Updates from Adam Isacson (January 29, 2024)
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This week's edition is as jam-packed as you'd expect from someone working on border and migration policy at this moment. There's a weekly Border Update, a podcast, nine charts explaining December migration data, links about organized crime-tied corruption in the Americas, and a Spanish podcast about the U.S. elections. And of course, upcoming events and some recommended readings.
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: January 26, 2024
- Read this week's edition here. See past weekly updates here.
- For 2024 - read our daily border links posts here. You can subscribe to the daily border links list here.
THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
Republicans’ efforts to tie migration restrictions to Ukraine aid are sputtering in the Senate, as former president and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump has been calling conservative Republican senators and urging them to reject a deal. This is happening even after Democrats appear to have agreed to major curbs on asylum access, and after negotiators were voicing cautious optimism that legislative text might appear this week.
In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration and granted the federal Border Patrol permission to cut through razor-sharp concertina wire that Texas’s Republican-led state government has placed along the Rio Grande. The decision is limited in scope, not compelling Texas to do more than allow agents to cut or move wire. However, the state’s governor and some Republican legislators have invoked “invasion” rhetoric and even counseled ignoring the Supreme Court’s order.
Border Patrol appears to be apprehending 3,000 to 4,000 migrants per day border-wide, a sharp drop from an average of more than 8,000 per day in December. However, sector chiefs in Tucson and San Diego have reported increases following post-holiday lows. Migration levels in Honduras and Panama remain at their lowest in several months.
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WOLA Podcast: Understanding Regional Migration in an Election Year
Here’s a podcast about current regional migration trends that I recorded last Friday with Maureen and Stephanie from WOLA. They were brilliant. Here’s the text from the podcast landing page at wola.org:
As congressional negotiations place asylum and other legal protection pathways at risk, and as we approach a 2024 election year with migration becoming a higher priority for voters in the United States, we found it important to discuss the current moment’s complexities.
WOLA’s vice president for Programs, Maureen Meyer, former director for WOLA’s Mexico Program and co-founder of WOLA’s migration and border work, is joined by Mexico Program Director Stephanie Brewer, whose work on defense of human rights and demilitarization in Mexico has focused often on the rights of migrants, including a visit to the Arizona-Sonora border at the end of 2023.
This episode highlights some of the main migration trends and issues that we should all keep an eye on this year, including:
- Deterrence efforts will never reduce migration as long as the reasons people are fleeing remain unaddressed (the long-standing “root causes” approach). Such policies will only force people into more danger and fuel organized crime. “The question is not, are people going to migrate? The question is, where, how, and with who?”, explains Brewer.
- For this reason, maintaining consistent and reliable legal pathways is more important than ever, and the ongoing assaults on these pathways—including the right to seek asylum and humanitarian parole—are harmful and counterproductive.
- There can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution for the variety of populations currently in movement, and the focus should no longer be on ineffective policies of deterrence and enforcement. “It’s a long term game that certainly doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker for political campaigns,” Meyer points out.
- Organized crime is a huge factor in regional migration—both as a driver of migration and as a facilitator. Official corruption and impunity enable these systems, a point that migration policies often fail to address. Brewer notes that during her trip to Arizona’s southern border in December 2023, the vast majority of migrants she spoke to were Mexican, and among them, the vast majority cited violence and organized crime as the driving factor. In recent months, Mexican families have been the number one nationality coming to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.
- It is a regional issue, not just a U.S. issue, as people are seeking asylum and integration in many different countries. Mexico, for instance, received 140,000 asylum applications in 2023. This makes integration efforts extremely important: many people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border had attempted to resettle elsewhere first. “It’s a twofold of the legal status itself, but then real integration efforts that are both economic and educational, but also addressing xenophobia and not creating resentment in local communities,” explains Meyer.
Download the podcast episode’s .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.
Charts: Migration at the U.S.-Mexico Border through December 2023
Late on Friday the 26th, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its dataset of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border through December. Here are some highlights, expressed as nine charts.
Migrants apprehended by Border Patrol (in border areas between ports of entry)
Between ports of entry, CBP’s Border Patrol component apprehended 249,785 people last month. That is probably a monthly record. It is at least the largest amount measured since October 1999, the earliest month for which Border Patrol makes monthly data available.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions jumped 31 percent from November (191,112). Increased migration from Venezuela, which more than doubled, accounted for 41 percent of the border-wide month-to-month increase.
December also saw big increases in migration between ports of entry from the other three nationalities (in addition to Venezuela) whose citizens the Biden administration allows to apply for its humanitarian parole program: Cuba (+192 percent from November to December), Haiti (+1,266 percent), and Nicaragua (+91 percent). This may mean that the humanitarian parole program is saturated by demand and insufficient supply.
It was the first month since May 2022 that more than 1,000 Haitian citizens crossed between the ports of entry and ended up in Border Patrol custody.
CBP encounters with migrants at ports of entry
At the official border crossings, CBP’s Office of Field Operations encountered 52,249 migrants. This is a record—though not by a wide margin, as CBP tightly controls who gets to step on U.S. soil and approach its ports of entry. Since July 2023, port-of-entry encounters have been within a narrow band: between 50,837 and 52,249. Of December’s encounters, CBP’s release indicates, 45,770 (88 percent, 1,476 per day) had made appointments using the CBP One smartphone app.
All encounters
Combine the Border Patrol and port-of-entry totals, and U.S. border authorities encountered 302,034 people at the U.S.-Mexico border last month. That is a record.
Border Patrol apprehensions of unaccompanied children, or parents and children
46 percent of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol between ports of entry in December were members of family units (41 percent) or minors who arrived unaccompanied (5 percent). That is the 24th-highest child-and-family share of Border Patrol’s last 147 months, and probably ever: high, but nowhere near a record.
The overall number of children and families (114,192), however, was the second-most ever, nearly matching the record set in September 2023.
CBP encounters with family units (parents with children)
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw the second-highest-ever monthly total of family unit-member encounters: 123,512, just short of September 2023’s record total of 123,815.
Family-unit encounters rose 19 percent from November to December. Citizens of Venezuela arriving as families accounted for 38 percent of the month-to-month increase, and citizens of Mexico accounted for 28 percent.
CBP encounters with unaccompanied minors
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 12,467 children arrive at the border unaccompanied. That was the 17th-highest monthly total ever, and a 5 percent increase over November 2023.
The nationalities that contributed most to the increase in unaccompanied child arrivals were Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Arrivals from El Salvador and Honduras both declined.
Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults
When the pandemic-area Title 42 expulsions policy was in effect, Border Patrol apprehensions of single adults skyrocketed. The reasoning was that (a) a large portion of adult migrants were seeking to evade apprehension, not turn themselves in to seek asylum; and (b) when Title 42 caused them to be expelled to Mexico after a very brief time in Border Patrol custody, many attempted to migrate again, leading to many more repeat apprehensions.
That was borne out in the months after Title 42 ended, when single adult apprehensions dropped sharply. However, even without a quick expulsions policy in place, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of single adult migrants between the ports of entry jumped 41 percent from November to December, from 96,478 to 135,593. This was the 8th largest monthly total of single adult migrant apprehensions of the past 147 months.
CBP encounters with single adults
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions with port-of-entry encounters, December 2023 saw 164,907 migrants arrive as single adults, a 32 percent increase over November (125,332). Single adult migrants from Venezuela and Guatemala accounted for nearly two-thirds of the increase, while citizens of Mexico declined slightly.
Organized Crime-Tied Corruption in the Americas: Some Links from the Past Month
A key detonating factor in Ecuador‘s January outbreak of violence was “Operation Metastasis,” a December 2023 campaign by the national prosecutor’s office targeting government and judicial officials tied to the country’s organized crime groups. Among 30 people charged, the New York Times reported, “were judges accused of granting gang leaders favorable rulings, police officials who were said to have altered evidence and delivered weapons to prisons, and the former director of the prison authority himself.”
This corruption worsened after a 2018 shakeup and reduction of the central government’s security administration, forced by economic austerity measures, that reduced some agencies and eliminated others.
“The state and law enforcement entities cannot control the situation of criminality and violence,” Felipe Botero of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime told Vox, because “they are involved with organized crime in the country.”
- Annie Correal, “Ecuador’s Attorney General Took on Drug Gangs. Then Chaos Broke Out.” (The New York Times, January 13, 2024).
- CD Goette-Luciak, “Cocaine, Cartels, and Corruption: The Crisis in Ecuador, Explained” (Vox, January 11, 2024).
- Sugey Hajjar, “La Criminalidad Sorprendio a una ‘Debil’ Institucionalidad en el Area de la Seguridad” (El Universo (Ecuador), January 14, 2024).
Recent attacks on members of Tijuana‘s municipal police, following an alleged November theft of drugs from a Sinaloa Cartel structure, “arise from the need of drug traffickers to buy police officers in order to remain in power” and this is because “the judiciary is rotten,” said Jesús Alejandro Ruiz Uribe, the Mexican federal government’s delegate for the state of Baja California. “The judicial power is currently a revolving door, the good police put the criminals in jail and the bad judges take them out again.”
- Mara Yanez, ““Esta Podrido el Poder Judicial”: Ruiz Uribe” (Revista Zeta (Tijuana Mexico), January 19, 2024).
To the east of Tijuana, surveillance videos taken on January 12 showed Mexican soldiers allegedly assisting a theft of synthetic drugs from a Sinaloa Cartel-run laboratory on a ranch in Tecate, Baja California, not far from the U.S. border.
SinEmbargo columnist Adela Navarro Bello wrote about this case, concluding, “Although these cases are isolated, they are increasingly frequent. Elements of the Mexican Army, the Armed Forces, and the National Guard collaborate with organized crime and drug trafficking cells in different parts of the country.”
- “Exhiben a Militares en Robo de Droga” (Revista Zeta (Tijuana Mexico), January 23, 2024).
- Adela Navarro Bello, “Otra Vez, una Unidad del Ejercito, Con el Narco” (SinEmbargo (Mexico), January 24, 2024).
In south-central Chiapas, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, rural communities are forcibly displacing after confronting Mexican Army soldiers who they say were working with the Jalisco Cartel. Violence has flared up in parts of Chiapas in the past year as Jalisco and Sinaloa have entered into a bitter fight over trafficking routes, aggressively pushing out rural residents.
- Ángeles Mariscal, “Desplazamiento Forzado Masivo en la Sierra de Chiapas, Ante Amenaza de Carteles y Agresiones del Ejercito Mexicano” (Chiapas Paralelo (Chiapas), January 16, 2024).
- Ángeles Mariscal, “Carteles de la Droga Cortan Luz y Agua a Comunidades de Chiapas, Exigen se Sumen a Sus Filas” (Chiapas Paralelo (Chiapas), December 27, 2023).
Hugo Aguilar, the governor of Santander, Colombia‘s fifth-most-populous department, from 2004 to 2007, admitted that he received support from the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group during his election campaign. Aguilar, a former police colonel who commanded the unit that killed Pablo Escobar in 1993, told the post-conflict transitional justice system (the Special Jurisdiction for Peace or JEP) that he did not receive money from the AUC. “They told the people that they should vote for Colonel Aguilar” in the zones they controlled, he said.
- “Hugo Aguilar Acepto en la Jep Haber Recibido Apoyo de las Auc para Ser Gobernador” (El Espectador (Colombia), January 23, 2024).
Colombia‘s Supreme Court has opened an investigation of the president of Colombia’s Senate, Green Party Senator Iván Name Vásquez. A former head of Los Rastrojos Costeños, a splinter group of Colombia’s North Valle Cartel active in the 1990s and early 2000s, alleged that Sen. Name was linked to his group.
- “Esta Es la Banda Criminal por la Que Es Investigado Ivan Name, Presidente del Senado” (El Espectador (Colombia), January 22, 2024).
“Alliances between criminal networks and individuals who hold positions within state institutions have even created hybrid economies, such as scrap metal trafficking or fuel smuggling, where legal and illegal business intersect,” reported InsightCrime’s Venezuela Investigative Unit. “With corrupt state elements continuing to profit from informal mining,” the security forces’ raids on illicit precious-metals mines “may work to guarantee those elements a more favorable share of those profits, rather than stamping out the practice.”
- Venezuela Investigative Unit, “3 Takeaways From Transparencia Venezuela’s Illicit Economies Index” (InsightCrime, January 10, 2024).
“Organized crime can’t grow without state protection, and Latin American mafias have long made it a mission to capture parts of the state,” wrote the Council on Foreign Relations’ Will Freeman at the Los Angeles Times. “They have had at least as much success amassing political power as any of the region’s political parties.”
- Will Freeman, “Organized Crime Threatens Latin America’s Democracies and Fuels Migration. The U.S. Can Help” (Council on Foreign Relations, The Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2024).
Podcast: ¿Dejará De Ser Una Democracia Estados Unidos Si Donald Trump Gana Las Elecciones?
I joined Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán and former U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley on the latest episode of Duzán’s popular Spanish-language podcast.
The episode was a scene-setter for the 2024 U.S. election campaign. Neither John nor I get called on to do a lot of this “election horserace” sort of punditry, but that may have made this a more engaging attempt to explain the current U.S. political moment to a non-U.S. audience.
Latin America-Related Events in Washington and Online This Week
(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)
Monday, January 29, 2024
- 10:00-11:00 at csis.org: El Salvador’s 2024 Elections: Voting in a One-Party State? (RSVP required).
- 3:00-4:00 at the Atlantic Council and atlanticcouncil.org: Industry Minister Víctor Bisonó on the Dominican Republic’s economic growth and resilience (RSVP required).
- 5:30-7:00 at Georgetown University and YouTube: Religious and Academic Freedom in Nicaragua (RSVP required).
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
- 10:00 in Room 2141 Rayburn House Office Building and online: Hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government on The Southern Border Crisis: The Constitution and the States.
- 10:00 in Room 310 Cannon House Office Building and online: House Homeland Security Committee Markup of Articles of Impeachment against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
- 10:00-1:00 on several social media streams: Un Camino con las Víctimas.
- 11:30 at USCRI Zoom: The Impact of Proposed Changes to the Asylum System on Survivors of Human Trafficking (RSVP required).
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
- 9:00-10:30 at InsightCrime YouTube and Facebook: Organized Crime in Venezuela: Challenges and Perspectives for 2024.
- 11:00-1:00 at UNAM Zoom: Tensiones Constitucionales: Libertad de Expresión y Derechos de Autor en la Era Digital (RSVP required).
- 1:00-6:00 at Rutgers University and online: “La Marea Feminista”: Feminist Movements for Reproductive Justice and Against Gender -Based Violence and Exclusion (RSVP required).
Thursday, February 1, 2024
- 12:15 at the Atlantic Council and atlanticcouncil.org: Unlocking opportunities for the US-Suriname relationship (RSVP required).
Links from the Past Week
Jonathan Blitzer, “Do I Have to Come Here Injured or Dead?” (The New Yorker, Sunday, January 28, 2024).
An excerpt from the New Yorker staff writer's upcoming book profiles a Honduran woman whom Border Patrol separated from her sons at the border in 2017.
Zachary B. Wolf, What Texas Is (and Is Not) Doing to Defy a Supreme Court Setback (CNN, Saturday, January 27, 2024).
University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck explains that at the U.S.-Mexico border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) “is interfering with federal authority to a degree we haven’t seen from state officials since the desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Ice Major Surgeries Were Not Always Properly Reviewed and Approved for Medical Necessity (Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, Thursday, January 25, 2024).
DHS's Inspector-General finds that for two of six hysterectomies it reviewed in ICE detention facilities, the detainees' "medical files did not include documentation to support a conclusion that a hysterectomy was medically necessary."
Jhoan Sebastian Cote, Caqueta en Epoca de Paz Total: Refugio de Disidentes y Ruta de Marihuana (El Espectador (Colombia), Monday, January 22, 2024).
A graphics-heavy survey of the drug trade, violence, and politics in Colombia's south-central department of Caquetá, much of which is under the influence of a FARC dissident network currently negotiating with the Petro government.
Maria Jose Longo Bautista, Lo Que Dejo la Fiebre de la Amapola en San Marcos (Agencia Ocote (Guatemala), Monday, January 22, 2024).
In Guatemala's southwestern department of San Marcos, "poppy crops left more Mexico border trade and better living conditions. But also violence, weapons, and displaced people."
And Finally
