Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southwestern border of the United States on Sept. 27, where she talked tough on preventing migrants from entering the United States without authorization. The Democratic presidential candidate promised to maintain strict asylum policies, which include a new standard, permanently excluding migrants who cross into the United States between official ports of entry from filing asylum claims.
She also pledged to sign a bipartisan border bill, which she said her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, has “tanked” for political reasons. Press accounts report that the former president persuaded his supporters in Congress to bail on what had been a promising immigration package negotiated by leaders from both parties.
“To reduce illegal border crossings, I will take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry,” Ms. Harris said in the border town of Douglas, Ariz. “Our system must be orderly and secure, and that is my goal.” Not to be outdone in campaign displays of toughness at the border, Mr. Trump has promised mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants should he be re-elected to the presidency.
While the candidates jousted through the end of the election season, migrant encounters along the U.S. southwestern border continued a sharp fall in fiscal year 2024. On Oct. 22, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a decrease of 55 percent in “encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border” in the seven weeks after heightened restrictions on entries for asylum claims were instituted in early June.
But the vice president’s stump speech and Biden administration’s statements on the border often omit a key factor that has prevented higher numbers of migrants from crowding the U.S. border: Mexico has significantly stepped up its immigration enforcement ahead of the U.S. election on Nov. 5, detaining more than 700,000 migrants in 2024.
Few of those detainees have been deported to their native countries, however. Most are instead being sent from the central and northern Mexico states where they are intercepted on their way to the U.S. border to the less developed states of Mexico’s south, where economic opportunities and services for migrants are scant.
“With the tightening of [migration] policies in the United States, Mexico’s policies are also tightening,” said Julio López, C.S., the executive secretary of the Mexican bishops’ conference’s migrant ministry. “The goal is to contain migration in the south” of Mexico.
An example of that containment strategy is evident in the sweltering Gulf Coast city of Villahermosa, some 800 miles from the closest U.S. border crossing, where busloads of migrants are dumped after being rounded up by Mexican immigration officials. Many have little more to show from the encounter with Mexican authorities than notices to leave the country within 20 days.
“Mexico detains them, [then] they come to dump them here, and the migrants have to figure out how to return to their place of origin,” said Efrain Rodríguez León, director of the Tabasco Human Rights Committee in Villahermosa. He believes Mexican officials want migrants to “self-deport” to their home countries. Instead, most inevitably head north to the United States, only to be detained and sent south again in a migrant carousel created by the migration suppression strategies of both Mexico and the United States.
There's an app for that: CBP One
Yuris, a migrant from El Salvador traveling with her 5-year-old daughter, was pulled off a commercial bus roughly 100 miles up the road from Villahermosa, then transported by immigration officials to the city. Those officials never told her where she was going.
“I pulled up the map [on my phone] and it said ‘Villahermosa.’ That’s how I knew we were in Villahermosa,” Yuris, 29, said. She was speaking from Albergue Amparito, a shelter in Villahermosa that usually serves the families of patients at a nearby hospital but increasingly hosts migrants sent to the city.
Farzana Ahmadi, a former police officer in Afghanistan and an ethnic Hazara, fled Afghanistan with her mother and sister after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. The family reached Mexico City but, like many other migrants, grew frustrated by the at-times-wonky CBP One app. U.S. officials urge migrants who plan to seek asylum to use the phone app, which allots 1,450 daily appointments for migrants to enter the United States at an authorized port of entry.
Ms. Ahmadi’s family tried to fly to the U.S. border, only to be stopped by Mexican immigration officials and sent to Villahermosa. “We desperately need assistance,” Ms. Ahmadi said via a translated text message shared at Albergue Amparito. “We are waiting for an appointment for CBP One, but we don’t know how to book an appointment or follow up.”
The shelter subdirector, Josué Martínez, said the Afghan women’s case has been taken up by lawyers in Mexico City.
Many migrants sent to Mexico’s south speak of their hope to reach Mexico City. The nation’s capital offers a sense of safety and hope, especially for migrants from outside Latin America. In Mexico City, migrants can connect with camps and shelters that cater to them and a vast informal economy that allows migrants to sustain themselves as they attempt to confirm appointments through the CBP One app.
But as Election Day approached, U.S. Customs and Border Protection expanded the reach of the CBP One app to southern Mexico, allowing migrants traveling in that region to also begin requests for asylum appointments. The Mexican government, meanwhile, increased enforcement. Highways leading into the country’s interior became dotted with checkpoints, and Mexican officials began forcing migrants off buses and freight trains.
Father López believes the decision to expand the reach of CBP One serves both Mexican and U.S. interests. Mexican officials, he said, wanted to get migrants out of Mexico City—despite the capital’s professed progressive politics—while U.S. officials prefer that migrants be kept far from the U.S. border.
U.S. authorities, he suggests, hope to allow migrants to move north “in dribs and drabs through the CBP One app,” preventing a build-up at the northern border “where they can enter en masse.”
A border deal
Neither the U.S. or Mexican governments have ever acknowledged a deal to detain migrants headed for the U.S. border. But analysts point out that Mexico’s increased enforcement began after a meeting between senior U.S. and Mexican officials at the National Palace in Mexico City in December 2023.
Analysts describe an alleged deal: Mexico agreeing to deploy its National Guard to stop transmigration through the country in exchange for the Biden administration to remain silent on sensitive Mexican matters like internal security, human rights and accusations of democratic backsliding by populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office Sept. 30, and his successor and protégé Claudia Sheinbaum. Mr. Trump had previously coerced a similar agreement from Mr. López Obrador—threatening escalating import tariffs unless Mexico stopped migration.
“The U.S. is willing to collaborate with Mexico on other matters, as long as Mexico keeps doing its part of the bargain,” said Brenda Estefan, a political analyst and professor at the Ipade Business School in Mexico City.
Ms. Estefan argues that “the U.S. migration system is completely broken, and they haven’t managed to approve a bipartisan bill that could address it in a proper manner. So they outsource [migration control] to Mexico because that’s basically the only option that the [U.S.] executive has as long as there are no bipartisan agreements.”
The Mexican government has not said how many migrants have been sent south under the new enforcement regime, and the National Immigration Institute in Tabasco State did not respond to requests for comment. Advocates say migrants arrive in Villahermosa with few services to support them.
“Villahermosa is not a city designed to handle high migratory flows,” Mr. Martínez said. “There is neither the infrastructure nor the capacity on the part of institutions that can safeguard or protect the people’s basic rights,” he explained. “It’s like a time bomb.”
Adding to the desperation: Many migrants are now determined to reach the U.S. border before the election, fearful that the CBP One app might be discontinued or that Mr. Trump could win.
“People, mostly Venezuelans, say they have to reach the United States because many already have family there and they’re telling them: Come before they close the border,” Mr. Martinez said.
Brian Strassburger, S.J., hears migrants’ anxieties about the upcoming election during his regular visits to shelters in the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, which sit on the south side of the Rio Grande opposite McAllen and Brownsville, Tex.
He ends his celebrations of Mass at the shelters with information sessions, recently telling a group in Reynosa not to delete their CBP One accounts—sometimes done by migrants out of frustration—and saying that non-Mexicans can expect to wait seven months for appointments. (Mexicans wait up to 10 months, he says.)
“The new president takes office Jan. 20…. Don’t believe any rumors that we’re going to have a change on Nov. 5,” Father Strassburger told the migrants gathered for Mass. “President Biden continues as president until Jan. 19.… Everything continues the same.”
Father Strassburger has seen the Biden administration’s migration policies unfold along the Texas-Mexico border since arriving in Brownsville three years ago. He describes it as “carrots and sticks,” with the administration using big sticks lately to get migrants to exclusively use the Border Patrol’s phone app.
“It’s taken them four years to kind of figure out how to do it. And now they’ve kind of figured it out with lots of lots of sticks: harsh penalties for anyone entering any other way” than the app, he said.
“With the executive order on June 4, it was all about incentivizing crossing at the port of entry with the CBP One app appointment and not crossing between ports of entry. But they also closed down the line of vulnerable cases.” Some migrants needing immediate protection had previously been allowed faster entry.
The digital border
Father Strassburger has become more positive about CBP One over time. The phone app has evolved from a free-for-all akin to people rushing to get concert tickets to a somewhat more predictable tool with a high percentage of the migrants who had been stuck waiting for months eventually given appointments.
“CBP One is allowing about a half million people in the country every year,” he said, while another program for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans “is letting about 300,000 people in a year.”
“That’s not nothing,” he says, “and I’m grateful for that.”
The app can still frustrate and confuse migrants, however. A migrant caravan departed on Oct. 6 from the city of Tapachula near the Guatemala border after migrants grew frustrated because they were unable to make appointments for asylum claims. Scam artists also prey on migrants, offering their high-priced services as intermediaries to arrange appointments, Father Strassburger said. The allotment of appointments can seem capricious, too. Advocates suspect some appointments are given to newer users of CBP One rather than migrants who have been trying for months because it improves waiting-time metrics.
“The majority of people getting appointments are purely getting them by luck,” said Joanna Williams, the executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, a binational Catholic project serving migrants in Nogales, Arizona, and the Mexican state of Sonora. “From the migrants perspective, [this] makes it all the more unjust.”
The initiative reports it has been lately serving Mexicans who are fleeing drug cartel violence in states such as Sinaloa, Guerrero and Chiapas rather than migrants transiting the country. But the impact of Mexico’s migration enforcement has become obvious in Mexico’s north: Fewer migrants overall make it to the border.
The Rev. Francisco Gallardo, director of migrant ministries for the Diocese of Matamoros, says drug cartels, which routinely target migrants for kidnapping and extortion in his corner of northeastern Mexico, have turned especially aggressive because of the diminishing supply.
Migrants “spend all day in the shelters to avoid being kidnapped,” he said.
Those lucky enough to receive CBP One appointments in southern Mexico are now provided with bus rides to the northern border—complete with a National Guard escort to avoid problems. Those fortunate migrants wait the final few days in the diocesan shelter in Reynosa until they cross into the United States to make their asylum claims.
Milangela Sánchez, 39, left Colombia with her three children in late August, tiring of the scant opportunities for Venezuelan migrants like herself in that country. She arrived in Mexico in mid-September and got a CBP One app appointment in just 13 days. “I applied every day and thank God that I got the appointment,” she said from Reynosa, where she had just arrived on a bus from the country’s south.
Thousands of other migrants are hoping for the same luck before Jan. 20.
