez, told EFE that they fear an intensified exodus of Venezuelans following the election outcome. “Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. are on edge expecting that family and friends who are still in Venezuela will flee their homes in the coming weeks and months,” reported the Washington Examiner. Roger Mojica, the new director of Panama’s Migration Service (SMN), told local media of his concern that an exodus of 4 to 5 million Venezuelan migrants could happen. (More than 7.7 million Venezuelans—over a quarter of the population—have left the country since the mid-2010s.)

The chief of police of the Mexican border state of Chihuahua said that his department has received reports from U.S. counterparts warning that members of Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest organized crime group, have passed through the state en route to the United States.

At The Hill, Manuela Nivia of Albright Stonebridge Group lamented that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) had put on hold the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—pending adjustments to reduce potential fraud—at a time when Venezuelans may need to flee the country more urgently. On August 29, DHS announced that the program, which allows up to a combined 30,000 citizens of these 4 countries per month to apply for a 2-year protected status in the United States, is restarting.

Mayorkas meets with Colombia and Panama counterparts as Darién Gap deportation flights continue

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met on August 26 in Cartagena, Colombia with the foreign ministers of Colombia and Panama to discuss greater cooperation to manage migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region through which about a million people have migrated since 2022.

The three nations committed to more repatriations (like U.S.-funded flights that Panama has begun to operate); greater information sharing; more dialogue and coordination; more development aid for communities along the migration route; more efforts to integrate migrants; and “a plan of action with concrete and realistic steps to strengthen Colombian and Panamanian state presence along their shared border.” The officials did not specify what those concrete steps would be.

Panama sent a second U.S.-funded deportation plane to Colombia on August 24, following a flight on August 20. The Colombian citizens aboard were detained after migrating through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle between the two nations. A flight carrying 30 Ecuadorian citizens—27 men and 3 women, 9 reportedly with criminal records—departed for Manta on August 29, the first flight to Ecuador. It is the second flight to be funded by the U.S. government; Panama has paid for two others, the Associated Press reported.

Another plane to Colombia departed on August 30 with a reported 28 people aboard. That would make a total of 117 people deported since August 20. The flow of migrants through the Darién Gap is at its lowest point in over two years right now, but is still about 400 people per day.

According to EFE citing an August 25 Panamanian government statement, 231,089 people have migrated through the Darién Gap jungles so far in 2024. That is fewer than 333,704 during the first eight months of 2023. Of these migrants, 66.3 percent have been Venezuelan, while Colombian and Ecuadorian citizens have been nearly equal at 6.3 percent each. Chinese citizens are in fourth place with 5.2 percent of the total; 4.8 percent have been Haitian. Migration has been dropping: from 31,049 people in June, to 20,519 in July, to 9,497 so far in August. (Panama’s migration authority has not yet updated its presentation of official statistics.)

Panama plans a flight to India on September 3.

CBP refuses to share nationalities of migrants suspected of terrorist ties

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) rejected a Fox News Freedom of Information Act request to identify the nationalities of migrants encountered at the border who appeared in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Dataset.

CBP has reported 139 such encounters during the first 10 months of fiscal 2024 (43 at ports of entry, and 96 Border Patrol apprehensions), but does not reveal where the people with suspected terrorism affiliations are from. Republican critics of the Biden administration—including the authors of an August 5 House Judiciary Committee report—have often cited this data, which show an increase in such encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2021.

The official explanation for turning down the request for nationalities cites privacy concerns and the possibility of revealing investigative techniques, “allowing the terrorists to take countermeasures against the investigators and their investigations.”

WOLA suspects, but is unable to prove, that many—perhaps most—individuals matching the dataset come from Colombia, a country that has seen a sharp recent increase in border encounters and has had five different groups this century on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, two of which have long since demobilized.

Other news

  • WOLA has published a graphical commentary highlighting 12 trends happening right now at the U.S.-Mexico border and along the U.S.-bound migration route. It finds that overlapping crackdowns in Mexico and the United States have made asylum-seeking migration difficult, reducing numbers dramatically. The data indicate, however, that the reduction will be temporary, that the crackdowns are shutting out and bottlenecking many migrants who need protection, and that Texas’s separate crackdown has had little effect.
  • In the more than three years since Texas’s state government began implementing its border security crackdown, at least 17 Texas National Guard members participating in “Operation Lone Star” have died, Stars and Stripes revealed. While the Texas state Military Department has not shared data about deaths among the troops, the number “came out during a hearing last week of the Texas House Committee on Defense and Veterans’ Affairs,” reporter Rose Thayer found. Causes of death vary. They include at least four deaths by suicide, traffic accidents, an accidental shooting, and medical emergencies. At its peak in 2021, about 10,000 Texas National Guard members were assigned to the border mission. The state refuses to share the deployment’s current size.
  • The Houston Chronicle looked at data showing that Operation Lone Star has not reduced migration to Texas any more than to other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • In remarks to NewsNation, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called for building barriers along Texas’s border with New Mexico because “There are people who cross from Mexico into New Mexico and then right over into El Paso.” He also declared his intention to expand construction of “buoy walls” with serrated metal discs in the middle of the Rio Grande. An initial buoy structure sits in 1,000 feet of the river near Eagle Pass as the federal government’s legal challenges continue.
  • A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas suspended a Biden administration initiative that would offer a pathway to residency and citizenship for up to half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. The temporary restraining order responds to a lawsuit brought by 16 Republican state attorneys-general, led by Texas and America First Legal, the litigation outfit managed by former Trump immigration advisor Stephen Miller. Similar Republican coalitions have challenged other Biden pro-immigration initiatives before the federal judiciary’s conservative Fifth Circuit (which covers Texas and Louisiana), with mixed success.
  • In an article at the Texas Observer, Brian Elmore, an El Paso emergency medical physician who co-founded the Hope Border Institute’s Clínica Hope facility in Ciudad Juárez, vividly described what it is like trying to save lives in a sector of the border that has seen Border Patrol’s count of migrant deaths—mostly from heat exhaustion and dehydration— more than quadruple since 2021. “El Paso is witnessing the convergence of two deadly trends: climate change and border militarization,” Elmore wrote.
  • Four men and two women from Colombia were taken to a hospital “for varying levels of injury” after falling from the border wall near Otay Mesa, southeast of San Diego, local television news reported. A 60-year-old man from Mexico fell from the 30-foot border wall, on the Mexico side, near Sasabe, Arizona after midnight on Wednesday, the Tucson Sentinel reported. He lay on the ground with a compound fracture in his leg, aided through the wall by humanitarian volunteers on the U.S. side; medical workers treated his leg through the wall at 5:30PM, but the man remained in the desert awaiting rescue through Wednesday night.- The New York Times’s Hamed Aleaziz examined the sharp drop in Border Patrol migrant apprehensions that followed the Biden administration’s early June imposition of a rule restricting access to asylum between the border’s ports of entry. While the rule has made the border quieter at a key electoral moment, “migrant activists say Mr. Biden’s executive order is weeding out far too many people, including those who should be allowed to have their cases heard.”
  • Cronkite News covered CBP’s August 16 issuance of a new directive governing the agency’s handling of migrants’ personal belongings, which frequently get discarded or confiscated even when they are valuable or necessary for medical or legal purposes. Noah Schramm, who has worked on the belongings issue at ACLU of Arizona, characterized the policy change as an advance, but “remains concerned because the rules don’t explicitly ensure that migrants get their belongings back when they’re moved to another facility or released.”
  • An expansion of the CBP One smartphone app’s geographic coverage went into effect on August 23, allowing asylum seekers to make appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry while in Mexico’s southern-border states of Chiapas and Tabasco. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not expanded daily appointments beyond the current 1,450 per day, even as new asylum access restrictions have made the app most migrants’ only path to the U.S. asylum system at the border. A letter from numerous U.S. and Mexican civil society organizations, organized by the Mexico-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI), called on Mexico’s government to do far more to protect and accommodate people awaiting CBP One appointments. “People await appointments in Mexico’s territory for up to 7 months,” the letter observed. “The extended stay has generated overcrowding in shelters…which, together with authorities’ failure to provide decent and safe spaces for waiting, has forced many people to settle in informal camps.”
  • A Texas Observer investigation revealed that the state’s Department of Public Safety has entered into a five-year, $5.3 million contract to use “Tangles,” a controversial AI-powered surveillance software platform that the agency first employed along the border for the state government’s “Operation Lone Star” security crackdown. The software essentially allows authorities to track the location of a person’s cellphone without obtaining a judicial warrant, using mobile advertising identification data.
  • At the Intercept, Sam Biddle reported on DHS’s intention, through its Science and Technology Directorate, to find ways to implement facial recognition scanning of all drivers and passengers approaching the Mexico border, even when their vehicles are in motion.
  • The Ciudad Juárez-based human rights group Comprehensive Human Rights in Action (DHIA) revealed that for months, officials from Mexico’s migration agency (National Immigration Institute, INM) have been detaining migrants who arrive in the border city’s airport and placing them on buses bound for Villahermosa, Tabasco, in Mexico’s far south. Unaccompanied children were among those placed on the buses, in clear violation of government policy and human rights, DHIA alleged.
  • Guatemalan authorities arrested four police officers who had been demanding bribes from Cuban and Venezuelan migrants near the terminal in the country’s capital from where buses depart for the Mexico border.
  • A UNHCR document reports that 63,672 citizens of Ecuador sought asylum in the United States between 2021 and 2023. Of 339 Ecuadorians the UN agency interviewed in countries along the U.S.-bound migration route, 63 percent said they were fleeing “generalized violence” and 56 percent said they were victims of violence.
  • A hearing was scheduled Thursday in U.S. District Court for a lawsuit brought by 16 Haitian citizens who allege abuse at the hands of mounted Border Patrol agents, who were caught on video charging at them on the banks of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas in September 2021. The hearing is to consider the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case.