Migrant Crossings on the Rise Again at U.S. Border

Illegal crossings along the U.S. Southwestern border are rising fast just three months after the Biden administration tightened immigration policy, with Border Patrol arrests surging in remote desert areas.

Migrants trying to enter the U.S. illegally are braving record-high temperatures, which is making their journeys riskier and requiring more rescues by U.S. and Mexican border authorities.

More than 130,000 migrants were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in July, according to a U.S. government official briefed on the data, a third more than in June.

The fastest growth was in Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which comprises most of Arizona, with some 40,000 apprehensions, the most since April 2008. Authorities attribute much of the Tucson traffic to a shift in tactics by human smugglers guiding migrants to the border.

Tens of thousands of migrants crossed in some of the most remote and harsh stretches of the Arizona desert between Yuma and Tucson as smugglers try less-frequently used routes to avoid detection. Such paths keep to areas with limited infrastructure to detain migrants, making it more likely they will be released.

“You would think nobody would be coming, but they are all coming in the worst heat in history,” said Adam Isacson, a border-security expert at WOLA, a Washington-based human-rights advocacy group.

There have been no deaths or major medical emergencies reported in the newly busy area, a patch of desert around Ajo, some 130 miles west of Tucson, in recent weeks, officials say. U.S. authorities recovered the bodies of more than 890 migrants, a record number, along the border in the 2022 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the Biden administration. Many died from dehydration while lost in arid areas of the border.

John Modlin, the Border Patrol’s top agent in Tucson, said on July 28 that officers there had made about 10,000 arrests and more than 400 rescues in the previous week. In all of June, there were around 24,000 arrests, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

Border authorities in the Rio Grande Valley sector of east Texas also reported spikes in migrant apprehensions. Large numbers of arrests have continued into August.

Crossing in desert areas can be deadly, with ground temperatures well exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit at times, CBP officials say. Such extreme conditions have led to a spike in 911 calls, they say. Agents responding to such calls for help routinely find dozens or even hundreds of migrants in need of aid and trying to surrender to arriving border agents, according to an official familiar with the situation.

CBP said the Border Patrol has deployed additional agents and transportation resources to the region.

The agency said that “callous human smuggling organizations” have even sent migrant families with children through stretches of a National Wildlife Refuge and the Tohono O’odham Nation southwest of Tucson.

While arrests for illegal border crossings have increased sharply in recent weeks, they remain significantly below the 222,000 reported in December. They are also lower than in the months before the Biden administration stopped enforcing the Title 42 public-health law that allowed agents to quickly turn back migrants before they could ask for asylum.

Although extreme temperatures have traditionally dissuaded migration during some summer and winter months, the weather hasn’t usually been a decisive factor for migrants in the last two or three years, said Dana Graber Ladek, Mexico chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency.

Along the key routes in Latin America, the number of migrants making their way north has also been rising fast. It is an indication that apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border could again reach the record level seen earlier this year.

Farther south, a record 273,000 migrants crossed the dangerous jungle paths of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama from January to early August, more than in all of 2022, according to Panama’s government. Most people are on the way to the U.S. More than 150,000 Venezuelans made the trek. Panama’s statistics show that July was the busiest month so far this year, with crossings almost doubling from June to more than 55,000, even as the rainy season picked up. Torrential rains spark flash floods, and pathways become almost impassable because of dense mud, fueling risk of fatal accidents and diseases.

“There was a momentary decrease in migration in May after the end of Title 42,” said Graber Ladek of the U.N. “But we have witnessed continued high flows in the Darién Gap, and it was only a matter of time before that was reflected in Mexico.”

Mexico’s government registered a monthly record of more than 58,000 migrants heading to the U.S. in June, the latest month of available estimates, a 45% increase from May. In Cuba, social-media advertisements have recently increased offering door-to-door transportation to the U.S. through flights to Nicaragua and ground travel across Central America and Mexico.

This Havana to Managua air bridge had all but ceased after the Biden administration introduced a program of sponsors for Cuban migrants. But Arturo McFields, a former senior Nicaraguan diplomat based in Washington who defected last year, said many Cubans aren’t waiting to find sponsors and are selling all they own to escape the island’s worst economic crisis in more than three decades.

“For many ordinary Cubans, finding a sponsor who has money in the U.S. is Mission Impossible,” he said.

On Facebook, self-styled improvised travel agents are offering airline tickets from Cuba to Nicaragua for about $900. Photographs and videos on Facebook show satisfied clients boarding planes at Havana’s airport. Others also offer help getting from Nicaragua through Mexico and into the U.S.

“Quick travel from Nicaragua to USA by car, no jungle, no trailer trucks, safe conduct through Honduras and a humanitarian visa in Mexico,” offers one fixer on Facebook.

Since mid-July, immigration authorities in Mexico have reported finding more than 2,200 migrants along key routes, most of them crammed into a dozen trucks. The majority were families with children from Guatemala, Honduras and as far away as Egypt and India, the government said. One in 10 was an unaccompanied minor. Many wore plastic identification bracelets with legends such as “Toribio,” likely indicating the human-smuggling organization that was paid for the journey, authorities said.

“At this point, human smuggling is an industrial commodity, a FedEx kind of operation,” said Isacson.

Endemic poverty and criminal violence are still the main reasons that Latin Americans emigrate, migrants say. A 60-year-old migrant from Honduras said that she arrived in Mexico this week fleeing the violent community of Choloma, near the city of San Pedro Sula, because of extortion threats.

“I had to leave my house because if I didn’t deliver the extortion payment this weekend, they were going to kill me,” said the migrant, a garment retailer.

“All my family is out of the country too,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to enter the U.S. Until now, what I do is thank God that I’m still alive.”

—Michelle Hackman, Juan Carlos Rivera and José de Córdoba contributed to this article.

Write to Santiago Pérez at [email protected] and Alicia A. Caldwell at [email protected]