In the past year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the southern U.S. border, begun building a new border barrier, and arrested migrants for allegedly trespassing on private property.
All tagged immigration
In the past year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the southern U.S. border, begun building a new border barrier, and arrested migrants for allegedly trespassing on private property.
Mexico is considering setting tougher entry requirements for Venezuelans, partly in response to U.S. requests, after a sharp rise in border arrests of Venezuelans fleeing their homeland, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Gaston, a Venezuelan human rights lawyer, spent years visiting the country's most squalid prisons as he defended students jailed for protesting its socialist government.
Fearing retaliation by the authorities for his work, Gaston decided to flee to the United States. There, he was arrested by Texas state troopers, court records show. It was one of roughly 1,600 trespassing arrests of recent border-crossers in Texas since July under an immigration crackdown by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, dubbed Operation Lone Star.
On Friday night, a local lawyer published a Facebook post saying that local school district buses were transferring migrants, mostly Haitians, to processing facilities. "THE SAME BUSES OUR CHILDREN WILL RIDE ON MONDAY!!!!" Jacques De La Mota wrote alongside pictures of a yellow school bus seemingly picking up migrants in the dark.
Eddyson Langlais, 24, was huddled under the Del Rio International Bridge in Texas, alongside thousands of fellow Haitian migrants on Friday night, when he saw news on Facebook that felt like a gut punch: The United States was going to fly Haitians back to their homeland.
More than 10,000 mostly Haitian migrants were bivouacked in a squalid camp under a bridge in southern Texas on Friday, even as hundreds more headed toward the border in a growing humanitarian and political challenge for U.S. President Joe Biden.
Haitians camped out under a Texas bridge followed instructions circulated on WhatsApp to get there, according to a dozen migrants who said the tips delivered to their phones helped them evade checks by Mexican authorities.
Record numbers of Venezuelans have been attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexican border in recent months, some facilitated by rapidly-adapting smuggling networks.