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Ahead of this week’s Democratic National Convention, a Chicago mutual aid the group began storage of toiletries, sleeping bags and tents. The group anticipated that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott can send buses with migrants from the southern border, in an attempt to create a spectacle and tie Democrats to immigration dysfunction.

The buses never came. The Texas program which has sent more than 120,000 migrants to democratically-led cities across the country since 2022 haven’t sent any buses for about two monthsaccording to The New York Times — despite Governor Abbott’s pledge to continue the effort.

There is a reason for that fewer migrants try to cross the border. US Border Patrol reported 56,000 meetings in July, far from it a record 250,000 reported in December. That’s at least partly due to a June executive order by President Joe Biden to tighten border controls, including shutting down the asylum system whenever crossings reach a certain weekly threshold.

Dara Lind, senior fellow at the nonprofit American Immigration Council, said in theory the executive order would drive down encounters by creating less incentive for people to cross. However, Lind emphasized that migration patterns are complex and that a number of factors, including warm summer temperatures, can affect crossing attempts. “The US loves to talk about immigration as if the only relevant factor is US policy, and that’s simply not true,” Lind said.

Migrants arriving at the border are also being deported at a much higher rate under the new Biden policy. The result is one astonishing reduction in the number of people released into the countryfrom more than 190,000 in December 2023 to around 12,000 in July.

Experts say US-backed efforts by the Mexican government to crack down on the migrant transit there has also fueled the reduction in crossing attempts. Several migrants who spoke to The Associated Press described brutal behavior by Mexican law enforcement, including beatings and extortion.

This week kicked off another part of the Biden administration’s efforts to outsource immigration enforcement as Panama deported 29 Colombiansprobably headed for the US border. The effort – fully funded by the US – aims to deter migrants from crossing the Darien Gap, a shaking stretch of jungle between Panama and Colombia.

A couple of recent reports suggest that the government is not doing a good job of keeping track of migrants who make it to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) failed to count nearly 42% of those detained by the agency between 2019 and 2022, according to a new report from the National Accountability Agency.

Meanwhile, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog, agency ‘unable to account for’ some of the more than 30,000 unaccompanied immigrant children who have not appeared for immigration court hearings in the past five years. Without knowing where children are, “ICE has no assurance that (they) are safe from human trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” Inspector General Joseph Cuffari wrote in a report to Congress this week.

Immigration and privacy advocates are alarmed by research into a high-tech way to better track immigrant children: facial recognition. Last week, MIT Technology Review reported on government efforts to develop facial recognition algorithms which could identify immigrant children years later as they age.

While there was no busing of migrants into Chicago this week, immigration and border security were front and center at the Democratic convention as the party sought to address one of its biggest weaknesses of voters in opinion polls. Political commentators observed that the party included a “tougher” messages or moved to the political right on immigration, ratify a party platform that supports faster deportations of economic migrants and stricter rules on political asylum.

“Gone are the candid testimonies of undocumented immigrants, the denial of Trump-era policies and the demands for better treatment of migrants and expanded asylum protections,” wrote Vox’s Christian Paz, contrasts the 2024 DNC with programming from the three previous conventions.

At the same time, many speakers leaned toward the idea of ​​the United States as a nation of immigrants, enriched by their presence. The immigrants included both parents of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy — one of the architects of a bipartisan immigration bill that died in Congress this summer — offered a clear example of the needle Democrats were trying to thread. “We can be a nation of immigrants who love their country and a nation with a secure border,” Murphy said.

While the party’s apparent shift is dismaying to immigration and human rights advocates on the left, many are holding their tongues for now. “It’s the fear of Trump,” pro-immigrant advocate Erika Andiola told Politico.

In his campaign, Donald Trump has called not only for restoring the immigration efforts of his presidency, such as building a border wall and expedited deportations, but also for a program to round up all the undocumented in the country, place them in camps and deport them.

On Thursday, Trump campaign on the Arizona-Mexico borderand claimed, without evidence, that Harris wants “open borders” and would allow 100 million people to enter the country illegally if elected.

At the highest rate of border crossings last year, it would take about 500 years for 100 million people to enter the United States