Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Post-Election Migration, Relations with Mexico, Incoming Administration Plans

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.

Support ad-free, paywall-free Weekly Border Updates. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to sustain this effort. Please contribute now and support our work.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• Migration is reduced at the border, but may be activating in southern Mexico

Preliminary data indicate that Border Patrol apprehended fewer migrants at the border in November than any month since July 2020. An expected post-election rush, with migrants seeking to get to the United States before Donald Trump’s inauguration, has not happened. In southern Mexico, though, people appear to be arriving in larger numbers and seeking to migrate in large groups.

• Relations with Mexico following Trump’s tariff threat

President-Elect Trump appeared to pull down his November 25 threat to slap tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods until they stop the entry of migrants and drugs, following a reportedly cordial phone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. However, Sheinbaum showed a willingness to push back, disputing Trump’s characterization of what was agreed. A future area of disagreement may be Mexico’s willingness to accept deportations of migrants from third countries.

• Notes on the incoming Trump administration’s border and migration plans

This section lists several analyses and reports about the incoming administration’s hardline approach to the border and migration. Topics include potential use of the U.S. military, the Texas state government’s crackdown serving as a model or template, the shaky future of alternative migration pathways, and signs that at least some Democrats are moving rightward.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Migration is reduced at the border, but may be activating in southern Mexico

“U.S. authorities made about 46,700 arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico in November, down about 17 percent from October to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency,” reported the Associated Press’s Elliot Spagat. That preliminary figure would be the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data table

The chart depicts migration rising in the final months of the Trump administration, as the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy ceased to deter people from coming to the border. Migrant apprehensions jumped higher in early 2021, after Donald Trump left office and the world’s borders reopened nearly a year into the pandemic.

Border Patrol apprehensions then dropped in January 2024 as Mexico’s government, at the Biden administration’s behest, started cracking down harder on migrants transiting the country. The chart shows a further drop in June 2024 as the Biden administration banned most asylum access between border ports of entry, in a move that continues to face legal challenges.

No rush to the border has materialized in the month since Donald Trump’s November 5 presidential election victory. Events have not borne out the expectation that migrants stranded in Mexico would seek to get to U.S. soil before January 20, when Trump is to take office and begin carrying out hardline border and migration policies.

A pre-inauguration increase in migration remains possible. The Mexican daily Excelsior reported from Nogales that Mexican smugglers, sensing migrants’ increased motivation, have raised their fees since Trump’s election. Other media reports have pointed to greater numbers of people turning themselves in to U.S. authorities in Texas, especially in the Del Rio Sector near Eagle Pass, a region that has been relatively quiet in 2024. Across from Eagle Pass, in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, the University of Texas Strauss Center’s latest quarterly report on asylum processing found “an increase in the number of migrants passing through.” One cause may be “bus companies beginning to transport migrants to the city again.”

A single group of 300 people turned themselves in to Border Patrol in Eagle Pass on November 28, while federal and Texas authorities reported over 100 unaccompanied children—including toddlers—crossing into the state between November 24 and December 1.

Activity is increasing in southern Mexico, where local activists told Spain’s El País that the daily flow of migrants across the border from Guatemala has risen to “between 800 and 1,200” from “around 300” before the U.S. election. “Activists have called this increase ‘the Trump effect,’” noted reporter Bryan Avelar.

Trump’s victory presents difficult choices to people inside Mexico who had hoped to seek asylum in the United States, usually by awaiting appointments at official border crossings using Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One smartphone app. The incoming administration may take steps to eliminate even that access to the U.S. asylum system; during the campaign, Trump called CBP One “the Kamala phone app” and promised to shut down its use to make appointments at ports of entry.

“Though there is no official figure,” the Guardian reported, “local human rights organizations estimate there is currently a floating population of perhaps 50,000 migrants in Tapachula,” the city near Mexico’s border with Guatemala where most migrants arrive after passing through Central America. People lacking Mexican documentation often end up stranded in Tapachula as security and migration forces endeavor to keep them there.

Located in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state, Tapachula offers few opportunities to earn money while waiting. Meanwhile, the threat of ransom kidnappings and other organized crime victimization has risen sharply over the past year. Mexican authorities last week reported a rare arrest of four kidnappers at a notorious site near Tapachula where they were holding their victims.

Many thousands more are in other cities across Mexico. For example, the daily La Jornada estimated that 4,000 are living in 4 encampments in Mexico City.

Getting across Mexico has become more difficult since the beginning of 2024, when Mexico stepped up operations to block migrants’ progress, busing tens of thousands of them back to cities in the country’s far south. On December 3 alone, Mexican military and state police forces detained over 5,200 migrants, Reuters reported. By comparison, over the first 8 months of 2024, Mexico reported a daily average of 3,807 “events” of migrants blocked or detained, dramatically more than previous years’ averages.

For more background on Mexico’s migration control policies, see a December 4 brief published by the Congressional Research Service. That document points out that “from FY2015 to FY2023, the [U.S.] State Department provided more than $176.6 million in International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) funding to support Mexico’s immigration control efforts.”

Numerous reports have drawn attention to so-called “caravans”—large groups of migrants traveling together—forming in Tapachula and walking through Chiapas. No caravan has made it to the U.S. border intact in more than five years, as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reminded Donald Trump in a response to the President-Elect’s threat to impose tariffs (discussed below).

Still, migrants opt to walk together, at least in the first several dozen miles from Mexico’s border with Guatemala, out of a belief in “safety in numbers” without hiring a highly paid smuggler, or out of frustration with the Mexican government’s migration and asylum systems. As they walk along roads in the heat of southern Mexico, authorities prevent them from boarding vehicles; few “caravans” make it even as far as Mexico City, which is still over 1,000 miles from the U.S. border.

“The caravans are becoming larger and larger,” Ricardo Santiago of Doctors Without Borders told Al Jazeera. “If in September and October they were made up of a few hundred people, now they are made up of thousands.” El País cited five groups forming in Tapachula in the past few weeks; La Jornada counted seven in three months.

A group of about 1,500 people who departed on December 2 from Tapachula had “stalled” two days later a short distance away in Escuintla, Chiapas, EFE reported. However, a spokesperson said that 80 percent remain determined to reach Mexico City, 650 miles from Tapachula. “We have to pick up the pace, we don’t know what measures Trump is going to take,” a Venezuelan man had told Agénce France Presse.

While some people migrating through Mexico appear determined to reach the United States before Inauguration Day, Reuters spoke to a dozen others, including some who traveled overland from Venezuela, who are considering giving up and returning home.

The top migration officials of Mexico and Guatemala met twice in the past week to discuss how to better coordinate their management of migratory flows along the two countries’ border. One of those meetings involved Mexican Interior Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez. The Secretary earlier told Mexican legislators “that the Mexican government is prepared to respond firmly to any threat or action by the next U.S. administration,” according to the daily Milenio.

Mexico’s refugee agency (Mexican Refugee Aid Commission, COMAR) published data on December 3 about the number of non-Mexican citizens who have sought asylum in Mexico’s system so far in 2024. The number has dropped significantly this year: 73,317 people through November, just over half of 2023’s full-year total (140,725) and on track to be the fewest, by far, since pandemic-affected 2020. As in previous years, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, and El Salvador are the nationalities whose citizens apply for protection in Mexico the most.

Data table

A chronically underfunded and overburdened agency, COMAR is currently in crisis, the Mexican news website Animal Político reported. It has not had a director since President Sheinbaum took office in October, and is facing a 6.5 percent budget cut even as a Trump crackdown might increase the number of migrants planning to stay in Mexico. The 2025 budget of Mexico’s migration enforcement agency (National Migration Institute, INM) will be 35 times the size of COMAR’s 47.9 million pesos (US$2.36 million).

Relations with Mexico following Trump’s tariff threat

Donald Trump dealt a shock to U.S.-Mexico relations after issuing a brief, vaguely worded threat on November 25 to impose across-the-board tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” Mexico’s recently inaugurated president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by pointing out that Mexico is already carrying out a historically tough crackdown on migration (see the discussion above), that the United States needs to do more to curb its demand for drugs and the availability of weapons that get smuggled into Mexico, and that she was prepared to respond with tariffs on U.S. goods.

The President and President-Elect then had a telephone conversation that both described as cordial. However, Sheinbaum disagreed with Trump’s characterization of her response as having “agreed to stop migration through Mexico” and committing to “effectively closing our southern border.” She told a press conference, “Everyone has their own way of communicating, but I can assure you, I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.”

The Mexican president also stepped up criticism of Trump’s plan for “mass deportation” of undocumented migrants in the United States, more than a third of whom are citizens of Mexico. “The United States would not eat if it were not for Mexican farm workers,” she pointed out on December 4.

(On December 5, WOLA published a podcast episode and a written Q&A explainer about this incident and its implications for migration, the synthetic drug overdose crisis, and U.S.-Mexico relations.)

Numerous analysts noted that the episode may foreshadow Trump’s approach to Mexico on issues like border security, migration, and counternarcotics, if not to foreign policy in general. It appears to consist of issuing vague demands that are impossible to satisfy, extracting vague concessions, and then declaring victory before a domestic audience. In this case, Trump may even seek to claim credit for a Mexican government migration crackdown that has already been stranding large numbers of people in the country since at least January 2024.

Many observers remarked on the tariff threat’s recklessness. The San Antonio Express-News interviewed Texas economists who warned that a 25 percent surcharge on goods entering from Mexico would devastate the economies of the state’s border regions.

Some of the incoming U.S. administration’s crackdown on migration may require Mexico’s cooperation, especially initiatives that may require Mexico to accept the return of non-Mexican migrants across the land border. On December 5, Sheinbaum told reporters that Mexico asked the Trump transition team to carry out its “mass deportation” plan without returning non-Mexican citizens to Mexico.

“The Trump transition team has discussed deporting migrants to places other than their home country if those nations will not accept them,” two sources told Reuters, confirming an NBC News report that governments contacted include those of Panama, Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, and Grenada.

The government of Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, agreed to accept returns of non-Mexicans on three occasions:

• The “Remain in Mexico” or “Migrant Protection Protocols” program (2019-2021 and, briefly by court order, 2021-2022) sent over 81,000 non-Mexican migrants back into Mexico to await asylum hearings in U.S. immigration courts. Many suffered attacks and abuses inside Mexico.
• The Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy (2020-2023) expelled migrants from seven countries other than Mexico, including would-be asylum seekers, nearly a million times.
• After Title 42 ended, Mexico’s government agreed to accept up to a combined 30,000 deportations per month of citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. This latter policy continues, although at a slower tempo: in October, just 1,524 citizens of those countries crossed the border without authorization, making them potentially subject to deportation under the Biden administration’s May 2023 rule limiting asylum access.

Newsweek reported that the incoming Trump administration plans to revive the Remain in Mexico policy “within months” of inauguration. “We’ll probably take a little bit of time to reinstate because you have to negotiate that with the government of Mexico, but I believe they will do that as well,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told the publication. It is unclear whether Mexico would agree to a renewed Remain in Mexico program and, if so, on what scale it would operate.

Migration has not been a major campaign or public opinion issue in Mexico. However, as migrants transiting the country have increased both in number and geographical diversity, anti-migrant sentiment has been growing, noted a USA Today analysis by reporter Lauren Villagrán. It cites an October UNHCR poll finding that “nearly a third of respondents believed migrants should only be allowed to transit rapidly through Mexico to the U.S., while 13% believed their border should be closed and migrants deported.”

Notes on the incoming Trump administration’s border and migration plans

As the U.S. government prepares for a transfer of power, the incoming Trump administration continues to make personnel and policy pronouncements.

As this update goes to publication on December 6, Trump has announced that his nominee to be commissioner of CBP will be Rodney Scott, who was the chief of Border Patrol from the latter part of the Trump administration into the first few months of the Biden administration, which dismissed him. Scott has since been a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s border and migration policies. The President-Elect also named Caleb Vitello, a career official with a lower profile than Scott, to head ICE in an acting capacity.

In addition to the exchanges with Mexico listed above, the past week saw the following developments and resources.

Soldiers and law enforcement

• At Just Security, Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice produced a primer explaining the legal framework that would allow the new administration to use U.S. military personnel to carry out immigration enforcement on U.S. soil. (WOLA’s November 22 Border Update includes a discussion of these authorities.)
• At InkStick Media, Tyler Hicks reported on how sheriffs and other local law enforcement across Texas and Oklahoma are gearing up to assist deportations alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the next administration, noting that self-styled militia groups may play a role too.

Texas

• At the Washington Post, Arelis Hernández and Molly Hennessy-Fiske reported that the Texas state government’s Republican leadership is “vying to make Texas the launching pad” for the next administration’s border crackdown and mass deportation effort. “The leadership of Texas is trying to create a model for the federal government that is exceptionally tough and exceptionally cruel to immigrants,” said Daniel Hatoum of the Texas Civil Rights Project. The next administration might seek to reimburse Texas for expenses incurred carrying out its controversial $11 billion-plus “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown.
• The New York Times’s J. David Goodman came to a similar conclusion about Texas’s crackdown becoming a template for the next administration’s border policies. “This is a model we can take across the country,” the incoming White House “border czar,” former acting ICE director Thomas Homan, said while visiting Eagle Pass, Texas. While Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) bused released asylum seekers to Democratic-governed cities during the Biden administration, Kristin Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council pointed out that now, “They could just turn those buses around and bus immigrants from blue cities back to Texas” to be staged for deportation.
• Reports at the Austin American-Statesman and the New York Post found that Texas is considering using buses to send migrants directly to ICE custody instead of to Democratic cities. However, since the CBP-released migrants aboard Texas’s buses have all had documentation—usually, notices to appear in immigration court—and approval for release, it is not clear why they would be bused to detention.
• At the Border Chronicle, Gabb Schivone reported on the large and continuing deployment of Florida state troopers and guard personnel to Texas’s border region, another model that could expand under Trump.
• Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), a Democratic congressman representing Laredo and part of the Rio Grande Valley, told NewsNation that he looks forward to collaborating with Homan on aspects of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” policy. “We can deport people quickly under Title A, we can do ‘stay in Mexico,’ we can do so many things on policies that can work right away,” Cuellar said. The Representative also told Newsweek that the “wall of buoys” that Gov. Abbott has installed in the Rio Grande outside Eagle Pass was a measure that he suggested years ago. Cuellar, currently under indictment and facing bribery and money laundering charges, is one of the House’s most conservative Democrats.

Impact on DHS

• Bloomberg Government reported on concerns among some Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees that the incoming administration’s single-minded border and immigration focus could reduce resources and bandwidth for the Department’s many other functions, from the Secret Service to the Coast Guard to the Transportation Security Administration. The article covers authoritarianism concerns as well: Spencer Reynolds, a former DHS official now at the Brennan Center, said that “DHS is ‘primed to lead a crackdown on dissent’ under Trump because the Biden administration hasn’t created adequate guardrails on its intelligence and law enforcement practices.”
• Politico reported on concerns that the border and deportation focus could deplete resources from a vital DHS component: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which assists Americans affected by natural disasters.

The future of TPS and DACA

• At Vox, Nicole Narea covered the likelihood that the incoming administration may revoke, or refuse to renew, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations currently protecting at least 860,000 people from over 16 countries from deportation.
• Three Democratic senators sent President Joe Biden a letter asking him, before he leaves office, to grant and extend existing TPS designations and expedite renewals and safeguards for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries, to complicate possible Trump efforts to undo those programs’ protections.

Other reports and analyses

• At the Intercept, Sam Biddle asked more than three dozen data technology companies whether they planned to assist the incoming administration’s border and deportation efforts; these companies’ potential role raises privacy and civil liberties concerns. Only four companies were willing to comment.
• At the U.K. Independent, Josh Marcus discussed the environmental and human rights harms of the first Trump administration’s 458 miles of border wall construction or replacement, while noting that Donald Trump rarely refers to the wall lately.
• The Hill reported on a lunch between Democratic senators during which many criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the border, lamenting that it wasn’t tougher and didn’t leave the Trump-era Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy in place beyond May 2023. There appeared to be a consensus among the unnamed attendees that “the party needs to listen to Sinema and Democrats such as Brown, Tester, Rosen, Shaheen, and Hassan who want the party to tack to the center on border security.”
• A report from the National Immigration Law Center and Human Rights First urged the Biden administration to act in its final days to guarantee asylum seekers’ access to legal counsel while in CBP custody.

Other news

• An alarming mobile phone video, recorded on November 27, showed a Border Patrol vehicle hitting a person in an area on U.S. soil but south of the border wall, not far from the San Ysidro port of entry between San Diego and Tijuana. The video shows the individual flipping and then running back into Mexico. “The disturbing part to me is that there aren’t any brake lights, it’s a direct hit, and that raises a question about whether the intention was to strike the individual as a way to stop and apprehend him, which just goes against any type of policy that we would have in place,” said Pedro Ríos of the American Friends Service Committee. A CBP statement acknowledged that “an agent driving a Border Patrol vehicle collided with an individual who then absconded into Mexico.”
• A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that DHS law enforcement agencies lack policies or procedures to assess whether there is “bias risk” in their use of technologies for detection, observation, monitoring, or surveillance, including those that use artificial intelligence. Agencies’ policies for the use of technologies “did not always address key privacy protections,” GAO added.
• The latest monthly report on ICE deportation flights from Thomas Cartwright of Witness at the Border found no increase in such flights in November. This is partly due to reduced migrant apprehensions at the border.
• The ICE flights report counted zero deportation flights to violence-battered Haiti in November, after one in October. However, ICE sent a plane to Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, on December 3. (The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is closed to international flights due to security concerns.) “The first deportation flight since last month’s gang attacks grounded U.S. flights landed in Cap-Haïtien came despite warnings from human rights groups and the United Nations about returning people to a country gripped in chaos,” reported Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald.
• Cartwright’s report noted that Panama operated 34 deportation flights between August and November, removing people who had migrated through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region. Of the planes, 24 went to Colombia, 7 to Ecuador, 2 to India, and 1 to Vietnam. During those four months, they removed about 1,370 people, or 1.8 percent of the total Darién Gap migration.
• The director of Panama’s migration agency said that Panama, with U.S. assistance, has spent about $2.2 million on the 34 flights aiming to deport people on about 3 planes per week. Of the 34 flights, Cartwright reported, 32 were funded by the U.S. government, which has allocated $6 million to support Panama’s deportation flights.
• Roger Mojica, the agency director, added that only about 9,000 people migrated through the Darién Gap in November, down sharply from 23,000 in October and 25,000 in September. As WOLA’s November 15 Border Update observed, bad weather contributed.
• The head of the Guatemalan government’s migration agency (Guatemalan Migration Institute, IGM), Danilo Rivera, announced a new initiative to register migrants transiting the country. “It is concerning that lacking internal regularization is fostering human trafficking networks,” the official said. Rivera cited “a right to be able, as a country, not to filter the United States but to protect ourselves.”
• While Rivera said that “Guatemalan regulations do not contemplate deportation or expulsion,” the IGM expelled 22,636 migrants from Guatemalan territory during the first 11 months of 2024, EFE reported. Most were expelled into Honduras; the vast majority were citizens of Venezuela (17,653), followed by Colombia (1,690) and Ecuador (1,042).
• A two-year study with thirty-six motion-activated trail cameras in Arizona found that recently built border wall segments’ “tall, bollard-style barriers reduced overall wildlife crossings by 86% and left bears, deer, mountain lions, badgers and wild turkeys with no way across, because they can’t seem to squeeze through the 4-inch openings between the vertical steel beams,” the Arizona Daily Star reported.
• A Cuban woman was hospitalized for “multiple trauma” after falling from the border wall near Mexicali, Mexico, on December 1.
• NBC San Diego profiled Ana, a 21-year-old woman from Michoacán, Mexico who remains hospitalized and unable to walk after falling from a 30-foot Trump-era border wall segment on October 22.
• Noticias Telemundo accompanied humanitarian workers in Arizona who say that the number of deceased migrants recovered in deserts on the U.S. side of the border significantly exceeds Border Patrol’s official count. A CBP spokesperson told Telemundo’s Albinson Linares that “the differences result from a specific change in the agency’s work. Under a border security initiative that ended in 2012, Border Patrol was responsible for trying to find as many deaths as possible in border counties. But when the initiative ended, it began tracking only the deaths and remains it found in daily patrols and enforcement activities,” and through collaborations with other local actors.
• The Justice Department has charged three U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Fort Cavazos in Killeen, Texas, with running an operation to smuggle migrants from Mexico and Guatemala.
• At the New York Review of Books, author and journalist John Washington reviewed Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings, the winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. De León “spent almost seven years with a group of Honduran smugglers, or guías (guides) as they prefer to be called, ferrying people through Mexico.” Washington praises the book but raises some ethical questions about De León’s approach, which involved witnessing violence and giving cash to some of his subjects.