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Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Less migration, CBP pregnancy suit, 2024 campaign rhetoric, Texas notes

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Team WOLA

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:

The U.S.-Mexico border is at the lowest point for migration since the Biden administration began, because of a crackdown in Mexico and sharp new limits on asylum access. As shelters report lower capacity, reports of kidnappings and deaths are up, especially around El Paso. Numbers are down in the Darién Gap as well. The drop is most likely a temporary phenomenon.

CBP reached a $45 million settlement with over 1,000 female employees of its Office of Field Operations, who claimed in a lawsuit that the agency systematically penalized those who disclosed pregnancies. The settlement drew fresh attention to the male-dominated culture at an agency that has made only very slow progress increasing the number of women in its workforce.

A collection of links points to the Kamala Harris campaign’s efforts to “flip the script” and attack Donald Trump on border and migration policy, including pledges to hire more agents, along with new analyses of the Vice President’s border and migration policy record and other electoral developments.

Texas’s Republican governor is requiring hospitals to inquire about patients’ migration status, while laying down fresh razor wire amid mounting questions about state National Guard and police use of force along the borderline. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops defended Catholic migrant shelters that Texas’s attorney general has targeted for legal action.

 

THE FULL UPDATE:

Views of the summer 2024 decline in migration

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not yet published final numbers showing July’s sharp drop in migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border (see WOLA’s August 2 Border Update). However, reports from along the border show what the decline, which began in January and accelerated in June, is looking like.

“Chutes and ladders” and an asylum ban

2024 has seen the smallest monthly totals of Border Patrol migrant apprehensions measured during the Biden presidency, and July appears to have hit a low level last measured in September 2020. The drop has two principal causes.

At the beginning of the year, Mexico launched a strategy of increased checkpoints and patrols, coupled with what the Wall Street Journal called a “chutes and ladders” strategy of busing tens of thousands of migrants to the southern part of the country. (Mexico has not relied heavily on detentions or deportations.) With Mexican territory harder to cross, Border Patrol apprehensions fell by half from December 2023 (a record month) to January 2024, and stayed in a range between 118,000 and 141,000 per month through May.

Then, on July 5, the Biden administration began implementing a new rule—being challenged in federal court—that puts asylum out of reach for most people who cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry. This caused a further momentary pause in migration: Border Patrol apprehensions fell from 117,901 in May to 83,536 in June, and appear to have been about 57,000 in July.

 

At the Washington Examiner, Anna Giaritelli reported that migrant apprehensions are dropping close to the 1,500-per-day average threshold that, if maintained for 3 weeks, would trigger a suspension of the June 5 asylum ban rule. The ban would go back in effect if the average climbs back above 2,500 per day; July’s average was under 1,850 per day.

Mounting human rights concerns

At the Guardian, Justo Robles found that CBP is implementing the June asylum rule in a way that sends people back across the border into danger after fleeing threats. The article cites an August 7 report from six national and border-region organizations—a follow-up to a July 25 memo—documenting U.S. border agents ignoring migrants’ claims of fear of return. It conveys concerns that the asylum ban will lead more people to risk death by migrating through borderland deserts. A principal author of the August 7 report, Christina Asencio of Human Rights First, discussed its findings with Arizona Public Radio.

Fewer migrants, but more kidnappings and deaths

At NBC News, Didi Martínez and Laura Strickler reported that populations have dropped by 60 percent or more at migrant shelters in U.S. border cities and interior cities. The number of people waiting in makeshift encampments in Mexican border cities has also plummeted; this is in part because the Mexican government’s aggressive busing policy, and in part because people using the CBP One app from Mexican territory to schedule port-of-entry appointments are often awaiting their dates from elsewhere in Mexico.

Mexico’s northern border state of Chihuahua, which includes Ciudad Juárez, has seen a considerable decrease in migration flows but an increase in the number of migrants whom criminals are kidnapping or otherwise targeting for extortion, said the state government’s public security secretary. Gilberto Loya said that Chihuahua state police have freed 1,245 kidnap victims so far this year; the number who have not been rescued—and had to pay ransoms or suffer worse fates—is unknowable but probably larger.

On the Texas and New Mexico sides of the border across from Chihuahua, meanwhile, Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector is on pace to record a record number of migrant deaths despite recent months’ lower migration levels; Border Patrol’s count of recovered remains stood at 140 in July.

Reporting from Yuma about humanitarian volunteers’ efforts to prevent deaths, Arizona’s Family noted that “at least 90 undocumented border crossers have died this year attempting to cross into the Arizona desert.” Anticipating “a potential increase in migration flows” through treacherous deserts where hundreds of migrants die each year, Doctors Without Borders is resuming a medical mission along the border in Arizona.

Migrant rights defenders in San Diego told Border Report that they have seen a sharp drop in the number of asylum seekers waiting to be processed at the border wall since the June 5 rule went into effect. The hot summer weather is also a factor slowing migration at the moment, said Pedro Ríos of American Friends Service Committee.

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.

Migrant shelters in Tijuana have been seeing more arrivals of unaccompanied minors, municipal migration official Enrique Lucero told Border Report. Often, Lucero said, parents are “sending their children to the border ahead of themselves, hoping to reunite at some point in the future.” He also cited “a belief that unaccompanied minors are accepted into the United States immediately and given asylum.”

Darién Gap migration drops

Further south, Panama’s Darién Gap region is also reporting a drop in migration, as noted in WOLA’s August 2 Border Update. Though Panama’s new government has yet to update official statistics beyond May, a UNHCR update revealed that 31,049 people migrated through the treacherous jungle region in June. Of that total, 23,509 (76%) were citizens of Venezuela.

That Darién Gap pace of roughly 1,000 migrants per day had been steady since January, but was a drop from well over 2,000 per day in August and September of 2023. Preliminary data from July, gleaned from Panamanian government press releases, points to a further drop in the flow to just over 700 per day. (WOLA discussed this in an August 14 video.)

 

An update from Colombia’s migration agency counted 261,975 migrants passing through the country between January and July, more than Panama’s July 21 count of 216,005. Of the total, 185,508 (71 percent) were citizens of Venezuela. The update also reported a sharp downturn—from a January-June average of 29,672 to 15,315 in July—in the number of migrants departing for the Darién Gap on ferries from the towns of Necoclí and Turbo.

Panama’s recently inaugurated president, José Raúl Mulino, called on the U.S. government to accelerate disbursements to pay for flights to repatriate migrants from the Darién back to their countries of origin, Reuters reported. The U.S. government has allocated $6 million to help Panama carry out repatriations, Reuters reported in July.

In a Guardian photo essay from Colombia’s department of Norte de Santander, near the Venezuela border, Euan Wallace reported that migrants and shelters are bracing for a “new spike in migration” from Venezuela following authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro’s widely disputed claim to have won the July 28 elections. In comments to reporters, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado warned that the fraudulent election outcome and subsequent repression will trigger sharply increased migration from a country that has already seen a quarter of its population flee. “If Maduro chooses to cling to power by force, we can only expect a migratory wave like we have never seen: three, four, five million Venezuelans in a very short time.”

A momentary decline

The current decline in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border will be short-lived since migrants’ desperation remains unchanged, argued 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 the small Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) that the U.S. government has helped to establish in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala.

A Guardian column by High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi echoed 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.

 

CBP settles pregnancy discrimination suit

The New York Times reported on a $45 million settlement that CBP has reached with about 1,000 female employees of its Office of Field Operations, which works at ports of entry. The employees first filed suit against the agency before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016 for having “instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation” against employees who become pregnant.

CBP supervisors, the plaintiffs argued, were systematically forcing employees to enter “temporary light duty” roles, moving them out of their regular positions, upon disclosing their pregnancies. According to Government Executive, a light-duty placement “offers fewer chances for overtime and other differential pay, lowers the chances of promotions, allows for fewer training opportunities, makes preferred schedules more difficult to earn, and requires the surrendering of their right to carry a firearm.”

Such placements, lawyers for the plaintiffs reported, “violated federal law because the agency treated pregnancy differently from all other short-term disabilities.” In a statement, lead plaintiff Roberta Gabaldon said, “This policy was never about our abilities – it was about the agency’s outdated views on pregnancy.”

CBP must now draft a new policy for pregnant employees and train managers and supervisors.

The New York Times reported that women are about 24 percent of CBP’s workforce, less than the FBI’s 30 percent. This percentage appears to include employees in non-law enforcement responsibilities: an agency statement reported by Government Executive touted “nearly 7,000 women law enforcement officers” working at an agency that, as of 2022, had just over 50,000 people  in law enforcement roles (out of a workforce of 63,843). 7,000 out of 50,000 is 14—not 24—percent.

CBP’s Border Patrol component meanwhile struggles to exceed a level of 5 percent female agents. CBP hopes that its recruitment classes will be made up of 30 percent women by 2030, but new hires are currently 20 percent women, the Times noted.

In other “CBP organizational culture” news, more than a dozen Border Patrol agents interviewed by the Washington Examiner said they would “never” vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “because they do not view her as supportive of the organization and its congressionally mandated mission.” One told reporter Anna Giaritelli, “We are screwed as a country if she becomes president. The border will never close.”

 

The 2024 campaign and the border

Harris, in fact, is pushing to hire more Border Patrol agents. At campaign rallies in Arizona and Nevada, the Vice President sought to “flip the script” on the U.S.-Mexico border issue, using it as a line of attack on Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Harris called for “comprehensive reform that includes, yes, strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.” Though reforms like a pathway to citizenship have stalled in the Senate for lack of 60 votes to break a filibuster, Harris is promising tougher border measures that would only require appropriations (50 votes), like hiring more agents.

Harris campaign advertisements are pledging to bring aboard “thousands” of Border Patrol agents. Asked by a Fox News reporter about this pledge, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blamed Republicans for blocking the Biden administration from funding the hiring of more agents. In fact, the 2024 Homeland Security budget already provides funding for a force of 22,000 agents, which is nearly 3,000 more than Border Patrol’s current staffing level.

Several media outlets published analyses of Harris’s role in the Biden administration’s border and migration policies. They generally concluded that Harris was in no way the administration’s so-called “Border Czar,” and that she had a mixed record leading its strategy for addressing root causes of migration from Central America.

  • Harris’s Central America role “was a decidedly long-term—and limited—approach to a humanitarian crisis, and it has allowed Republicans to tie her to the broader fight over the border,” the Associated Press noted.
  • At Salon, Adriel Orozco of the Migration Policy Institute explained why attacks on Harris’s vice-presidential role addressing causes of migration in Central America, misconstruing her as a “Border Czar,” are inaccurate.
  • “The Biden-Harris administration’s record on border enforcement is certainly mixed, but that should not distract from the progress made through Harris’ efforts to address the causes of immigration,” Wayne Cornelius of U.C. San Diego wrote at the Los Angeles Times.
  • Former Biden administration National Security Council official Katie Tobin told the BBC that Harris “deserves credit for ‘a good news story’ in Central America”: notable drops in migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since 2021.
  • A Bloomberg analysis looked at those drops, concluding, “the vice president does not appear to have failed in her limited assignment. Whether she succeeded is more difficult to say.” Author Justin Fox gave much credit to “relatively strong recent economic performance of the Northern Triangle countries” since the pandemic’s end, along with an increased flow of remittances from migrants in the United States.

Washington Post data columnist Philip Bump noted the 2024 decline in migration at the border, placing it alongside recent drops in crime and inflation that have taken key lines of attack away from the Trump campaign.

A Pew Research Center poll found 83 percent of U.S. respondents, including 76 percent of those identifying as Democrats, judging that the U.S. government is “doing a bad job dealing with migrants at the border.” Two thirds said that the Mexican government is also doing a bad job. Mexicans held more approving views of both migration policy and the United States in general.

In Arizona, Democratic Senate candidate Rubén Gallego, a House member with a progressive voting record, is proposing “increased funding for Border Patrol, border technology, and more border agents while also ‘advocating for sane, comprehensive immigration reforms, things that would take care of our Dreamers,’” NBC News reported. Gallego leads Republican opponent Kari Lake in polls for the vote to replace retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I).

The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington looked at reasons why Mexican-American voters in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley borderlands are increasingly voting Republican. They include social conservatism and support for law enforcement and fossil fuels, along with support for stricter policies toward newly arriving migrants.

At the New York Times, Lulu García-Navarro profiled Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), who led Republican efforts to negotiate border reform legislation with the Senate’s Democratic majority in late 2023 and early 2024. The “border deal” bill that negotiators came up with failed in early February amid vocal opposition from Donald Trump. Lankford said he resisted chief Democratic negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-Connecticut) demand that the bill include a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers”—undocumented people who were brought to the United States as children—because Republicans would have viewed it as a “bill-killer.”

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.

At Mother Jones, Mark Follman spoke to security experts concerned that Donald Trump’s “migrant invasion at the border” rhetoric could trigger disturbed individuals or white-supremacist groups to commit acts of violence.

 

Notes from Texas

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order requiring the state’s hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status. The governor’s goal appears to be to collect data about the cost of providing health care to undocumented people, which the state government would then cite in litigation against the Biden administration’s border and migration policies. Advocates fear that the measure will discourage people who need urgent medical care from seeking it.

National Guard troops acting on Gov. Abbott’s orders 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. In a visit to El Paso, EFE found “barbed wire fences over the Rio Grande (the natural divide with Mexico), prison-style watchtowers, helicopters, motion detectors and the omnipresence of the Border Patrol.”

Newsweek covered an August 6 Border Network for Human Rights virtual event at which Texas-area human rights denounced troubling recent cases of Texas police and guardsmen abusing migrants and improperly using force along the borderline. (WOLA’s Adam Isacson, discussing federal forces’ behavior and rising migrant deaths, was among this event’s speakers.)

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement defending the work of Catholic migrant shelters, like Annunciation House in El Paso and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, being targeted by Texas’ state attorney general for allegations of facilitating illegal migration and smuggling. It reads, “Anti-Catholic bias, political motivations, and misinformation have long undergirded these claims. Assisting newcomers, however, is one of the Corporal Works of Mercy and integral to Catholic identity.”

In Kinney County, which occupies a small piece of the border between Del Rio and Eagle Pass in mid-Texas, Sheriff Brad Coe—a staunch supporter of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) Operation Lone Star—is now training deputies in the use of less-lethal weapons like pepper ball and tear gas launchers in order to “manage crowds” of migrants, NewsNation reported.

The recent drop in migration has led to a sharp slowdown in Gov. Abbott’s program of busing released asylum seekers, without prior coordination, to U.S. cities governed by Democrats, NBC News reported.

 

Other News

  • The New York Times and Washington Post published full-length obituaries of Eddie Canales (1948-2024), the co-founder and director of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, who sought to prevent migrant deaths by leaving water stations on ranchland in Brooks County, north of the Rio Grande Valley border region.
  • 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.”
  • The Markup published an interview with Francisco Lara-García, a sociologist at Hofstra University who has studied border surveillance technology and its impact on civil liberties and everyday life in the borderlands. “Personally, the thing that is most unsettling is: the ways that you don’t know that you’re being surveilled.”
  • The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier penned a column at the libertarian publication Reason warning that a temporary suspension of the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela could lead to more illegal entries of migrants from those countries at the U.S.-Mexico border. The authors call into question the Department of Homeland Security’s justification for suspending the parole program: suspicions of fraud in sponsorship applications. Of irregularities in applications, they contend, much are the result of human error in the filling out of online forms, not malice.
  • Cato’s Bier also published statistics, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, about people arrested for fentanyl possession at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Between 2019 and 2024, the data showed, 80.2 percent of those arrested (7,598 of 9,473) were U.S. citizens. The data punctures the evidence-free argument, promoted by many U.S. politicians, that migration and fentanyl smuggling are tied. Bier’s analysis also presented reasons to doubt that new detection technologies at ports of entry would solve the United States’ fentanyl challenge.
  • At Voice of San Diego, Kate Morrissey visited Casita de U.T., a Tijuana migrant shelter housing trans women, all of them victims of violence, now waiting for CBP One appointments at the San Ysidro port of entry. The San Diego-Tijuana organization Al Otro Lado has supported a photography workshop to help them tell their stories during their months-long wait.
  • The commissioner of Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM), Francisco Garduño, remains on trial, facing criminal charges for the March 27, 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez INM detention facility that killed 40 migrants locked inside. On August 12 a judge in Ciudad Juárez denied Garduño’s lawyers’ request for conditional suspension of the proceedings against him. It was his legal team’s fourth unsuccessful attempt to have the case dismissed. Dozens of protesters had gathered outside the courtroom.
  • By exacerbating an economic crisis caused by the authoritarian regime’s mismanagement, Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector increased migration from the country, some of it to the United States, argued Isabela Dias in Mother Jones, adding to a finding reported in the July 26 Washington Post.
  • 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.
  • A NOTUS investigation raised concerns that those aboard a recent deportation flight to China, most of them likely people apprehended at the border, may have included members of Muslim ethnic groups, like Uyghurs and Kazakhs, facing “genocide.” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and National Security Council (NSC) officials were repeatedly unresponsive to reporters’ inquiries.
  • Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is about to deploy a tethered surveillance blimp just west of the Santa Teresa, New Mexico port of entry, a short drive from El Paso, local legislators told Border Report. New Mexico Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D) said that one of the aerostat’s functions will be to search for migrants in distress in a sector that has seen a sharp rise in deaths of dehydration, heat exhaustion, and exposure.
  • The conservative New York Post lamented that DHS’s Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) Program—a Biden administration initiative that puts some family asylum seekers through express adjudication processes, raising due process concerns—has deported just 2,600 of 24,000 migrants enrolled since May 2023.

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