The U.S. government — and the Texas state government — are spending more money than ever to curb unauthorized migration. Last year, the Border Patrol caught migrants nearly 1.7 million times. This year, numbers are likely to soar past 2 million. The U.S. last saw peak numbers in 2000, when the Tucson region was the hot spot for illegal crossings.
The Dallas Morning News spoke to Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, about illegal and legal immigration and the backlogged U.S. asylum system. She served in the Department of Homeland Security in the Republican administration of President George W. Bush and the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Does deterrence work?
“Not for long … [Border Patrol apprehensions] dropped temporarily at the beginning of the pandemic and 2020 but then started going up again, and it’s really remained fairly high since. Now it’s not just the Northern Triangle [El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras] folks. It’s from all over Latin America, from all over the world, 100-plus countries.”
The other big difference, probably between 2000 and now, is that a lot of the migration in 2000 was facilitated by mom-and-pop smugglers … not necessarily sophisticated enterprises but sort of opportunistic people who knew the region and would kindly guide people across. That is not the case now. Sophisticated, profit-seeking, transnational criminal organizations have an incentive to incentivize the migration we’re seeing now because they can make a lot of money on it and they are.
It also seems like right now we have a de facto policy by country. We are seeing the arrival of more Cubans and Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who aren’t subject to the pandemic-related health order Title 42 and its quick expulsions. Are the smugglers taking advantage of that, too?
Sure, and so are the Venezuelans and Cubans and Nicaraguans. They’ve already wanted to come, but the smugglers are saying, oh, yeah, you can come now because they can’t send you back to Mexico, because Mexico won’t take them. They can’t send you back to your own country, so you’re likely to stay. And that’s not incorrect. I mean, they’re likely to stay, at least, until their cases are heard. Whether or not they ultimately succeed in getting asylum is another question.
What’s your view of Operation Lone Star in Texas?
The narrative that the federal government has ... abdicated its responsibility to secure the border has been growing for a lot of years. It didn’t start under [former President] Trump. Governor [Greg] Abbott has decided that it is politically advantageous for him, certainly, to kind of go up against the big federal government and it’s especially advantageous when that government is of another party. But it’s also being driven by the fact that Texas is the frontlines of this right now.
[Operation Lone Star] doesn’t seem to be having a significant impact. It hasn’t impacted the numbers at all. I think there were things that have been done that are questionable from a legal perspective and a constitutional perspective. … Having Texas DOT inspect tractor-trailers coming through the border, you know, didn’t last very long and created lots of other problems and had nothing to do with migration.
What more can be done in migrant-sending countries?
This is the challenge, right? The situations that are driving people to migrate are problems that did not come up overnight and are very long-term problems. So addressing those problems is not a short-term fix.
If you invest long enough, and well enough, then maybe you can turn things around [in those countries.] Ultimately, it is the obligation of every government to support its own people in whatever way it can.
Right now it seems we have immigration policy also shaped by court injunctions. The Biden administration proposes something and it’s quickly challenged. That happened during the Trump administration, too. What’s the solution to that?
We first saw this during the Obama administration because Texas sued over the expansion of DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] and DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents]. …The current round of suing the federal government over immigration policies you don’t like by states of the opposite party has been going on now for almost a decade.
And it’s just grown in intensity and frequency. … Unfortunately for the operation of a consistent immigration policy, it’s very detrimental because it means that no administration of any party should expect to be able to make an immigration policy without getting sued. And so they almost know it’s coming. … I also would think that it’s operationally very, very difficult because the people on the ground … really don’t know from one day to the next what they’re supposed to be doing.
And asylum in 2000 versus now?
Most asylum seekers showed up at ports of entry. And it was a very small percentage of the overall number of encounters. This phenomenon of most people crossing, waiting to be apprehended to turn themselves in, has completely upended the entire infrastructure and operational systems that were put in place at the border to deal with a very, very different type of migration, and immediately overwhelms the capacity of the Border Patrol to manage it. And we have never caught up. It started in 2014.
This is not a temporary phenomenon. And as much as many immigration advocates don’t want to hear it, it’s time for us to revisit how we conduct asylum for those arriving at the border because it can’t continue the way it is.
And that’s really the impact of why deterrence is having less of an impact because [migrants are] able to get what they want, which is admission to the country, even if it’s temporary until they have an immigration court case by claiming asylum. … It’s equally erroneous to say that all asylum cases coming to the border now are fraudulent, as it is to say that all asylum seekers deserve asylum.
