September 6, 2024

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Two-month notice: Daily Border Links will discontinue after November 8, the Friday after the 2024 U.S. election. WOLA will continue to produce Weekly Border Updates. (This daily feature has been part of an election-year rapid-response effort that we lack resources to maintain indefinitely.)

Developments

In a big corruption case, federal prosecutors are accusing two Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers of receiving lavish payments from Mexican organized crime to facilitate shipments of drugs through the Otay Mesa and Tecate ports of entry southeast of San Diego, California. Their extravagant spending habits drew investigators’ attention.

• Alex Riggins, “2 San Diego Cbp Agents Accused of Working With Cartel, Allowing Drugs Through Inspection Lanes” (The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 5, 2024).
• Noah Goldberg, “Louis Vuitton Clothes and Vegas Hotels: Border Agents Spent Big With Money From Mexican Cartels, Prosecutors Say” (The Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2024).

La Verdad de Juárez spoke to the grieving parents of a four-year-old Venezuelan boy who died on September 3 when the cargo train on which his family was riding derailed in Chihuahua, Mexico, south of the border city of Ciudad Juárez. The boy’s mother suffered a severed foot. It was the third or fourth train that the family had boarded in their journey across Mexico.

• Blanca Carmona, Raul Flores, “Tragedia en el Tren: ‘el Sueno Era Llegar a Estados Unidos Con el Nino, No Lo Pudimos Cumplir’” (La Verdad (Ciudad Juarez Mexico), September 5, 2024).

Border Patrol is deploying a tethered “high tech surveillance blimp” near the Santa Teresa, New Mexico port of entry west of El Paso, Border Report reported. “This area is part of the Santa Teresa, New Mexico Border Patrol Station area of operation which has the largest number of migrant encounters in the El Paso Sector,” read a CBP statement.

The Santa Teresa area, near where the border passes from Texas to New Mexico, is at the epicenter of the El Paso Sector’s sharp rise in migrant deaths, mainly of heat exhaustion and dehydration. Until fiscal 2022, Border Patrol had never reported recovering more than 39 human remains in the sector, which encompasses far west Texas and New Mexico. As of August 27, according to the same article, the agency had found 168 remains of migrants in the El Paso Sector, up from 164 just 8 days earlier.

On September 1, Border Report had run a NewsNation story claiming that, due to lack of funds, this and other Border Patrol blimps would be shut down because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacked funds to maintain them.

• Julian Resendiz, “Feds Deploy Surveillance Blimp Over Busy Smuggling Corridor” (Border Report, September 5, 2024).

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents a large border district in central and west Texas, told the conservative Daily Mail that, if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election—as he predicts—a large number of migrants will rush to the border before Inauguration Day.

• Maryann Martinez, “Flood of Migrants Expected to Rush Us-Mexico Border Around Us Election” (The Daily Mail (UK), September 5, 2024).

Analyses and Feature Stories

An American Immigration Council analysis disputed the DHS Inspector General’s August 19 finding that 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children did not show up to their immigration court dates after crossing the border and entering U.S. custody. Much of the problem, it finds, has to do with paperwork and the byzantine bureaucratic requirements that children are expected to navigate, usually without attorneys. “The Inspector General’s analysis fails to explore any potential explanations for why the children were unaccounted for, recklessly suggesting that the children’s safety may be in question.”

• Jennifer Ibanez Whitlock, Raul Pino, “Oversight Agency Says 32,000 Unaccompanied Children Are Missing. But Are They?” (American Immigration Council, September 5, 2024).

As the six-year government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador draws to a close this month, the outgoing foreign minister, Alicia Bárcena, told Spain’s El País that she “is trying to outline Mexico’s migration strategy for the coming years.” It “includes investing $133 million in countries of origin, creating two new care centers in Chiapas, and the safe transfer to the northern border of migrants with asylum appointments in the United States.”

“Joe Biden’s administration has agreed to manage 4,000 crossings a day, 1,500 through its CBP One platform” plus the 2,500-per-day threshold above which the Biden administration has shut down access to asylum, the article reads. “But no more than that, says Bárcena, who recalls December 18, 2023, when the United States announced the closure of seven of its border posts” in order to transfer personnel to help process a large number of arriving migrants.

• Beatriz Guillen, “More Care Centers and Safe Transfers to the Us Border: Mexico Outlines Its Migration Strategy for the Coming Years” (El Pais (Spain), September 5, 2024).

On the Right

• Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), “Congressman Roy Chronicles the Biden-Harris Border Crisis” (U.S. House of Representatives, September 5, 2024).
• Simon Hankinson, “Biden-Harris Admin Restarts Fraud-Riddled Illegal Immigrant ‘Parole’ Program” (The Heritage Foundation, The Daily Signal, September 5, 2024).
• Elizabeth Heckman, Nikolas Lanum, “South Texas Police Chief Pushes for Increased Border Patrol: ‘They Can Obviously Use More Help’” (Fox News, September 5, 2024).