Migrants apprehended a record number of times at border, as arrivals of Venezuelans soar

EL PASO — U.S. Border Patrol apprehended migrants 2.2 million times in fiscal year 2022, shattering previous records, according to year-end figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The figures for the year than ended Sept. 30, show a pivotal shift in who seeks refuge in the U.S., with rising arrivals from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in the last couple of months. That provides new removal challenges for the Biden administration because it has weak diplomatic ties with those nations.

“I’m not surprised these are record numbers,” said Adam Isacson, a security and migration analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America.

“Latin America and much of the rest of the world are still being really hollowed out economically,” by the effects of the pandemic, prompting people to leave their countries.

Isacson added that people around the globe “are genuinely going hungry, desperate and finding that they really need to enter the United States,” a country that, despite inflation woes, is generating millions of jobs leading to vast labor shortages.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, published Friday night, showed the Border Patrol had 207,597 encounters with migrants in the southern border.

Overall, there were 227,547 apprehensions for the month of September, a 12 percent increase compared to August. These encounters include migrants attempting to pass at ports of entry as well as those caught between ports of entry by the Border Patrol. Of those, 19 percent involved individuals who had at least one prior encounter in the previous 12 months, according to a CBP release.

The CBP data shows there were 77,302 encounters with people from Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua in September 2022, which represents 42% of unique encounters, a 245% increase over September 2021. There were 55,372 encounters with migrants from Mexico. CBP now uses the “encounters” term as it distinguishes between regular apprehensions under immigration law and those caught and processed under the public health law known by the shorthand of Title 42.

About 63% of all apprehensions occurred along the Texas border with Mexico. The two sectors with more encounters were Del Rio (480,931,) and the Rio Grande Valley (468,124.) Overall, the 2022 fiscal year saw an increase in all three categories of migrants: single adults, family units and unaccompanied minors.

The record was the previous fiscal year when total apprehensions by the Border Patrol numbered nearly 1.7 million. In 2000, apprehensions by the Border Patrol approached 1.6 million.

CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus, said in a statement that “failing regimes in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua continued to drive a new wave of migration across the western Hemisphere.”

He also said the number of Venezuelans arriving at the southern border decreased sharply since restrictions were imposed earlier this month.

“Over the past week, the number of Venezuelans attempting to enter the country fell more than 80 percent compared to the week prior to the launch of the joint enforcement actions” with Mexico, Magnus said.

The results have played into the hands of Republicans who critics say have used the optics of migrants on the border to fan fear, tying migration to crime and fentanyl — a dramatic turnaround for a party that historically championed migrants fleeing communist or authoritarian governments.

The Biden administration, under political pressure, has enlisted the armed forces of both Mexico and Guatemala to help halt the flow of Venezuelans going through their territory. Over the weekend, Guatemala’s interior ministry and other agencies, including special forces, worked to halt the flow of Venezuelans trying to cross into Mexico.

“We are sending the message that the U.S. border is totally closed,” Interior Minister David Napoleón Barrientos told a radio reporter.

Additionally this month, the U.S. government began expelling Venezuelans held at immigration detention centers, transferring dozens to Ciudad Juárez.

A group of more than 200 Venezuelans who were in a detention center in Texas were placed on buses and driven to the border and forced to cross a pedestrian bridge that connects El Paso with Ciudad Juárez, where Mexican immigration officials were waiting. The result: Hundreds of Venezuelans, many of them with children, were stranded throughout Ciudad Juárez, particularly under the international bridge connecting Juarez to El Paso.

In Reynosa, across from McAllen, Mayor Carlos Peña Ortiz told the newspaper Reforma that migrants from South America continue to arrive, hoping to petition asylum in the U.S., and adding to the growing number of migrants expelled under the new policy.

Arturo Rocha, Mexico’s Assistant Foreign Minister in charge of North American issues, on Friday tweeted that “encounters” of people from Venezuela in Mexico’s northern border have decreased 90% since the new policy was announced.

“Unprecedented pressure at the border”

“The economic and political turmoil in the hemisphere, the lack of legal migration pathways, a collapsed asylum system, and the absence of return agreements with some countries have combined to create unprecedented pressure on the border,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization that tracks global migration.

The deportations are done under a pandemic rule known as Title 42, which suspends rights to seek asylum under U.S. and international law on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Using Title 42, critics say, won’t make the problem of immigration go away.

“The American public needs to understand that these numbers represent the reality of Title 42 and the externalization of asylum,” said Marisa Limón, Executive Director of El Paso-based Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center, a non-profit organization. “This policy formally seals the border as a deterrent but it doesn’t meaningfully address global migration. It only moves the humanitarian need south of the border and forces people to precariously try to access safety on U.S. soil by almost any means necessary.

In a visit to Dallas on Oct. 14th, Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said the exodus out of Venezuela reflects the fact that the world is seeing record displacement. The United Nations refugee agency, for example, has highlighted that 6.8 million have left that country of 28 million in recent years.

The Biden administration also said it will allow 24,000 Venezuelans to apply for humanitarian entry into the United States by air, a paltry figure considering the number of them trying to reach the U.S. border.

This month, for instance, the number of Venezuelans passing through Panama on their way north soared to 21,000 in one week, from 6,000 the previous week, Mayorkas said.

For September alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a DHS agency, logged nearly 34,000 Venezuelans seeking entry into the U.S. at the southern border. In August, that number had been about 25,000, DHS data shows.

Meanwhile, GOP leaders in border states, led by Texas and elsewhere, have used migrants as pawns to underline their criticism by sponsoring “political stunts.” Florida bought bus and plane tickets to send some of them to Democratic states, including Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, catching local officials off guard.

Here in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, running for reelection, has made border security the centerpiece of his campaign. His highly touted Operation Lone Star has topped $4 billion in state funding. That includes sending National Guard service members and state police to patrol the border with Mexico, initiating construction of a border wall, and busing migrants to East Coast states, including New York City.

The City of El Paso, with a Democratic mayor, has also bused migrants to cities in the northeast.

Beyond the midterm elections, global migration will persist as countries struggle with hard-hit economies — some run by authoritarian governments, some simply overrun by violence — forcing millions to flee.

“It’s hard to bet against another 2 million migrants again in 2023,” said Isacson, who added that the record numbers of migrants is “predictable” as are the next steps going forward. “It’s also predictable that Venezuelans are going to try to avoid capture by going into very remote areas, with smugglers, and risking their lives, too often with their children.”

Isacson, the analyst from WOLA, said pressure at the border between the U.S. and Mexico will continue.

“Smuggling patterns via land have shifted with the arrival of South Americans and Cubans in a way that we’ve never seen before as they’ve proven that the once overwhelming Darien Gap — the geographical region that connects South to North America and a dangerous trek consisting of jungles, forests, watersheds and the presence of criminal organizations — is no longer impenetrable.”

“The Darien Gap is just one more obstacle [that] migrants have to overcome,” he said.

Dianne Solis contributed to this story.