U.S.-Mexico Border Update: February 20, 2026

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Feb 20, 2026, 5:57:55 PM (13 days ago) Feb 20
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https://www.wola.org/2026/02/u-s-mexico-border-update-anti-drone-weapons-dhs-shutdown-detention-warehouses-border-wall-january-data/

U.S.-Mexico Border Update: February 20, 2026

With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here.

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

  • Cartel drones, laser weapons, and the El Paso airspace closure: A chaotic February 11 incident, in which El Paso airspace was closed after CBP used a military laser to shoot down what it thought was a drone, highlighted challenges in communication, coordination, and transparency within the Trump administration. It also highlighted concerns about increased Mexican criminal organizations’ use of drones at the border.
  • DHS shutdown spotlights need for reform at border and migration agencies: DHS is officially shut down—though ICE and CBP are funded—as its 2026 budget expired amid Democratic legislators’ demands for human rights and accountability reforms. A series of reports and allegations point to a troubled organizational culture at DHS law enforcement agencies, while Secretary Kristi Noem’s continued tenure is in doubt.
  • Migrant detention expansion raises alarms: New details emerged about ICE’s $38 billion plan to remake its detention system as a series of giant warehouses around the country. The Fifth Circuit upheld the Trump administration’s effort to mandate detention for any migrant who crossed the border improperly, which would enable the detention of millions. Allegations and accounts of abuse and neglect in ICE detention continue to spill out, especially involving pregnant women, children, and families. Concerns focus on the troubled Dilley, Texas family detention center.
  • Border wall plans raise environmental and cultural concerns: CBP has already placed $12 billion in contracts for border barrier construction, about a quarter of what Congress appropriated for wall-building last year. This is enabled by 2005 legislation permitting waivers of environmental, cultural, and other laws, and construction is now getting underway in public parkland and indigenous communities.
  • Fewest child and family migrants since at least 2011, according to January CBP data: Border Patrol apprehended 6,070 people in January 2026, the third-lowest monthly total of the Trump administration. The number of child and family-unit migrants apprehended in January was the fewest of any month for which we have records. Data indicate a halt to a two-year trend of reduced fentanyl seizures, and no apparent impact on cocaine supplies from the Trump administration’s lethal boat strikes.


THE FULL UPDATE:

Cartel drones, laser weapons, and the El Paso airspace closure

What happened on February 11

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly closed El Paso's International Airport and nearby airspace on the morning of February 11, after the Defense Department and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) activated a new laser weapon against a suspected Mexican cartel drone that turned out to be a party balloon. The chaotic incident highlighted challenges in communication, coordination, and transparency within the Trump administration. It also highlighted concerns about increased detections of drones likely operated by Mexican criminal organizations in the U.S.-Mexico border region.

On the evening of February 10, the FAA abruptly shut down El Paso International Airport, stating that the airport and nearby airspace would be closed for 10 days for unspecified security reasons. The Trump administration did not offer a prompt official explanation. About eight hours later—a period during which local officials in El Paso voiced outrage—the FAA rescinded the order and reopened the airport and most nearby airspace.

Later, journalists’ inquiries revealed what actually happened.

  • Sometime in late January, the Defense Department had approved a request from CBP to use some of the department's anti-drone laser technology.
  • In an email to the Pentagon on February 6, the FAA's top lawyer warned that deploying a laser without any restriction on flights could create “a grave risk of fatalities or permanent injuries” to civilians in the air nearby. Defense and FAA officials were to meet on February 20 to discuss the potential use of laser weapons. However, Pentagon officials separately communicated their belief that they had already satisfied legal requirements to consult with the FAA.
  • Before dawn on February 9, members of a CBP tactical unit working with Defense Department personnel fired a 20-kilowatt directed-energy laser weapon, known as a LOCUST system. They deployed it from a site on or near the Fort Bliss army base, not far from El Paso’s airport, which is about five miles from the border with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The LOCUST system, developed in 2024, is designed to take down small drones. On this occasion, the suspected Mexican cartel drone target turned out to be a Mylar party balloon.
  • After learning of the incident, on February 10, FAA Administrator Brian Bedford ordered a 10-day shutdown of El Paso’s airspace due to potential harm to civilian aircraft.
  • “The FAA and DOW [‘Department of War’] acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy tweeted on the morning of February 11. (The FAA is part of the Department of Transportation.) This turned out to be inaccurate. So was an administration official’s statement to USA Today that Mexican cartel drones had breached U.S. airspace.
  • In Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported, officials who were not informed about the reason for closing El Paso’s airspace worried that it signaled a possible non-consensual cross-border attack on an organized crime target inside Mexican territory, something that President Donald Trump has threatened to do on a few occasions.
  • For now, there are no known plans to use the laser weapon again without coordination.

Mexican criminal groups’ use of drones

As they seek to move people and contraband across the border into the United States, Mexican criminal organizations have employed drones at the border for several years. Usually, they surveil U.S. authorities’ presence and movements. At times, criminal groups have used drones to transport small amounts of relatively lightweight drugs like fentanyl or methamphetamine. Usually, the drones involved are small, cheap models similar to those used by hobbyists and photographers in the United States.

“There have been drone incursions from Mexico going back to as long as drones existed,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents most of El Paso, told a news conference. Estimates of when organized crime drones first appeared at the border range from the early 2010s to 2017 or 2019.

“In the last six months of 2024, over 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the southern border,” testified Steven Willoughby, the acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Management Office, in a July 2025 Senate hearing. “Commercial off-the-shelf drones can fly for more than 45 minutes, reach speeds over 100 miles per hour, and carry over 100 pounds of payload,” Willoughby added. A CBP official told Cronkite News that, between October 2024 and September 2025, the agency detected 34,682 drone flights within 500 meters of the U.S.-Mexico border, compared to 7,678 along the border with Canada.

Further south in Mexico, in states like Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, criminal organizations use drones equipped with explosives to carry out attacks on rival organizations, government targets, and civilians whom they seek to displace. Cases of weaponized drones near the border are rare, although explosive-laden drones were used in an attack on a prosecutor’s office in Tijuana in October 2025.

Mexican criminal groups’ drones have been a growing concern for U.S. officials of both parties. Border drone incursions apparently “topped the agenda” at a U.S.-Mexico bilateral security meeting in late 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported. At those meetings, the Mexican government promised to “create a working group on the topic.” In New Mexico, the Democratic-majority state legislature is nearing approval of legislation that would give local law enforcement greater authority and capacity to defend against drones entering the airspace from Mexico.

Some analyses published after the February 11 incident point out that the United States’ drone defense efforts are lagging. The incident highlighted a central issue that remains unresolved: the danger of using counter-drone measures such as GPS jammers or lasers in densely populated areas with heavy civilian air traffic.


DHS shutdown spotlights need for reform at border and migration agencies

A partial shutdown and stalled negotiations on reforms

Legislation appropriating 2026 funds for DHS (discussed in WOLA’s February 6 Border Update) expired on February 13, and much of the sprawling department's personnel are now either furloughed or not being paid. That is not the case for DHS’s border and migration enforcement components. The partial shutdown deprives CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of base funding, but they are otherwise sustained by a massive amount of separate funding from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that the Republican congressional majority passed in July 2025.

The shutdown will continue until the majority Republicans and minority Democrats in both houses of Congress can agree on Democrats’ demands for a set of rights-related reforms to ICE and CBP. The Democrats have some negotiating leverage because Senate rules (the “filibuster”) require 60 out of 100 members to agree to end debate and allow voting on most legislative measures.

In early February, Senate Democratic leadership published a list of 10 demands for reform as conditions for their support of the 2026 DHS appropriation. The list has ten items: requiring judicial warrants to enter residences, “no masks,” requiring ID, protecting sensitive locations, stopping racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, ensuring state and local coordination and oversight, building safeguards into the detention system, mandating “body cameras for accountability, not tracking,” and “no paramilitary police.”

The list does not include other much-proposed items like clawing back funds from last year’s “big bill,” limiting agents’ immunity, restoring victims’ ability to sue, reestablishing internal oversight bodies that the administration all but dismantled in 2025, or establishing a use-of-force review board for ICE, or even abolishing the agency and replacing it with something else.

Republicans shared a counterproposal on February 9, which Democrats immediately rejected. There has been little movement since, as Congress was out of session the week of February 16.

Republicans are refusing to budge on requiring ICE agents to have judicial, not administrative, warrants before entering residences, and on having DHS agents operate without masks to hide their identities. Republicans also rejected a Democratic proposal to fund the rest of DHS while negotiations continue on the base budget for ICE and CBP.

Organizational culture concerns at ICE and CBP

The stalemate has continued to shine a spotlight on concerns about the organizational culture at DHS law enforcement agencies and the potential threat to U.S. democracy posed by those agencies responding to a political agenda while escaping accountability for human rights abuses.

ICE and CBP personnel “are routinely going far beyond what the law allows them to do. Their aggressive tactics on the ground are backed up by unprecedented interpretations of their legal authorities,” read an analysis by the American Immigration Council of “How ICE Went Rogue.” A New York Times editorial warned:

After 250 years of republican rule, it can be hard for many Americans to imagine what happens to a country when its government goes rogue. The residents of Minnesota and other cities subject to the Trump immigration crackdown have recently experienced a version of it. People have been harassed, humiliated, assaulted and even killed by federal law enforcement. And people do not know where to turn for help, because government officials who are supposed to protect them are the ones doling out the abuse. When societies start down this road, they often continue.

These cultural and accountability concerns are manifesting in several ways. Some involve detention, discussed below in this update’s next section. Others involve the DHS surge in Minneapolis, covered in the “‘Mass deportation’ and human rights in the U.S. interior” collection of links below. Additional concerns include the following.

  • NBC News reviewed dozens of incidents over the past year in which ICE, CBP, and related agencies’ personnel misused “less-lethal” weapons like tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other projectiles. “The reporting reveals a cycle of escalation: Heavily armed immigration officers’ open-air raids motivated angry residents to meet officers head-on in the streets. Rather than trying to defuse a tense situation, officers abruptly used physical or chemical force. DHS seemed to apply these tactics with little discretion, whether protests were peaceful or violent, large or small.”
  • Internal emails that American Oversight obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that as early as March 2025, top ICE officials were aware of a fourfold increase in agents’ involvement in use-of-force incidents during the Trump administration’s first two months, compared to the same period in 2024.
  • The same email cited a similar quadrupling of assaults against ICE agents, a claim that Trump administration officials frequently repeat, while providing little evidence, to justify uses of force. White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan told CBS News that a rise in assaults, in his view, necessitated agents’ use of masks. “Look, I don’t like the masks either… but because threats against ICE officers are up over 1,500 percent, actual assaults and threats are up over 8,000 percent, these men and women have to protect themselves.” Journalist Radley Balko noted that, in fact, the increase is over a baseline of just 10 assaults claimed during the first six months of 2024. “There were 79 in 2025. Meanwhile, over the same period, the number of federal agents participating in deportations and removals has swelled from 6,000 to over 30,000.” Balko added that no immigration agent has been killed in the line of duty since 1949, while according to data compiled by the Cato Institute, 2025 “was actually the second-safest year ever for ICE officers and Border Patrol agents.”
  • The New York Times reported that DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to tech companies like Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta demanding the names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and other information associated with social media accounts that track ICE operations or criticize the agency. The Washington Post had reported on February 3 about a U.S. retiree for whom DHS served an administrative subpoena to Google seeking the contents of his Google account, after he sent a letter to a DHS lawyer urging mercy for an asylum seeker.
  • Bloomberg noted that aggressive CBP and ICE tactics that have recently shocked people in the U.S. interior are not new to border communities. “CBP agents traditionally operate along the border and at ports of entry and are not trained for urban policing, according to experts and historians.”
  • Wired reported on an online forum where active and former ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents often argue about the past year’s “mass deportation” controversies. “Put yourself in the shoes of the guys in the street strung out on crazy op tempo, being threatened and antagonized all day, having inept leadership, low morale, and then having to fight every formerly low risk non-crim (or barely crim) because they are all hyped up on victim status and liberal energy. Plus hyper partisan radicalization on both sides,” one forum member wrote. “If you think the news is enraging you now, wait till this spring/summer when we need to fill the mega detention centers.”

Shifts at DHS

The highly controversial DHS “Metro Surge” operation in Minneapolis is ending, and the number of federal personnel in the area—which peaked at about 3,000 in January—is drawing down, “Border Czar” Homan announced on February 12. “Let me be clear,” Homan nonetheless added. “Mass deportations will continue, and we’re not rolling back.”

The Border Patrol sector chief who had led the operation—and earlier aggressive surges in Los Angeles and Chicago—is no longer serving as an “at large” commander. Gregory Bovino has returned to El Centro, in southeast California, where he has served as sector chief almost continuously since 2020. “Bovino’s very good,” President Trump said, “but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy, and in some cases that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”iNewSource noted that Bovino is generally liked in the El Centro area—Calexico and the Imperial Valley—where Border Patrol is a key employer and maintains better relations with the community than it did during the past year’s interior “surges.”

Another highly visible DHS figure is also leaving: Tricia McLaughlin, the Department’s spokesperson and assistant secretary for public affairs, is stepping down. McLaughlin’s often combative statements frequently failed subsequent fact-checks; CNN’s Aaron Blake said her departure “is the latest sign of a reset in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy, which has fallen sharply out of favor with the American people.”

Meanwhile, though, DHS has hired 21-year-old Peyton Rollins to its social media team. Rollins comes from the Department of Labor, where he published several social media posts “that raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging,” according to the New York Times.

More inside-source reporting indicates that after the Minnesota debacle and amid growing discontent with her management style, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is fighting to keep her job. This comes from reporting filled with often juicy anecdotes in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and the Washington Examiner.

The articles describe White House officials as privately “angry” and “frustrated” with Noem and her chief advisor, onetime Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, “as Republican midterm strategists raise alarms about the political damage,” the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff wrote. “One person familiar with the discussions told us that Noem’s position is no longer secure, even though the president has not yet moved against her.” A common assessment holds that Noem’s and Lewandowski’s main internal rivals are White House “Border Czar” Homan (who is reportedly rarely in contact with Noem) and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.

“Since being sworn in, Secretary Noem has enriched herself, abused the power of her office, obstructed congressional oversight, and violated her oath to the Constitution,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. “Secretary Noem is a liar with no concern for the lives of Americans killed by the Department she runs. She must go.”

Oversight of DHS

Rep. Thompson’s comments came at a February 10 hearing, one of two that week including Scott and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons as witnesses (the other, in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, took place on February 12). Democrats and a small number of Republicans voiced strong concerns about the agencies’ human rights records and accountability.

“It’s clearly evident that the public trust has been lost,” the Senate committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), said. “To restore trust in ICE and Border Patrol, they must admit their mistakes, be honest, and forthright with their rules of engagement, and pledge to reform.”

Neither official responded to questions about the January killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as investigations are ongoing. When asked whether Secretary Noem should resign, Lyons did not defend her: “I’m not going to comment on that, sir,” he replied.

In correspondence with Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), DHS General Counsel James Percival confirmed that Noem’s office had demanded that the Department’s statutorily independent Office of Inspector General (OIG) hand over a list of all of its ongoing investigations. In what The Hill portrayed as a thinly veiled threat, Percival reminded the OIG that the DHS secretary has limited power to terminate ongoing investigations. Duckworth indicated that Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, an appointee from Trump’s first term, cited these threats when he declined to investigate abuses committed during the violent September-November 2025 “Operation Midway Blitz” surge in Chicago.

A column at Steady State by two former directors of the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), and an article at The Lever, recalled this internal oversight office’s evisceration during the initial months of the Trump administration. The mass firing of CRCL personnel weakened oversight at a time when DHS law enforcement agencies’ human rights performance and organizational culture have drawn ever more intense scrutiny.

“With its budget slashed by more than 75 percent, the watchdog agency has been left with a skeleton crew of nine people, down from 150 at the beginning of 2025,” the Lever noted. “It’s now run by a former adviser to the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank who also holds another full-time job as deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.” Former top CRCL officials Katherine Culliton-González and Peter Mina observed: “Prior to this administration, CRCL was notified of every death in DHS custody, and, in practice, the civil rights office was also regularly notified of deaths and use-of-force incidents during operations.”


Migrant detention expansion raises alarms

Data about ICE detention and in-custody deaths

ICE posted data, current through February 7, showing that the agency was holding 68,289 people in its network of detention facilities around the United States. That is an unexpected drop, 4 percent fewer than the record 70,766 that the agency reported as of January 24. ICE arrested 1,164 people per month nationwide in January, the third-highest monthly total of the Trump administration, and averaged 1,020 during the first seven days of February.

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Immigration data and policy analyst Austin Kocher attributed the drop to an explosion of habeas corpus petitions filed to get people out of detention—a response to a July 2025 policy, discussed below, mandating immigration detention in possibly millions of cases—as well as “the kind of routine fluctuations that show up in ICE detention data over time.” Kocher concluded, “I hesitate to attach too much meaning to this drop unless the trend continues.”

An internal DHS document obtained by CBS News showed that only 13.9 percent of migrants arrested by ICE between January 21, 2025 and January 31, 2026 (54,650 of 393,000) faced charges or were convicted of violent crimes. Still, ICE classified 58 percent of those arrested (229,000) as “criminal aliens,” as most were charged or convicted of lesser or non-violent offenses.

A citizen of Cambodia died in ICE custody on February 16, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) reported another death notice on February 19, bringing the total to eight in-custody deaths in the first 50 days of 2026 and 38 since the Trump administration began.

Building the network of warehouse detention camps

The New Hampshire governor’s office published an ICE memo providing previously undisclosed details about the scope and cost of the agency’s plan to purchase warehouses around the United States to hold detained migrants. These details are staggering.

  • ICE would devote $38.3 billion to what it calls the “Detention Reengineering Initiative.” The money comes from $45 billion allocated for detention in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by congressional Republicans in July 2025.
  • The plan would increase ICE’s detention capacity by 92,600 beds. Although the memo refers to reducing existing facilities, the plan would still increase the agency’s detention capacity to well over 100,000 people.
  • Eight warehouses would hold 7,000 to 10,000 people “for periods averaging less than 60 days.”
  • Sixteen “regional processing centers” would hold 1,000 to 1,500 people “for average stays of 3–7 days.”
  • ICE would purchase 10 existing facilities that it already operates.
  • The agency expects to have all facilities up and running by November 30, 2026.

“The new sites will serve as ICE’s long-term detention solution,” the memo notes.

A new citizen oversight initiative, Project Salt Box, is aggregating data on the warehouses. It has identified three “mega-center” (7,500 capacity or more) sites purchased by ICE in Tremont, Pennsylvania; Soccoro/Clint, Texas; and Social Circle, Georgia. Another six “regional processing” sites have been purchased in Hamburg, Pennsylvania; Romulus, Michigan; San Antonio, Texas; Flowery Branch, Georgia; Surprise, Arizona; and Hagerstown, Maryland.

Building on earlier reporting by CNN and Migrant Insider, Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket described “WEXMAC TITUS,” a U.S. Navy program created in 2021 that allows agencies, for national security reasons, to bypass much bureaucracy and bidding, quickly purchasing goods and services from contractors. The program’s contracting ceiling for ICE has been increased to $55 billion. “WEXMAC TITUS allows ICE to treat immigration enforcement like a national security operation rather than a standard civil immigration one,” Michael Wriston of Project Salt Box told Kabas.

The warehouse camps are generating opposition in communities, and not just from activists alarmed by dark parallels to notorious 20th-century human rights crimes. Opposition, often by local governments and statewide officials, some of them Republicans, has sunk warehouse purchases in Ashland, Virginia; Kansas City, Missouri; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Salt Lake City, Utah; Hutchins, Texas; and Byhalia, Missouri. Officials in Social Circle, Georgia lament the loss of tax revenue and the strain on already overburdened water and sewage infrastructure.

Andrea Pitzer, author of the 2017 book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, wrote in her newsletter, “Ask your representatives if they want the name of the town to become infamous in history for being the next Dachau, the next Vorkuta—the site of a concentration camp, joining a terrible league of cities worldwide.”

Fifth circuit upholds ban on bond, making millions vulnerable to detention

In a move that promises to increase the detained and ultimately deported population, ICE issued a July 8, 2025 memo requiring that all migrants who had, at any point, arrived in the United States by crossing the border improperly be detained, without bond, until their cases are adjudicated. The denial of bond applies regardless of how long they have lived in the United States, whether they have active asylum cases, or whether they have criminal records.

The July memo rests on a radical reinterpretation of a 1996 immigration statute (Section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act), and detained immigrants have filed more than 20,200 federal lawsuits to obtain their release since the Trump administration took office, according to a count compiled by Reuters. “In at least 4,421 cases,” reporters Nate Raymond, Kristina Cooke, and Brad Heath found, “more than 400 federal judges ruled since the beginning of October that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding people illegally as it carries out its mass-deportation campaign.” A review by Politico’s Kyle Cheney found that 373 judges have ruled against the administration in these cases, compared to just 28 who sided with it; of 64 Trump-appointed judges, 44 have ruled against the administration.

Still, two out of three judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with those 28 judges, upholding the Trump administration’s interpretation of the detention mandate in the states that the circuit covers. (See WOLA’s February 6 Border Update.) Those states are Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, which together accounted for about 43 percent of ICE detainees in the agency’s most recent (February 7) report on the detained population.

The case, Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, will be appealed, either to an en banc panel of all active 5th Circuit judges, or to the Supreme Court. Either process could take months at least.

“If allowed to stand,” wrote New York Times columnist David French, the 5th Circuit ruling “could result in the indefinite detention of millions of immigrants in inhumane, overcrowded facilities scattered across the United States.” Added an analysis by Georgetown University Law Professor Steve Vladeck, “two of the nation’s most right-wing circuit judges adopted an odious legal claim that district court judges from across the country (and ideological spectrum) have overwhelmingly rejected,” noting that the decision was “based on the analytically and linguistically flawed claim that such individuals [people who long ago had crossed into the United States improperly] are ‘arriving aliens’ who are ‘seeking admission’ to the United States.”

“In the short term,” wrote Vox legal analyst Ian Millhiser, the decision “is likely to accelerate the Trump administration’s already-common practice of taking people arrested in Minnesota and other places, and moving them to Texas where their lawsuits seeking release will be heard by the Trump-aligned Fifth Circuit.” That, in turn, could speed an expanded ICE workforce’s ability to fill the warehouse facilities that will be opening over the course of 2026.

Abuse allegations and findings

Over the past two weeks, journalists, organizations, and courts have published alarming allegations and findings about abuse, neglect, and poor conditions in ICE’s existing, mostly contractor-run, detention facilities.

  • 7,252 people had been detained for over six months as of mid-January, 79 of them for more than two years, the Associated Press reported, citing ICE data. That number has more than doubled since December 2024, the last full month of the Biden administration (2,849).
  • “Courts are being confronted with harrowing stories about women being separated from their nursing infants or housed in cramped and ill-equipped ICE facilities while pregnant, in conditions that threaten their health and have, in some cases, been followed by miscarriages,” Politico reported. ICE’s own policy, a Center for Reproductive Rights report recalled, states that, barring exceptional circumstances, “ICE should not detain, arrest, or take into custody for an administrative violation of the immigration laws individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing.”
  • The Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights, interviewing deported women as they arrived in Honduras, found more examples of mothers deported without their U.S.-born children and never given the option to remain with them, a new form of family separation, the Huffington Post reported.
  • Officials in seven states told NOTUS of at least 32 children who have entered their states’ foster care systems during the past year after their parents were detained or deported, another form of family separation.
  • The Texas Newsroom and the California Newsroom reported that the administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is consolidating pregnant unaccompanied minors—“girls apprehended by immigration enforcement or separated from their families”—into a single for-profit shelter in San Benito, Texas, where abortion is illegal and access to specialized care for high-risk pregnancies is inadequate.
  • An individual who had worked inside a Baltimore ICE holding space inside a federal building told Washington DC’s CBS affiliate, “it was probably day one, day two that I saw the abuse” in the facility. “I saw people laying in feces. People throwing up, people laying in urine,” among other accounts of severe overcrowding and abuse.
  • A district court judge in Minnesota, presented with accounts of abuse and obstacles to legal representation in migrant holding spaces within the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building, ordered ICE “to dramatically revamp conditions,” including improved access to attorneys, Politico reported.
  • At the massive “Camp East Montana” on the grounds of Fort Bliss in El Paso, where three detained migrants died in December and January, one ruled a homicide, “There are two active tuberculosis cases and 18 COVID-19 cases,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) reported following an oversight visit. The Fort Bliss camp, which is made up of tent structures and managed by a private contractor with little prior experience in detention, is “like a concentration camp, absolute hell,” and full of “anxiety and depression,” an Irish citizen detained there told the Irish Times.
  • Outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a facility managed by ICE contractor CoreCivic southeast of San Diego, detained people have been throwing handwritten notes inside lotion bottles and other objects over the facility’s walls and fences to protesters gathered outside. The protesters “have collected 14 lotion bottles, two deodorant bottles, and one AA Battery that detainees have thrown over the fences with notes attached to them,” LA Taco reported. “It’s cold here all the time and the food is poor,” one note read. “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”
  • A district judge in California ordered ICE and DHS to provide “constitutionally adequate” healthcare to people detained in CoreCivic’s California City Detention Facility in the Mojave Desert. Judge Maxine M. Chesney also required the appointment of an external monitor to oversee compliance, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The Dilley family detention facility

CoreCivic, which the New York Times reported “has been accused of falsifying records to disguise unsafe conditions, failing to provide lifesaving medications, and being slow to take critically ill people to the hospital,” also operates the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas.

Dilley is currently ICE’s only family detention facility. It opened during the Obama administration and closed after Joe Biden took office. Since the Trump administration reopened it in early 2025, about 3,500 adults and children have been detained there.

As of mid-January, Dilley was holding about 1,400 people, including about 500 children, 450 parents, and 450 single women held in a separate area, the legal services group RAICES told the New York Times. Immigration data analyst Austin Kocher found that Dilley’s late-January population of 1,332 people was nearly triple what it was in October. Though a 2015 amendment to the 1990s Flores settlement agreement prohibits detaining children without a final order of removal for more than 20 days, many children have been held at Dilley for longer than that.

“The trauma that children suffer in family detention is easy to understand,” wrote former immigration policy officials Andrea R. Flores, Claire Trickler-McNulty, and Deborah Fleischaker. “Watching a parent be arrested, searched, and stripped of autonomy and the ability to make even the most basic decisions about daily life is profoundly destabilizing for a child. Being detained with one parent, but separated from another—as Liam [Conejo Ramos, the boy detained in Minnesota while wearing a blue bunny hat in an emblematic photo, who was held with his father at Dilley] was—adds another layer of trauma.”

“All the kids are sick,” a former worker at Dilley told Adrián Carrasquillo of the Bulwark. I’ve never gotten sick before, but when I worked there I was always sick… It’s hard for the children to sleep because the lights are always on in the rooms.” Two families and one immigration lawyer told the New York Times that CoreCivic’s medical staff at Dilley refused to treat children with stomach ailments “unless they had already vomited at least eight times.”

A harrowing ProPublica investigation, featuring the testimonies of children detained at Dilley with their parents, described harsh conditions and a deep psychological toll. Some have been held there for as many as 113 days and are facing outright mental health crises, including cases of self-harm and suicidal ideation. A large number of the families held there are not even undocumented: they had active asylum or immigration cases, and some were arrested during routine ICE check-ins or court appearances.

ProPublica shared a wrenching series of letters and drawings from children, which one detainee brought with them upon their release in mid-January. The letters report being separated from parents and feeling overwhelmed by the uncertainty of their situation. Many also express frustration with the treatment they receive from guards.

After ProPublica published the letters, Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider tweeted, staff at Dilley began “raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children.” The San Antonio Current reported that Univision-affiliated reporter Lidia Terrazas posted to her Instagram a video chat with a 15-year-old girl left with “a pile of colorful paper scraps” after guards “stormed into her room looking for drawings and letters” and then “destroyed what they found.”

Terrazas also reported the case of “Juan Nicolás,” a two-month-old baby who was rushed to the hospital with bronchitis and “choking on his vomit” after nearly a month at Dilley. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who represents nearby San Antonio, said that the baby was sent back to Dilley following a hospital visit during which he became unresponsive, and then deported to Mexico with his family hours later. “They were abandoned across the border in Mexico,” Castro tweeted. Their attorney told the representative, “ICE deported the family with only the money that they had in their commissary—a total of $190.”


Border wall plans raise environmental and cultural concerns

After a moment during which some of the Trump administration’s supporters were grumbling about the pace of border wall construction, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told the congressional Homeland Security committees that “CBP has already placed $12 billion in Smart Wall funding on contract, with all remaining barrier contracts scheduled for award by June 30, 2026. We anticipate completing 250 miles of new barriers by September 30, 2026.” The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” appropriated $46.5 billion in new funding for border wall construction, roughly 3 times what the first Trump administration secured.

As with nearly all border wall projects over the past 20 years, construction is enabled and expedited by Section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005, which allows DHS to waive 48 environmental and cultural protection laws. Projects then move ahead without environmental impact assessments, public comment, or cultural review. Ohio State University geographer Kenneth Madsen has tracked 61 of those border-wall waivers since 2005—28 of them since 2025.

A waiver of 28 environmental, historic preservation, and archeological preservation laws will speed construction of more than 150 miles of barriers from Hudspeth County, Texas, east of El Paso, into state parkland near Big Bend National Park. “An online map posted by CBP indicates that ‘smart wall’ construction is planned both within the state park and in neighboring Big Bend National Park,” reported Martha Pskowski at Inside Climate News. “One of our most beloved national parks and our state’s largest park will be scarred beyond repair,” archaeologist David Keller told Pskowski.

Construction on public lands has already begun in Arizona. At SFGate, Amanda Heidt reported on blasting along mountains in the Coronado National Memorial to enable wall construction in the state’s southeast borderlands. Further west, leaders of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose lands straddle 62 miles of border in Arizona and Sonora, traveled to Washington to voice their strong opposition to plans to build walls that “would effectively seal the Tohono O’odham Nation from Mexico,” the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reported.

Blasting meanwhile continues along the south face of Mount Cristo Rey, the iconic volcanic intrusion towering over western El Paso that is both a religious pilgrimage site and a frequent migration route. “Controlled explosions will continue throughout the duration of the project, which is anticipated to finish in October 2027,” El Paso Matters reported, noting that conservationists warn that the new barrier “makes it harder for plants and animals to cross back and forth through their natural corridor,” which bears “dire consequences for their long-term survival.”


Fewest child and family migrants since at least 2011, according to January CBP data

CBP published new data about migrant encounters and law enforcement events at the U.S.-Mexico border in January. It shows a 6 percent decline in Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants along the border: from 6,472 in December to 6,070 in January. (Border Patrol is a component of CBP.)

The January figure is the third-lowest monthly total of the Trump administration’s 12 full months, and probably the third-lowest since the 1960s. Including arrivals of “inadmissible” individuals at ports of entry, CBP’s encounters with migrants totaled 9,726 in January, down 3 percent from 9,991 in December.

This continues the very sharp drop in migrant arrivals at the border that coincided with the Trump administration’s January 2025 suspension of the right to seek asylum at the border and its subsequent aggressive pursuit of “mass deportation” in the U.S. interior. Border Patrol apprehensions averaged 155,485 per month during the Biden administration—more than 25 times the 6,070 measured in January—and 42,403 during the first Trump administration (7 times January’s total).

The December-to-January drop may reflect seasonal patterns, as non-asylum-seeking migration often bottoms out in winter cold and summer heat. If so, we can expect some increase in migrant arrivals as spring approaches.

The January numbers provide twelve full months of data since the administration’s January 20, 2025 inauguration (February 2025 through January 2026). Over that year, Border Patrol apprehended 85,868 people between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry. The last time a U.S. fiscal year (October through September) recorded that few apprehensions was 1967 (73,973).

Of January’s Border Patrol apprehensions, just 10 percent were children or parents with children. The number of children and family unit members apprehended in January—627—was the fewest for any month for which WOLA has been able to compile data, going back to October 2011.

wola_migration_charts.001-1-1024x768.png

Data table


71 percent of January’s apprehended migrants were citizens of Mexico (67% over the past 12 months), 10 percent were citizens of Guatemala (12%), and 6 percent were citizens of Honduras (6%).

Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, in south Texas, led all nine of the agency’s U.S.-Mexico border sectors for the third straight month, with 1,271 apprehensions; Rio Grande Valley was the number-two sector over the past 12 full months. Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector (far west Texas and New Mexico) was in second place and first over the past 12 months, followed by Arizona’s Tucson Sector (third place over the past year).

CBP reported seizing 767 pounds of fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico border in January, 84 percent of it (a typical proportion) at the ports of entry. During the first four months of fiscal year 2026, CBP’s border fentanyl seizures have averaged 1030 pounds per month, up from 957 pounds per month during fiscal year 2025. Should that pace continue through September—and it is too early to predict with any certainty—2026 would be the first fiscal year to register an annual increase in fentanyl seizures since 2023.

U.S.-Mexico border seizures of cocaine totaled 2,469 pounds in January, down significantly from the average of the prior 12 months (3,648 pounds). This reduced amount does not indicate, however, that the Trump administration’s nearly six-month-old campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats is affecting cocaine supplies.

CBP’s “coastal/interior” seizures of cocaine totaled 3,059 pounds in January, the most since December 2024 and nearly double the previous 12 months’ average (1,738 pounds). The agency’s cocaine seizures from all borders, coasts, and interior locations, meanwhile, have averaged 6,207 pounds per month since the boat strikes began in September. That is 6 percent greater than the average for the prior 12 months (5,866 pounds per month, September 2024-August 2025). As CBP is finding slightly more cocaine than before nationwide, it is impossible to argue that the widely criticized and illegal boat strikes have deterred cocaine traffickers.


Other news

  • A report from Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by ranking member Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), estimated that the Trump administration’s deals with foreign governments to accept deportations of third countries’ citizens have carried a total cost of “upward of $40 million.” Payments have been made to Equatorial Guinea ($7.5 million), Rwanda ($7.5 million), El Salvador ($4.76 million), Eswatini ($5.1 million), and Palau ($7.5 million), and those countries have received about 300 third-country citizens (252 of them Venezuelans sent, for a few months, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison). That adds up to over $100,000 per deported person. The report lists 25 countries on four continents with which the administration has third-country deportation agreements or that have received third-country nationals over the past year.
  • Washington DC District Court Judge James Boasberg, who has overseen the case of the Trump administration’s March 2025 invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to render 137 Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador without due process, issued a new ruling—building on a December decision—laying out a formal process to return the men to the United States to continue immigration proceedings, should they wish to do so..
  • Fifty-five Cuban men whom the Trump administration sent in December to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, at a U.S. naval base in their home country, were abruptly returned to ICE detention in the United States, the New York Times’ Carol Rosenberg reported. The reason for the bizarre back-and-forth transfer to the Guantánamo base, which occurred at significant expense, remains unclear.
  • “We’ve gone nine months with zero crossings at our Southern Border,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a speech in Maine. As noted above, Border Patrol in fact apprehended 6,070 migrants who crossed the border in January, and 61,964 over the past 9 months. Hegseth may have been referring to nine months without people, like asylum seekers, being released from Border Patrol custody at the border.
  • CBP plans to spend $225,000 per year for access to Clearview AI, a facial recognition platform based on more than 60 billion publicly available images that the company has scraped from the internet. “Civil liberties groups and lawmakers have questioned whether face-search tools are being deployed as routine intelligence infrastructure, rather than limited investigative aids, and whether safeguards have kept pace with expansion,” Wired reported.
  • Nicaragua has reinstated visa requirements for visitors from Cuba, Haiti, and 126 other countries, ending a policy that had made the Central American country a key transit point for U.S.-bound migrants. The policy change is almost certainly a response to pressure from the Trump administration, which gained salience after the January 3 raid in Venezuela that extracted leader Nicolás Maduro, a close ally of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. El Toque noted that Guyana and Brazil are now more likely destinations for Cubans seeking to flee an island where the economy is in free fall as the Trump administration uses tariff threats on supplying countries to blockade oil shipments.
  • The Nicaraguan government arrested Manuel Antonio Romero two days after the United States deported him on February 7, the independent Nicaraguan news outlet Artículo 66 reported. His whereabouts remain unknown.
  • A survey of 101 recently deported Hondurans, carried out by the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Honduran government’s human rights ombudsman, found that 81 percent of them intend to stay in Honduras and only 12 percent plan to try to migrate again within a year.
  • The Colombian government’s migration agency reported detecting 21,056 southbound flows of migrants from Panama, mostly Venezuelan and Colombian citizens who had given up on migrating to the United States after the Trump administration shut down asylum access. Nearly all of the southbound individuals arrived by boat via the Caribbean rather than attempting the overland route through the Darien Gap. The greatest southbound flow reported by Migración Colombia was in February 2025 (2,914 people), and the fewest was in November (1,073); the number rose slightly to 1,310 in December.
  • Another shipwreck of a southbound boat in the Caribbean off the Panamanian coast killed three migrants, two Venezuelan citizens and one Colombian citizen, on February 10.
  • A ZonaDocs report based on testimonies of women migrating in Mexico showed “that the violence they face is not an isolated incident, but a recurring pattern documented by civil organizations, human rights institutions, and international agencies. The risks they face—extortion, aggression, abuse, lack of services, and lack of protection—are repeated along the routes and are exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive policies with a gender perspective.”
  • The Tucson Sentinel reported that ICE agents have “maintained an erratic presence” at the DeConcini port of entry between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, where they have been reviewing southbound border-crossers’ documentation. “Interactions with ICE in Nogales have ranged from stopping a Hispanic reporter at the border to accusing regular border-crossers of possessing false documentation.”
  • Arizona Public Media reported from the Sonoran border town of Sásabe, which is recovering after an outbreak of organized crime violence late in 2023 had made it a virtual ghost town, with many residents fleeing through an opening in the border fence.
  • The border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across from Brownsville, Texas, suffered an intense day of running gun battles between organized crime groups and authorities on February 12, Elefante Blanco reported.
  • Between its February 5, 2025 launch and January 22, 2026, the Mexican government’s “Operation Northern Border,” begun in response to tariff threats from President Trump, has arrested 10,929 people, intercepted nearly 9,000 firearms, and seized 603 kilograms of fentanyl in 18 U.S.-Mexico border region municipalities.
  • NewsNation reported on a CBP memo, citing FBI reporting, claiming that Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel has ordered members to shoot at agents in Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector. The memo reportedly stated that the Jalisco organization, which is not prominent in Tijuana across from San Diego, “has instructed its members to carry out assaults in areas of Mexico not controlled by the cartel.”


Links: “mass deportation” and human rights in the U.S. interior

Stories from February 17, 2026

The imminent exit of Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin from the agency is the latest sign of a reset in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy, which has fallen sharply out of favor with the American people

Under Trump, the Homeland Security agency responsible for processing visas and green cards has become a site for easy arrests

Kilmar Abrego Garcia cannot be re-detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, dealing the Trump administration another blow in its effort to keep him locked up while it attempts to deport him again

Trump's immigration approval falls to lowest since return

De acuerdo a cifras del gobierno venezolano, más de 20.000 migrantes han regresado al país luego de ser deportados desde Estados Unidos

Stories from February 16, 2026

State’s governor had demanded impartial inquiry into the shooting of the VA nurse by federal immigration agents

The public reaction to the violence in Minneapolis suggests that we have held on to our sense of universal truths

Los venezolanos solicitantes de asilo en Estados Unidos temen que sus casos se debiliten tras la captura de Nicolás Maduro

Stories from February 15, 2026

A much-hyped ICE pullback from Minneapolis is a blip in a looming nationwide surge of arrests, concentration camps

Stories from February 14, 2026

An upcoming Senate primary contest in Illinois, which is likely to pick the state’s next senator, has centered on Democrats’ future approach to federal immigration policy

As the Trump administration aims to deport millions of people over the next four years, “Reveal” tells the human stories of those caught up in ICE raids

Este fue el vuelo 111 que llegó al país con migrantes deportados desde Estados Unidos. En esta ocasión el vuelo llegó de Miami

Stories from February 13, 2026

Congressional Democrats say they will approve no money for the Department of Homeland Security without guardrails on immigration agents. Their voters in Minnesota are demanding no less

Protesters in Minneapolis and St. Paul said in sworn statements that they were singled out by agents who demonstrated that they knew where they lived

The Handbasket spoke with the congresswoman who called out ICE long before it was popular

Typically, Democrats run for the hills when immigration comes up. But as two blue-state governors are showing, the winning play is actually to confront ICE and MAGA xenophobia head on.

Today, US Representative Rosa DeLauro, along with 43 other Catholic Democratic members of Congress, released the following Statement of Principles regarding immigration enforcement: “As Catholic Democrats in Congress, we are guided by a living Catholic tradition that affirms the dignity of every human life, advances the common good, and demands that we protect the most vulnerable in our society through a strong and compassionate safety net.

Stories from February 12, 2026

A Washington judge who preserved legal protections for Haitian immigrants received graphic and violent messages in response to her ruling last week

A judge dropped charges against the immigrant and another man after the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota said new evidence was not consistent with the agents’ testimony

Scenes from a city under siege

The Twin Cities surge marked the Trump administration’s largest immigration operation since the president took office promising to deport millions of people

Vilma Palacios is one of thousands who have given up their immigration cases and voluntarily left the U.S. after being detained. More detainees are opting for voluntary departure than ever before, a CBS News analysis found

The announcement came more than two months into an operation that has led to tense protests, thousands of arrests and three shootings in the Democratic-led state

Stories from February 11, 2026

The deployments encountered repeated legal setbacks that stymied President Donald Trump’s desire for a show of force in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon

A Kafkaesque saga in which the government has failed to produce critical video footage has reached new levels of absurdity

Investigators say one immigration official abused his girlfriend for years. Another admitted he sexually abused a woman in his custody

ICE lawyers in New York City earn more than $100,000 a year, enjoy generous benefits and post about rich social lives. Their work is vital to Trump’s deportation agenda

A Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez five times, claiming that she tried to run him over. Newly released videos and text messages reveal fresh details about what happened

Any serious push to account for the actions of this government must include recompense and repair for its victims

Lawmakers need to acknowledge these realities about immigration if they want to implement policy that is both popular and in the nation’s best interest

Stories from February 10, 2026

Netherlands-based site uses public information and tips to reveal identities of agents involved in crackdowns across US

A POLITICO review of hundreds of cases brought by ICE detainees shows a pattern of noncompliance that has frustrated judges across the country

Federal assault and obstruction charges doubled since ICE crackdown began

A trove of evidence was released Tuesday in the controversial shooting of Marimar Martinez by a Border Patrol agent at the height of Operation Midway Blitz last October

Before the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, allegations against four others shot at by federal immigration agents failed to withstand scrutiny

ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, monthslong expansion campaign. WIRED is publishing dozens of these locations

Congress has little authority to rewrite local limits on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement -- and shouldn’t try to do so

Survivors of abuse at a shuttered federal prison known as “the rape club” are teaming up with local activists to keep ICE out of Northern California

Two months after federal agents began operations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, residents say they have found strength in uniting as a community

The Black immigrant population in the United States has both grown considerably since 1990 and become more diverse, with the one-time heavily Caribbean and Latin American origins now more evenly mixed with arrivals from Africa. This fact sheet uses U.S. Census Bureau data to explore the demographic, workforce, and household characteristics of this group, which makes up 9 percent of the country’s overall immigrant population

Stories from February 9, 2026

Advocates urge migrants to seek legal advice before giving up on the American dream

Ruben Garcia, the shelter's executive director, said the Trump administration's hardline immigration policies reflect a belief that all migrants are criminals

In one 30-minute stretch, three Minneapolis legal observers were arrested as ICE ramped up its targeting of community volunteers

  • Erik Uebelacker, “Judge Slams ICE for ‘Stalling' Case Over 26 Federal Plaza Conditions” (Courthouse News Service, February 9, 2026).

The scrutinized Manhattan detention facility is now housing clients on multiple floors, lawyers told a federal court on Monday

We are no longer talking about individual law enforcement agencies, but rather a giant, singular blob

From Somalis in Minneapolis to Nepalis in New York City, immigrant communities turn to trusted local news sources. Here's our regular ranking of the top 25 nonprofit news sites in the United States

The case of one Houston man, nearly deported to India after a quarter-century here, shows what happens when prosecutorial discretion is abandoned

Stories from February 8, 2026

En un lapso de tiempo muy corto, los Estados Unidos dejaron de ser un refugio seguro para quienes huyen de un régimen violentamente represivo

Two weeks after Alex Pretti’s killing, federal agents have shown no signs of backing down. The resistance definitely hasn't

What happens when Americans are treated the way the U.S. treats other countries?

Stories from February 7, 2026

The president falsely accused Haitians in Ohio of eating pets. Now he’s trying to deport them

Trump’s team wants a reset on its mass-deportation goals, not a retreat

Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Ms. Good’s vehicle, but Trump administration leaders said to drop it. About a dozen prosecutors have departed, leaving the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office in turmoil

A Mexican immigrant whose skull was broken during his arrest by immigration officers last month in Minnesota says the beating was unprovoked

A judge ordered the U.S. to return three migrant families who were affected by President Trump's family separation policy in his first term and then deported in his second

Immigrant advocates point to the billions of dollars in funding to beef up ICE detention and put thousands more agents on the street

Stories from February 6, 2026

DHS's inspector general is probing ICE's biometric and surveillance programs

Due to a lack of hiring standards, federal policy, poor training, and no accountability for bad behavior, ICE is eroding liberty for all Americans

A Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez five times. Video from the October incident in Chicago could now be released as early as Monday

The White House seems to be mining the Coolidge era for inspiration. But America is not the country it was in 1924

The monitoring of federal agents by activists has been at the heart of the opposition to the Trump administration’s raids. The tactic has a long history

What we’ve learned in Minneapolis

Stories from February 5, 2026

This Quarterly Mixed Migration Update (QMMU) looks at mixed migration within South America, towards North America and back, and Central America, and the Caribbean

Experts say Tom Homan’s charge, replacing Greg Bovino’s aggressive tactics, may change the tone, but not the mission

It doesn’t happen often, but local law enforcement can arrest and charge federal agents. Legal experts say there’s a moral obligation to at least try to hold federal immigration officers accountable when they violate the Constitution and the law

Immigrants apprehended in Minnesota are being sent to a gigantic West Texas detention center where lawyers and detainees say conditions are deplorable, then released in El Paso to find their way home


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