New Report Calls for Major Investments and Reforms to Build a U.S. Border Control System that Can Address Present and Future Challenges

WASHINGTON, DC — A new report out today calls for major reforms and investments — including for immigration functions not always understood to be part of the border enforcement system — to address unprecedented migration challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing from visits to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities along the entire southwest border and extensive interviews of governmental and nongovernmental officials in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) report emphasizes that border control cannot be achieved at the border alone. Success will require, among other things, significant investments in building capacity as well as collaboration with regional partners to address the increasingly complex migration patterns now being seen throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The report traces the factors that have stretched the U.S. border management system beyond its capabilities: The current record level of encounters of asylum seekers and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, sharp diversification in nationalities and the shift in the characteristics of arrivals, with families now accounting for an increasing share.

While the Biden administration last year began to implement a far-reaching strategy that seeks to incentivize orderly and legal arrivals and disincentivize unauthorized crossings, the early results have been mixed, the MPI researchers find. Longstanding processing capacity, policy coordination and resource limitations across the agencies that have a role in screening arriving migrants are among the significant hurdles to success.

The report, Shifting Realities at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Immigration Enforcement and Control in a Fast-Evolving Landscape, offers a series of recommendations to create a more effective, durable system of border control. Among them, the U.S. government should:

1. Establish multi-agency border processing centers, where federal agencies and NGO partners would operate, streamlining migrant screening and referrals and creating surge capacity to respond to spikes in arrivals. Beyond CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should be co-located with representatives of certified NGOs and legal service providers to enable more efficient operations.
2. Create a federal mechanism to redirect migrants without U.S. ties to interior destinations that have available services and capacity, akin to what already occurs with refugee admissions. This directed distribution, supplementing the existing work of border NGOs, would enable shared responsibility beyond just a few destinations such as New York, Chicago and Denver, while accommodating desires by communities such as Pittsburgh to welcome border arrivals.
3. Implement asylum system reforms to ensure timely and fair decisions, and adequately fund essential agencies. Because the border enforcement and asylum systems are now inextricably linked, ensuring necessary investments for the agencies that play the leading roles in the asylum process — USCIS and the immigration courts — is essential to effective border control. USCIS and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) require significant investments in personnel, technology and capacity building to be able to streamline asylum adjudications and address massive backlogs. Deciding incoming asylum cases in months, not years, is critical to effective border control. Increased legal representation and case management support would ensure that asylum seekers understand and comply with the various steps of the process. And ICE must be sufficiently funded to ensure repatriation of those whose cases are denied.
4. Further strengthen engagement and cooperation with Mexico on migration management. Beyond collaboration on enforcement measures, the U.S. government should address specific challenges its Mexican counterparts face in meeting the humanitarian needs of migrants waiting in Mexico for CBP One appointments, as well as support and assist Mexico in building its own immigration and protection systems as a migrant-destination country.
5. Develop robust refugee processing and resettlement programs within the Western Hemisphere. Realizing the potential of the Safe Mobility Offices to provide migrants access to protection and new labor mobility pathways closer to home requires developing trust and communication with local networks of community intermediaries that are assisting intending migrants with protection needs.

“The volume and diversity of migrant arrivals have strained U.S. border enforcement beyond its capabilities, overwhelming an immigration and enforcement system not built for them,” analysts Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh and Doris Meissner write. “The Biden administration has advanced an ambitious, wide-ranging set of post-Title 42 policies that aim to establish border control and humane enforcement. But their success requires vastly expanded resources to overcome breakdowns in the government’s ability to, for example, decide asylum cases in a timely and fair fashion, fully process expedited removal cases and provide funding to NGO partners, whose work with migrants is essential in border communities and destination cities.”

They note that congressional action is essential to strengthen and modernize the U.S. border control system by greatly increasing its capacity. “Without such efforts, managing migration at the southwest border will continue to be a reactive exercise, rather than a cohesive strategy that proactively identifies migration patterns and responses across the region and addresses migrant protection needs and border control imperatives,” the authors conclude.

The report is the first of two examining conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. On January 25, MPI will release a companion report that traces how today’s border challenges were decades in the making. The report, co-authored by former CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin, identifies key developments since the early 1990s to improve border security and lessons learned that could inform future border strategies.

Read today’s Shifting Realities at the U.S.-Mexico Border report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/shifting-realities-us-mexico-border.

For more MPI work on border security, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/border-security.