The Alien Enemies Act invocation and El Salvador renditions have days in court: The Trump administration sent 17 more detained people—10 Salvadorans and 7 Venezuelans—from Guantánamo to El Salvador’s Center for Containment of Terrorism
(CECOT) prison. Federal courts are probing violations of a restraining order against the use of the Alien Enemies Act, as we continue to learn about people removed to the Salvadoran prison despite a lack of criminal background. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) recognized that at least one man, Kilmar Ábrego García, was removed in error, but the administration is not asking El Salvador to release him.
Notes about deportation flights: A Boston federal judge barred the Trump administration from deporting migrants to third countries without allowing them to argue that they might be harmed. Deportation flights to Venezuela have resumed.
Reports highlight unsafe conditions and abuse aboard ICE’s deportation flights with little accountability or transparency.
Budget resolution to move in Senate: The Senate is preparing to vote on a budget resolution that sets the stage for a larger spending bill advancing President Trump’s “mass deportation” and border-hardening agenda. The forthcoming “reconciliation”
bill could allocate $90–175 billion over 10 years for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Passed by a simple majority, it would bypass the filibuster and exclude Democrats.
Notes on the U.S. military’s border and migration role: The U.S. military presence at the border has grown to over 6,700 active-duty troops, expected to grow to 10,000. Roles and equipment are expanding, and the price tag since January
20 is now $376 million since January 20. The Guantánamo base now holds about 85 migrants at a very high cost. Senators visiting the base criticized it as a wasteful, likely illegal attempt to bypass due process.
Low border numbers in March: Border Patrol recorded 7,180 migrant apprehensions in March, the lowest monthly total in decades, amid a near-total shutdown of asylum access. Shelters are empty, aid groups are scaling back, and migrant injuries
from wall falls have declined. In Panama, migration through the Darién Gap plummeted to less than 200 in March.
Noem’s travel to Latin America: Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem visited El Salvador, Colombia, and Mexico. Her appearance at El Salvador’s CECOT, shooting a video using jailed people as a backdrop, drew criticism. In Colombia,
Noem signed a biometric data-sharing agreement. In Mexico, she claimed some progress toward a similar deal.
THE FULL UPDATE:
The Alien Enemies Act invocation and El Salvador renditions have days in court
17 more people
The Trump administrationremoved 17 morepeople—10
Salvadorans and 7 Venezuelans—to El Salvador’s CECOT, Latin America’s largest prison, on the evening of March 30.
The 17 were transported on a military aircraft from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, where the Trump administration has been
detaining some migrants whom it regards as having criminal ties.
“All individuals are confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders, including six child rapists,” tweeted El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. Donald Trump thanked Bukele
on his “Truth Social” network.
The White House shared a list of their names with Fox News.
The administration stated that these individuals were not removed under the Alien Enemies Act, which would have violated a temporary
restraining order in place since March 15. Instead, these individuals appear to have had final orders of removal in U.S. immigration court.
The temporary restraining order
On March 28, James Boasberg, the Washington, DC district court judge who issued a March 15 temporary restraining order to stop the flights that ultimately arrived in El Salvador, extended that
order for another two weeks. For now, the Trump administration may not invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime
authority, to deport people without due process on suspicion of membership in the Tren de Aragua, as it did on the evening of March 15. Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan criminal group that the administration has added to the U.S. government’s list of terrorist
organizations.
Two days earlier, on March 26th, a three-judge circuit court panel upheld the restraining order,
rejecting the Trump administration’s effort to undo it.
After losing in the Circuit Court of Appeals, the administration made an emergencyrequest to
the Supreme Court to review that ruling. “Any time in the next few weeks,” the Supreme Court could decide, using
its “shadow docket,” whether to allow or prohibit the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act while justices deliberate on its legality, Ian Milhiser explained at Vox.
The Supreme Court’s choice of whether or not to suspend the “Alien Enemies” removals while it decides, the New York Timesrecalled,
happens without hearings or oral arguments.
On April 3, Judge Boasberg held a new hearing to determine whether Trump administration officials violated his order to turn around the El Salvador-bound flights on March 15. When Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said the administration had complied
with the order, Boasberg replied, “There is a fair likelihood that that is not correct.” The judge pressed Ensign
for information about individuals in the administration responsible for sending the flights despite his order, raising the possibility of finding them in contempt of court. Ensign continued to claim ignorance of “operational details” and high-level
government decision-making. “The hearing itself is several steps short of any real consequence that Boasberg might impose on the Trump administration for potentially flouting his order,” Talking Points Memoexplained.
On March 24th, administration lawyers had invoked the “state secrets privilege,” which usually implies national
security or foreign policy sensitivity, to avoid sharing further information about what happened on the 15th.
At the Atlantic, Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School observed that in its dealings with the judicial
system on immigration and other cases, the Trump administration is drawing lessons from its mostly successful first-term effort to have courts go along with its 2017 ban on travel to the United States by nationals of several countries. “The administration
learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the [Supreme] Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation.”
In the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on March 26, top national security agency chiefs presentedtheir “Annual Worldwide Threats Assessment.”
Notably, the U.S. intelligence community’s 31-page documentmade zeromention of
any “predatory incursion” from Venezuela’s government or any “invasion” of migrants. Those alleged threats were the pretexts that the White House used to invoke the
wartime Alien Enemies Act and to shut the U.S.-Mexico border to asylum seekers. In fact, the Threats Assessment’s only
mention of Venezuela at all—and there are none about the Tren de Aragua—noted a sharp reduction in arrivals of Venezuelan migrants.
Venezuelan women on a plane to El Salvador
Filings in the Alien Enemies Act litigation revealed that eight Venezuelan women were among the people placedaboard the
removal flights to El Salvador on March 15. Salvadoran authorities refused to take them, as well as a man from Nicaragua who was also aboard, and all returned to detention in the United States.
“The incident is the latest example of the haphazard nature of the flights to El Salvador,” concluded NBC News, which spoke to
two of the women. Both said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or contractor personnel falsely told those aboard the planes that they were going to Venezuela, even claiming that they were in Venezuela after they landed in El Salvador.
Ábrego García Case
ICE had placed 23 citizens of El Salvador aboard the three planes that took detained migrants to San Salvador on March 15. They were not returned under the Alien Enemies Act: the agency claimed they already had final removal orders from U.S. immigration
court.
That has turned out not to be true in at least one case: that of Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old father living and working in Maryland after being granted
withholding of removal in 2019. Under that status, Ábrego García was not deportable.
In a March 31 court filing quickly covered by
Nick Miroff at the Atlantic, ICE official Robert Cerna recognized that the agency had removed Ábrego García to El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” an “oversight…carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final
order of removal and Ábrego-García’s purported membership in MS-13,” the Salvadoran gang.
Ábrego-García’s order of removal has been withheld since 2019, and Cerna’s allegation of gang membership is unproven and based on the claim of one confidential source. Ábrego García has no criminal record and had been
in the United States since 2011.
(Cerna is the same official—the acting director of ICE’s Harlingen, Texas field office—who had claimed in a March 17 filing that
“the lack of a criminal record” about a deported individual “does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact…the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.”)
Despite recognizing its error in court, the Trump administration has not asked the Salvadoran government to release Ábrego García from its CECOT mega-prison or return him to his home in the United States. Justice Department lawyers are
opposing Ábrego García’s lawyers’ demand that the administration do so, claiming that there is nothing they can do. Mr. Ábrego García’s lawyers call that
“outrageous.”
In a Fox News appearance on April 3, Vice President JD Vance said that Ábrego was not the “father of the year” because he had “traffic violations,” adding, “we do not
ask permission from far left Democrats before we deport illegal immigrants.” (Arguing about the case with commentators on Twitter earlier in the week, Vance made false
claims that Ábrego García had been “convicted” of gang membership.)
These cases, and the Trump administration’s refusal to ask the Salvadoran government to revert imprisonments, are leading analysts, like Slate’sMark
Joseph Stern and Amanda Tyler of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, to voice concerns about the potential use of the CECOT as a
“legal black hole” (Tyler) or “black site” (Stern) where it is impossible to file writs of habeas corpus to challenge unlawful detentions. (The term “black site” emerged during the George W. Bush administration, which held some foreign terrorism suspects
beyond the reach of U.S. criminal law in secret foreign detention facilities.)
“Although the Alien Enemies Act does not apply to American citizens, without due process, a citizen could be mistakenly deported to El Salvador, held indefinitely, and reliant on the same administration that deported them to realize the error and decide
to retrieve them,” wrote Adam Serwer at the Atlantic. Greg Sargent echoed that
at the New Republic, quoting Ábrego García’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg: “if the government can remove people in ‘error’ without recourse, then that logic could ‘apply with equal force to U.S. citizens.’”
“The over-broad and ill-defined evidence immigration agencies employ to allege gang affiliation has led to the worst harms of detention or deportation,” recalled Nayna
Gupta of the American Immigration Council at Just Security.
Meanwhile, as José Olivares and Ryan Grim reported at Drop Site News, another of the Salvadorans sent to the CECOT on March 15 was Cesar Humberto López-Larios,
alias “Greñas,” an MS-13 gang leader who was arrested in Mexico last year and quickly extradited to the United States. López-Larios “was involved in secret negotiations between the gang and Bukele’s government,” which may have included electoral support to
Bukele’s political party, before Bukele abandoned secret talks in 2022. His removal from the United States prevents “the sordid links between Bukele and the gang he is famous for warring against” from being “aired publicly.”
El Salvador claims that people can file complaints
CNNreported that, according to a Salvadoran official, “families of the imprisoned Venezuelans can petition the Salvadoran
government for their release—but the fruitfulness of that process is an open question in a country accused of arbitrary detention by rights groups and even the US State Department.”
A lawyer representing 30 of the imprisoned Venezuelans has filed a habeas corpus petition with
the Salvadoran Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber.
The Salvadoran NGO Cristosal is compiling information from the families of the Venezuelan detainees.
ICE’s gang membership criteria
An ACLU filing included a copy of a rubric of criteria that ICE agents have used to determine whether they suspect that a migrant
may be a member of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization. The agency’s “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” sets up a scoring system that would identify someone
as a member of the group based on tattoos and “insignia, logos, notations, drawings, or dress.” Scores on both of those counts would be enough to qualify as a Tren de Aragua member, even though experts state that the criminal group does not use tattoos and
rarely uses common iconography.
Reuters reporters reviewed 50 cases of Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador on March 15. They found that 27 of them had pending immigration court dates to consider their requests for asylum in the United States. Of the 50, 10 were arrested
upon reporting to ICE offices for regularly scheduled check-ins. Three-quarters had tattoos.
In New York, Daniel Delgado, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man who arrived with a grant of humanitarian parole that the Trump administration is now cancelling, toldEfecto
Cocuyo that he is scared of being sent to El Salvador: “I have quite a few tattoos and it’s terrifying to think that they could use that as an excuse to label me as a criminal. It was already difficult to be seen as a thug in Venezuela, and now here they
want to sell us as terrorists.”
The steady stream of accounts of people who appear to have been wrongfully sent to the CECOT prison is starting to generate an
outcry among some conservatives, the New York Timesnoted. They include the popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed
Donald Trump in 2024 but has called the possible imprisonment of innocent people in El Salvador “horrific.”
Some Venezuelan prisoners profiled in media over the past week
New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer profiledAndry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup
artist from Venezuela whose tattoos commemorate the renowned Epiphany (Three Kings) festival in his hometown, Capacho. At the Guardian, Tom Phillips and Clavel Rangel spoke
to people who knew Hernández in Capacho.
Jefferson Jose Laya Freites, a 33-year-old asylum-seeker with no criminal record and legal work authorization, was profiled in USA
Today. His wife is left behind to care for five children in Aurora, Colorado.
Frengel Reyes Mota, profiled in the Miami Herald, is a 24-year-old asylum seeker with no criminal record in Venezuela, no tattoos,
and U.S. immigration detention records that “are riddled with mistakes.” He has a 9-year-old son and a dog named Sacha.
The mother of Francisco García Casique, a barber, toldEfecto
Cocuyo, “I don’t know what condition he’s in. Nobody has given us legal assistance yet.”
Carlos Alexis Uzcátegui, profiled in Venezuela’s Tal Cual, is 32 and arrived in
the United States with a CBP One appointment. He worked in a seafood restaurant in Mexico City while he awaited that appointment. He has 13 tattoos, most of them commemorating family members.
Carlos Daniel Terán Aguilar, age 18, profiled in Texas Monthly, was arrested by ICE at his home in
Austin, Texas, where he was living with his father and stepmother. “They were all from Venezuela, and all were in the country legally.” Terán’s criminal record in Chile, where he had lived before emigrating to join his father, consists of a charge of marijuana
possession when he was 16.
At Beyond the Border, Kate Morrissey profiledAlirio Guillermo Belloso Fuenmayor, whose wife said he was a family man
with an eight-year-old daughter who never committed a crime. His immigration case appeared to have fallen victim to a filing error.
The Miami Heraldprofiled“E.M.,” who applied for and eventually received refugee status, along with his girlfriend, in January.
That did not prevent him from being detained and sent to El Salvador. He has tattoos: “a crown, a soccer ball, and a palm tree.”
Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo, age 26, who was profiled in Mother Jones and Tal
Cual, arrived with a CBP One appointment in mid-2024. He has no criminal record, but about 20 tattoos.
Notes about deportation flights
On March 28, a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the
Trump administration fromdeporting migrants to third countries without giving them a “meaningful opportunity”
to argue that doing so might endanger them. This ruling does not place limits, however, on removals under the Alien Enemies Act.
Deportation flights to Venezuela have resumed in earnest. Venezuelan planes have flown to Honduras to retrieve deported individuals from the United States at least four times: 199 people
on March 24, 178 people on March 28, 229 people
on March 30, and an unknown number on April 3. A Venezuelan plane also retrieved 313 Venezuelan
citizens from Mexico on April 3, taking 151 children, 60 adult men, and 102 adult women back to Caracas.
ProPublica published a grim exposé of conditions aboard the deportation flights run by Global Crossing (GlobalX), an ICE contractor, based on interviews
with seven of the company’s current or former flight attendants. They did not receive instructions, for instance, about evacuating shackled individuals from the aircraft in the event of an accident. “‘Just get up and leave,’ one recalled a GlobalX
pilot telling him. ‘That’s it. … Save your life first.’”
The Project on Government Oversight documented the case of Colombian citizen Camilo Alexis Rincon, who was allegedly shoved
and hit by guards while he was shackled aboard a December 2022 ICE deportation flight. Neither ICE nor its contractor, Akima, reported the incident through official channels.
Much of what we know about ICE’s deportation flights owes to the diligent volunteer monitoring work of Tom Cartwright with Witness at the Border. The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff published a profile of
Cartwright, a former executive at J.P. Morgan based in Ohio who has been tracking flights since 2020. Under Trump, what had been a retirement project has become an “everyday job” requiring 30 to 40 hours per week of work.
“To date no daily figures appear to have ever been released of the actual number of removals carried out by this administration,” noted a data analysis from TRAC Immigration.
Budget resolution to move in Senate
In coming days, the U.S. Senate will vote on a budget resolution that will serve as a framework for a subsequent, more detailed bill. That later bill could increase the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” and border spending by more than $100
billion.
The resolution about to move through the Senate lays out a plan, NBC Newsexplained,
“to instruct committees to begin work a massive bill to pass Trump’s agenda on taxes, immigration funding and other priorities.”
This so-called “reconciliation” process was originally expected earlier in the year, but the Republican majorities of the House and Senate have disagreed about how to move forward. Once both houses approve an identical budget resolution, Republicans would
then be able to pass their later spending bill by a simple majority, using a special procedure to avoid the Senate’s filibuster rule. That rule usually requires
60 percent of the chamber to agree to take a bill to a vote, but reconciliation would cut Democrats out of the process.
In addition to likely tax cuts and cuts to domestic social programs, the “reconciliation bill” might include an additional $90 billion (House version) to $175 billion (Senate version) for DHS to spend over the next 10 years. The yearly
addition is roughly equivalent to the current combined annual budget of ICE and Border Patrol.
The bill would include similarly large outlays for the Defense and Justice departments, which may play central roles in a “mass deportation” effort that is barely underway with current resource levels.
In an April 2 White House meeting, President Trump approved the Senate Republican leadership’s approach, and senators may vote on the budget resolution as early as this weekend. That could involve a chaotic all-night process of party-line votes on largely
symbolic amendments, known as a “vote-a-rama.”
When it comes, perhaps in April, more likely in May or even later, the actual “reconciliation” bill will involve much higher budgetary stakes.
Notes on the U.S. military’s border and migration role
The price tag at the border
At an April 1 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Defense Department officials revealed that about 6,700 active-duty military personnel are
currently deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border and “up to 10,000 have been ordered.” They will remain there “for an extended period.” This is in addition to about 2,200 to 2,500 National Guard personnel already stationed at
the border on a federal support mission.
Since January 20, the border mission has cost the Defense Department $376 million, or about $5.3 million per day, civilian Pentagon officials told the Committee.
“About 90% of what the active forces are doing down there is in what we call detection and monitoring,” said Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command. Border Patrol or other civilian law enforcement personnel, not soldiers, apprehend
detected migrants.
If “operating in close proximity to the border,” however, troops are armed with rifles or pistols.
Gen. Guillot said that the only change to the rules of engagement that he has proposed is the ability to shoot down drones that might be surveilling troops stationed at the border.
New missions
The Defense Department is empowering active-duty soldiers to play less of a behind-the-scenes
role. A March 20 directive enables soldiers to conduct patrols near the border to monitor suspected illegal activity, and to transport Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, including Border Patrol agents, in military vehicles. Except
for Texas National Guard personnel under the command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R), previous military deployments at the border have not involved conspicuous
foot patrols. Soldiers are still not empowered to detain or apprehend migrants or other civilians.
Reutersrevealed that two Defense Department intelligence agencies, the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), will be increasing their use of satellites to surveil the U.S.-Mexico borderzone. “The government could use AI to identify objects or persons of interest by sifting
through satellite images and other data feeds, much like the Defense Department can do on the battlefield,” two sources told the news agency.
The U.S. Army’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team is sending 105 Strykers, a 20-ton combat vehicle, to the border from Fort Carson, Colorado, the Denver Gazettereported.
Personnel from this unit will be stationed between Yuma and El Paso, centered on Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
“The 19-ton, eight-wheeled vehicle also looks imposing when seen from Mexico, and that’s on purpose,” Border Report’s Julian Resendiz reported from
Sunland Park, New Mexico, west of El Paso.
The U.S. Navy has now stationed destroyers in the ocean at both ends of the U.S.-Mexico border. WOLA’s March 21 Border Update noted the
deployment of the USS Gravely to the Gulf of Mexico. The USS Spruance is now off the coast of San Diego and Tijuana. An April 1 Northern Command press
release indicated that the Spruanceprovided “vectoring assistance” to a recent Coast Guard operation that led to 13 arrests.
“We’ve essentially tripled the amount of Coast Guard assets on the southern border” since January 20, Peter Nelson, Officer in Charge of Coast Guard Station San Diego, toldBorder
Report. The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but becomes a military branch during wartime.
Marines have installed concertina wire along the border wall in “Friendship Park,” a site near where
the border meets the Pacific south of San Diego that, in the early 1970s, was inaugurated as a binational park but has been closed to the public on the U.S. side since the COVID pandemic.
Guantánamo
Five Democratic or Democratic-caucusing senators paid a March 28 visit to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, where the Trump administration is currently detaining approximately 85 migrants. They included the ranking Democrats on the Senate’s committees
on Armed Services (Jack Reed of Rhode Island), Homeland Security (Gary Peters of Michigan), Foreign Relations (Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire), and Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration (Alex Padilla of California).
Their statement read: “After examining the migrant relocation activities
at Guantanamo Bay, we are outraged by the scale and wastefulness of the Trump Administration’s misuse of our military. It is obvious that Guantanamo Bay is a likely illegal and certainly illogical location to detain immigrants. Its use is
seemingly designed to undermine due process and evade legal scrutiny.”
According to the New York Times, the senators said that Defense Department officials told them the first month of detention operations
at the base had cost $40 million to hold 395 men. That is $100,000 per person over 1 month.
Much of the cost is the stationing of 1,000 troops to support detention operations at the base. Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, told the
House Armed Services Committee on April 1 that if the base were to expand to meet President Trump’s stated goal of detaining 30,000 people there, he would need 9,000 troops to carry out that mission.
Low border numbers in March
Migration
CBP reported on April 1 that Border Patrol apprehended 7,180 migrants during the month of March. The agency’s
release billed that as “the lowest southwest border crossings in history.” That is not quite accurate, though it appears to be the fewest in a month since the 1950s and 1960s, when yearly totals divided by 12 were less than 7,180.
CBP will probably release more details about March migration in mid-April.
If we assume that there are about 32,800 Border Patrol agents and military personnel currently or about to be stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border, that yields a ratio of 4.6 uniformed personnel for each migrant apprehended in March. Dividing further reveals
that in an average day, each uniformed agent or soldier apprehends 0.007 migrants. (The numbers in the chart below come from the DHS Inspector-General, Stars
and Stripes, CNN, and CBP’s latest release.
The historic drop in migration owes to the effective shutdown of all asylum access at the border, as directed by a January 20 White House executive
order claiming an “emergency” caused by an “invasion” of migrants—a judgment on which courts have yet to rule.
The number of non-asylum-seeking migrants also seems to be down right now. As happened during the first months of Donald Trump’s first term, and during the initial periods of several other border crackdowns, migrants and smugglers have entered a sort of “wait
and see” stance.
In 2017, during Trump’s first months in office, migrant apprehensions similarly dropped to what were then 21st-century lows by April of that year, only to begin increasing again in May. It is hard to predict if that pattern will repeat in 2025, as the total
shutdown of asylum is a new variable, as is the deployment of nearly 10,000 military personnel.
As asylum seekers have all but stopped reporting there for now, aid groups like American
Friends Service Committee are reducing their operations at “ Whiskey
8,” a site south of San Diego where people had been waiting between the border wall’s two layers to turn themselves in to Border Patrol.
Along with reduced migration has come a drop in what had been a very high number of injuries from people falling off the 30-foot border wall between San Diego and Tijuana, according to
the San Diego Union-Tribune. Nonetheless, the Times of San Diegoreported that a migrant died and another
was injured by a border wall fall on the evening of March 31.
In Arizona, Brad Jones, a volunteer with the humanitarian group Humane Borders, toldNewsweek that he fears that the border crackdown will cause
more people to risk their lives trying to migrate through more remote and dangerous parts of the border.
At the House Armed Services Committee hearing discussed above, Gen. Guillot of Northcom said that because the increased security force
presence has reduced opportunities to bring illicit drugs and migrants across the border, Mexico’s border zones are experiencing increased violence as criminal groups “incur into other cartels’ territories.”
Further south
The President of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, said on March 28 that only 194 people had migrated north through the
Darién Gap since March 1. That points to the lowest monthly total since the early pandemic period for a treacherous jungle route through which over 1 million people passed between
2022 and 2024.
Colombia’s migration authority reported an “inverse flow” of 3,485 people migrating southbound from Panama—nearly
always by sea—between January 1 and March 15, compared to 2,813 people detected going northward into the Darién Gap.
In a report from a February field visit to the Darién region, the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission found
that most abuses that criminal groups perpetrate on migrants along the dangerous jungle route go unreported. When victims do report suffering violence, few of those reports lead to convictions, even after prolonged efforts in Panama’s judicial system.
The New Humanitarian covered the situation of tens of thousands of U.S.-bound citizens of other countries who, after being stranded by the Trump administration’s suspension of asylum access, are trying to adjust to life in Mexico.
“Many of those now stranded have been in Mexico for months in ‘deplorable conditions, lacking water and sanitation, with no access to basic services or healthcare,’” Reinaldo Ortuño of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) told reporter
Daniela Díaz.
“So far, the Mexican government hasn’t laid out a clear strategy or designated officials to manage the situation,” an article in
the New Humanitarian series observed. It noted the struggles of the Mexican government’s overwhelmed refugee agency, COMAR, and of the UN Refugee Agency, whose operations in Mexico have been hit hard by the Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts.
On March 28, COMAR and UNCHR announced the opening of a “Multi-Service Center” to assist asylum
seekers and refugees in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas.
Cuba is by far the number-one nationality of migrants passing through Honduras so far this year, displacing Venezuela since January.
Agénce France-Presse reported that with the likelihood of applying for protection in the United States nearly zero, many
Cuban migrants, who are arriving at the North American mainland via Nicaragua, are seeking to settle in Mexico.
At Mexico’s northern border, migrant shelters are mostly empty. “Trump’s rules are severe, and migrant (arrivals) are rare,” Ismael Martinez of the Pan de Vida shelter in western Ciudad Juárez toldBorder
Report. Shelters in Baja California are at 30 percent capacity, La Jornadareported.
Noem’s travel to Latin America
Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem visited three nations in Latin America last week. What received the most attention was her visit to
El Salvador’s CECOT on March 26, from where she recorded a
video touting Trump administration policies while wearing a Rolex on her wrist and using a crowded cell of tattooed prisoners as a jarring, dehumanizing backdrop.
On March 27, Noem was in Colombia, where the tone of her visit appeared to
have been more cordial than might have been expected after a public fight between Donald Trump and President
Gustavo Petro over military deportation flights at the end of January. Noem and Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia signed an agreement to expandbiometric data-sharing about
migrants and law enforcement.
On April 1, Noem said that during her “ fruitful”
March 28 stop in Mexico, she and President Claudia Sheinbaum had agreed to discuss the possibility of sharing biometric data about migrants and travelers in Mexico. Sheinbaum said that
was not entirely correct: Mexico would only consider sharing biometrics about migrants. R3D, a Mexican digital rights group, recalled that
Mexico already has an agreement with the U.S. government, signed in 2017, to share biometric data about migrants. “There is no reason to believe that the data transfer agreement is not currently in force or that the collection of data on migrants
in migrant detention centers has stopped.”
The Mexican government reported on April 1 that its “Northern Border Plan,” a deployment of Mexican National Guard troops to the border zone begun on February 5 in response to a tariff threat from Donald Trump, “has resulted in 1,998 people being detained
and 1,862 firearms seized,” local media reported.
Other news
Mexico’s government expressed relief that President Trump did not include new levies on Mexican goods in his April 2 announcement
of worldwide tariffs. Even as financial markets reeled from the news, “President Sheinbaum’s strategy has worked,” said Economy
Minister Marcelo Ebrard. “We have a preferential treatment.” In early March, Trump had placed a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods, but then rescinded it for products covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) free trade agreement.
A federal judge in California postponed the Trump administration’s early cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 citizens
of Venezuela in the United States, which was to deprive them of status on April 7. District Court Judge Edward Chen said it
was “unprecedented” for TPS to be ended so abruptly, and cited “negative stereotypes” about Venezuelans. For now, Andrew Kreighbaum explained at Bloomberg
Law, the work permits of people affected by the cancellation and postponement are still valid. Administration attorneys are seeking to appeal the ruling to the federal judiciary’s 9th Circuit on an accelerated basis so that they may quickly bring the
TPS cancellation to the Supreme Court, the Miami Heraldreported.
Another federal judge in California overturned, for now, the Trump administration’s cancellation of a contract to provide legal
services to children who arrived at the border unaccompanied, so that the kids do not have to defend themselves in immigration court. The Associated Presspointed
out that legal service providers, which had already begun laying off employees, are still awaiting word from the Office of Refugee Resettlement about how it may comply with District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín’s April 1 decision.
Immigrant rights defense groups filed suit on March 31 to block DHS from reactivating a long-dormant
1940s requirement that undocumented migrants register with the government.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is cancelling the Shelter and Services Program (SSP),which reimbursed local governments and charities that provide emergency shelter to recently arrived migrants. Now, CNNreported that
DHS officials are discussing how to divert remaining SSP funds into immigration enforcement, perhaps including ICE detention.
The Trump administration’s plan to impose a ban on travel from citizens of dozens of countries, discussed in WOLA’s March 21 Border
Update, has been delayed with no clear implementation date, USA Todayreported. A January 20 White House executive
order had given the State Department 60 days to develop a list of banned countries, but “the State Department’s top spokesperson declared the deadline no longer in effect.” The delay’s cause is not clear.
The Trump administration has revoked the U.S. visa of Oscar Arias, a two-time president of Costa Rica and winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize
for advocating a negotiated end to Central America’s civil wars. Arias, 84, has criticized Donald
Trump in the past, and repeated some of those criticisms in an April 1 news conference he convened to discuss the visa revocation.
The Interceptreported that Google is now providing cloud data support for upgraded, machine learning-capable CBP surveillance towers
along the border. “It appears every camera in CBP’s Tucson Sector will pipe data into Google servers,” noted reporter Sam Biddle.
At the Texas Observer, an investigation by Francesca D’Annunzio found that the Texas state Department of Public Safety (DPS)
has sharply expanded its use of AI for surveillance, raising privacy and civil liberties concerns. DPS is using Tangles, an AI platform that gathers information from various web sources, with an add-on feature, WebLoc, which allows geofencing to track mobile
device movements without a warrant.
The Texas Observer also published a chapter of an upcoming edited volume about border walls. Scott Nicol, a Rio Grande Valley-area advocate and artist, recounted
the 30-year history of wall construction relying on sweeping waivers of environmental and cultural laws.
“Half a year’s rainfall” in less than two days caused significant flooding in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and across the border in Tamaulipas, Mexico.
A high-speed Border Patrol vehiclepursuit near Elsa, Texas, in the Rio
Grande Valley, ended with two migrants dead—a woman and a 14-year-old boy from Guatemala—when their vehicle plunged into an irrigation canal on March 28. Another high-speed Border Patrol pursuit,
near Sonoita, Arizona, ended with a crash that left a U.S. citizen suspected of smuggling migrants in critical condition.
At Vox, Christian Paz reviewed recent polling showing immigration to be the only issue for which more
voters approve than disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance, though margins are narrow.
However, Aaron Blake recalled at the Washington Post, “Polling has shown that Americans, by huge margins, oppose
deporting undocumented immigrants who a) have no criminal records, b) arrived as children, c) have children who are U.S. citizens and/or d) have been here at least 10 years. Those categories account for a large majority of migrants.”
Adam Isacson (he/him), Director for Defense Oversight
WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas (www.wola.org)
