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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Preliminary reports indicate that Border Patrol apprehended 57,000-60,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2024. That is the smallest monthly total of the Biden administration and the fewest since September 2020. The drop illustrates the short-term impact of Mexico’s crackdown on migration in transit and the Biden administration’s June 5 rule restricting asylum access. Numbers are also down further south along the U.S.-bound migration route, in Panama and Honduras.
Eduardo (Eddie) Canales (1948-2024), founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, died on July 31 following a bout with pancreatic cancer. A pillar of the humanitarian and advocacy communities, Canales saved many lives by placing water stations throughout Brooks County, Texas, where dozens of migrants die each year of dehydration. Canales helped many relatives of missing migrants achieve closure by helping locate and identify remains.
The border was the subject of attack ads and campaign rhetoric as the U.S. general election campaign moved into full gear. Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris sought to attack Donald Trump from the right, blaming him for the February failure of legislation that would have restricted asylum access. Harris’s campaign manager pledged that if elected, the Vice President would keep in place the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions, which rights defense organizations are currently challenging in court. The Trump campaign meanwhile sought to portray Harris as a “border czar” (a title she did not hold) who has been “soft” on border security.
As July 2024 came to a close, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and CBS News reported that Border Patrol apprehended “roughly 56,000,” “around 57,000,” or “under 60,000” migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border during the month. While Customs and Border Protection (CBP) may not publish the official count until mid-August, it appears certain to be the lowest monthly migration total of the Biden administration’s 42 months in office.
The second-lowest month, June 2024, saw 83,536 Border Patrol apprehensions. July was the month of fewest migrant apprehensions since September 2020.
New York City is now measuring fewer than 1,000 migrants per week seeking shelter, for the first time since October 2022, Gothamist reported.
The drop—down from a high of 249,739 apprehensions in December—owes to a Mexican government crackdown on migration that began in January, and to the Biden administration’s implementation of a June 5 rule severely limiting access to the U.S. asylum system for people who cross the border between ports of entry.
This rule carries a high human cost, as U.S. border officials are turning away and deporting many people seeking protection from threats. Some cannot wait months for an appointment at a port of entry using the CBP One app, and some do not know that this option exists. Reporting from Ciudad Juárez, NPR’s Sergio Martínez-Beltrán talked to asylum seekers who have been trying for as many as nine months to secure one of 200 daily CBP One appointments at an El Paso port of entry.
“With its latest anti-asylum rule, mirroring similar bans by Trump, the Biden administration is forcing individuals into the hands of traffickers and cartels, pushing them to more dangerous routes,” wrote Jennifer Babaie of the El Paso-based Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center at the Austin American-Statesman.
Las Américas is one of ten organizations that produced a July 25 report, summarized by Newsweek, laying out more than 30 known examples of due process and human rights violations that asylum seekers have suffered since the June 5 rule went into effect.
The rule would restore asylum access between ports of entry if the daily average of Border Patrol apprehensions drops below 1,500 and remains there for 3 weeks. The preliminary July reporting points to a daily average of less than 1,900 Border Patrol apprehensions per day over the month.
Should further drops in apprehensions cause a suspension of the June rule, asylum access would still be complicated by a May 2023 Biden administration rule prohibiting asylum for non-Mexican migrants who crossed the border between ports of entry and were not refused asylum in another country along the way. This rule did not deter migration during the fall of 2023, however, when Border Patrol apprehensions reached record levels.
Mexico meanwhile published data showing that its migration authorities encountered migrants 712,226 times during the first six months of the 2024 calendar year—about 120,000 encounters per month. If this trend persists in July, it is possible that Mexico’s encounters will exceed CBP’s combined count of Border Patrol apprehensions and CBP One port-of-entry appointments on the U.S. side. (What Mexico is counting isn’t entirely clear, though: its authorities have been aggressively busing migrants to the southern part of the country, but rarely detaining or deporting them, so the 712,226 may include much double- and triple-counting.)
Further south along the U.S.-bound migration route, the flow of northbound-transiting migrants into Honduras from Nicaragua has fallen by more than half, from 1,482 per day in May to 791 per day during the first 24 days of July. That is the lowest daily rate Honduras has measured since April 2023. “Migration experts claim that the significant decrease is due to the closure of several points in the Darien Jungle,” reported Nicaragua’s Radio Corporación.
In the Darién Gap, numbers have also declined. Though it has not updated its official by-country tally since inaugurating a new government on July 1, Panama’s migration service’s press releases indicate that it registered 14,942 migrants in the Darién over the first 21 days of July. That is 712 per day, down from a likely 1,035 per day in June and the lowest daily rate since December 2022.
It appears that July 2024 will have been the first month since June 2023 in which both Honduras and Panama measured less than 1,000 migrants per day.
Though Panama’s new president, José Raúl Mulino, has used barbed wire to block at least five paths in the Darién Gap, “I can say that Mulino’s plan has little chance of succeeding,” wrote Thomson Reuters correspondent Anastasia Moloney, who has walked the Colombian side of the dangerous route that about a million migrants have traversed since 2022. “When there’s a crackdown on migrant routes, smugglers respond by raising their fees.”
WOLA mourns the passing of Eduardo (Eddie) Canales (1948-2024),founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas. Falfurrias is in Brooks County, where dozens of migrants perish each year trying to walk around a longstanding Border Patrol highway checkpoint. Canales pioneered the placement of humanitarian water stations in ranch land, and had been instrumental to efforts to help families locate the remains of missing loved ones. He was featured in the award-winning 2021 documentary Missing in Brooks County.
Canales died peacefully in his sleep on July 31 following a bout with pancreatic cancer. At a GoFundMe page, users can donate to support Canales’s family and his memorial services.
The following is excerpted from a tribute published by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where Eddie Canales was a board member:
Born of migrant farm worker parents, Eddie spent his early years in a rural, migrant border town outside of Texas, while his father worked in steel mills in Gary, Indiana, and East Chicago.
In his early years, Eddie attended the University of Houston and became involved with MAYO and La Raza Unida Party, which marked the beginning of a long history of political activism and organizing. He has served the labor, social, and economic justice movements in many capacities and with several organizations, including the Congreso de Aztlan –the National Committee of La Raza Unida–, the Texas Farmworkers, the Longshoremen, SEIU, and Centro Aztlan in Houston, where he served as the Director for ten years. Eduardo was a community and union organizer in Colorado, New Mexico, Eastern Washington, Montana, Idaho, Texas, and Wyoming. He agitated, organized, negotiated, and provided direct services around issues ranging from economic and labor justice to anti-police brutality. Eddie was among the founders of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) in the mid-1980s, and served on its Board of Directors for many years, including as Chairperson.
Eddie, along with Maria Jimenez, a human rights pioneer in the region, co-founded the South Texas Human Rights Center (STHRC), the only human-rights organization in Texas working to prevent migrant deaths through education, advocacy, and organizing and by addressing the root causes of migration. Under Eddie’s leadership, the center established relationships with local ranchers and placed over 150 water stations to prevent migrant deaths at the South Texas/Mexico border with plans to open more this year. The center is currently working with researchers, and international forensic scientists to systematize forensic data collection of unidentified migrant remains and map unknown migrant graves in at least eighteen Texas border counties and to bring closure to the families of loved ones lost in migration.
The border and migration were core issues in dueling campaign ads and speeches issued this week by former president Donald Trump (R) and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a new video ad and at an Atlanta campaign rally on July 30, Harris attacked Trump for leading opposition to a failed Senate “border deal” bill in February. That bill would have paid for hiring more Border Patrol agents and would have cut off asylum access when border encounters exceed a daily threshold. “As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said in Atlanta.
Analyses at MSNBC noted Democrats’ tactic of seeking to attack Donald Trump from the right on border security, citing the “border deal” bill. The Biden administration’s June 5 asylum restriction rule duplicates that failed bill’s controversial provision banning asylum access between ports of entry when daily Border Patrol apprehensions exceed 2,500. On July 29 the union representing asylum officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) filed a brief in support of the ACLU’s lawsuit seeking to block that rule.
Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, told CBS News that, if elected, Harris would keep in place the Biden administration’s current restrictions on asylum access at the border. These include the June 2024 rule, plus a May 2023 rule prohibiting asylum between ports of entry for non-Mexican people who did not seek asylum in another country en route to the U.S. border. “The policies that are, you know, having a real impact on ensuring that we have security and order at our border are policies that will continue,” Chávez Rodríguez told CBS reporter Camilo Montoya-Gálvez.
Both rules are facing legal challenges, as U.S. law guarantees the right to seek asylum on U.S. soil regardless of how the asylum seeker arrived.
Some coverage is operating on the assumption that Harris’s support of migrant rights and asylum, when serving as a California prosecutor and senator, could be a liability in the national presidential campaign. Analyses at the Washington Post, NBC News, and Politico suggested that Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona)—a “border hawk” who opposed lifting the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy—would be a vice-presidential running mate who could shield her from charges of being insufficiently tough on the border.
Progressive Democratic legislators, and leaders of Latino and immigrants’ rights groups, are supporting Harris despite disagreements with the Biden administration’s hardening of some border and migration policies, like asylum bans, the New York Times reported.
Donald Trump’s campaign meanwhile released its first television ad of the general election, focusing on the border. It “attacks likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris as an evasive, weak and distracted leader who did not protect the U.S.-Mexico border from drug trafficking, increased migrant crossings and a possible terrorism threat,” the Washington Post reported.
The ad begins with an image of Harris and the line, “This is ‘America’s Border Czar,’ and she has failed us.” The Vice President, who was tasked only with addressing root causes of migration in Central America, never held such a title.
In an in-depth piece at the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer recalled that Harris never had a position of responsibility for managing the border: instead, she was charged with addressing root causes of migration from Central America. This “was, by definition, slow and strategic work—essential from a policy perspective but politically inopportune.”
“The distinction has not stopped Republicans from misleadingly branding Harris as the nation’s ‘border czar’ and blaming her for the sharp upticks in migration under the Biden administration,” read an analysis by Lauren Gambino at the Guardian.
“She was given a very hard, difficult, convoluted portfolio,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, told Reuters. Though her initial efforts in the Central America root-causes role were “widely panned, even by some Democrats,” the New York Times stated, she later had “some success” in “a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fund-raiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies” of northern Central America, particularly in encouraging private-sector investment.
Though it is hard to assign weight to the long-term strategy that Harris oversaw, U.S.-Mexico border encounters with migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have dropped: from an average of 58,420 per month in fiscal 2021 to 38,657 per month (-34%) so far in fiscal 2024. By contrast, average monthly encounters with all nationalities increased 40 percent during that period.
- A 38-year-old mother from Ecuador was found dead along the Mexican side of the border wall, south of Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector (southeast California), on July 22. Border Patrol agents found the victim’s 10-year-old daughter alive next to her body. The cause of death appeared to be heat exhaustion and/or dehydration.
- California-based iNewSource described disturbing Border Patrol body-worn camera footage of the March death of Guatemalan migrant Petronila Elizabeth Poma Perez, who fell from the border wall near San Diego after hanging and crying for help for over 20 minutes while agents awaited backup. The article points to a lack of coordination between Border Patrol agents and local fire department personnel.
- The Senate Appropriations Committee was set to mark up (amend and approve a draft of) the 2025 Homeland Security Appropriations bill, which funds DHS and its components, on August 1. It did not do so, however, due to disagreements over funding for the Secret Service. The chamber is departing Washington for its August recess without a Homeland Appropriations bill out of committee.
- In an en banc ruling, the federal judiciary’s Fifth Circuit permitted Texas’s state government to keep a 1,000-foot string of buoys and serrated metal discs floating in the middle of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass while legal challenges continue. The ruling overturned an appeals court’s earlier decision. A trial over the buoys themselves—as opposed to the injunction preventing their use while arguments continue—is to begin on August 6 in Austin. While most of the conservative circuit’s judges’ arguments focused on the river’s navigability in that part of Texas, Judge James Ho submitted an opinion supporting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) use of the Constitution’s “invasion” clause, implying that migrants and asylum seekers are foreign invaders against whom Texas may defend itself.
- CBS News visited El Paso’s Annunciation House migrant shelter, which has been the subject of a legal assault from the Texas state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), who calls the shelter a “stash house” for undocumented people even though it cooperates closely with federal authorities releasing migrants. In early July a state judge blocked Paxton’s effort to demand that the shelter provide documents, but Paxton is appealing that decision to Texas’s State Supreme Court. Paxton has meanwhile launched inquiries into two other shelters: Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in McAllen and Team Brownsville.
- While this story is far from over, the Venezuelan regime’s evidence-free announcement that President Nicolás Maduro won July 28 elections dealt a setback to hopes that a democratic transition might reduce or even reverse migration from the South American nation. Instead, if Maduro’s victory stands, polling of Venezuelans indicates that more will consider leaving. Venezuelan migrants waiting in Ciudad Juárez for CBP One appointments told La Verdad de Juárez that they are distraught and frustrated by the July 28 outcome. Venezuelan migrants in Mexico City told the Associated Press that, as instability and repression worsen, they fear for their relatives back home.
- The New York Times fact-checked Donald Trump’s absurd claim that crime has declined in Venezuela because Nicolás Maduro’s regime has sent the country’s criminals to the United States. To the extent that crime has decreased in Venezuela, it represents a consolidation of organized crime control within the country, with fewer competing gangs.
- The conservative outlet NewsNation, citing a Border Patrol “internal safety bulletin,” reported that 1,000 members of Venezuela’s “Tren de Aragua” organized crime group are in the United States with orders to attack police. West Texas border district Rep. Tony Gonzales (R) gave comments amplifying the allegation.
- Of 959 citizens of Ecuador interviewed by UNHCR along the US-bound migration route in 2023, 59% said they were fleeing “generalized violence” and 28% said that they had been victims of violence.
- A Washington Post feature looked at Chinese migration to the U.S.-Mexico border, which has increased sharply in the past 18 months. Migrants cite economic hardship and political repression, exacerbated by COVID-19 lockdowns, as primary reasons for leaving. Those interviewed by the Post paid smugglers between $8,000 and $60,000 per person for their journeys to the United States. Ecuador, which has been most Chinese migrants’ first entry into the Americas mainland, recently suspended visas for arriving Chinese citizens, but higher-priced alternative smuggling routes emerged “within days.”
- Hours after he gave television interviews about organized crime extortion—including the closure of 191 Oxxo convenience stores in the border city of Nuevo Laredo—gunmen shot to death Julio Almanza, the head of the business chambers federation of the border state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. The shooting happened on July 29 in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
- Joe Biden’s administration has expelled or deported more migrants than Donald Trump’s, recalled a Politico analysis by Jack Herrera. This is largely because Biden’s administration has seen a larger population of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border than Trump did.
- Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York), Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Illinois), and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-New York) introduced the “Destination Reception Assistance Act,” which would assist asylum-seeking migrants and the U.S. communities receiving them. Several prominent Democratic legislators and NGO leaders added comments endorsing the bill.
- A brief from the Women’s Refugee Commission laid out several recommendations to promote orderly and safe migration throughout the Americas. They include more legal migration pathways such as an improved Cuba-Haiti-Nicaragua-Venezuela parole program; improving the Safe Mobility Initiative currently active in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala; working with civil society to implement commitments in the 2022 Los Angeles Declaration; support for Mexico’s asylum system and migrant shelters; and supporting deported non-Mexican migrants’ integration in Mexico.