• How Authorities Assess Asylum Seeker Credibility

    Credibility is a crucial factor when immigration authorities determine whether an asylum seeker is eligible to reside in Denmark or not. However, the assessment of an asylum applicant’s credibility takes place in such a complex and opaque procedure that an applicant’s rights can easily be suppressed.

  • U.S.-Mexico Border Encounters Decline After Increased Migrant Expulsions

    The number of migrant encounters at the United States-Mexico border dropped nearly 40% — from a record of about 252,000 in December 2022 to about 156,000 in January — according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. CBP credits the decrease to a parole program that began on January 5 for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

  • 2023 Border Security & Intelligence Summit

    Defense Strategies Institute announced its 11th Annual Border Security & Intelligence Summit. This forum will bring together DHS, IC, Federal Agencies, and Industry to discuss the protection of U.S borders through enhanced technology and intelligence solutions.

  • Administration Unveils New Border Measures to Curb Unlawful Migration to U.S.

    President Joe Biden announced Thursday measures to crack down on migrants seeking to enter the United States without authorization. The measures will make it easier for border authorities to quickly expel migrants who enter the U.S. between legal crossing points and revive country agreements where would-be asylum-seekers, who passed through a third country, must show they failed to receive protections there before asking for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

  • U.S. Supreme Court Rules to Keep Title 42 for Now

    The court ordered the Biden administration to continue enforcing the policy while Texas and other states that want to keep the Trump-era rule in place prepare their legal arguments.

  • U.S. DHS Chief Warns Borders Being Rendered Meaningless

    America’s borders – and borders in general – are no longer sufficient to help protect the United States from a variety of evolving threats, including foreign wars, according to a grim assessment by DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

  • Schengen States Extend Border Checks, Ignoring EU Court

    Though the top EU court recently ruled that Germany, Denmark and other Schengen states have no legal basis for extending border checks reimposed in 2015, the European Commission is not initiating infringement procedures.

  • Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality

    Activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in studies when claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies fail to appreciate the fact that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts, while they are in custody, as illegal immigrants. These studies thus misclassify as native-born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants.

  • Brazil’s Election and South America’s Looming Migration Woes

    The second round Brazil’s presidential election, to be held 30 October, might plunge the highly polarized country into a political chaos. One side-effect would be the mass migration of Brazilians fleeing instability, exacerbating the hectic state of migration at the U.S. southern border. Brazilian migrants will join the growing number of migrants from Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in reshaping migration trends.

  • Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: The Scale of the Problem

    Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. immigration system is broken – but the issue is not who should be admitted legally, for how long, and what about their families. Rather, a defining way in which the system is broken is that the current system is unable to implement the policies that Congress and the administration have already chosen. This article summarizes the basic facts about the immigration backlogs, which comprise roughly 24 million cases across the U.S. government.

  • DHS Revokes Trump-Era Asylum Reforms That Were Tied Up in Court

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently canceled reforms made in 2020 to modernize the asylum system. DHS should have at least considered lawful alternatives before revoking.

  • Cost of Providing for Illegal Aliens Released into the U.S. Since Jan. 2021: $20.4 Billion Annually

    According to a new analysis by FAIR, a nonprofit organization calling for reducing overall immigration levels, the cost of providing for the needs of illegal aliens who entered the country under since January 2021 adds an additional $20.4 billion annually.

  • Unaccompanied Child Imposters Identified in El Paso

    U.S. Border Patrol agents in the El Paso Sector recently identified ten adults posing as unaccompanied minors while in custody. So far in FY 2022, nearly 700 adult migrants were discovered to be posing as minors.

  • How Have Attitudes Towards U.S. Immigration Changed?

    Hostility to immigrants isn’t new to the United States. From the Know Nothings in the 1850s, to Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1890s, to Donald Trump, there were political movements and leaders who demonized immigrants. Are the Know Nothings, Cabot Lodge, or Trump representative of the broader opinion of their times? A new study that uses artificial intelligence to chart the tone of more than 200,000 congressional and presidential speeches on immigration since 1880 provides a surprising historical perspective.

  • Migration to the U.S. Is on the Rise Again – but It’s Unlikely to Be Fully Addressed During the Summit of the Americas, or Anytime Soon

    Migration in the Americas has dramatically increased over the past decade due to deteriorating political, economic and humanitarian conditions in several countries, particularly in Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti. High rates of crime, corruption, poverty, environmental degradation and violence all influence people’s decisions to migrate. The power of drug cartels, which can be embedded in government institutions like the police, also plays a key role in prompting migration.