Rumors from smugglers, 'open border' claims, headlines factor in migrant rush

In recent months, Joanna Williams of Kino Border Initiative has heard an odd rumor circulating among migrants at the nonprofit’s shelter in Nogales, Sonora, as they waited for an appointment to request asylum using the “CBP One” application.

Asylum seekers must wait as long as six months, often in dangerous conditions along the border in Mexico, for one of the few appointment available through the app, promoted by the Biden Administration as the only legitimate way to request asylum for most migrants.

But the asylum seekers said they heard the app was about to go off-line, Williams said.

“People would come up and say, ‘Hey, I heard the app is shutting down. If it’s not going to be an option, I don’t think I should continue trying on the app,’” said Williams, executive director of Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic-led nonprofit that offers food, shelter, legal assistance, psychological support and other services to migrants on the border.

The rumor was baseless, but it’s certainly convinced some to opt to cross the border between ports of entry and request asylum from border agents in the field, instead of continuing to wait, advocates say.

U.S. officials are now trying to counter the latest rumor with their own online messaging.

“CBP One isn’t going to end. Ignore traffickers’ lies,” the U.S. Consulate in Nogales posted in Spanish on X, formerly Twitter, on Dec. 18. Other U.S. Consulate offices across Mexico have issued the same fact-check in hopes of convincing asylum seekers to stay the course and continue using the app.

Myriad factors influence the volume of migrant arrivals, including global instability, which is leading to rising migration worldwide.

But the current surge in migrant arrivals along the U.S.-Mexico border appears at least partly driven by misinformation and rumors, increasingly spread via social media platforms like TikTok and large group chats in the WhatsApp messaging application, according to reports from migrant-aid organizations and U.S. officials.

Human smugglers lose customers when migrants take advantage of legitimate pathways to asylum, officials say. So smugglers often spread rumors or misinformation, sometimes based on a nugget of truth, to generate demand for their lucrative industry, which has thrived in the face of U.S. border policies of deterrence and the lack of accessible avenues to request asylum.

Last month advocates in Texas, too, began hearing migrants share the rumor that CBP One would end after the holidays, said Tom Cartwright, a volunteer with South Texas-based advocacy group Witness at the Border.

Rumors like this “circulate on social media platforms and create a sense of urgency,” he said.

Migrants more “news aware”

Another emerging challenge is “pseudo-legitimate travel agencies” in cities like Dakar, the capital of Senegal, advertising travel to Europe and the U.S., according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. These groups advertise “visa-free travel to Europe,” selling packages that connect migrants to a smuggling organization in the western hemisphere to facilitate travel to the U.S.-Mexico border, according CBP.

Even political discourse in the U.S. filters down to what migrants hear about conditions at the border.

Conservative pundits repeating the falsehood that the U.S. has “open borders” under the Biden Administration filters down to potential migrants in Central America, according to a September poll funded by America’s Voice, a national advocacy group that supports immigration reform. The poll interviewed 600 randomly selected Central Americans between the ages of 16 and 39 who were living in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Nearly one in five people surveyed said they believed the U.S. had open borders and that most migrants can apply for asylum if they make it to the border. Among the youngest group surveyed, ages 16 to 24, more than one-third reported hearing U.S. officials or politicians claim the border is open.

Williams of Kino Border Initiative agreed that migrants are increasingly responding to U.S. news headlines that are now easier to access through social media.

Especially in the past few years, migrants have become more “news aware,” Williams said.

“Six or seven years ago I wouldn’t have migrants here asking me about, ‘What does this headline mean?’” she said. “Now it’s become much more common.”

But Williams emphasized that no one is trying to reach the U.S. simply because they read a headline or heard a rumor.

“The decision to migrate is determined by life factors. But the timing is often determined by what’s in the narrative in the headline,” she said. “It’s more that somebody who’s planning on leaving, or feeling pushed to leave, gets the sense of, ‘This is my window of opportunity.’”

Surge continues in Tucson

In November, the Tucson sector was again the busiest of the southern border’s nine sectors, as it has been since July. Border agents apprehended more than 64,600 migrants between ports of entry last month, up from 55,000 in October, according to monthly data released by CBP on Friday.

Border Patrol agents in the Tucson sector apprehended 19,400 migrants between ports of entry last week alone, according to John Modlin, the agency’s Tucson sector chief.

Casa Alitas and other resources for asylum seekers have been approaching full capacity for months now, with more than 1,300 migrants released to their care daily in recent days, said Diego Piña Lopez, agency director for Tucson nonprofit Casa Alitas, which provides temporary shelter and support services for asylum seekers.

As other sectors have experienced their own recent surges, especially the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas, that’s limited the Border Patrol’s ability to “laterally decompress” by transporting migrants to other areas of the border, Piña Lopez said.

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But so far Tucson’s shelter system has been able to house all migrants released here by the Border Patrol as legal asylum seekers, before they move on to stay with family or sponsors in other parts of the country, usually within 48 hours.

Migrants have long relied on word of mouth to inform their decisions, but the advent of social media has put more information, much of it unreliable, at the fingertips of vulnerable people desperate to find a way to safety, Piña Lopez said.

Policy changes create uncertainty

Smugglers also appear to be capitalizing on the ongoing U.S. federal budget debates, which U.S. media has reported could lead to drastic restrictions on asylum, Cartwright said.

“Anything that creates additional deterrence, like some of the things they’re talking about in these (budget) proposals, is going to directly improve the profits of organized crime,” he said.

Impending policy changes often contribute to a surge, or a drop, in arrivals, as migrants either hurry to cross the border before a change occurs, or take a wait-and-see approach in the weeks after a policy change.

The last time the southern border saw migrant-arrival volumes this high was in May, before the end of the Trump-era Title 42 policy, which allowed border agents to immediately return migrants to Mexico without giving them a chance to request asylum, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council.

“It’s not the only reason we’re seeing high numbers right now, but we have seen very consistently that rumors can play a very large role in these mass crossing events,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

In the lead-up to the end of Title 42, the Biden Administration’s messaging focused on how strict the policy that replaced it would be, including deportations and a five-year ban on re-entry for those who entered the U.S. outside ports of entry.

“The Biden Administration was sending messages that, ‘Once Title 42 is over, we will get harsher, we will crack down,’” he said. “A lot of people thought, ‘Well, shoot, we better go now,’” Reichlin-Melnick said. Then, there was a significant drop in arrivals after Title 42 ended, “as migrants took a wait-and-see approach.”

Biden’s so-called “asylum ban” is now in effect, although it’s been challenged in court, he said.

But as it turned out, the U.S. does not have the staffing capacity to put every asylum seeker through the harsher, rapid asylum screenings the policy called for, Reichlin-Melnick said. Asylum seekers are still being released to await asylum hearings in the U.S., often scheduled years later due to the underfunded asylum system’s backlog.

“Despite this rule banning asylum to most people crossing, that’s not actually impacting a large number of people because most are not getting the rapid screenings that could produce a decision in a matter of days, as opposed to a matter of years.”

“It’s crucial to understand, nearly everyone who is crossing the border right now will be banned from asylum under this rule (once they have their asylum hearing) because they didn’t use CBP One or because they can’t show ‘exceptional circumstances’ for why they crossed between ports of entry,” he said.

An example of “exceptional circumstances” would be a smuggler threatening to shoot a migrant for refusing to cross between ports of entry — as long as the migrant could prove it happened, he said.

“Core challenges” not addressed

Advocates and immigration analysts say the current chaos at the border largely results from policymakers’ decision to underfund the asylum system and U.S. ports of entry, while focusing almost exclusively on border enforcement, like wall construction, that has minimal impact on the number of arrivals and primarily serves to channel migrants to hard-to-reach and dangerously remote locations in the borderlands.

The backlog facing immigration courts is now a record 3 million pending cases, up from 2 million just one year ago, according the the latest figures from Syracuse University researchers who manage the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.

Calls to “close the border” don’t really mean much, experts say.

Presidential administrations face “hard limits” on what they can do, Reichlin-Melnick said, and the Biden Administration has made a number of policy changes that have been blocked in court.

“Once someone is on U.S. soil, under international law, they’re our problem,” he said. “We cannot simply turn people around once they’ve crossed the border. There’s no legal authority that permits that. Even if Congress creates a new legal authority to do that, it would still require the affirmative consent of Mexico, as did Title 42.”

The Biden Administration wants to hire 1,600 new asylum officers, which would “increase by 2.5 times the number of personnel that interview and adjudicate claims for asylum and facilitate timely decisions so that those who are ineligible can be quickly removed and those with valid claims can have faster resolution,” according to a fact sheet released by the White House in October.

But current negotiations in Congress aren’t focused on bolstering the asylum system.

“Everyone would agree a five-year wait to hear an asylum claim is a broken system,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “But right now unfortunately, the negotiations in Congress are less about fixing the system than about getting rid of it and hoping that solves the problem. But that isn’t going to stop migrants from crossing the border, and it won’t stop the administration from releasing people, because the fundamental core challenges will still be there.”