Karen Musalo, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
With the expiration of a pandemic-era restriction, the Biden administration is set to impose a new rule to curtail immigration at the US-Mexico border.
A makeshift memorial where a tractor-trailer was discovered with 53 dead migrants inside, near San Antonio, Texas, June 29, 2022.
Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
A 1994 US policy was supposed to deter migration by securing popular access points. Instead, it drives people to enter the US by more hazardous means, such as being crammed in hot tractor-trailers.
At last 50 people from Central and South America were found dead inside a vehicle in San Antonio, Texas, on June 27.
EPA-EFE/Adam Davis
Keeping landscapes connected can help protect wild animals and plants. In the US Southwest, border wall construction is closing off corridors that jaguars and other at-risk species use.
A Spanish-language sign warns migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border against explsing themselves to the dangerous elements in the desert.
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The number of migrants dying while trying to cross the US-Mexico border is at an all-time high. But these figures are still likely an underestimate.
Unaccompanied immigrant minors wait for Border Patrol processing after they crossed the Rio Grande into Roma, Texas, April 29, 2021.
John Moore/Getty Images
A record 95,079 child migrants had arrived alone at the US’s southern border by July this year. The US is legally responsible for these children, but it is struggling to give them adequate care.
Lake Mead, which serves seven U.S. states and three Mexican states, is drying up.
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The dire conditions that brought waves of Cubans to the US in the 1980s and 1990s are again escalating on the communist island, provoked by Trump-era sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. Border Patrol detains tens of thousands of the families and children who try to cross U.S. borders every year.
AP Photo/Julio Cortez
Children and families have been fleeing to the US in rising numbers for nearly a decade. So why is the current situation at the US-Mexico border being viewed as something new?
Unaccompanied minors wait to see a Border Patrol agent after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas on March 25, 2021.
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Unaccompanied minors pose a humanitarian challenge for Biden, as they did for Trump and Obama. There are no quick fixes to child migration and many vexing complications, says an immigration scholar.
The first group of asylum-seekers allowed to cross from a migrant camp in Mexico into the United States following Biden’s repeal of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy arrives to Brownsville, Texas, Feb. 25, 2021.
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Luck and tenacity paid off for some 15,000 migrants who may now pursue their asylum cases in the US But nearly 42,000 cases filed from Mexico under a Trump-era rule were already rejected.
The pandemic and anti-immigration policies haven’t stopped migration from Central America – they’ve just made conditions at the border more hazardous.
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COVID-19 has created new hardships for migrants while giving the Trump administration an excuse to further restrict asylum as public attention focuses on the pandemic.
The political border cuts in two a region rich in biological and cultural diversity.
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Government policies and dangerous conditions affect the ability of researchers working on both sides of the US-Mexico border to conduct scientific fieldwork.
An inscription on the Peace Arch at the crossing between Washington state and British Columbia alludes to the special border relationship between the U.S. and Canada.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
The U.S. wanted to use the coronavirus pandemic as a reason to send the military to its northern border. The idea is part of America’s desire to “Mexicanize” the world’s longest undefended border.
Undocumented migrants climb on a train known as ‘La Bestia’ in Las Patronas town, Veracruz state, Mexico, Aug. 9, 2018, to travel through Mexico and reach the U.S.
Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images
The US may be in sight from the border towns of Sonora, Mexico, but the trip is far from over. Cartels control the desert territory that divides the two countries – and no one gets through for free.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer checks migrants’ documents.
AP Photo/Fernando Llano
Trump officials plan to send asylum seekers from the US to El Salvador while their claims are processed. That would expose these vulnerable people to grave dangers, says a political violence expert.
Asylum-seekers are carried from the Rio Grande.
REUTERS/Veronica G. Cardenas
Immigrant children could remain indefinitely in federal detention if courts allow the Trump administration to ditch a landmark agreement that has protected migrant children for decades.