To Gov. Greg Abbott, the results of his multibillion-dollar border security initiative are clear.
In a recent television interview, Abbott highlighted a decrease in the number of migrants trying to enter the country through the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass after he ordered the state National Guard to seize a 50-acre public park there. He also noted another statistic: Texas has more than two-thirds of the U.S.-Mexico border, but has recently seen fewer illegal crossings than other border states.
“We are having a profound impact in stopping the flow of illegal immigration into the state of Texas,” Abbott said in the interview, crediting Operation Lone Star, the border security initiative he launched in March 2021.
Federal statistics confirm Abbott’s claim that overall more migrants were encountered by Border Patrol agents outside of Texas each of the first three months of this year. During the 2023 fiscal year, Texas on average accounted for roughly 59% of migrant encounters along the southwest border. During the first half of the 2024 fiscal year, which began in October, Texas has on average accounted for 43% of migrant encounters.
However immigration and foreign policy experts say the reasons driving the recent shift — and any migration patterns changes in general — are much more complicated. And they said the numbers are likely to change again if history offers any clues.
“He can, with no evidence and no real deep analysis, claim all the credit he wants to — and good for him,” said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at the Baker Institute, a nonpartisan policy research organization based at Rice University in Houston. “But those of us who have been looking at immigration for a long time would probably be a lot more skeptical.”
The number of migrants trying to enter the country illegally in between legal ports of entry reached historic levels in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a record 2.4 million migrant apprehensions at the nation’s southwestern border for the fiscal year that ended in September 2022.
Texas shares about 1,250 miles of border with Mexico and is home to five of the nine Border Patrol sectors along the southern border — the El Paso Sector also includes New Mexico’s 180 miles of the border. Since at least 2019, Border Patrol agents in the Texas sectors have recorded more encounters with migrants each month than the rest of the sectors.
Mexico has in recent months increased its enforcement efforts by arresting or detaining more migrants from other countries, said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas. But Mexican statistics indicate that the country is not deporting people and recent court decisions have ruled that migrants can’t be detained for more than 36 hours for the most part, he said.
“They’re just massively putting people on buses, it seems, and sending them to the southern part of the country and the central part and almost anywhere else that’s not near the [U.S.] border in order to try to depressurize the border,” Isacson said. “It’s very confusing and murky but they are stopping a lot of people.”
It’s also possible that Senate Bill 4, Texas’ new immigration law that would let state police arrest people suspected of entering the country illegally, is causing a “wait and see” moment that typically accompanies any new immigration policy, Isacson said. The law remains locked in unresolved court challenges and is not currently in effect.
“If the courts allow SB 4 to go forward, the numbers might drop even more,” Isacson said. “But then they will come back. … Migrants will realize that ultimately it’s just another speed bump.”
Some immigration policy experts credit the Biden administration for the recent decrease, pointing to a winter visit from top U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas — to Mexico to discuss immigration with their Mexican counterparts. Top American and Mexican officials have touted agreements from such closed-door meetings.
Immigration experts pointed out that apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped during the first three months of the year — a period that would typically see an increase as migrants try to make the journey before the summer heat arrives.
Another major change last year was the expiration of Title 42, a policy launched by the Trump administration at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed U.S. border officials to quickly remove migrants to Mexico without allowing them to claim asylum.
Many of those migrants would try crossing again — and each time they were apprehended counted as an encounter, which pushed up the number of encounters, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University who has researched the border and U.S.-Mexico relations.
Migrant encounters decreased immediately after the end of Title 42, according to Border Patrol data, but increased again near the end of 2023.
“How are we going to attribute the increase or decrease to either Border Patrol or to Operation Lone Star?” Correa-Cabrera said. “It’s difficult. It’s impossible to know that.”
Source: Texas Tribune BY Alejandro Serrano
Photo: Texas DPS special agents apprehend a group of undocumented migrants from Honduras as part of Operation Lone Star in Kinney County near Brackettville on Nov. 8, 2021. Credit: Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune
