Migration at the border remains at its lowest level since the fall of 2020, according to new CBP data released in August, following a crackdown on migratory movements that Mexico launched in early 2024 and a June Biden administration ban on most asylum access between border ports of entry. The August total, however, was 3 percent greater than July—the first month-to-month increase in six months—which may indicate that these crackdowns’ deterrent impact is flattening or even eroding.
Kamala Harris called out the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation” plans. Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance doubled down on false and racist claims about Haitian immigrants living and working legally in Ohio. A national poll revealed immigration and the border remains among voters’ top concerns.
A report from Arizona attorneys revealed a high portion of unaccompanied children reporting verbal and physical abuse while in Border Patrol custody. A FOIA result points to more than 200 CBP personnel under investigation for serious misconduct. Reports on the Uvalde, Texas school shooting response and complications in prosecuting migrant smugglers in Arizona.
Border Patrol’s recoveries of migrant remains in its El Paso Sector now stand at a record 171 since October. Investigations from the ACLU, NPR, and the Border Network for Human Rights and Texas Civil Rights Project reveal troubling aspects of the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star.”
THE FULL UPDATE:
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions increased in August—slightly, but for the first time in six months
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released data about migration and enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border through August.
Last month, Border Patrol apprehended 58,038 people at the border. That is up slightly from July (56,399), but still the second-fewest migrant apprehensions since September 2020. Border Patrol’s fiscal year 2024 migrant apprehensions are on track to be 21 percent fewer than last year’s.
Though only a 3 percent uptick, it was the first time since February that Border Patrol’s apprehensions increased over the previous month. This may be a sign that a 2024drop in migration at the border has “bottomed out” following a beginning-of-year crackdown in Mexico, which was followed in June by a sweeping Biden administration restriction on access to asylum.
The Washington Postcovered Mexico’s ongoing crackdown, which it called “the merry-go-round” (the Wall Street Journal, in August, called it a “chutes and ladders” policy). The Mexican government has acted to reduce migration to the U.S. border by massively busing about 10,000 non-Mexican migrants per month to the country’s south. “It’s unclear whether the results are sustainable. The number of migrants camped out in Mexican cities is rising,” noted Post reporter Mary Beth Sheridan. In Villahermosa, Tabasco, where many southbound buses’ routes end, the city’s only migrant shelter is at double last year’s capacity.
In a September 13 interview with New York Times podcast host Ezra Klein, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the Biden administration’s border security and migration record, including its June 2024 proclamation and rule restricting access to asylum for most migrants who cross the border between ports of entry.
The administration continues to enforce this rule very strictly. Border Patrol released fewer people into the U.S. interior with “notices to appear” in August (9,936) than in any month since February 2021.
An additional 49,465 people were able to enter custody at ports of entry (official border crossings). About 44,700 of that total were people who had made appointments using the CBP One app. CBP continues to allow about 1,450 CBP One appointments per day; the monthly port-of-entry total has changed little since June 2023.
Combining Border Patrol and ports of entry, the nationalities most frequently encountered in August were citizens of Mexico (37,601), Venezuela (15,214), Cuba (10,423), Guatemala (7,099), and Honduras (6,943). Nearly all encounters with Cubans and Venezuelans took place at ports of entry.
Of the nine sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, San Diego, California (14,436) measured the most migrant apprehensions. El Paso, Texas-New Mexico (13,282) was in second place; it was last in the “top two” in April 2023. Tucson, Arizona (11,922) was third.
Combining Border Patrol and ports of entry, 34 percent (36,016) of August’s migrant encounters were with members of family units, and 7 percent (7,130) were unaccompanied children. 32 percent of families and 35 percent of unaccompanied children were Mexican.
CBP has seized 18,981 pounds of fentanyl at the border during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2024. For the first time since fentanyl first appeared in the mid-2010s, border seizures of the drug are almost certain to be fewer than they were in the year before (26,719 pounds in 2023). Fiscal 2024’s fentanyl seizures are on pace to be 23 percent fewer than in 2023.
As in previous years, 88 percent of fentanyl has been seized at ports of entry, and another 5 percent at Border Patrol’s interior vehicle checkpoints.
2024 campaign and the border
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, included a few paragraphs about the border and migration in September 18 remarks to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Without mentioning specifics or referring to the Biden administration’s current imposition of asylum restrictions, Harris called for immigration reform, protection for “DREAMers” (undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children), and an “earned pathway to citizenship,” while ensuring that “our border is secure.”
Harris attacked Republican opponent Donald Trump for presiding over family separations during his 2017-2021 term, and for his campaign’s plan to carry out mass deportations if elected. “Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How is that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?”
At Mother Jones, Isabel Dias noted Trump’s use of the term “remigration” instead of “deportation” in a recent post to his social network. “The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship.”
Many outlets published recent analyses of the Trump-Vance campaign’s unfounded and racist attacks on Haitianmigrants living and working legally in Springfield, Ohio—and the origins of the especially virulent strain of racism that gets aimed at Haitians in the United States.
An in-depth investigation of the attacks’ origin at the Wall Street Journal;
A post to the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Impact site by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
A Scripps News/Ipsos poll found that 39 percent of U.S. respondents, and 47 percent of Arizona respondents, ranked “immigration” second, after “inflation,” among the most important issues facing the United States.
Three in five said they “are closely following news around the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
54 percent of respondents said they favored mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, though 68 percent favored a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers: undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.
By a margin of 44 to 34 percent, respondents voiced a view that Donald Trump would “do a better job handling immigration.”
Of 1.8 million asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants who entered the United States in 2023—both at the border and elsewhere—12 percent settled in U.S. states considered “swing” or “battleground” states for the 2024 election, according to a Bloomberganalysis. Of these, 72 percent listed addresses in those states in counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
“From what I’ve read and seen from Vice President Harris, I think she tries to take a balanced approach,” Adriel Orozco of the American Immigration Council toldMother Jones. “She tries to take a humanistic lens to migration, considering her background as a child of migrants, but she’s also a prosecutor.”
Notes on recent oversight of Border Patrol
A report from the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which plays a role in overseeing treatment of unaccompanied children in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, found that of children surveyed in 2023 and 2024 in Arizona, nearly 4 in 10 reported verbal abuse from Border Patrol agents, including racist and derogatory language. One in ten reported physical abuse like being pushed, kicked, or handcuffed. Children frequently reported being denied medical care.
A response to a Newsweek Freedom of Information Act request revealed that 211 CBP personnel are under investigation for serious misconduct. Accusations include “17 alleged cases of domestic violence, 11 cases of sexual assault, and 10 cases of smuggling migrants across the border,” along with 11 cases of physically abusing a detainee, and 13 cases of association with criminal gangs.
CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility shared a report on Border Patrol agents’ participation in the delayed response to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, not far from the Del Rio-Eagle Pass border. As the New York Timesdescribed the report’s findings, “border agents had been just as confused and delayed as dozens of other state and local law enforcement agents inside the school by the chaotic and mostly leaderless response.”
An Arizona Republicinvestigation found that nearly a quarter of human smuggling suspects arrested at Arizona’s border don’t get prosecuted “because Border Patrol agents failed to convey adequate probable cause before making a traffic stop or because migrants are unable to serve as material witnesses in a case.” It added, “countless others” have avoided prosecution due to COVID-19, lack of criminal history, or prosecutors’ “Tucson Sector guidelines” for prioritizing cases.
Texas updates
In an article about Texas’s state government laying razor wire along the state border with New Mexico, Border Report revealed Border Patrol’s latest count of migrant deaths in its El Paso Sector, which includes far west Texas and New Mexico: 171 remains recovered in fiscal 2024 (since October). That is up sharply from 149 remains recovered in the sector in 2023, 71 in 2022, and 39 in 2021.
A report from the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Texas warned that federal and state immigration checkpoints combine with a state-level abortion ban to make it impossible for undocumented migrants to leave Texas to obtain reproductive health services. CBP and Border Patrol maintain 19 federal checkpoints in the state of Texas, making road travel difficult for those without documentation.
NPRinvestigated the deployment of National Guard troops from Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) controversial“Operation Lone Star.” The three non-border, Republican-governed states have spent a combined $7.1 million to send troops to the border.
The El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights and the Texas Civil Rights Project held a news conference to report on numerous recent examples of Texas National Guard soldiers, working in support of Operation Lone Star, physically and verbally abusing migrants at the borderline. (WOLA published a September 13 commentary documenting similar credible allegations.)
Gov. Abbott designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, an organized crime group, a “terrorist organization,” calling them “an extreme version of the heinous MS-13 gang.” Border Patrol union representative Chris Cabrera, present at the announcement, said, “As a federal agent, we have no way of vetting these people other than the honor system. If they tell us their name, we can’t check against Venezuela’s database.”
Other news
A letter from over 75 organizations, organized by the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute, calls for improvements to the CBP One app‘s feature allowing asylum seekers to make appointments at border ports of entry. These include increasing the number of appointments, and improving protections for applicants who must spend many months in Mexico awaiting appointments. Some miss those appointments because they’ve been kidnapped by criminal organizations.
Asylum seekers interviewed by EFE in Ciudad Juárez said that while they deeply disliked the several-months-long waits for CBP One appointments, the app offered a process for entering the United States and turning themselves in to U.S. authorities that is “more orderly” and “a little safer.”
The independent Venezuelan daily Tal Cualfound that a “wave” of people leaving Venezuela has yet to materialize following stolen July 28 elections. Still, “it is clear that there is an increase in migratory movements compared to previous months.” Venezuela’s El Pitazoreported that about 1,500 people per week are crossing from the Venezuelan border state of Zulia into Colombia’s department of La Guajira, a portion of whom intend to migrate overland to the United States.
Citing official figures, a UNHCR update reported that 272,168 people entered Honduras irregularly, most with the intention of migrating to the United States, during January-July 2024. Because “not all persons on the move who enter Honduras irregularly register” with Honduran authorities, UNHCR estimated that 340,000 people transited the country during those 7 months. Panama reported a much smaller number (221,582) of people transiting the Darién Gap region during January-July 2024. Much of the difference is citizens of Nicaragua who pass through Honduras, plus citizens of other countries who avoid the Darién passage by flying to Nicaragua, taking advantage of the country’s less-restrictive visa policies.
A report from the Niskanen Center looked at the causes of increased migration of citizens of India to the United States. They include religious persecution, political instability in some regions, and economic dislocations. Recently more Indian migrants have been apprehended at the border with Canada than at the border with Mexico. Routes often begin in El Salvador (which now charges a large fee for visas) and Nicaragua, but increasingly begin in Bolivia, which requires overland travel through the Darién Gap.
The Republican-majority House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee held a September 18 hearing entitled “A Country Without Borders: How Biden-Harris’ Open-Borders Policies Have Undermined Our Safety and Security.” Witnesses at the contentious proceedings included a former Border Patrol sector chief; a Republican member of San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors; the mother of a woman allegedly raped and murdered by a man from El Salvador; and the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, which includes Nogales.
By a vote of 266-158, the House of Representatives passed the “Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act,” a Republican-led bill that makes deportable any non-citizen convicted of “a crime of domestic violence or a sex offense.” Advocates like the Tahirih Justice Center worried that the bill could jeopardize immigrant victims of those crimes: “Abusers who better understand the U.S. language and laws can prevent victims from accessing safety by threatening to expose immigrant victims to the police, ICE, and the deportation machine.”
The U.S. Senate passed the “ Southern Border Transparency Act,” which requires DHS to report in more detail about paroles and releases of migrants. (DHS reporting on migrant custody and transfers has in fact improved since this bill was introduced in late 2023.) It is not clear whether this bill will move in the House of Representatives.
Republican and Democratic legislators in both houses of Congress introduced the “Enhancing Southbound Inspections to Combat Cartels Act,” legislation that would increase inspections of outbound traffic from the United States to Mexico, seeking to combat flows principally of firearms and bulk cash.
Australian journalist Prue LeWarne reported about encounters with migrants—and migration agents—after journeying on Mexico’s “La Bestia” cargo train.
U.S. law enforcement officials interviewed by Border Report confirmed a Mexican police claim that traffickers have been using drones to move drugs from the border state of Chihuahua, including between densely populated urban areas along the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.
“I wish this entire year at the border was just a movie. I wish it was an improbable fiction that leaders from both major political parties are competing to see who can be the cruelest,” wrote Adriana Jasso, who spent a year working with asylum seekers at the border wall with American Friends Service Committee, at the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Adam Isacson
