Despite the Biden administration insisting it has got tough on the border, 104,000 migrants are still waiting in northern Mexico to enter the US and claim asylum, according to a report.
That number is significantly higher than the 60,000 who were estimated to be in the area waiting to cross by Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz in mid-May when Title 42 measures ended with a huge surge at the border.
Although the government has put tougher penalties in place for those caught attempting to enter the US illegally, up to 43,500 migrants are being waved into the country legally each month after applying through the government’s CBP One app.
That has led to tens of thousands of migrants – mostly Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans – determined to wait it out and trying their luck for one of the 1,450 daily appointments offered through the app.
Figures obtained by The Post show 17,000 asylum-seekers waiting in Tijuana, just south of San Diego, California, alone, according to city immigration officials.
The city is now hosting more migrants than the 16,000 reported to be in the city in May when Title 42 ended, prompting a last minute crush of migrants to try and get over the US-Mexico border.
Just south of Brownsville, Texas, another 8,000 migrants are waiting in shelters, camps or simply out on the streets, according to a Reuters report, citing government officials.
Charity workers in the city if Ciudad Juarez, Mexico across the border from El Paso, Texas, say the situation is fluid with lots of migrants both coming and going.
Local reports have said there are between 6,000 and 12,000 migrants in the city at any given time, all of whom are seeking refuge in the US and crossing legally or illegally via people smugglers, known as ‘coyotes’.
“There are quite a few people waiting for CBP One,” explained Dylan Corbett, Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, which serves migrants across the border in Juarez.
“We’re in the thousands, probably, but not too high. I’d hesitate to give anything more concrete.”
Many migrants — mostly Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans — believe they have legitimate asylum cases and are waiting the 90 days or so it usually takes refugees to get an appointment with the American government through the CBP One App.
If a migrant receives an appointment they are then given an interview where it is determined if they meet the required criteria. If so, they are allowed to continue into the US and pursue their asylum claim and get a work permit. Migrants can legally be in the country for years until their cases appear in court.
Any migrant who does not pass the interview is expelled from the US. As they have not broken any immigration laws, they are unlikely to be penalized at that point.
CBP counts all who present themselves for their scheduled interviews as ‘encounters’ at the border and includes them in their statistics, but the agency has yet to release any data on how many of those applications are rejected and how many people who used the CBP One app have been expelled since the end of Title 42 in May.
Thousands of migrants continue to arrive weekly in Chicago and New York where the shelter systems are overwhelmed, indicating tens of thousands of people are let into the country each month on a ‘parole’ basis.
The Biden Administration recently announced it has increased the number of daily CBP One Appointments to 1,450. At least 106,000 asylum appointments were granted in the first five months of 2023, according to CBP’s data.
The administration says that the CBP One app encourages a more orderly form of migration at the border, rather than a free-for-all.
Former Border Patrol chief Ron Vitiello slammed the Biden Administration on Fox News, claiming: “The numbers are muted in the sense that encounters at the border between the ports of entry are lower, but they’re not lower overall.
“People are coming, using CBP One, they’re coming to the port and they’re being released into the United States.
When you’re releasing over a third of everyone who comes to the border, then they’re going to just encourage more people to come into the pipeline.”
Most migrants are waiting for their opportunity to access the country legally, as a post-Title 42 reality means much stricter penalties for those caught crossing the border without authorization, Kenneth Ferrone of Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico told The Post.
“I think the word got out to most of the migrants, ‘Don’t attempt to cross,’” Ferrone said.
“Some of the things that the Biden Administration has done has made it very tricky for them because if they do come and they don’t use the CBP One App, there are some severe consequences,” Ferrone stated.
But others aren’t waiting for the legal route and are instead jumping the border illegally.
The Mexican government estimates many migrants are simply passing through Mexican border cities like Juarez and immediately entering the US between ports of entry, stealing their way into the country illegally. The Herald of Chihuahua newspaper reported as many as 12,000 migrants arriving in Juarez each month.
Those numbers align with what the US Border Patrol has been seeing on the ground, stopping about 300 migrants a day from entering into El Paso illegally, according to city’s migrant dashboard.
Any migrant caught illegally crossing the border will be deported, either to their home country or back to Mexico — which is the worst case scenario, many migrants have previously told The Post.
In an effort to stop repeat offenders, US immigration officials are returning illegal immigrants to the Guatemala-Mexico border or releasing them into Mexico City once the US deports them.
“We don’t see a lot of deportations from Juarez; a lot of them are in Tapachula,” Corbett said. “We are deporting a significant amount of people every day out of El Paso and those deportations have an effect when people are returned to the interior of Mexico or to Central America. That can have a deterrent effect.”
That means the hordes of migrants once seen in border cities near the US are now in Southern Mexico —overwhelming migrant shelters in Mexico City, where sources said there are also thousands of migrants arriving each week. Some 63,462 migrants have applied for asylum in Mexico from January to June, UNICEF told The Post.
“This is the border in the center of the country,” Sister Maria Silva, who runs a shelter in the capital city which is now bursting at the seams, told CNN.
On Saturday a 1,000 person caravan departed Mexico’s southern border headed north for the US border. Border officials remain unsure if they will see a human tidal wave when those migrants arrive at the US-Mexico border.
“There’s always a dip in the summer, there’s a new process, there are harsh penalties and deportations taking place,” Corbett added up.
“I don’t know if they all combine to produce a ‘new normal’ or if we will see something different down the road.”
The exact number of migrants across Mexico remains unknown and the Mexican government did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.