Has anyone else noticed that the illegal border crossing numbers have collapsed?
A few weeks ago Secretary Blinken went to Mexico City.
Now all of a sudden the numbers of illegal crossings have essentially collapsed, falling by 2/3rds. Now call me skeptical, but what the heck is going on as we enter a new ELECTION YEAR. Could a visit by American officials just as the election cycle is heating up be connected.
Looks like Mexico is building the equivalent of a "Gaza Strip" to contain the illegals on its own SOUTHERN border. They seem to be grabbing all the Guatamalens, Nicaraguans and other non-Mexicans they can grab and are shipping them to their own southern border encampment. So maybe I'm nuts, but sometime in mid November to you think they might open the flood gates again?
BY THE WAY, this is actually something that Mexico has done in the past, and they also unleashed the herd in the past too.
FULL ARTICLE at the link:
cis.org
A few weeks ago Secretary Blinken went to Mexico City.
Now all of a sudden the numbers of illegal crossings have essentially collapsed, falling by 2/3rds. Now call me skeptical, but what the heck is going on as we enter a new ELECTION YEAR. Could a visit by American officials just as the election cycle is heating up be connected.
Looks like Mexico is building the equivalent of a "Gaza Strip" to contain the illegals on its own SOUTHERN border. They seem to be grabbing all the Guatamalens, Nicaraguans and other non-Mexicans they can grab and are shipping them to their own southern border encampment. So maybe I'm nuts, but sometime in mid November to you think they might open the flood gates again?
BY THE WAY, this is actually something that Mexico has done in the past, and they also unleashed the herd in the past too.
FULL ARTICLE at the link:
Recent Sky-High Levels of Illegal Migration Are Dropping Fast — and Here’s Why
Is the Mexican president's fear of a second Trump administration enough to get him to continue the clamp-down on third-country illegal immigration through the November U.S. elections?
cis.org
Recent Sky-High Levels of Illegal Migration Are Dropping Fast — and Here’s Why
Hint: Biden and Mexico’s Obrador have arranged an out-of-view crackdown that could endure through the U.S. presidential election and serve them both politically
Mexican immigration agents try to stop immigrants in Matamoros from illegally crossing the Rio Grande in May 2023. Photo by Todd Bensman.
AUSTIN, Texas — Nothing in the American experience has ever compared to the 10,000-14,000 illegal crossings every day the last several months that afflicted major American cities or those poor federal government souls who must manage the U.S. southern border.
But November’s and December’s latest “newest” record-smashing crossings, which exacerbated an already significant political liability to President Biden’s November reelection bid, were falling fast by New Year’s Day. And they’re still dropping.
Daily Border Patrol encounters of illegally crossing foreign nationals in the first weeks of January, in fact, were down by up to 70 percent from the 12,000 and 14,000 per day of recent weeks, to a still managerially catastrophic 4,000 and 5,000, according to government data shared confidentially with me.
What led to those numbers dropping from ionospheric heights the national media had no choice but to cover in a presidential election year? Will it last? Is this one real?
It helps to know that the falling numbers neatly coincide with recent shuttle diplomacy to Mexico City about the (political) crisis by Biden personally and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken on December 22 and then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Blinken on December 27. The second meeting produced a joint communique lacking any useful details about the horse-trading, as my colleague Andrew R. Arthur has still managed to expertly analyze.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Arthur told me. “There’s a deal. We just don’t know what the deal is.”
But the hardly reported or analyzed on-the-ground fruits of all this cannot go ignored for much longer because media visuals of the chaos have loomed so very large in Republican political campaigning — as in ongoing negotiations with Republican senators holding up Ukraine war funding and in House negotiations over raising the debt ceiling.
The fact that the camera-loving high numbers at the heart of all this are dropping so precipitously now warrants some discussion.
Mexico Is Cracking Down in Old and New Ways to Slow the Flow
Migrants board a freight train near Monterrey, Mexico, in the spring of 2023. Photo by Todd Bensman.
In a nutshell summary of Mexico’s doings, according to my own content analysis of Mexican media, forces under control of Mexico’s central government are rounding up immigrants in the country’s north and shipping them by bus and airplane to southern cities like Tapachula in Chiapas State (on the border with Guatemala) and Villahermosa in Tabasco State. They are all expected to go home or stay put alongside those continuing to enter from Guatemala.
They’ll be held back to wait for a molasses-slow bureaucracy to approve individual travel papers. Tens of thousands are filling those southern provinces now.
Meanwhile, federal forces are installing new road checks to hem them in, a la the Gaza Strip, and in the northern provinces to catch, return, and deter runners still getting through.
Probably to instill an enforcement vibe, Mexico also appears to be ramping up air deportations from its rapidly filling southern provinces that may send increasing numbers of uncooperative, rebellious, or repeat attempting immigrants caught in this southern bureaucracy back to distant home countries.
The bottle-necking strategy is actually nothing new and easily undone; I’ve been reporting on it since 2019 (See “Video Report: How Trump’s Policies Ended the Mass Migration Crisis on Mexico’s Southern Border – For Now”). But the Biden administration has long let Mexico slide on it so long as Mexico did it in a way that American TV cameras couldn’t see (See “Mexico’s Duplicitous ‘Ant Operation’ Moved Tens of Thousands of the U.S. Border Sight Unseen — and Will Again Through 2022”).
To eliminate another obvious draw, Mexican authorities have emptied and then bulldozed at least one longstanding migrant camp, the sprawling one in Matamoros across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and reportedly dug deep anti-pedestrian trenches to deny further easy access to popular crossings there. Other ad hoc camps also are probably scraped away by now, too, or soon will be if this continues.
Perhaps one of Mexico’s most impactful slow-down measures is that, finally, it is doing something about “La Bestia”, the system of cargo trains that have super-powered the Biden border crisis for three years running by transporting hundreds of thousands of migrants from deep southern Mexico to its northern border cities.
The Trains
In January 2023, I returned from a field research trip and published dispatchesestablishing that La Bestia was quietly enabling the illegal migration crisis at the U.S. southern border, that Mexico was allowing it to run unfettered, and that Biden, unlike prior presidents like Obama, had never pressured Mexico to stop the use of the trains by migrants.
“Mexico is feeling no pressure to block this stream of human cargo,” I wrote in a January 19, 2023, report for The Daily Mail about the renewed widespread use of the trains. “There was no public mention of La Bestia before, during, or after President Biden's talks with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO for short] during his recent visit to Mexico City.”
Three years too late, the administration apparently has seen the light and shown it to AMLO.
Mexican media reports that Mexico City has ordered its military to blockade railyards like the ones I visited in my reporting in Monterrey, El Torreon, and Piedras Negras across from Eagle Pass, to stop migrating foreigners from boarding. They’re also rousting immigrants already on freight trains that briefly stop or slow down en route to northern Mexican cities.
“Migrants report finding it extremely difficult to reach [northern Mexico], as authorities, including immigration and the National Guard, stop their progress along train tracks,” a January 10 story in the Chihuahua Herald reported.
People in popular northern railway destination cities like Juarez, across from El Paso, have noticed the sharp change.
“After the arrival of thousands of migrants aboard cargo trains in Ciudad Juarez during the last quarter of 2023, a train with around five people headed to the border was observed,” wrote El Diario on January 12. “The small group traveling on a wagon was photographed by a resident of that town, who at the end of last year witnessed the passage of different trains with hundreds of people towards this border.”
According to Mexican media, this is part of a broader “agreement” signed by Mexico’s immigration service and the U.S. Border Patrol to also block northbound immigrants on public roads.
Immigrant Roundups in the North, Renewed Blockade in the South
The new year brought new scenes in big Mexican border cities like Piedras Negras across from the recently swamped Eagle Pass, Texas, and the city of Juarez, the same ones where jam-packed trains of a month ago reportedly now arrive nearly empty.
“Agents from the National Migration Institute can be seen chasing migrants from the banks of the river who do not give up and are waiting for the moment to be able to cross to the U.S. side,” The Juarez Herald reported in a January 11 story headlined“Military Prevents Migrant Families from Crossing to the U.S.”
Many of those whom authorities manage to catch end up on highly deterring flights to Villahermosa or Tapachula or even all the way back to home countries, an action that, if a recent history of these is any indication, can significantly retard repeat efforts to reach the American border. Round-up operations seem ubiquitous in northern Mexico these days — for how long no one can say.
“A convoy of 10 units from the National Migration Institute and the Municipal Public Security Secretariat traveled along the banks of the Rio Grande, which remained without the presence of migrants,” El Diario explained for a January 10 video report. “According to the municipal authority, the federal government sent them a letter to request their security support to carry out a tour of the border limits while the INM reported that the edge of the Rio Grande is a permanent control point.”
In the first 10 days of January, the outlet noted, irregular daily crossings of migrants to the United States have dropped by more than half, from 1,095 each day in December to 468.
The forced exodus from Piedras Negras (across the river from from Eagle Pass) began just before Christmas on the eve of the Biden state visit. By December 31, at least 22 flights and as many as 30 flights departed from that city to Mexico's south, according to the migrant advocacy group Witness to the Border, which tries to track them.
Orders for the flights from Piedras Negras came from on high in Mexico City, Diario de Tabasco reported, and were complemented by 10 buses of migrants per day from that city.
Illegal traffic into Eagle Pass today continues, but in fractional volumes of what they were in the fall.
“Notably”, Witness at the Border reported in its December release, “Mexico also reinstated deportation flights to Venezuela with two flights.”
The in-Mexico flights and busing are happening in many other northern Mexican border cities as well. Witness at the Border reports southbound flights from towns all along the border, from Tijuana, at the border's most western edge, all the way to Matamoros near the Gulf of Mexico.
In a story headlined “Truncated American Dream: Learn about Miguel’s Story”, the Tabasco Herald described how Mexican immigration agents rounded up Guatemalan Don Miguel and his six children from a long-standing migrant camp in Matamoros on December 31.
They shipped him to Villahermosa, where he has requested a back to Guatemala for lack of food or money to wait in southern Mexico.
He was far from the only one pulled from the sprawling camp in Matamoros, one that has been in place for at least five years and which I know well from a chaotic week I spent reporting in and around it in May 2023. (See “Video Updates: Mexican Border in Chaos as Title 42 Ends”). . . .
STORY CONTINUES
