The Making of the President 2024: The US-Mexico Border
The number of migrants attempting to cross the Mexico-US border has been steadily increasing since April 2020. Every year, tens of thousands of unaccompanied children arrive at the Mexico-US border and agents of the US Border Patrol (USBP), a federal law enforcement agency, face the challenge of deterring, detecting, and apprehending any person crossing into the US illegally at any point not designated as a port of entry. They are also empowered to seize contraband smuggled into the US through non-ports of entry. Border security and immigration has been a wedge issue between Democrats and Republicans for a long time. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, more aggressive immigration laws were implemented which gave more power to the USBP.
Hundreds of migrants die each year along the Mexico-US border while attempting to cross into the US from Mexico illegally. Exposure (including heat stroke, dehydration, and hyperthermia) were the leading cause. According to the estimates by group Border Angels, about 10,000 people have died in their attempt to cross border since 1994. In 2014, the US declared a crisis at the border due to an influx of unaccompanied minors and women making their way through checkpoints. The crisis predominantly concerned increased immigration from the Northern Triangle of Central America encompassing Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, where there are high amounts of political instability, violent crime, and poverty. Thousands of Central American migrants had been clustered in Mexican border cities like Matamoros, Tamaulipas, for months, blocked from seeking asylum in the US. The US government and United Nations provided free transportation to return refugees to their homes in Central America, but for many returning home was not a good option and they would rather face the potentially life-threatening methods of illegal entry: crossing the river, climbing into tractor-trailers driven by human smugglers, or both. In 2019, as the USBP reported, the number of migrants caught hiding in tractor-trailers along the border had risen by 40 percent that year.
In June 2013, the Senate approved the most comprehensive immigration overhaul bill since 1986. Negotiated by a bipartisan group of eight senators, fourteen Republicans joined all Democrats in voting for the measure and President Barack Obama promised to sign it. Most conservative Republicans opposed the bill and said it would be dead on arrival in the House. The bill provided for increased border security, including 20,000 new border patrol officers, completion of 700 miles of border fencing and new border surveillance equipment. The bill also provided a "path to citizenship" for some eleven million undocumented immigrants already living in the country. Gallup polling found the overhaul was broadly supported by both Democrats and Republicans. But Speaker John Boehner refused to consider the bill in the House, promising that the House would "do our own bill." However no immigration reform bill emerged.
In September 2019, the US Supreme Court allowed a new ruling to take effect that could curtail most asylum applications at the border. The ruling would demand that most asylum seekers who pass through another country first will be ineligible for asylum at the US's southern border. The ruling was set to take effect on the week of October 8, 2019. President Donald Trump's administration tried to stop migrants from getting into the US at all, asking them to take a number at the border and to wait until they are called for a chance to have their asylum cases heard. As a result, in September 2019, the US immigration court faced over one million waiting for their cases to be heard, matching the highest backlog seen in the US.
In the fiscal year 2021 beginning October 2020, the USBP confirmed more than 1.6 million encounters with migrants along the Mexico-US border, more than quadruple the number in the previous fiscal year and the largest annual total on record. Encounters had fallen by about half in fiscal 2020, when the border was closed during the COVID pandemic. On January 13, just one week prior to Biden's inauguration, more than 3,000 people departed Honduras and El Salvador for the US. That number grew to approximately 7,000-8,000 one week later. On January 16, Guatemala and Mexico deployed the military to their borders, in an attempt to stop the migrant caravan from transiting through their countries on the way to the US, but this proved ineffective.
On his first day in office, President Hoe Biden halted the construction of Trump's Mexican border wall, ending the national emergency declared by the Trump administration in February 2019. Republicans expected prior to Joe Biden taking office that there would be a border surge at the start of 2021, and they planned to make it a central issue in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections. The number of migrants arriving in the US from Central America had been rising since February 2021. The USBP reported an increase in encounters with unaccompanied children from the month before. The reported 5,858 encounters in January to 9,457 in February constituted the largest one-month percentage increase in encounters with unaccompanied children since CBP began recording data in 2010.
In February 2021, a group of migrants was found massacred in northern Mexico. A few months later, the US Customs and Border Patrol reported that various colored bracelets with writing on them being used as a method to track a migrant's payment status to their "coyote" and drug cartels that control various parts of Mexico. The bracelets reportedly are used for tracking status of protection from cartel actions such as death, kidnapping, and the right to be in cartel controlled territory or to cross the border into the US.
In March 2021, amid a rise in migrants entering the US from Mexico, Biden told migrants: "Don't come over." He said that the US was arranging a plan for migrants to "apply for asylum in place", without leaving their original locations. In the meantime, Biden continued the Trump administration's Title 42 policy for quick deportations as migrants continued to cross into the US. Biden had stated earlier that his administration would not deport unaccompanied migrant children. The rise in arrivals of such children exceeded the capacity of facilities meant to shelter them, causing the Biden administration to direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage these children, but the facilities were overwhelmed because of the numbers of adults and children coming into the country.
On March 24, 2021, Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris to reduce the number of unaccompanied minors and adult asylum seekers. She is also tasked with leading the negotiations with Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In June 2021, Vice President Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico in an attempt to address the root causes of migration from Central America to the United States. During her visit, in a joint press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Harris issued an appeal to potential migrants, stating "I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come."
In September 2021, over 30,000 Haitian migrants crossed the border in the Del Rio, Texas, sector. At one point, a migrant camp beneath the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge contained over 15,000 temporary residents. The poor conditions in the camp attracted widespread international media attention. Photos of horse-mounted USBP agents emerged allegedly showing the agents mistreating migrants.
The USBP detained more than 1.7 million migrants crossing the Mexico-US border illegally in the 2021 fiscal year, the highest number ever recorded. In November 2021, only 31 percent of Americans approved of President Biden's handling of immigration. Progressives have pressed the president to provide asylum to migrants who have legitimate claims of persecution in their homelands.
Human smugglers have been spreading the false rumor that the US has open borders in order to lure Central Americans to the United States border, under the impression they would be granted asylum upon arrival. Disinformation originates with politicians and conservative media in those countries.
Many Republicans and conservative commentators alleged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was to blame for the border crisis. On January 28, 2024, House Republicans introduced two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, alleging "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" and breach of the public trust. Constitutional scholars, Democrats, and some conservatives asserted Republicans were improperly using impeachment to address immigration policy disputes rather than for high crimes and misdemeanors. A February 6 full House vote to impeach failed to pass, on a 214-216 vote. The impeachment resolution passed on a 214-213 vote one week later.
Following months of negotiations, on February 4, 2024, a bipartisan group of senators released a 370-page bill intended to sharply reduce incentives for migrants to attempt border crossings. The bill included a "border emergency" provision that would automatically require the border to be closed if border encounters reached an average of 5,000 per day over several days. Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans falsely asserted the bill allowed 5,000 illegal border crossings per day. The bill would end the practice of "catch and release" that allows migrants entry into the country while they await immigration hearings. Instead, migrants would be detained pending hearings. The bill also provided for a tighter asylum application and approval process, with speedy removal of migrants who do not qualify. The plan included hiring thousands more border patrol and asylum officers and increasing detention capacity. It also provided for thousands of work visas for migrant spouses of U.S. citizens awaiting immigrant visas.
President Biden supported the bill, while Speaker Johnson said, even before its release, that it would be "dead on arrival" in the Republican-controlled House. Shortly after the proposal was announced, House majority leader Steve Scalise declared it would not be brought before the House for a vote. Independent Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, asserted the border would have been closed every day so far in 2024 if the bill had been law. Biden promised in January that he would immediately close the border if the bill was enacted. Lead Republican negotiator James Lankford of Oklahoma, was among the most conservative Republican Senators, attempted to defend the bill throughout the weeks leading to the vote, but Donald Trump publicly called for Republicans during the Senate negotiations to oppose the proposal. The National Border Patrol Council, a labor union representing some 18,000 border patrol officers, quickly endorsed the Senate bill.
Senate Republicans swiftly turned against the bill upon its release, after Trump openly said he did not want Joe Biden to score a political win with the legislation. On February 7, Senate Republicans blocked the proposal in a floor vote. Lankford said on the floor before the vote that a "popular commentator" had told him a month earlier, "'If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.'" Two days before the vote, Trump told a radio host, "This is a very bad bill." The bill's $118 billion package included $60 billion for Ukraine military and $14 billion for Israel. Trump said at a rally days later, "We crushed crooked Joe Biden's disastrous open borders bill," while Biden said, "Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends."
Polling has shown that border security and immigration are among the top issues concerning potential voters in the 2024 presidential election.In response to the influx of migrants, Republican controlled states such as Texas and Florida have been busing migrants to major sanctuary cities controlled by Democrats such as New York and Chicago.
Donald Trump has stated that if elected, he would increase deportations, send the U.S. military to the border, expand ICE detentions, deputize local law enforcement to handle border security, increase Customs and Border Patrol funding as well as finish building the wall on the southern border. The Biden administration has undertaken a policy of punishing migrants who enter the country illegally and providing temporary protections to migrants from certain countries such as Venezuela, Ukraine, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti. This has resulted in a total increase in migrants legally arriving at points of entry, and a decrease in migrants attempting to illegally cross the border.
Independent candidate Robert Kennedy has stated that he supports securing the border, including efforts like Operation Lone Star by states in the absence of federal action.
Hundreds of migrants die each year along the Mexico-US border while attempting to cross into the US from Mexico illegally. Exposure (including heat stroke, dehydration, and hyperthermia) were the leading cause. According to the estimates by group Border Angels, about 10,000 people have died in their attempt to cross border since 1994. In 2014, the US declared a crisis at the border due to an influx of unaccompanied minors and women making their way through checkpoints. The crisis predominantly concerned increased immigration from the Northern Triangle of Central America encompassing Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, where there are high amounts of political instability, violent crime, and poverty. Thousands of Central American migrants had been clustered in Mexican border cities like Matamoros, Tamaulipas, for months, blocked from seeking asylum in the US. The US government and United Nations provided free transportation to return refugees to their homes in Central America, but for many returning home was not a good option and they would rather face the potentially life-threatening methods of illegal entry: crossing the river, climbing into tractor-trailers driven by human smugglers, or both. In 2019, as the USBP reported, the number of migrants caught hiding in tractor-trailers along the border had risen by 40 percent that year.
In June 2013, the Senate approved the most comprehensive immigration overhaul bill since 1986. Negotiated by a bipartisan group of eight senators, fourteen Republicans joined all Democrats in voting for the measure and President Barack Obama promised to sign it. Most conservative Republicans opposed the bill and said it would be dead on arrival in the House. The bill provided for increased border security, including 20,000 new border patrol officers, completion of 700 miles of border fencing and new border surveillance equipment. The bill also provided a "path to citizenship" for some eleven million undocumented immigrants already living in the country. Gallup polling found the overhaul was broadly supported by both Democrats and Republicans. But Speaker John Boehner refused to consider the bill in the House, promising that the House would "do our own bill." However no immigration reform bill emerged.
In September 2019, the US Supreme Court allowed a new ruling to take effect that could curtail most asylum applications at the border. The ruling would demand that most asylum seekers who pass through another country first will be ineligible for asylum at the US's southern border. The ruling was set to take effect on the week of October 8, 2019. President Donald Trump's administration tried to stop migrants from getting into the US at all, asking them to take a number at the border and to wait until they are called for a chance to have their asylum cases heard. As a result, in September 2019, the US immigration court faced over one million waiting for their cases to be heard, matching the highest backlog seen in the US.
In the fiscal year 2021 beginning October 2020, the USBP confirmed more than 1.6 million encounters with migrants along the Mexico-US border, more than quadruple the number in the previous fiscal year and the largest annual total on record. Encounters had fallen by about half in fiscal 2020, when the border was closed during the COVID pandemic. On January 13, just one week prior to Biden's inauguration, more than 3,000 people departed Honduras and El Salvador for the US. That number grew to approximately 7,000-8,000 one week later. On January 16, Guatemala and Mexico deployed the military to their borders, in an attempt to stop the migrant caravan from transiting through their countries on the way to the US, but this proved ineffective.
On his first day in office, President Hoe Biden halted the construction of Trump's Mexican border wall, ending the national emergency declared by the Trump administration in February 2019. Republicans expected prior to Joe Biden taking office that there would be a border surge at the start of 2021, and they planned to make it a central issue in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections. The number of migrants arriving in the US from Central America had been rising since February 2021. The USBP reported an increase in encounters with unaccompanied children from the month before. The reported 5,858 encounters in January to 9,457 in February constituted the largest one-month percentage increase in encounters with unaccompanied children since CBP began recording data in 2010.
In February 2021, a group of migrants was found massacred in northern Mexico. A few months later, the US Customs and Border Patrol reported that various colored bracelets with writing on them being used as a method to track a migrant's payment status to their "coyote" and drug cartels that control various parts of Mexico. The bracelets reportedly are used for tracking status of protection from cartel actions such as death, kidnapping, and the right to be in cartel controlled territory or to cross the border into the US.
In March 2021, amid a rise in migrants entering the US from Mexico, Biden told migrants: "Don't come over." He said that the US was arranging a plan for migrants to "apply for asylum in place", without leaving their original locations. In the meantime, Biden continued the Trump administration's Title 42 policy for quick deportations as migrants continued to cross into the US. Biden had stated earlier that his administration would not deport unaccompanied migrant children. The rise in arrivals of such children exceeded the capacity of facilities meant to shelter them, causing the Biden administration to direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage these children, but the facilities were overwhelmed because of the numbers of adults and children coming into the country.
On March 24, 2021, Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris to reduce the number of unaccompanied minors and adult asylum seekers. She is also tasked with leading the negotiations with Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In June 2021, Vice President Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico in an attempt to address the root causes of migration from Central America to the United States. During her visit, in a joint press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Harris issued an appeal to potential migrants, stating "I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come."
In September 2021, over 30,000 Haitian migrants crossed the border in the Del Rio, Texas, sector. At one point, a migrant camp beneath the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge contained over 15,000 temporary residents. The poor conditions in the camp attracted widespread international media attention. Photos of horse-mounted USBP agents emerged allegedly showing the agents mistreating migrants.
The USBP detained more than 1.7 million migrants crossing the Mexico-US border illegally in the 2021 fiscal year, the highest number ever recorded. In November 2021, only 31 percent of Americans approved of President Biden's handling of immigration. Progressives have pressed the president to provide asylum to migrants who have legitimate claims of persecution in their homelands.
Human smugglers have been spreading the false rumor that the US has open borders in order to lure Central Americans to the United States border, under the impression they would be granted asylum upon arrival. Disinformation originates with politicians and conservative media in those countries.
Many Republicans and conservative commentators alleged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was to blame for the border crisis. On January 28, 2024, House Republicans introduced two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, alleging "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" and breach of the public trust. Constitutional scholars, Democrats, and some conservatives asserted Republicans were improperly using impeachment to address immigration policy disputes rather than for high crimes and misdemeanors. A February 6 full House vote to impeach failed to pass, on a 214-216 vote. The impeachment resolution passed on a 214-213 vote one week later.
Following months of negotiations, on February 4, 2024, a bipartisan group of senators released a 370-page bill intended to sharply reduce incentives for migrants to attempt border crossings. The bill included a "border emergency" provision that would automatically require the border to be closed if border encounters reached an average of 5,000 per day over several days. Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans falsely asserted the bill allowed 5,000 illegal border crossings per day. The bill would end the practice of "catch and release" that allows migrants entry into the country while they await immigration hearings. Instead, migrants would be detained pending hearings. The bill also provided for a tighter asylum application and approval process, with speedy removal of migrants who do not qualify. The plan included hiring thousands more border patrol and asylum officers and increasing detention capacity. It also provided for thousands of work visas for migrant spouses of U.S. citizens awaiting immigrant visas.
President Biden supported the bill, while Speaker Johnson said, even before its release, that it would be "dead on arrival" in the Republican-controlled House. Shortly after the proposal was announced, House majority leader Steve Scalise declared it would not be brought before the House for a vote. Independent Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, asserted the border would have been closed every day so far in 2024 if the bill had been law. Biden promised in January that he would immediately close the border if the bill was enacted. Lead Republican negotiator James Lankford of Oklahoma, was among the most conservative Republican Senators, attempted to defend the bill throughout the weeks leading to the vote, but Donald Trump publicly called for Republicans during the Senate negotiations to oppose the proposal. The National Border Patrol Council, a labor union representing some 18,000 border patrol officers, quickly endorsed the Senate bill.
Senate Republicans swiftly turned against the bill upon its release, after Trump openly said he did not want Joe Biden to score a political win with the legislation. On February 7, Senate Republicans blocked the proposal in a floor vote. Lankford said on the floor before the vote that a "popular commentator" had told him a month earlier, "'If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.'" Two days before the vote, Trump told a radio host, "This is a very bad bill." The bill's $118 billion package included $60 billion for Ukraine military and $14 billion for Israel. Trump said at a rally days later, "We crushed crooked Joe Biden's disastrous open borders bill," while Biden said, "Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends."
Polling has shown that border security and immigration are among the top issues concerning potential voters in the 2024 presidential election.In response to the influx of migrants, Republican controlled states such as Texas and Florida have been busing migrants to major sanctuary cities controlled by Democrats such as New York and Chicago.
Donald Trump has stated that if elected, he would increase deportations, send the U.S. military to the border, expand ICE detentions, deputize local law enforcement to handle border security, increase Customs and Border Patrol funding as well as finish building the wall on the southern border. The Biden administration has undertaken a policy of punishing migrants who enter the country illegally and providing temporary protections to migrants from certain countries such as Venezuela, Ukraine, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti. This has resulted in a total increase in migrants legally arriving at points of entry, and a decrease in migrants attempting to illegally cross the border.
Independent candidate Robert Kennedy has stated that he supports securing the border, including efforts like Operation Lone Star by states in the absence of federal action.