Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Presidential debate, Darién Gap, transiting Mexico, Texas notes
by
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
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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Migration and the border were principal topics at the September 10 presidential campaign debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Harris avoided specifics and pledged to support compromise legislation, which failed in the Senate in February, that would restrict asylum access. Trump made vitriolic and racist comments about migrants, some of which debate moderators had to fact-check on the spot.
The number of migrants transiting the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama, fell in August to the fewest since June 2022. Some of the drop may be a “wait and see” effect as migrants evaluate the actions of a new president in Panama who has promised increased deportation flights with U.S. support. Data from the first eight days of September, however, seem to point to a 41 percent increase in per-day Darién Gap migration over August’s average.
Mexico has begun having security force personnel accompany buses transporting migrants who have CBP One appointments at the U.S. border. Some press coverage last week covered the kidnappings, extortions, and other trauma suffered by migrants who seek to transit Mexico on their own.
Texas’s state government is persisting in a legal offensive against charities that assist migrants released from CBP custody at the border, and refusing a federal order to dismantle security-related construction on an island in the Rio Grande.
Migration and the border were principal topics at the September 10 presidential campaign debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.
Without going deep into specifics, Harris portrayed herself as a former border-state prosecutor whose “tough on border security” credentials included past efforts against cross-border organized crime.
Harris reiterated support for a bill, which failed in the U.S. Senate in February despite a negotiated compromise between Democratic and Republican senators, that “would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border” and “would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl.” That bill also included restrictions on access to asylum similar to those that the Biden administration imposed later, in June; Harris’s remarks did not mention asylum, though it was part of the debate moderator’s question.
Earlier, on September 9, The Harris-Walz campaign published a document outlining policy positions. That document also endorsed the February legislation. Without specifically mentioning asylum access, it asserted that Harris “and President Biden took action on their own”—referencing the June rule curtailing most asylum between ports of entry—“and now border crossings are at the lowest level in 4 years.”
Donald Trump’s frequent, vitriolic, and often false comments about the border and migrants (whom he said “have destroyed the fabric of our country”) provided the debate with some of its most colorful and remarked-upon moments. The Los Angeles Times’ Andrea Castillo cited several occasions when the former president steered his remarks back to his antipathy toward migration, even when another topic was at hand. (Harris derailed Trump, though, during the debate’s migration discussion, leading him to exhaust much allotted response time trying to refute a comment about his public rallies.)
In a September 9 Twitter exchange with billionaire Mark Cuban, the former president’s migration advisor, Stephen Miller, promised a “100% perfect deportation rate at the border,” using “Title 42/Safe 3rds/Remain in Mexico/Asylum Bars” if Trump is elected.
The campaign and other Republican surrogates amplified false and racist rumors that Haitian migrants were consuming people’s pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio. Trump leaned all the way into those false claims during the debate, stating that migrants were “eating the dogs…eating the cats” of the town’s residents. Trump also raised allegations that migrants are contributing to rising violent crime in the United States. Debate moderators fact-checked both claims: nobody is eating pets in Springfield, and U.S. crime rates are falling.
At Vox, Ian Millhiser published an explainer about the “racist, cat-eating conspiracy theory” that Trump amplified. NPR’s Jasmine Garsd found that racist anti-immigrant movements have a long history of accusing migrants of consuming house pets.
Other notable analyses of the debate’s border and migration-related content included the following.
Trump made occasional references to Venezuela. Days before the debate, he amplified since– debunked claims that members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua organized-crime group who arrived over the southern border had taken over apartment buildings in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. “In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state,” Trump said at a Wisconsin campaign rally. “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on the U.S. presence of the Tren de Aragua, which has begun to receive the level of attention that El Salvador’s MS-13 gang did during the Trump administration. Some of the group’s members appear to be sprinkled in among the approximately 700,000 Venezuelan citizens encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border since fiscal 2021. A “high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] official” told the Journal that “there are now more than 100 investigations in the U.S. involving suspected members of Tren de Aragua.”
In April, Insight Crime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit reported: “the few crimes attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in the United States appear to have no connection with the larger group or its leadership in Venezuela. And none of more than a dozen national, state, and local law enforcement agencies contacted by InSight Crime has reported any significant presence of Tren de Aragua.”
On September 11, Aurora’s Republican mayor and a Republican city council member put out a statement downplaying claims that the city is suffering a wave of Tren de Aragua-related crime.
In California on September 5 Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance (R), visited the borderline with local Republican politicians and Border Patrol agents. At “Whiskey 8,” the site along the border wall near San Diego where until recently many asylum seekers had been turning themselves in to U.S. authorities, Vance refused to rule out future migrant family separations under a second Trump administration.
For the first time in three months, Panama has updated official statistics about migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region.
On September 9, Panama’s National Migration Service updated that number: as of September 8, 244,243 people had migrated through the Darién Gap. During the first eight days of September, 6,058 people passed through. Notably, that average of 757 per day is 41 percent more than August’s average of 536.
Eight days’ data is not enough to tell us whether the past few months’ drop in Darién Gap migration is reversing. Some reversal is virtually certain, though: the recent drop is probably a short-term “wait and see” effect, as migrants and smugglers pause to evaluate the changes being implemented by Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, who was inaugurated on July 1. Mulino has ordered barbed wire laid across some jungle routes and has launched, with U.S. support, a deportation program that is sending a few planeloads of migrants back to their countries of origin every week.
Panama sent a U.S.-funded deportation flight to India, with 130 people aboard, on September 6. Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border cited a “believable” report that the flight cost $700,000 or “$5,400 per person.” On September 7, a smaller plane carried 29 people from Panama to Colombia, the fifth flight to Colombia since August 9.
In other aerial deportation news:
On September 11 Human Rights Watch published a third report since November on the Darién Gap, this one focused on how migration policies in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru have complicated the regularization and integration of Haitian and Venezuelan migrants, driving many to depart overland toward the United States.
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.”
The latter refers to an August 31 announcement from Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) that the country’s security forces will accompany buses transporting asylum seekers who have pending CBP One appointments at U.S. border ports of entry. Buses will depart from Mexico’s southern border states of Chiapas and Tabasco to the U.S. border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) makes 1,450 such appointments available to asylum seekers each day.
The INM posted a video on September 11 of the first bus transporting migrants across the country to their appointments. It departed Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, destined for the U.S. border-zone city of Reynosa.
Security force personnel accompany the buses because they pass through areas dominated by organized crime. The risk of kidnapping, assault, robbery, or worse during the passage across Mexico leaves migrants with post-traumatic stress. Kidnappings are the biggest trigger, a Ciudad Juárez-based lawyer with Jesuit Refugee Service told EFE. An anti-kidnapping organization reported two mass kidnappings of a total of 36 migrants, and 196 migrant kidnappings overall, just in July in Chihuahua, the state that includes Ciudad Juárez.
A study published in the journal Injury Epidemiology found that adults migrating toward the United States “are extorted on average $804 per research participant throughout the journey.” The most common extortion perpetrators that 85 respondents cited were police officers (80.6%), immigration officials (37.3%), organized crime (25.4%), and military personnel (20.9%). Extortion happened most often in Mexico (77.6%) and Guatemala (67.2%), two countries that seek to block, detain, and deport migrants as a matter of policy.
The Embassy of India in Mexico issued an advisory warning Indian citizens against travel in Mexico, citing the likelihood of prolonged detentions and deportations by Mexican forces, after three years of increasing numbers of Indian citizens passing through the country as they seek to migrate to the United States.
The late August expansion of the CBP One smartphone app’s geographic coverage to Mexico’s two southernmost states has saturated migrant shelters in Chiapas and Tabasco, La Jornada reported. The director of Tapachula’s El Buen Pastor shelter said that she is now serving 2,000 migrants per day, up from 600 to 700 before August 23, when people could begin using CBP One from Chiapas.
At Mexico’s northern border in Ciudad Juárez, the opposite is happening: the municipal government’s “Kiki Romero” migrant shelter is closing, Border Report reported. The border city’s population of migrants needing shelter has shrunk due to a Mexican government crackdown making transit of the country more difficult; the June Biden administration rule placing asylum out of reach for people who cross the border without a CBP One appointment; and the possibility of awaiting appointments using the backlogged app in other, usually safer, parts of Mexico.
In Ciudad Juárez, 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. The boy’s mother suffered a severed foot. It was the third or fourth train the family had boarded in their journey across Mexico.
