Border Patrol apprehended 53,881 migrants in September between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry, according to preliminary data. That would be the lowest monthly total since August 2020 and the third straight month of apprehensions in the mid-50,000s. A crackdown in Mexico, followed months later by a Biden administration rule restricting asylum access, substantially explains the reduction from record levels in late 2023. Numbers have ceased going down, however, indicating that the drop may not be long-lasting..
A collection of links to news coverage of border and migration issues in the campaign. They include Donald Trump’s false linking of disaster assistance and migrant assistance, Trump’s comments indicating that migrants have brought “bad genes,” Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, and polls showing contradictory points of view.
The Biden administration will not renew a two-year humanitarian parole status granted to up to 30,000 citizens per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In order to avoid falling into a legal limbo, parole beneficiaries will have to adjust their status, applying for Temporary Protected Status, asylum, or other options if they exist.
Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has named a new head of the Mexican government’s migration agency (INM). Sergio Salomón Céspedes will not take office until December, when he finishes his term as governor of Puebla, and the current INM director, Francisco Garduño, will stay on. This may point to some continuity in the new government’s approach to migration. Civilian prosecutors have meanwhile begun investigating an October 1 incident in Chiapas in which Army personnel fired on a vehicle carrying migrants, killing six of them.
THE FULL UPDATE:
September Border Patrol apprehensions remained in the mid-50,000s
CBS News, USA Today, and the Washington Examiner reported preliminary Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data indicating that Border Patrol apprehended 53,881 migrants in September between U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. That would be the smallest total of the Biden administration, down from 56,399 in July and 58,038 in August.
The Border Patrol figure would be the fewest since August 2020, when Donald Trump was president, and less than the monthly average for 2019.
September is the third month in a row in which Border Patrol apprehensions have stayed in the mid-50,000s. In December 2023, apprehensions reached a record of nearly 250,000. Then, in January 2024, the government of Mexico began an ongoing crackdown on migration transiting its territory, which brought the monthly number down to the 110,000s or 120,000s through May. Migration began dropping further after the Biden administration, on June 4, issued a proclamation and rule blocking most access to the U.S. asylum system for people who cross the border between ports of entry.
Another 48,000 people came to the border’s ports of entry in September, most of them with CBP One appointments.
The foreign minister of Honduras stated that U.S. aerial deportations of Honduran citizens fell 35 percent from 2023 to 2024. This decline corresponds with a 35 percent drop in Border Patrol apprehensions of Honduran citizens at the U.S.-Mexico border, comparing an average month in fiscal 2023 to an average month in fiscal 2024 (for which 11 months of data are available).
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated 105 removal flights worldwide in September, according to the latest monthly report from Witness at the Border. That is the fewest since July 2023; reduced apprehensions at the border are a likely factor.
The report’s author, Thomas Cartwright, has also been tracking Panama’s stepped-up deportation flights—most of them supported by U.S. funding—of migrants apprehended exiting the Darién Gap route. Between early August and October 5, the report notes 16 flights, 12 to Colombia, 3 to Ecuador, and 1 to India. Those planes carried 634 people, which Cartwright notes is equivalent to 1.4 percent of total migration through the Darién during that period.
This is far from the first time that crackdowns have reduced migration at the border for several months at a time. In the past, even tough measures like the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy did not keep the numbers down for long, and it is notable that migration has plateaued since July.
Notes about the 2024 campaign and the border
Fact-checks have debunked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claims that a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program to shelter recently released migrants has “stolen” funds that would relieve victims of Hurricane Helene. FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which helps keep migrants from being released onto border cities’ streets, is funded through a separate channel, through CBP, and is less than 2 percent as large as FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler noted that the only time FEMA disaster funds were raided to fund migrant response was in 2019, when Trump was president.
Jonathan Blitzer, at the New Yorker, and Jamelle Bouie, at the New York Times, published critiques of the Trump-Vance campaign’s view that “mass deportation” could be a policy solution to address problems ranging from housing costs to crime. Blitzer raised concerns about deporting beneficiaries of documented statuses that depend on presidential approval, like humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status.
“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump told a conservative radio host. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” apparently referring to migrants in the United States as genetically inferior. At Vox, Zack Beauchamp analyzed the meaning of Trump’s remark: “Immigration is an existential threat to America, per Trump, because it brings in people who are genetically incapable of assimilating into the American body politic.”
Trump said that if elected, he would bring into his administration Tom Homan, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) known for his hard-line, pro-deportation views. Homan ran ICE during the 2017-2018 family separation controversy at the border. In 2023, Homan told the Conservative Political Action Conference: “I’m sick and tired of hearing about the family separation… I don’t give a s—, right? Bottom line is, we enforced the law.”
At CBS News 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker asked Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whether it was “a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did” after Donald Trump left office. (The Biden administration left Trump’s Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy in place for over 27 months.) Harris replied, “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions,” adding that the Biden-Harris administration’s recent asylum restrictions at the border have cut Border Patrol apprehensions in half. Whitaker sought to ask whether the administration should have acted earlier to restrict asylum, though the legal basis for the June ban on most asylum access between border ports of entry remains in dispute.
The Washington Postnoted that while some pro-immigration organizations are unhappy with Democrats’ rightward turn on issues like asylum access, they are muting their criticism during the campaign between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who promises a much harder line.
“Democrats have traveled a long arc in the last four years,” read a New York Times newsletter from Hamed Aleaziz. “When Biden took office, he spoke warmly of migrants seeking asylum and even tried to pause deportations altogether. (A court said no.) As his political fortunes sank, he turned toward deterring migrants. Finally, in June, he took a hard line.”
A Yahoo News / YouGovpoll found contradictory views of border and migration policy among U.S. respondents. Fifty-one percent agreed with Donald Trump’s statement that “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” At the same time, though, 73 percent agreed with Kamala Harris’s statement: “I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane. We can and we must do both.” Forty-nine percent favored “rounding up, detaining and expelling millions of undocumented immigrants,” 37 percent favored moving U.S. troops from overseas to the border, and 52 percent supported building more border walls. However, 51 percent support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants.
In what he called “one of the most dramatic swings in the history of U.S. public opinion,” Rogé Karma at the Atlantic pointed out that the share of U.S. respondents telling the Gallup polling organization “that immigration should decrease” has risen from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent now. This shift has hardened both parties’ rhetoric during the 2024 election campaign.
Humanitarian parole recipients will not be able to renew their status
This month marks two years since the Biden administration inaugurated a program allowing citizens of Venezuela to reside and work in the United States with a two-year humanitarian parole status. The administration expanded it in January 2023 to encompass up to a combined 30,000 people per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Now, CBS Newsrevealed, the administration does not plan to allow beneficiaries torenew their humanitarian parole. If they do not seek to adjust their status, parole recipients will find themselves in legal limbo, subject to possible removal.
The program allows people to apply online from elsewhere and arrive by air, avoiding the U.S.-Mexico border, if they have passports and U.S.-based sponsors. Mexico used the program’s existence to justify accepting up to 30,000 monthly land-border deportations of those countries’ citizens. The program remains open to new applicants, but it is now clear that their status will expire in two years.
Venezuelans who arrived in the United States before July 2023 are eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a non-permanent but firmer documented status. As a result, for the next eight or nine months at least, most Venezuelans facing expiration of their parole have another option. Haitians who arrived before June 2024 may also have a TPS option.
A Voice of Americaarticle pointed out that most Cuban parole recipients can apply for adjustment of status under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 after they have been in the United States for a year. Nicaraguan parole recipients arrived after their countries’ cutoff date for TPS; applying for asylum within a year of arriving in the United States may be an option for remaining in the United States with documented status, if they can prove credible fear of persecution upon return.
Cuba’s El Toquespoke with Cuban citizens who had applied to enter the humanitarian parole program. They found the parole procedure so backlogged that it was faster to go to Mexico and wait several months for a CBP One appointment at the border.
Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign has made clear its intention to undo the humanitarian parole and CBP One programs, and may not renew nationalities’ TPS when they next expire.
Three pieces probed reactions to the Biden administration’s parole non-renewal decision and a September 30 adjustment making it harder to reverse a June asylum restriction at the border.
Boston Globe columnist Marcela García argued that with these moves the Democrats, particularly Kamala Harris’s election campaign, are trying to preserve immigration pathways while simultaneously trying to minimize the lead that Donald Trump currently enjoys when voters are polled on the border and migration issue.
Times of San Diegospoke to local migrant rights advocates and service providers who don’t see recent harder-line policies having a long-term impact on migration flows. “I think it’s going to collapse like it’s collapsed in the past, and at some point we’re hoping that humane, sensible solutions will be taken more seriously,” said Margaret Cargioli of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “Our leaders are choosing politics over what’s right, and we cannot allow that,” added Lilian Serrano of the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
In a city with well over 100,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the Houston Chroniclespoke to local migration advocates and service providers who view the non-renewal of humanitarian parole as “electoral politics” and are urging community members to seek alternative protection pathways and “not to panic.”
Mexico’s new government is indicating no break with its predecessor’s migration policies
Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has named a new director of the country’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM). Sergio Salomón Céspedes, currently the governor of the state of Puebla, is a career politician who began in the once-dominant PRI political party. His resume includes some time administering the Mexican Red Cross, but he appears to have little background in migration policy.
In December, Céspedes will replace Francisco Garduño, a former prisons official who has headed INM since 2019, most of the government of Sheinbaum’s predecessor from the same political party, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Garduño faces criminal charges related to a March 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez INM detention facility that killed 40 migrants. Garduño will stay on for two more months, Sheinbaum said, because “he is working on a comprehensive strategy that President López Obrador made for the migration issue, but there are still pending and important issues in the Institute.”
This seems to indicate continuity on migration policy between López Obrador and Sheinbaum, likely including a commitment to continue a strategy of massively busing migrants to the southern part of the country to await CBP One appointments or apply for asylum or other status in Mexico.
Mexico meanwhile began reckoning with an October 1killing of six migrants by Mexican Army soldiers in the southern state of Chiapas. Another 10 were wounded. That evening, soldiers chased, then fired on, a pickup truck carrying 33 migrants about 50 miles inland from the Guatemala border. Mexico’s Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) claimed that the vehicle “evaded military personnel” and that soldiers heard “detonations.”
Two girls from Egypt, aged 18 and 11, were among the sixfatalities. “Three of the dead were from Egypt, and one each from Peru and Honduras. The other has apparently not yet been identified,” the Associated Press reported. Milenio cited a victim from El Salvador, but not Honduras.
President Sheinbaum called the incident “deplorable,” adding, “a situation like this cannot be repeated.” Sheinbaum said that civilian prosecutors are questioning the two soldiers who fired their weapons; they have not yet been charged with anything. She added that SEDENA initiated the legal complaint against the two soldiers, and that arrest warrants have been issued.
A prominent Mexican human rights organization, the Foundation for Justice, recalled that National Guard soldiers who killed migrants aboard a vehicle in Chiapas in 2021 still have not been brought to justice.
The Human Mobility Pastoral, part of the Episcopal Conference of Mexico’s Catholic church, condemned the shooting as “the consequence of the militarization of migration policy and a greater presence of the armed forces on the southern border.” Added a statement from numerous Mexican human rights organizations: “Mexico has chosen to implement a migration policy without a human rights focus, making use of military forces, such as the National Guard, the Navy or the Army, as mechanisms for migration control.”
Of surviving victims of the incident, most have been issued temporary documentation and are now near Mexico’s northern border, Milenioreported.
Other news
A U.S. federal government body that investigates inspectors-general submitted a report accusing Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General, of “substantial misconduct,” including reprisals against whistleblowers and providing misleading information to Congress. Cuffari, a Trump appointee, has come under fire from non-governmental watchdogs, particularly the Project on Government Oversight, for weakening oversight of a department that includes most U.S. border law enforcement agencies.
Axiospointed out that recently published FBI data covering 2023 showed “the average homicide rate of 11 border cities was lower than the national average”: 4.4 homicides per 100,000 residents, compared to 5.7 nationwide. The cities measured are Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and El Paso (Texas); Sunland Park (New Mexico); Nogales and Yuma (Arizona); and Calexico and San Diego (California).
After 30 years of “tough” border policies that have not discouraged people from migrating, Vicki Gaubeca of Human Rights Watch wrote at The Nation, “It’s time for U.S. leaders to acknowledge the folly of policies aimed at deterring immigration and to rethink how borders can be managed in a way that respects human rights.” The current drop in migrant numbers at the border, Gaubeca argued, is temporary: “the pendulum eventually swings back, no matter how much pain our policies inflict.”
In a Wilson Center interview, journalist Molly O’Toole explored how global migration patterns are transforming due to U.S. policies, economic conditions, and environmental crises. That is the overarching subject of O’Toole’s forthcoming book The Route, which traces migration from Brazil to the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s very difficult to think of a policy that the U.S. could conceive of that could stop people who are willing to die in order to make it,” she pointed out.
Andrew Selee and Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute authored an analysis discerning the outlines of “a new architecture for managing migration” emerging from the Biden administration’s combination of legal migration pathways, increased regional cooperation, and tightened asylum access at the border.
The Mexican-born population in the United States “shrank by more than 1 million people from its peak of 11.7 million in 2010 to 10.7 million in 2022 but has started growing again,” informed the Migration Policy Institute. “As of 2023, 10.9 million U.S. residents were immigrants from Mexico.” MPI estimated that, of the 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States in mid-2022, 5.1 million (45 percent) were from Mexico.
In Guatemala, elements of the Public Prosecutor’s Office—a separate branch of government whose leadership, unlike elected President Bernardo Arévalo, faces U.S. sanctions for corruption— raided five facilities run by the charity Save the Children. The prosecutors allege that the charity may be involved in trafficking unaccompanied migrant children. Hinting at a larger political agenda, the prosecutor’s office has asked the Texas state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), to collaborate in its investigation of alleged trafficking of Guatemalan children at the U.S. border. Paxton has been on a legal offensive against Texas charities that assist recently arrived migrants. “We reaffirm that we have never facilitated any transfer of children or adolescents out of Guatemala,” Save the Children, which has operated in Guatemala for over 40 years, told Agénce France Presse.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is asking the state’s legislature for an additional $2.88 billion to fund the state government’s border security crackdown, known as “Operation Lone Star.” The Dallas Morning News pointed out that this is “the largest ask in the Republican governor’s appropriations request for the 2026-27 budget cycle.” Operation Lone Star has already cost $11 billion since 2021; Border Patrol migrant apprehensions have not declined faster in Texas than they have in Arizona, which has no similar crackdown.
At a September 30 meeting of the Texas House Committee on State Affairs, Texas Public Radioreported, a court administration official revealed that U.S. citizens were 72 percent of those accused of smuggling immigrants in the state between May 2023 and April 2024. Less than 10 percent were from Mexico.
InSight Crime and Pirate Wire Services published analyses contending that the threat of the “Tren de Aragua,” a gang that emerged from Venezuela’s prisons and has the attention of U.S. law enforcement, is exaggerated. “Their reputation far exceeds their capabilities,” wrote Colombia-based reporter Joshua Collins at PWS. “The gang’s reputation appears to have grown more quickly than its actual presence in the U.S.,” concluded InSight Crime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit.
A “ caravan” of migrants that departed Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas over the weekend now numbers about 1,000 people and has walked about 45 miles. A woman from Venezuela told Milenio that her family “decided to leave Tapachula due to a lack of employment and opportunities, and in addition to the delay in the response from CBP One, they are forced to remain stranded at the southern border of Mexico.”