Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: migration in July, Darién Gap deportations, Democratic Convention

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:

• Notes from CBP’s July data release

Data released on August 16 show that Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions fell in July to their lowest level since September 2020. This is largely the result of dual crackdowns: Mexico’s interceptions of migrants and the Biden administration’s June rule curbing asylum access between ports of entry. Border Patrol’s interior releases of asylum seekers were way down, and it placed its largest-ever share into expedited removal. The Texas state government’s border security crackdown has not been a significant factor.

• Deportation flights commence amid reduced Darién Gap migration

Panama’s new president, who ran on a promise to crack down on migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region, announced a deportation flight of Colombian citizens, which flew to Medellín on August 20. José Raúl Mulino’s inauguration has been followed by a drop in migration through the Darién Gap to just over 400 people per day in August, down from over 1,100 during the first half of 2024. As with most lulls in migration following policy changes, the current decline is likely to be temporary.

• The border at the Democratic Convention

The Democratic Party Convention, taking place this week, includes a platform calling for a law making permanent bans on asylum access between ports of entry during busy periods—a position that the party would have been unlikely to adopt in the past. President Biden, nominee Kamala Harris, and other speakers attacked Donald Trump for urging Republican senators to torpedo a bill that would have imposed that asylum bar. Trump paid a campaign visit to the border in southeast Arizona.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Notes from CBP’s July data release

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data late on August 16 about encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border through July 2024. It found that Border Patrol apprehended 56,408 undocumented migrants last month in the areas between the border’s ports of entry.

Data table

• That is a 32 percent drop from June’s migrant apprehensions, a 52 percent drop from May, and a 77 percent drop from the record-setting month of December 2023.
• It was the smallest monthly total of Border Patrol apprehensions since September 2020, when Donald Trump was president during the early months of the COVID pandemic, and fewer than July 2019 and the monthly average for all of 2019.
• Every nationality with over 100 apprehensions declined from June to July.
• All nine of Border Patrol’s U.S.-Mexico border sectors saw a drop from June to July, as they did from May to June. The San Diego (California) sector was number one in apprehensions for the third time in four months, followed by Tucson (Arizona) and El Paso (Texas-New Mexico).
• Another 47,708 people came to border ports of entry, about 38,000 of them with appointments made using the CBP One app.

Combining migrants apprehended at and between ports of entry yielded a July total of 104,116 overall encounters with migrants in July, the fewest since February 2021. 32 percent were from Mexico, 12 percent from Venezuela, and 10 percent from Cuba. Of Venezuelan and Cuban citizens, 97 percent came to ports of entry, in most cases with CBP One appointments. Very few attempted to cross into Border Patrol custody, where the asylum rule and Mexico’s agreement to take those nationalities’ deportees would have made overland deportation very likely regardless of protection needs.

Data table since FY2020

Much of the recent drop in apprehensions owes to the Biden administration’s early June rule (currently being challenged in court) that almost completely cuts off asylum access for migrants apprehended between the ports of entry. CBP reports deporting more than 92,000 people to over 130 countries since the rule went into effect.

As a result of the policy change, Border Patrol released just 12,106 people into the U.S. interior in July with notices to appear in immigration court, down from 27,768 in June and a record high of 191,782 last December. It was the smallest number of Border Patrol releases since February 2021, and the smallest as a percentage of all Border Patrol apprehensions (21%) since January 2021.

Nearly half of those apprehended by Border Patrol (27,313 of 56,408, 49%) were placed in expedited removal proceedings, which the American Immigration Council defines as “a process by which low-level immigration officers can summarily remove certain noncitizens without a hearing,” other than an interview to assess claims of fear of return, if a migrant makes such a claim. That is the largest monthly percentage ever of apprehended migrants placed in expedited removal.

Under the June rule, these proceedings require those who express fear to prove a higher-than-usual standard of “credible fear” in order to access the U.S. asylum system. The rule caused a sharp drop—from 55 percent to 24 percent—in the share of migrants expressing fear of return, Camilo Montoya-Gálvez of CBS News reported, citing an August 16 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) court filing.

Migrants’ cautious reaction to the rule was the main reason for the 52 percent May-July drop in Border Patrol apprehensions. Even in May, though, apprehensions were already among the lowest levels measured since Joe Biden took office, due primarily to a crackdown on in-transit migration that Mexico’s government launched at the beginning of 2024. Mexico’s effort to block migrants and bus them to the country’s south caused Border Patrol’s apprehensions to fall by 50 percent from December 2023 (a record-setting month) to January, and apprehensions had held roughly steady between then and May before dropping again.

Amid the reduced number of migrants being apprehended between ports of entry, Border Patrol most days is dropping off “single-digit” numbers of migrants at the El Paso area’s largest migrant shelter, USA Today reported. (Those released to the shelter after receiving CBP One appointments exceed 100 daily.)

Migrant rights activist Abraham Monarez told Ciudad Juárez’s Norte that the number of migrants in the Mexican border city has plummeted because of the Mexican government’s crackdown, and because people find they can seek CBP One appointments from elsewhere in Mexico. Many who come to Juárez are staying in hotels instead of shelters, Monarez said. “Now, when they get their appointment at CBP, that’s when they move” north from places further south, like Mexico City.

The drop in migration has leveled off, however, for more than a month. A look at Border Patrol sectors that report weekly data points to Border Patrol apprehensions flattening out since early to mid-July.

Data indicate that the Texas Republican state government’s multi-billion-dollar “Operation Lone Star” border-security crackdown has not contributed significantly to the 2024 drop in migration. Looking at Border Patrol apprehensions by state reveals that Texas has not experienced a steeper migration decline than Arizona, where the Democratic governor has not pursued similar hard-line measures.

• Between the record-setting month of December 2023 and July, Border Patrol apprehensions in Texas fell 86 percent. However, they fell 84 percent in Arizona and 77 percent border-wide.
• Between January and July, Arizona’s Border Patrol apprehensions fell 74 percent, more than Texas’ 53 percent or the border-wide decline of 55 percent.
• Between May and July, Arizona also leads with a 64 percent drop in Border Patrol apprehensions, well ahead of Texas’s 50 percent drop and a border-wide drop of 52 percent.
• For the second time in the 2024 calendar year, Texas led all states in Border Patrol apprehensions in July .

The current drop in migration at the border led Texas’s Republican state government to pause, in late June, its program of busing some released migrants to Democratic-governed cities, the New York Times, Washington Examiner, and NBC News reported.

Even as it has become most protection-seeking migrants’ only option for accessing the U.S. asylum system, CBP is not increasing the number of available appointments at ports of entry using the CBP One app. The agency has held the number steady at about 1,450 appointments per day, even as accessing asylum by crossing between ports of entry has ceased to be an option for most.

Data Table

This may worsen the backlog of people awaiting, or seeking to obtain, appointments from inside Mexico, where the app’s geolocation restrictions require applicants to be present. On August 23, CBP is expanding the area within Mexico where the app functions, to include the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco. Until now, the app’s appointments feature had only functioned from Mexico City northward. (Citizens of Mexico may use the app from anywhere in the country.)

Also notable in CBP’s data release is what appears to be the first-ever annual drop in border-zone seizures of fentanyl. The agency seized 17,312 pounds of the potent synthetic opioid during the first 10 months of fiscal 2024. Extended to 12 months, that would be 20,774 pounds: a 22 percent drop from 2023. That would be the first year-on-year drop since fentanyl first began appearing in the mid-2010s. Similar to past years, 87 percent of CBP’s seizures have happened at ports of entry, and another 5 percent at Border Patrol’s interior vehicle checkpoints.

Data table

Deportation flights commence amid reduced Darién Gap migration

The number of migrants passing through the Darién Gap in August totaled more than 8,000 from August 1 to 19, according to the new director of the country’s National Migration Service (SNM). That is a bit over 400 people per day: a sharp drop from 1,104 per day during the first half of 2024 and over 2,000 per day in August and September 2023. It would be the lowest daily average measured in the Darién in any month since April or May 2022.

This is likely a temporary lull: the July 1 inauguration of a president promising to crack down on Darién Gap migration may have placed would-be migrants in a momentary “wait and see” mode. José Raúl Mulino has ordered placement of barbed wire along some routes through the jungle, and announced an arrangement with the United States to facilitate increased deportation flights.

On August 20 Panama sent its first planeload of deportees from the Darién Gap under this new initiative. Panama repatriated 28 Colombian adults, reportedly with criminal records, aboard a plane to Medellín. One, according to the director of Panama’s migration agency, Roger Mojica, was an alleged sicario (hitman) for the Gulf Clan, the Colombian organized-crime group that controls territory at the entrance to the Darién route.

Initial flights will go from Panama to Colombia, the country from which migrants entered. Colombians are only about 6 percent of migrants passing through the Darién. On August 22 Panama’s government announced that it will soon carry out removal flights to Ecuador (August 29), India (August 30), and China (September 3), along with additional flights to Colombia.

Migration Director Mojica said Panama has no plans to return citizens of Venezuela—the majority of Darién migrants—due to a lack of diplomatic relations with Caracas. After passing through Darién reception sites, Venezuelans “are allowed to continue with the controlled flow,” added Mojica.

Though Venezuelans apparently are not being deported, President Mulino told Univisión, “I sincerely regret it in my soul, because I know why many of them are fleeing. The political crisis in Venezuela is choking them”.

The U.S. government has reportedly allocated $6 million to support those flights. Assuming $500 per deportee, that would be enough to remove 12,000 people, equivalent to 6 percent of the migrant population in the Darién region during the first half of 2024.

Further south, Brazil has begun suspending visa-free travel to citizens of some Asian nations, including India, Nepal, and Vietnam. Some of those travelers have been seeking asylum upon arrival in Brazil, then continuing their journey northward, through the Darién Gap and toward the United States.

The Darién deportation flights’ early July announcement, along with the new Panamanian government’s other efforts to limit Darién migration, has contributed to a drop in the flow of migration elsewhere in Central America. 24,133 refugees and migrants transited Honduras in July, a 15 percent decrease from June, according to a monthly update from UNHCR. That is 778 people per day; the pace dropped further, to 490 per day, during the first 14 days of August.

The Associated Press reported from Peru, Chile, and Colombia about those countries’ expectation of a new wave of Venezuelan migration following the July 28 presidential elections’ fraudulent and repressive result. The Miami Herald reported on an August 8-11 Meganálisis poll of 1,007 Venezuelans, which found more than 40 percent are considering fleeing.

WOLA has seen data, compiled by relief agencies, pointing to a rough doubling in the flow of migrants through Colombia-Venezuela border crossings since the elections.

The border at the Democratic Convention

As the Democratic Party’s convention launched in Chicago, its platform, published August 19, included language calling for changes in the law that would curtail asylum access at the border during busy times, as is currently happening under the Biden administration’s early June asylum restriction rule. Under a section entitled “Temporary Emergency Authority to Shut Down the Border,” the platform—a non-binding document—suggested:

When the system is overwhelmed, the President should have emergency authority to expel migrants who are crossing unlawfully and stop processing asylum claims except for those using a safe and orderly process at Ports of Entry. The authority should be accompanied by humanitarian exceptions for vulnerable populations including unaccompanied children and victims of trafficking.

In remarks to the Convention on the evening of the 19th, President Biden hailed the drop in migration that took place in the first weeks after the asylum rule went into effect:

Then I had to take executive action. The result of the executive action I took: border encounters have dropped over 50%. In fact, there are fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office. And unlike Trump, we will not demonize immigrants, saying they’re the poison of the blood of America, poison the blood of our country.

A few convention speakers addressed border and immigration policy on the evening of August 21. Most of the messaging surrounded efforts to combat organized crime and fentanyl trafficking. Some, though, attacked Republican nominee Donald Trump for urging Republican legislators to kill the “Border Act,” a bill resulting from negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators that failed in February. That compromise legislation’s provisions included some items that Democrats would not have supported in the past, like a ban on asylum access at busy times and a big increase in ICE detention capacity.

In her August 22 acceptance speech, Vice President Kamala Harris attacked Trump for ordering “his allies to kill” what she called “the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it.” Harris pledged to bring the Border Act back and to sign it into law. She also called for immigration reforms including “an earned pathway to citizenship.”

Analysts and pundits saw some of the Democrats’ convention rhetoric calling for tougher border security measures and limits on asylum as indicative of a rightward shift within the party on border and migration policy, responding to similar shifts in public opinion.

Andrea Castillo of the Los Angeles Times also noted how down-ticket Democratic candidates for congressional seats are running ads featuring law enforcement personnel and attacking Republican opponents on the border issue, portraying them as obstructing legislative efforts to crack down on migration.

Republicans, meanwhile, spent over $247 million during the first half of 2024 on campaign ads with border and migration themes, nearly always as scare tactics, according to a Washington Post analysis. Of 745 ads surveyed, about 20 percent used out-of-context and outdated visuals, and a similar portion used derogatory terms like “illegals,” “aliens,” or even “murderers” or “rapists.” Ads were heavily focused in media markets far from the border, like Ohio, Indiana, and Montana.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a campaign visit to the border August 22 in Sierra Vista, Cochise County, southeast Arizona. That is a part of the border where voters trend Republican, leading Democrats in registrations by a two-to-one margin, unlike the much “bluer” Nogales area just to the west.

Trump’s event—with County Sheriff Mark Dannels, a longtime proponent of hard-line border policies, and representatives of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing most agents—was closed to the public. Local Democrats derided the visit as a “photo op.”

At an hour-long press conference, the ex-president drew attention to crimes committed by migrants, featuring some victims’ relatives. Trump falsely portrayed Kamala Harris as being a “border czar” who favored open borders, and inaccurately accused the Biden administration of allowing 20 million migrants to enter the United States.

(CBP’s migrant encounters at the border totaled about 8.2 million during the Biden administration, and about 4.1 or 4.2 million releases into the U.S. interior. Another 520,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan citizens entered—at airports, not the border—after applying for humanitarian parole.)

Roll Call noted that the former president’s remarks often wandered away from the border and migration issue.

The New York Times looked at how Trump, if elected, might use the U.S. military on U.S. soil in ways without precedent in modern U.S. history, probably by invoking the Insurrection Act. They include using soldiers to carry out Trump’s promised mass deportation of undocumented migrants. The BBC also examined this, as well as what ICE’s cooperation with local law enforcement would look like in this “mass deportation” scenario.

At an August 21 event in Edinburg, Texas with “hundreds” of agents in attendance, the Border Patrol union offered its election endorsement to Texas’s ultraconservative Sen. Ted Cruz (R). (The National Border Patrol Council first endorsed Donald Trump during the 2016 primary campaign.) The crowd booed when Kamala Harris’s name was mentioned, Border Report reported. “Cruz said a Spanish curse word to the crowd when referring to the administration and drew cheers from the Border Patrol agents assembled.”

Other news

• The number of migrant remains Border Patrol has recovered in its El Paso Sector (New Mexico and the far western edge of Texas) stands at a record 164 so far in fiscal 2024 (since October 2023), Border Report reported. This is the fourth straight year in which the El Paso Sector has set a new record (39 in 2021, 71 in 2022, and 149 in 2023). The death toll comes at a time when overall migration has dropped, but when new federal restrictions on asylum and a Texas state security buildup near downtown El Paso have incentivized more migration through nearby deserts. Deaths appear to be concentrated in areas that are a short drive from El Paso and other populations where water and first aid would be available.
• At the Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque published a tribute to Eddie Canales of the South Texas Human Rights Center (1948-2024), who passed on July 31. Canales maintained water stations and assisted identification efforts in Brooks County, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande Valley border region, an area where dozens if not hundreds of remains are recovered each year. A proper legacy for Eddie, del Bosque wrote, would be the establishment of a center in Texas to identify migrants’ remains and provide closure to their loved ones.
• A report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector-General found flaws in CBP’s 2023 rollout of the CBP One app’s appointment-making feature for asylum seekers. Users “experienced application crashes, received frequent error messages, faced language barriers, and may not have always had an equal opportunity to secure an appointment,” while the same intended U.S. address appeared in hundreds of entries.
• A boy from southern Mexico seeking to migrate to the United States was killed, and eight people from Ecuador, Africa, and Mexico were wounded, when assailants opened fire on the vehicle in which they were traveling in Mexico’s border state of Sonora, across from Arizona. The attack may have been related to violent competition between migrant smugglers.
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is continuing legal actions against the state’s charities assisting recently released asylum seekers and migrants. He is demanding that a representative from the Team Brownsville migrant respite center be deposed by the end of the month “to answer how the NGO assists migrants—among other things,” noted Aarón Torres of the Dallas Morning News. Paxton is also going after the non-profit status FIEL Houston, an immigrant rights group. The state Attorney General contends that FIEL, which criticizes the Texas state government’s hard-line migration policies, violates its tax-exempt status by being too vocal about legislation and electoral politics.
• Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens tweeted that the agency has apprehended more than 63,000 “Special Interest Migrants” so far in fiscal 2024, 85 percent of them in its San Diego (California) sector. The term refers to a person who “potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests” based on their travel patterns. The most common “travel pattern” is a migrant’s country of origin. Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not publish a list of its “special interest” countries, most appear to be majority Islamic nations—like Jordan, which is named in Chief Owens’s tweet.
• An American Immigration Council fact sheet broke down the $409 billion that the U.S. government has spent on immigration enforcement since DHS began operations in 2003. It noted that, adjusted for inflation, Border Patrol’s budget has increased 765 percent since 1994.
• A report from the DHS Inspector-General found that 448,000 unaccompanied migrant children were transferred to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement from 2019 to 2023, which then turned most of them over to relatives or sponsors. During those years, more than 32,000 unaccompanied children “ failed to appear for their immigration court hearings.”
• In September, Mexico’s refugee agency (Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, COMAR) plans to open a new facility, or “Multiservice Center,” to attend to migrants in the country’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. A short drive from the Guatemala border, Tapachula’s perpetually overwhelmed COMAR office receives the largest number of migrants arriving and applying for asylum— two-thirds of Mexico’s applications so far this year.
• In Tijuana, organized crime extortion is so pervasive that even small businesses like sidewalk vendors must pay $100 per week or be violently forced out of business. The fees have jumped in 2024, Border Report reported.
• Guatemalan police arrested seven people accused of being the smugglers who arranged the journey of some of the 53 migrants who died while locked in the back of an overheated tractor-trailer near San Antonio, Texas in June 2022.
• A document from UnidosUS (formerly known as the National Council of La Raza) endorsed “firm border enforcement,” particularly improvements to ports of entry and prioritizing asylum access for asylum seekers who come to ports of entry. Among other proposals is the creation of “an ‘immigration FEMA’ equipped with the funding and authority to respond to large-scale migration events.”