US-Northern Triangle's shared crisis continues

Christine Wade has a new post on Unaccompanied Minors: Central America’s Exodus Continues for the World Politics Review.

A cursory look at recent apprehension rates at the U.S. border might suggest that the crisis has abated somewhat, but this would be deceiving. While U.S. apprehension declined in fiscal year 2015 and 2016, this is largely the result of increased apprehensions by Mexico under its Southern Border Program. In fact, Mexican apprehensions are expected to increase by 70 percent in 2015, while U.S. apprehensions are expected to decrease by half. And while the data suggests that fewer Central Americans overall appear to be making it to the United States, more than 10,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended at the U.S. border in October and November, a 106 percent increase over the same period in 2014. Some suggest that smugglers may have responded to the crackdown and increased border security by changing their routes and even methods of travel to evade border control. This makes the journey for Central Americans, and especially unaccompanied minors, even more dangerous: Away from the more frequently traveled common routes, Central American migrants are more vulnerable to police abuses and human-trafficking rings, and civil society groups in Mexico have reported an increase in crimes against them.

More than a year after news reports about tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from the region made headlines, the Central American exodus continues. Efforts at enhanced border security designed to stem the tide of migrants may have made the journey more perilous while dissuading few from undertaking it. Meanwhile, Washington appears to have few policy solutions. The Alliance for Prosperity, a $1 billion regional security and economic development aid package developed in the wake of the crisis, offers little in the way of anything new, even as the root causes of this growing humanitarian crisis persist.