How the U.S. and Mexico Drove Border Crossings Down in an Election Year
Wall Street Journal
By Michelle Hackman in Phoenix and Santiago Pérez in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico
Aug. 5, 2024 5:00 am ET
When illegal migration surged across the U.S.-Mexico border last fall, Phoenix’s largest migrant shelter was so busy that cots filled the cafeteria and lined the hallways. Today the shelter, housed in a converted elementary school, is empty.
The U.S. has experienced a stark decline in illegal border crossings in the past six months, thanks to a newly sprung security gantlet migrants encounter traveling to the U.S. border through Mexico.
On the Mexican side, security checkpoints dot highways. Mexico’s National Guard patrols the southern banks of the Rio Grande, aiming to prevent mass concentrations of migrants. Thousands of asylum seekers caught heading north have been put on buses and sent back to southern Mexico near Guatemala. Aid organizations liken the busing strategy to the board game Chutes and Ladders, as migrants are moved around the country. The policy aims to discourage them from heading north. Many decide to return to South America, migrants say.
The Americans also have a new tool. An order issued by President Biden in June disqualifies migrants from winning asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally. As a result, many more of them can be deported quickly, and far fewer have been released into the U.S.
The moves mark an unprecedented level of cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico, both motivated by presidential elections this year, to bring down illegal border crossings in hopes of diverting attention away from the issue.
The effort has worked beyond anything the U.S. could have predicted, at least so far. The progress gives Vice President Kamala Harris a potential counter to efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies, who are painting her as the face of failed U.S. policies on immigration.
The U.S. recorded about 57,000 illegal crossings in July, according to a person familiar with unpublished government data, down from around 250,000 in December, when they reached an all-time high. That is the lowest monthly figure since 2020, when crossings were still relatively low because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This is just what the administration wanted,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “Not that Democrats are going to win on this issue, but that chaos at the border won’t be on the front pages anymore.”
The effort faces a big test. Thousands of migrants continue arriving in Mexico daily, most of them Venezuelans who can’t be deported by Mexico or the U.S. because the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro has refused to take them back.
There is also a rising risk of a new Venezuelan migrant exodus because of social turmoil after the country’s presidential election was marred by fraud allegations.
In the U.S., Republicans have quickly shifted to attacking Harris’s role in setting immigration policy, yoking the vice president to Biden’s record and referring to her as Biden’s “border czar.” (Republicans have adopted the term to describe the assignment Biden gave Harris in 2021 to address the causes of migration from Central America.) That theme was the subject of Trump’s first ad against Harris, which began airing last week.
Voters still rank illegal immigration among their top issues of concern in the presidential election. Some big cities including Chicago and New York are grappling with the long-term reality of housing and feeding tens of thousands of migrants living in public shelters.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll, conducted after Biden relinquished his spot on the Democratic presidential ticket, shows voters still favor Trump over Harris on immigration policy, 53% to 40%.
A barrier and a sponge
The coordinated effort to stem migration came after border communities including Eagle Pass, Texas, were overwhelmed late last year by the arrival of thousands of migrants who crossed the shallow waters of the Rio Grande, many of them with children in tow. Thousands were arriving in northern Mexico on any given day atop freight trains.
Late last year Biden dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to Mexico City over the Christmas holiday. Mexico vowed to change course, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The Mexican government virtually ended a program of granting humanitarian visas for arriving asylum seekers. Those visas were intended to give them an option to live in Mexico instead of heading to the U.S. Mexican authorities said the visas were often used by migrants to travel to the U.S. border and lower risks of detention.
It also deployed a fleet of buses to relocate migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to the country’s south. Under its “Chutes and Ladders” program, more than 60,000 migrants have been relocated since then from northern border states to such cities as Villahermosa in the southern Tabasco state, according to estimates by the Institute for Women in Migration, a Mexican advocacy group. And it stepped up efforts to bus thousands of migrants away from its border with Guatemala to an area further into Mexico, to avoid mass concentrations.
“Mexico now functions as a barrier and as a sponge,” Selee said.
Between 15 and 20 government-run buses arrive each evening in the southern city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez after a 250-mile journey from near the southern border with Guatemala, where there are large groups of arriving migrants.
Near the parked buses, a line of taxis wait for migrants, who are usually charged double or triple what residents pay. Some drivers work as lookouts for human smugglers who have taken advantage of the stricter measures to become an alternative for many migrants heading north.
“We have seen that many families simply decided to leave Tuxtla Gutiérrez on foot,” said José Amaya, an upholsterer who left Venezuela with his wife and three children a few weeks ago. In recent days, a caravan of about 2,000 migrants set out on foot from the border with Guatemala. These groups are usually disbanded by immigration authorities in southern Mexico.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that the measures aim to protect the U.S.-bound migrants. Many of those who have made it to the U.S. have told shelter managers that they were forced to bribe Mexican officers to do so.
International organizations estimate that the number of U.S.-bound migrants entering Mexico every day is more than double the close to 1,500 asylum seekers who are legally entering the U.S. with the CBP One app, the main portal to claim asylum in the U.S. Migrant-aid groups say there are as many as 100,000 migrants stranded in Mexico and subject to the government’s busing program.
The López Obrador administration is trying to avoid becoming a factor in the U.S. election, rather than explicitly elevating the Democrats, Selee said.
Still, a Trump victory would likely be more problematic for Mexico than a win by a Democratic candidate, said Antonio Ocaranza, a former presidential spokesman and a Mexico-based political consultant. Former and current senior Mexican officials fear mass deportations to Mexican soil and a resumption of the expansion of the border wall.
Despite the country’s neutrality, López Obrador has occasionally taken direct shots at Republicans. “Some Republicans use the immigration issue for electoral and political purposes,” he said at a recent news conference.
The political cooperation has run in both directions. When the U.S. government notified Mexico in late April that it planned to ban those crossing the border illegally from qualifying for asylum, López Obrador asked Biden to hold off on issuing the policy until after Mexico’s presidential election, according to U.S. officials familiar with the discussions. Biden issued the policy two days after the Mexican vote, which López Obrador’s protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum, won.
A spokesman for López Obrador didn’t return requests for comment.
“I think what is really important to understand, in my view, is that this executive order cannot be viewed in isolation,” Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview. “It needs to be viewed in the context of other actions we have taken, and that our international partners have taken.”
“We agreed on a joint strategy” that includes an expansion of areas where asylum-seekers can apply for CBP One appointments, Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said Friday, referring to the high-level bilateral meeting late last year.
U.S. policy
The Biden administration had been trying and largely failing to suppress illegal border crossings for years before the president’s latest executive actions.
During this latest effort, U.S. officials benefited from the reduced migration flow after Mexico stepped up enforcement. When Border Patrol facilities were at or above capacity, as they had been for much of the past few years, it became the Border Patrol’s priority to move migrants out of its custody as quickly as possible to make room for more. The fastest route was to print up paperwork for migrants with a court date—and release them.
Once their numbers were reduced, Border Patrol agents had more time to spend on each case, meaning they had time to coordinate quick deportations or transfers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.
It also became much tougher for migrants who wanted to claim any form of humanitarian protection from doing so. Until the change, agents routinely assumed migrants planned to ask for asylum. Under the new policy, agents were instructed not to ask. If migrants tell agents they fear going home, they are supposed to receive a screening interview for a temporary form of protection that would prevent them from being immediately deported.
Several advocates and shelter operators who have interviewed deported migrants said that agents are rebuffing their requests.
A representative for U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Pedro De Velasco, director of education and advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative, an organization that runs migrant shelters in Mexico just south of the Arizona border, said that he has interviewed migrants and that one of them said: “The border patrol agent told us there is no longer asylum, asylum is no longer an option.”
The area of Arizona south of Tucson was one of the stretches of the border hardest-hit by last fall’s surge. Churches and migrant shelters across the state were running 24-hour operations to receive migrants.
Today they are nearly all empty. Some have closed or shifted operations to serve other vulnerable groups, such as homeless people.
The largest shelter in Phoenix, where officials were housing an average of 250 migrants a day last fall in a space meant to accommodate a hundred, has played host to just 40 migrants in the past two months.
The Biden administration is still taking a significant number of asylum seekers, approximately 45,000 a month, through CBP One.
Republicans have pointed at that decision as a reason the administration’s policy hasn’t truly changed, despite its claims.
“What they’ve done is enshrined the status quo and tried to call it a solution,” said Ben Toma, the Arizona House speaker.
Risks loom
Despite the strategy’s success so far, cracks are forming in the logistical and legal hurdles both countries have thrown up. In the U.S., Biden’s new policy is being challenged in court, and many legal observers expect it won’t survive given that a nearly identical Trump policy was ruled unlawful in 2018.
Even if the policy remains in place, the new rules are less equipped to handle migrants who can’t be deported because many come from places as far away as Africa. ICE can detain these migrants for a short time—something that is increasingly possible with the lower numbers. But under U.S. law, they can’t be detained indefinitely if deportation isn’t possible. And under Mexican law, migrants can’t be detained for more than 36 hours in Mexico.
By far the largest and most complex challenge for the U.S. and Mexico is Venezuela, home of one of the largest asylum-seeking nationalities, primarily because the Venezuelan regime refuses to accept deportation flights.
More than eight million Venezuelans, or close to one-third of the country’s population, have emigrated after an unprecedented economic collapse. They are now the world’s biggest refugee group, ahead of Ukrainians and Syrians who fled their war-torn homelands, according to international organizations. Some 700,000 Venezuelans have emigrated to the U.S. over the past four years, according to U.S. data.
“We know that with a possible Trump victory there are risks of mass deportations. We are very alert,” said Yenzi Granadillo, a tall Venezuelan of athletic build who sold motorcycle parts before leaving his country with his mother and sister. To avoid deportation risks by illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, he plans to use the CBP One app to request asylum.
He said he knew their goal was politically fraught with difficulty. “The reality is that the high number of migrants is affecting some communities in the U.S.,” Granadillo said shortly after arriving in Tuxtla Gutiérrez on a bus carrying migrants from the border with Guatemala.
By Michelle Hackman in Phoenix and Santiago Pérez in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico
Aug. 5, 2024 5:00 am ET
When illegal migration surged across the U.S.-Mexico border last fall, Phoenix’s largest migrant shelter was so busy that cots filled the cafeteria and lined the hallways. Today the shelter, housed in a converted elementary school, is empty.
The U.S. has experienced a stark decline in illegal border crossings in the past six months, thanks to a newly sprung security gantlet migrants encounter traveling to the U.S. border through Mexico.
On the Mexican side, security checkpoints dot highways. Mexico’s National Guard patrols the southern banks of the Rio Grande, aiming to prevent mass concentrations of migrants. Thousands of asylum seekers caught heading north have been put on buses and sent back to southern Mexico near Guatemala. Aid organizations liken the busing strategy to the board game Chutes and Ladders, as migrants are moved around the country. The policy aims to discourage them from heading north. Many decide to return to South America, migrants say.
The Americans also have a new tool. An order issued by President Biden in June disqualifies migrants from winning asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally. As a result, many more of them can be deported quickly, and far fewer have been released into the U.S.
The moves mark an unprecedented level of cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico, both motivated by presidential elections this year, to bring down illegal border crossings in hopes of diverting attention away from the issue.
The effort has worked beyond anything the U.S. could have predicted, at least so far. The progress gives Vice President Kamala Harris a potential counter to efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies, who are painting her as the face of failed U.S. policies on immigration.
The U.S. recorded about 57,000 illegal crossings in July, according to a person familiar with unpublished government data, down from around 250,000 in December, when they reached an all-time high. That is the lowest monthly figure since 2020, when crossings were still relatively low because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This is just what the administration wanted,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “Not that Democrats are going to win on this issue, but that chaos at the border won’t be on the front pages anymore.”
The effort faces a big test. Thousands of migrants continue arriving in Mexico daily, most of them Venezuelans who can’t be deported by Mexico or the U.S. because the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro has refused to take them back.
There is also a rising risk of a new Venezuelan migrant exodus because of social turmoil after the country’s presidential election was marred by fraud allegations.
In the U.S., Republicans have quickly shifted to attacking Harris’s role in setting immigration policy, yoking the vice president to Biden’s record and referring to her as Biden’s “border czar.” (Republicans have adopted the term to describe the assignment Biden gave Harris in 2021 to address the causes of migration from Central America.) That theme was the subject of Trump’s first ad against Harris, which began airing last week.
Voters still rank illegal immigration among their top issues of concern in the presidential election. Some big cities including Chicago and New York are grappling with the long-term reality of housing and feeding tens of thousands of migrants living in public shelters.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll, conducted after Biden relinquished his spot on the Democratic presidential ticket, shows voters still favor Trump over Harris on immigration policy, 53% to 40%.
A barrier and a sponge
The coordinated effort to stem migration came after border communities including Eagle Pass, Texas, were overwhelmed late last year by the arrival of thousands of migrants who crossed the shallow waters of the Rio Grande, many of them with children in tow. Thousands were arriving in northern Mexico on any given day atop freight trains.
Late last year Biden dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to Mexico City over the Christmas holiday. Mexico vowed to change course, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The Mexican government virtually ended a program of granting humanitarian visas for arriving asylum seekers. Those visas were intended to give them an option to live in Mexico instead of heading to the U.S. Mexican authorities said the visas were often used by migrants to travel to the U.S. border and lower risks of detention.
It also deployed a fleet of buses to relocate migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to the country’s south. Under its “Chutes and Ladders” program, more than 60,000 migrants have been relocated since then from northern border states to such cities as Villahermosa in the southern Tabasco state, according to estimates by the Institute for Women in Migration, a Mexican advocacy group. And it stepped up efforts to bus thousands of migrants away from its border with Guatemala to an area further into Mexico, to avoid mass concentrations.
“Mexico now functions as a barrier and as a sponge,” Selee said.
Between 15 and 20 government-run buses arrive each evening in the southern city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez after a 250-mile journey from near the southern border with Guatemala, where there are large groups of arriving migrants.
Near the parked buses, a line of taxis wait for migrants, who are usually charged double or triple what residents pay. Some drivers work as lookouts for human smugglers who have taken advantage of the stricter measures to become an alternative for many migrants heading north.
“We have seen that many families simply decided to leave Tuxtla Gutiérrez on foot,” said José Amaya, an upholsterer who left Venezuela with his wife and three children a few weeks ago. In recent days, a caravan of about 2,000 migrants set out on foot from the border with Guatemala. These groups are usually disbanded by immigration authorities in southern Mexico.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that the measures aim to protect the U.S.-bound migrants. Many of those who have made it to the U.S. have told shelter managers that they were forced to bribe Mexican officers to do so.
International organizations estimate that the number of U.S.-bound migrants entering Mexico every day is more than double the close to 1,500 asylum seekers who are legally entering the U.S. with the CBP One app, the main portal to claim asylum in the U.S. Migrant-aid groups say there are as many as 100,000 migrants stranded in Mexico and subject to the government’s busing program.
The López Obrador administration is trying to avoid becoming a factor in the U.S. election, rather than explicitly elevating the Democrats, Selee said.
Still, a Trump victory would likely be more problematic for Mexico than a win by a Democratic candidate, said Antonio Ocaranza, a former presidential spokesman and a Mexico-based political consultant. Former and current senior Mexican officials fear mass deportations to Mexican soil and a resumption of the expansion of the border wall.
Despite the country’s neutrality, López Obrador has occasionally taken direct shots at Republicans. “Some Republicans use the immigration issue for electoral and political purposes,” he said at a recent news conference.
The political cooperation has run in both directions. When the U.S. government notified Mexico in late April that it planned to ban those crossing the border illegally from qualifying for asylum, López Obrador asked Biden to hold off on issuing the policy until after Mexico’s presidential election, according to U.S. officials familiar with the discussions. Biden issued the policy two days after the Mexican vote, which López Obrador’s protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum, won.
A spokesman for López Obrador didn’t return requests for comment.
“I think what is really important to understand, in my view, is that this executive order cannot be viewed in isolation,” Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview. “It needs to be viewed in the context of other actions we have taken, and that our international partners have taken.”
“We agreed on a joint strategy” that includes an expansion of areas where asylum-seekers can apply for CBP One appointments, Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena said Friday, referring to the high-level bilateral meeting late last year.
U.S. policy
The Biden administration had been trying and largely failing to suppress illegal border crossings for years before the president’s latest executive actions.
During this latest effort, U.S. officials benefited from the reduced migration flow after Mexico stepped up enforcement. When Border Patrol facilities were at or above capacity, as they had been for much of the past few years, it became the Border Patrol’s priority to move migrants out of its custody as quickly as possible to make room for more. The fastest route was to print up paperwork for migrants with a court date—and release them.
Once their numbers were reduced, Border Patrol agents had more time to spend on each case, meaning they had time to coordinate quick deportations or transfers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.
It also became much tougher for migrants who wanted to claim any form of humanitarian protection from doing so. Until the change, agents routinely assumed migrants planned to ask for asylum. Under the new policy, agents were instructed not to ask. If migrants tell agents they fear going home, they are supposed to receive a screening interview for a temporary form of protection that would prevent them from being immediately deported.
Several advocates and shelter operators who have interviewed deported migrants said that agents are rebuffing their requests.
A representative for U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Pedro De Velasco, director of education and advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative, an organization that runs migrant shelters in Mexico just south of the Arizona border, said that he has interviewed migrants and that one of them said: “The border patrol agent told us there is no longer asylum, asylum is no longer an option.”
The area of Arizona south of Tucson was one of the stretches of the border hardest-hit by last fall’s surge. Churches and migrant shelters across the state were running 24-hour operations to receive migrants.
Today they are nearly all empty. Some have closed or shifted operations to serve other vulnerable groups, such as homeless people.
The largest shelter in Phoenix, where officials were housing an average of 250 migrants a day last fall in a space meant to accommodate a hundred, has played host to just 40 migrants in the past two months.
The Biden administration is still taking a significant number of asylum seekers, approximately 45,000 a month, through CBP One.
Republicans have pointed at that decision as a reason the administration’s policy hasn’t truly changed, despite its claims.
“What they’ve done is enshrined the status quo and tried to call it a solution,” said Ben Toma, the Arizona House speaker.
Risks loom
Despite the strategy’s success so far, cracks are forming in the logistical and legal hurdles both countries have thrown up. In the U.S., Biden’s new policy is being challenged in court, and many legal observers expect it won’t survive given that a nearly identical Trump policy was ruled unlawful in 2018.
Even if the policy remains in place, the new rules are less equipped to handle migrants who can’t be deported because many come from places as far away as Africa. ICE can detain these migrants for a short time—something that is increasingly possible with the lower numbers. But under U.S. law, they can’t be detained indefinitely if deportation isn’t possible. And under Mexican law, migrants can’t be detained for more than 36 hours in Mexico.
By far the largest and most complex challenge for the U.S. and Mexico is Venezuela, home of one of the largest asylum-seeking nationalities, primarily because the Venezuelan regime refuses to accept deportation flights.
More than eight million Venezuelans, or close to one-third of the country’s population, have emigrated after an unprecedented economic collapse. They are now the world’s biggest refugee group, ahead of Ukrainians and Syrians who fled their war-torn homelands, according to international organizations. Some 700,000 Venezuelans have emigrated to the U.S. over the past four years, according to U.S. data.
“We know that with a possible Trump victory there are risks of mass deportations. We are very alert,” said Yenzi Granadillo, a tall Venezuelan of athletic build who sold motorcycle parts before leaving his country with his mother and sister. To avoid deportation risks by illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, he plans to use the CBP One app to request asylum.
He said he knew their goal was politically fraught with difficulty. “The reality is that the high number of migrants is affecting some communities in the U.S.,” Granadillo said shortly after arriving in Tuxtla Gutiérrez on a bus carrying migrants from the border with Guatemala.
