AP: 2,000 Migrants Heading to U.S. from Southern Mexico

There’s likely more and less to this than the headlines suggest, or conventional wisdom would conclude

By Andrew R. Arthur on October 22, 2024
tapachula caravan

An earlier caravan in Tapachula last week. Photo by Todd Bensman.

On October 20, AP reported: “A group of about 2,000 migrants left Mexico’s southern border Sunday hoping to reach the country’s north and ultimately the United States.” That sounds like a “caravan” of people to me, and the reason they are coming is simple: Like many Americans, they are concerned about the results of the November 5 presidential election and want to get in while they can. But there’s likely a lot less and more to this story than meets the eye.

The “Caged City” of Tapachula. My colleague Todd Bensman just returned from the departure point for the migrants in the AP report, the city of Tapachula, in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Chiapas is the southernmost Mexican state, bordering Guatemala, and Tapachula is the biggest border-adjacent locality in the state. I am not simply mentioning this as a geography lesson for a place you’re unlikely to go.

Rather, it’s because Tapachula has long been a key crossing point for northbound migrants — both legal and otherwise — into Mexico. And of late, it’s been one of two spots (the other being Villahermosa, in the neighboring state of Tabasco) where the Mexican government has been concentrating “other than Mexican” (OTM) migrants who are seeking to make their way north to the United States.

Because the Mexican government has been holding OTMs in Tapachula on behalf of the U.S. government, Bensman refers to it as “the caged city”. Let me explain.

CBP One App Interview Scheme. On January 5, 2023, the White House issued a fact sheet titled “Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions”. Among other policies, it announced that:

When Title 42 eventually lifts, noncitizens located in Central and Northern Mexico seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry have access to the CBP One mobile application for scheduling an appointment to present themselves for inspection and to initiate a protection claim instead of coming directly to a port of entry to wait. This new feature will significantly reduce wait times and crowds at U.S. ports of entry and allow for safe, orderly, and humane processing.

I’ve dubbed that the “CBP One app interview scheme”, and many of the “facts” in this announcement aren’t “factual” per se. For example, there’s the contention that would-be illegal migrants would only be able to schedule appointments for interviews at the border ports of entry once “Title 42 lifted”, which occurred on May 11, 2023.

In reality, that program had already been ongoing on a limited basis when that fact sheet was issued, as Bensman reported months earlier, and it expanded to all would-be migrants just a week later, on January 12.

Moreover, the claim that CBP One app users are “seeking to enter the United States lawfully” is untrue as a matter of fact and law. By definition, none of them are seeking lawful entry because they don’t have the documents — visas and passports — needed to be admitted to the United States lawfully.

In any event, CBP currently makes 1,450 CBP One port interview appointments available to aliens who use the app daily (529,250 per annum), and according to CBP, some 813,000 migrants scheduled appointments using the app through the end of August.

Congressional disclosures revealed that 95.8 percent of migrants who scheduled app appointments were released into the United States and, if you do the math, you’ll see that nearly 799,000 foreign nationals — none of whom had visas or any right to enter this country — have been waved in under this scheme. That’s roughly the population of San Francisco.

And — to return to Tapachula — the scheme’s not just for migrants in northern and central Mexico anymore. On August 23, CBP began allowing OTMs “to request and schedule appointments from” Tabasco and Chiapas.

As I noted in early September, the Mexican government has begun accommodating OTMs in those two states who have scheduled appointments using the app by busing them from Tabasco and Chiapas to the U.S. Southwest border ports of entry. And to assist the Mexican government, DHS has been giving them access to CBP One so our allies to the south can figure out which OTMs to allow through.

Appointments can be made on the app 21 days in advance of open interview times, which means a lot of OTMs are stuck in Chiapas and Tabasco waiting their turns to board the Mexican government’s buses. How many? Bensman was told by a local publishing sources in Tapachula that there are about 150,000 migrants in the city, while AP puts the figure at a more modest 40,000 migrants.

“Migration and Watchlist Encounter Trends”. So why aren’t those migrants in Tapachula simply jumping the line to enter illegally by breaking out and heading north? Because the Mexican government won’t let them.

In its otherwise dismal “Homeland Threat Assessment 2025”, the DHS Office of Analysis and Assessment includes the following, under the heading “Migration and Watchlist Encounter Trends”:

While FY 2024 year-to-date overall migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border remain high compared to pre-pandemic historical trends, monthly encounters have declined since December 2023 and, as of July, were the lowest in over three years. This trend is probably explained, in part, by increased Mexican enforcement efforts and migrant reactions to shifts in US asylum policy.

These ”increased Mexican enforcement efforts” are the fruits of a diplomatic agreement the administration brokered with Mexico City last December, which Bensman has described as follows:

The deal had Mexico mount an aggressive, sustained nationwide migration crackdown that involved, among other disruption operations, the deployment of 32,000 troops to conduct mass roundups of migrants in the country’s north for “internal deportation” to Mexico’s southern states, where the migrants are bottled up.

The “southern states” being, of course, Chiapas and Tabasco. Thus, if those OTM migrants want out of Tapachula and Villahermosa, they must either have enough money to pay off cartels and corrupt officials to secure their passages or keep hitting refresh on the CBP One app until they get lucky.

Having just returned from Tapachula, Bensman doubts that the 2,000 migrants AP references are simply being allowed to walk all the way to the U.S. Southwest border, however.

Instead, he thinks that the Mexican government is taking pressure off the caged city (where he describes the “misery index” as being “off the charts”) by allowing those migrants to proceed to less-congested areas, such as Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas state, or even Mexico City itself.

Thus, there is likely less to the AP report than meets the eye. For now.

The Election Threat. I say “for now” because nobody, least of all the migrants, know what the presidential election might bring.

As AP reports:

Some migrants, like Venezuelan Joel Zambrano, believe a new administration in the U.S. could put an end to asylum appointments through an online system called CBP One.

“That is what makes us fearful. They say this could change because they could both close the CBP One appointment and all the services that are helping migrants,” he said.

While I have no doubt a second Trump administration would implement border policies very different from the current Biden-Harris ones, I’m not so sure that it would scrap the whole scheme entirely.

Note that the White House, DHS, and DOJ under the Trump administration also attempted to implement policies to encourage asylum-seeking migrants to use the ports to make their claims rather than just entering illegally and requesting protection once they were apprehended.

Specifically, in November 2018, Trump issued Presidential Proclamation (PP) 9822, “Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States”.

Premised on his authority under section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the then-president suspended the entry of aliens across the Southwest border for 90 days, except for aliens who came through the ports of entry and for aliens with certain humanitarian claims.

In other words, PP 9822 only applied to illegal entrants, and that same day, DHS and DOJ issued a rule barring illegal entrants subject to such a proclamation from applying for asylum. That rule is known as the “Port of Entry rule” because it limits asylum claims to aliens coming through the ports, not between them.

The problem is that rule was quickly blocked, first by a district court judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and then by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit.

As I explained in May, however, many of the same issues those courts had with the Port of Entry rule have been again raised in litigation challenging similar Biden-Harris policies, and a key finding that those courts relied upon (too legally complicated to discuss here) was later called into question by the Supreme Court in a June 2020 opinion that involved different facts.

A different Ninth Circuit decision on the Biden-Harris policies could allow a putative second Trump administration to keep at least part of the CBP One app interview scheme, provided it could also bar asylum claims by illegal entrants along the lines of the Port of Entry rule.

It’s questionable, however, that even if Trump redux were to allow migrants to make appointments using the app that it would continue to then release them into the United States as the current administration has been doing.

Instead, migrants whose claims were accepted for adjudication at the ports would likely either be detained (which current law requires), or be sent back across the border to await their asylum hearings (along the lines of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy).

If Vice President (and current Democratic nominee) Kamala Harris were to prevail, on the other hand, it would likely just be more of the same for the foreseeable future at the Southwest border.

Mexico City Will Get to Weigh In. Unless, in either scenario, the Mexican government has other ideas. That December enforcement deal was struck by the Biden-Harris administration with then-Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (AMLO), but he’s not president anymore.

On October 1, AMLO’s protégé Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president, and thus far she’s been continued her country’s internal migrant crackdown. Whether that continues, under either Harris or Trump, is anybody’s guess, but the ultimate answer likely depends on how much pressure Washington exerts and whatever new concessions Sheinbaum demands.

Trump previously played hardball with AMLO to get him to agree to both Remain in Mexico and Title 42, and his temperament hardly seems to have changed in the interim. Harris is a wild card in all of this, but Sheinbaum may demand something along the lines of a massive amnesty from the current vice president to ensure Mexico’s crackdown continues.

Don’t expect to see thousands of migrants pouring over the Southwest border between now and election day, but don’t be surprised to see a surge after the election. Mexico’s new president may test whoever prevails on November 5, at least to see how far she can push her new American counterpart, and that means potentially opening up the “caged city” of Tapachula, Mexico.