What is driving record migration to the US border?

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Millions of people are leaving their homes across Latin America in numbers not seen in decades, many of them moving to the United States.

While migration to the U.S. southern border has always fluctuated, the pandemic and subsequent recession hit Latin America harder than almost anywhere else in the world, pushing millions into hunger, poverty and despair.

a generation progress against extreme poverty was wiped out. Unemployment reached a two-decade high. The Russian invasion of Ukraine blocked an important grain and fertilizer pipeline, causing a spike in food prices.

Economic shocks were compounded by violencewhile conflicts between armed groups festered in once relatively peaceful countries and raged in places long accustomed to terror.

In the midst of these events, both smugglers and migrants have launched vigorous social media campaigns, many filled with misinformation, that have encouraged people to migrate to the United States.

This accumulation of grim factors means that when a pandemic-era border restriction known as Title 42 is lifted this week, the United States will face an immigration challenge even greater than the one it faced when the measure for was imposed first.

“You can’t make up worse facts to leave tens of millions of people with no choice but to move,” said Dan Restrepo, who was President Barack Obama’s top adviser on Latin America. “Inevitably you get huge displacements. It really is a perfect storm.”

For the past three years, the US government has tried to curb the record flows of people arriving at the US border by using the public health measure to quickly deport those who crossed the border illegally.

However, when Title 42 expires, migrants entering the country illegally will have the chance to apply for asylum, something many were not allowed to do during the three years the public health restriction was in place.

Qualifying won’t be easy — the Biden administration is introducing new eligibility restrictions — and if the process works as intended, many will be expelled relatively quickly anyway.

But the large flows emerging in northern Mexico could overwhelm the system, meaning more people, especially families and children, could be released to the United States with a notice to appear before an immigration judge.

In some cases, social media is being used to falsely advertise upcoming border rule changes as the opening of floodgates. On TikTok, posts tagged #titulo42 have been viewed more than 96 million times, with one popular post claiming, “May 11: You cannot be evicted. Title 42 has ended.”

The number of encounters at the border has already spiked in recent days, a jump that US officials hope will only last a few weeks and then eventually taper off.

Many migrants come from places like Venezuela, which was experiencing one of the world’s worst economic crises before the pandemic. Much of the country sank further into misery when the coronavirus locked the world. A mass exit deepened, bringing the total number of Venezuelans who have fled since 2015 to 7.2 million — about a quarter of the population.

In Colombia, where worker protection is weak, unemployment reached its peak highest rate officially. Brazil recorded the second highest number of Covid deaths worldwide. Immigrants who had already traveled to these two countries from all over Latin America were among the first to lose all hope of existence.

Nicaraguans historically migrated north in relatively small numbers. But inflation, falling wages and an increasingly authoritarian government have driven hundreds of thousands to leave in recent years.

Gang violence and murders exploded in relatively quiet Ecuador. Haiti was hit by one cholera outbreakan extreme hunger crisis and warfare between armed criminal groups – all at once.

The Darién Gap, a treacherous 70-mile stretch of jungle that connects Central and South America, suddenly became a thoroughfare for those without visas or money to make the journey another way.

The United Nations expects as many as 400,000 people to pass through this year, nearly 40 times the annual average from 2010 to 2020.

Willian Gutiérrez, 31, a welder and bricklayer, sat in a pale pink tent on a Colombian beach not far from the jungle last year and said the situation at home in Venezuela had gone from bad to worse. He hadn’t had a steady job in years, meals were meager, “and sometimes I stopped eating so they could,” he said, pointing to his children, Ricardo, 5, and Yolayner, 2.

The family lived in a half-finished house with no electricity in the oil-rich city of Maracaibo, explains Mr. Gutiérrez’s wife, Johana García, 38. After seeing so many friends leave for the United States, she said, they decided to take the plunge.

They went because the US economy recovered quickly from the coronavirus and then became hungry for workers.

But they were also told — by people smugglers, family members, and people posting on Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp — that they could actually cross the border and stay under President Biden.

Mrs. García, who had just enough money to buy a tent, a headlamp and two sacks of bread for the jungle trek, had heard this from Venezuelans who had come to the United States before.

“It’s hard, yes,” they told her, “but it’s possible.”

Indeed, U.S. border authorities routinely use Title 42 to immediately return people who enter the country illegally, and have invoked Title 42 more than 2.7 million times since March 2020.

But Mexico only agreed to take in migrants displaced from a handful of countries in the region, forcing the Biden administration to fly others back to their home countries — a slower process limited by cost, logistics and the fact that some governments have not always accepted deportation flights from the United States.

“What was on paper in some ways the strictest border policies ever enacted, such as a full and total travel ban, has never worked that way in practice,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, director of policy at the American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.C. -based immigrant advocacy group.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has allowed some 1.8 million migrants to remain in the country pending asylum hearings, many of whom turned themselves in after crossing the border, according to federal records. Unknown numbers also entered the country unnoticed.

“People who want to go to the United States know that it’s been a good time to try and get into the country,” said Andrew Selee, the president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. “They calculate their chances of getting in before they leave.”

Ana Gabriela Gómez, 28, a pharmacist’s assistant who made less than $100 a month at home in Caracas, left Venezuela with her two young sons in September. After nine terrible days in the Darién jungle, she learned that Mr. Biden was tightening border restrictions against Venezuelans.

But so many neighbors and friends had survived. She didn’t quite believe the president.

“I’m going to see it with my own eyes,” she decided. After arriving at the US border with her boys, ages 5 and 6, she crossed the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juárez and turned herself in to US Border Patrol agents, who let her through.

She is now staying at a shelter in Manhattan and plans to seek asylum. According to her, the journey was painful, but worth it.

“My goal was to come here,” she said, “but now I have another goal: work, get my papers, a good school for the boys.”

In Facebook and WhatsApp groups targeting would-be migrants, a cascade of users has encouraged migrants to make the journey to the border after the public health measure expires.

“For those who want to know if the border is open,” one person said called in a Facebook group last week Darién Jungle Migrant Survivors“Yes it is.”

Natalie Kitroeff reported from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and Julie Turkewitz from Bogota, Colombia. Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting from El Paso, Texas, and Emiliano Rodriguez Mega from Mexico City.