Central America & Mexico Policy Initiative

Professor Stephanie Leutert, Director of the Central America & Mexico Policy Initiative at the Strauss Center, recently completed a year-long Policy Research Project (PRP) with a group of graduate students at the LBJ School. The project, titled “Beyond the Border: Central American Migration and Mexico’s Migratory Policy,” took a Mexican policy perspective on Central American migration, and…

Benjamin Rohrbaugh, Fellow in the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the Strauss Center, co-authored a report for the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School titled Closing Critical Gaps that Hinder Homeland Security Technology Innovation. COVID-19 has overwhelmed the response systems of the United States and clearly shown the scale of the federal government’s underinvestment in public safety…

Stephanie Leutert, Director of the Central America/Mexico Policy Initiative at the Strauss Center, participated in a recent panel on the state of emigration from Central America and immigration reform. Panel members discussed the push and pull factors for migration, the smuggling industry surrounding this migration, and the current humanitarian crisis at the border. The panel was presented by…

Stephanie Leutert, Director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the Strauss Center, recently authored an article for the national security law blog Lawfare. In her article “One County, 650 Migrant Deaths: An Introduction,” she introduces a series of essays on the deaths of 650 people in Brooks County, Texas, between 2009 and…

Director of the Strauss Center’s Central America / Mexico Policy Initiative, Stephanie Leutert, wrote about her experiences seeing the “metering” program along the Mexican border in her article “What ‘Metering’ Really Looks Like in South Texas.” Leutert highlights that 18,000-people are waiting along the border due the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) metering policy.

The Trumpcast podcast recently released a new episode “Understanding Mexico in the Migration Crisis,” where host Leon Krauze interviewed director of the Strauss Center’s Central America/Mexico Policy InitiativeStephanie Leutert. They discussed Mexico’s involvement in what has been labeled as a crisis at the United States southern border. Leutert argued that for border control agents, the number of people…

In her article, “How Many Central Americans Are Traveling North,” (Spanish version available here) Mexico Security Initiative Director Stephanie Leutert, along with LBJ Student Sarah Spalding, attempt to calculate how many Central Americans are making the trip to the United States. To answer the question, they build a model that incorporates data from U.S. Customs…

Beginning in August 2018, the Mexico Security Initiative’s Policy Research Project has been working with FM4 Paso Libre, an NGO that offers humanitarian assistance to migrants in transit and also conducts research on migration in Mexico. The 16 graduate students in the class are conducting research on four timely topics, including 1) the integration of…

In a recent article for Lawfare, Strauss Senior Fellow and Mexico Security Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow Jake Dizard analyzes the future of Mexican national security under new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or, as he is known by the public and in the media, AMLO. Dizard suggests that although AMLO was elected by a “public that yearns for a…