Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 26, 2025
Adam Isacson
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 26, 2025
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- Though still very low, Border Patrol apprehensions increased 38 percent in August: Border Patrol’s apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border increased 38 percent from July to August, the first increase in four months, although apprehensions remain near 60-year lows. The increased number of family and child arrivals to south Texas appears to account for much of the growth.
- ”Mass deportation” and human rights: CNN documented a new family separation crisis as ICE is not giving some parents enough time to make arrangements for their U.S. citizen children before deportation. ICE’s version of what happened during a fatal shooting in Chicago came under tight scrutiny. The number of people who have died in ICE detention this year appears to have grown to 16.
- In the Courts: Throughout the federal courts, legal challenges are proliferating against the administration’s early-July policy of denying bond to nearly every undocumented immigrant in the United States who arrived illegally, which is mandating a growing number of detentions of people who have been living in the United States and pursuing immigration cases for years.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Though still very low, Border Patrol apprehensions increased 38 percent in August
Migration
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published data about its encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in August, with a release issued late on Friday, September 19.
The number of people apprehended by Border Patrol last month remained near its lowest monthly level in about 60 years, due to a near-total ban on asylum access and a growing climate of fear among migrants in the U.S. interior. Still, apprehensions increased for the first time since April.
Border Patrol apprehended 6,321 migrants between ports of entry (official border crossings) at the U.S.-Mexico border in August, or 204 per day, up from 4,596 (148 per day) in July and 6,068 (202 per day) in June, but down sharply from 58,009 (1,871 per day) in August 2024.
Seventy percent of Border Patrol’s apprehended migrants in August were citizens of Mexico, similar to the percentage in July (67 percent). That is far greater than the 35 percent share of the apprehended migrant population that has come from Mexico since fiscal 2020. As in July, 87 percent of Border Patrol’s August apprehensions were of citizens of Mexico or northern Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador), much more than those nations’ 61 percent share since fiscal 2020.
Of nationalities over 50 in either month, Border Patrol reported increases in apprehensions of nearly all from July to August:
- Colombia 44—>102, 132%
- Cuba 50—>99, 98%
- Nicaragua 33—>53, 61%
- Honduras 301—>440, 46%
- Mexico 3,071—>4,431, 44%
- El Salvador 97—>120, 24%
- Venezuela 149—>182, 22%
- Other Countries 148—>165, 11%
- Ecuador 71—>72, 1%
- Guatemala 508—>500 -2%
The reason for the increase is not clear. However, the New York Post, citing a “Homeland Security source” in late August, raised the possibility of recently deported people “trying to sneak back into the United States.”
CBP’s statement noted that Border Patrol did not release a single asylum seeker or other migrant into the U.S. interior with parole or a notice to appear in August. There have been no such Border Patrol releases since April. All apprehended migrants were detained, deported, or, in the case of unaccompanied minors, sent to the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Border Patrol’s apprehensions of family unit members and unaccompanied minors increased 48 percent from July to August, faster than the rate of increase for single adults (35 percent). Still, family and unaccompanied minor apprehensions (1,139) accounted for only 18 percent of August’s total, similar to the 17 percent in July (769). Eighty-four percent of families and unaccompanied children entering Border Patrol custody in August were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador, up from 58 percent since fiscal 2020.
Overall, CBP—which combines Border Patrol agents operating between ports of entry and Field Operations officers operating at the ports of entry—took 9,740 people into custody in August, up from 7,824 in July and 9,302 in June, and down sharply from 107,473 in August 2024. The August 2024 figure had included 45,500 people with CBP One appointments at ports of entry—a program that no longer exists.
Migrants encountered at the ports of entry remained few in August, as the Trump administration stopped using the CBP One smartphone app to help asylum seekers make appointments. CBP’s port of entry encounters totaled 3,419 people or 110 per day in August, up 6 percent from 3,228 in July, which was almost identical to 3,234 in June. Ninety-four percent of migrants encountered at ports of entry in August were citizens of Mexico, similar to 94 percent in July and 92 percent in June.
Of the nine geographic sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas displaced El Paso, which had been the number-one sector for the previous six months (since the Trump administration took office). The Rio Grande Valley sector’s August apprehensions (1,363) increased by 43 percent from July and made up 22 percent of August’s border-wide total. El Paso (Texas-New Mexico, 1,305) was second, followed by Tucson (Arizona, 1,068) and Laredo (Texas, 742). Laredo, which is adjacent to the Rio Grande Valley and typically one of the least busy sectors, also saw a 43 percent increase from July to August.
”Mass deportation” and human rights
Family separations
A multi-author investigation from CNN found over 100 cases of U.S. citizen children, “from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without their parents,” whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported without giving them adequate time to make arrangements for their kids’ care.
ICE’s “Detained Parents Directive,” revised on July 2 with weaker protections for undocumented parents, calls for agents to give parents time to make arrangements for U.S. citizen children if they choose not to be deported with them. “Yet, some detained parents have alleged they were not given such accommodations,” CNN found.
This echoes allegations that WOLA and Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) heard repeatedly in interviews with people who receive deported migrants in Honduras and Guatemala in late July. “This is the new family separation crisis,” Zain Lakhani of WRC told CNN. (We discuss these separations with Lakhani in an August episode of WOLA’s Podcast.)
The report includes accounts of children being abruptly left with teenage siblings, acquaintances, or even strangers who are now grappling with how to care for them. CNN reporters found many of the families through GoFundMe pagesfor the children’s new guardians.
An ICE spokesperson said: “CNN is trying to obscure the fact that each of the illegal alien parents they are defending willingly chose to break our nation’s criminal and administrative laws and as a result of those choices, are responsible for what happens to their children—just as any U.S. citizen parent who breaks the law is when they are taken to jail.”
Chicago
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues sending ICE and other agencies’ agents to pursue undocumented immigrants in Chicago, a surge of personnel, sweeps, and raids that it is calling “Operation Midway Blitz.” Over its first two weeks, ICE claimed that it had arrested nearly 550 people with “no end date in sight.”
More surveillance and body camera footage, among other details, have become available about the fatal September 12 ICE shooting of an undocumented Mexican man in a Chicago suburb. These have called into question ICE’s initial account that an agent used lethal force in self-defense when firing his weapon at the vehicle of Silverio Villegas González, age 38, who allegedly dragged an agent “a significant distance” with his car as he sought to flee the scene.
Villegas died of gunshot wounds in Franklin Park, shortly after dropping his two children off at school and day care. The New York Times posted a detailed analysis of footage from the incident, showing Villegas pulling his sedan into reverse, not driving at two agents standing on either side of the vehicle. One agent escalated quickly, pulling out his gun. One of the agents suffered a wound while off-camera. Footage showed him with a scraped knee and torn jeans. Both agents can be heard in radio communications saying the wound was “nothing major.”
The Chicago Sun-Times was unable to determine which agency—local police, the FBI, or perhaps another—might be leading the investigation into the incident.
ICE considered temporarily shutting its facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview, the site of intense protests, but decided to keep it open. Many citizen videos from the protests showed agents freely using tear gas and pepper-spray bullets, and slamming demonstrators to the ground to clear the way for vehicles. One woman caught on camera being thrown to the ground was a local Democratic congressional candidate with a large social media following.
Rosalio Pelayo Salgado, a father detained at Broadview since ICE arrested him at his home on September 10, told his daughters that he is “being held in a room with at least 150 other men as ICE officers constantly yell at them and call them slurs. He also told his daughters detainees are only given food and water based on good behavior,” the Chicago Sun-Timesreported. “They’ve refused to give him his anxiety medication and said they threw his glasses away, so he can’t see.”
Deaths in ICE detention
Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old DACA recipient, died on September 21 at the Adelanto Processing Center, an ICE detention facility run by the GEO Group in California. “The Adelanto facility has been the subject of ongoing complaints from detainees, attorneys, and inspectors regarding medical care, segregation practices, and mental health services,” recalled Austin Kocher at his newsletter.
Ayala-Uribe, Kocher said, was the 14th person to die in ICE custody since the Trump administration began. On September 23, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) announced two more deaths, increasing the total to 16.
Pregnant women in detention
In a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, 29 Senate Democrats requested information, with a September 26 deadline, about the mistreatment of pregnant women in ICE detention facilities. The letter cited reporting on 911 calls from pregnant detained women in “distress, bleeding or suffering severe pain,” and a recent Senate Judiciary Committee staff visit that found 14 pregnant women detained at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, “a shockingly large number…with many of them receiving little to no medical care.”
Abuse of migrants who can’t be deported to their home countries
A Mother Jones investigation by Tanvi Misra revealed a growing number of cases of migrants whom ICE will not release from custody, or whom DHS seeks to deport to third countries, even after immigration courts grant them protection from deportation to their countries of origin. “ICE officers are no longer using their discretion, but just applying this blanket policy of, ‘We’re just not going to release you at all unless, basically, a court tells us that we have to,’” said attorney Evan Benz of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.
Detention of crime victims
Among those caught up in the “mass deportation” campaign are immigrants who were victims of crime; ICE has been detaining and deporting them more often, after rescinding a policy that shielded them from detention and removal. The change, the Associated Press reported, may affect “thousands of immigrants who would likely never have been arrested by ICE under other administrations, let alone held without a chance to post bond.”
Detainees missing in Florida
Florida’s state government is now operating two very large detention facilities for migrants, and well over a thousand did not appear in ICE’s locator system as of September 18. In many cases, loved ones and attorneys have no way to find them, Reason and the Miami Herald reported.
New York arrests
In downtown Manhattan, 11 local elected officials were among dozens of activists and religious leaders arrested after carrying out a non-violent direct action. They were demanding access to observe conditions in a short-term ICE holding facility on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, which has become notorious for prolonged stays and miserable conditions. Those arrested included Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, who was also arrested there in June.
On September 25, video showed a federal agent violently pushing an Ecuadorian woman to the floor of the hallway of the immigration courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza, as she and her daughter clung to her husband, whom the agents were detaining.
Immigration judges
The Trump administration has fired nearly 20 immigration judges so far in September, adding to the over 80 judges already cut this year, NPR’s Ximena Bustillo reported. More than 125 judges have quit or been fired since the beginning of 2025; as of September 30, 2024, there had been a total of 735. As of June 30, that corps of immigration judges had a backlog of 3,797,662 cases to consider.
Racial profiling
Naturalized citizens in the United States are now carrying their passports during their daily routines as a shield against ICE’s tactics and racial profiling, even though they have full legal status in the United States, Ruben Castañeda reported at Palabra. The fear of being targeted by ICE agents has led to concerns about belonging and safety. “ICE agents are acting with a lot of hate. They don’t care if you show them a passport; they don’t want to see it,” said “Claudia,” a Chilean-American woman in the Washington, DC area. “They’re using violence against people walking on the street or driving in their cars.”
Terrorism charges
Now that the Trump administration has added several Mexican and Latin American organized crime groups to the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations, migrants who pay Mexican smugglers to enter the United States could end up being charged with aiding terrorism. “If people are paying these criminal organizations, you could say they are lending financial support to these terrorist groups,” CBP official Robert Dominguez told a virtual news conference covered by Border Report.
ICE masking in California
California passed a law, the “No Secret Police Act,” banning law enforcement officers, including federal immigration agents, from concealing their faces while on duty. It would take effect on January 1. “California officials and immigrant-rights advocates say the law is aimed at restoring transparency after months of viral videos showing masked teams detaining residents during Los Angeles operations—images that [California Governor Gavin] Newsom (D) likened to ‘a dystopian sci-fi movie,’” noted Migrant Insider. “The State of California has no jurisdiction over the federal government,” tweeted the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney for California’s Central District.
Strawberry delivery driver
Brittny Mejía of the Los Angeles Times narrated what happened to Angel Minguela Palacios, who was detained while delivering strawberries in downtown Los Angeles on August 14 near the site where Border Patrol agents were putting on a show of force outside a news conference with Gov. Newsom. The 48-year-old father, who fled Mexico 10 years ago, spent six weeks in an Arizona ICE facility before a judge ordered him released on bond. Before that, immediately following his arrest, Minguela had spent six days in an ICE temporary processing center called “B 18,” where conditions appeared intentionally made severe to convince those held there to self-deport.
ICE recruitment and office space
Helen Li of the Intercept visited a DHS Career Expo in Provo, Utah, to explore the question of “who wants to join ICE.” Those who showed up to apply for jobs at ICE, CBP, and elsewhere “ran the gamut from college students seeking debt relief to those parroting white nationalist talking points.”
The U.S. government’s General Services Administration is “scrambling” to find office space for the rapidly growing ICE presence around the United States, forming an internal “ICE Surge” team to seek office space in 19 cities, according to NPR.
Worksite raids
ICE is shifting its focus to target undocumented people at job sites, to round up large numbers of individuals at once, like a controversial recent raid of a Hyundai plant in Georgia where ICE arrested 300 people from South Korea. An official told Anna Giaritelli at the Washington Examiner that the administration considers this a new phase, following operations focused on migrants with criminal records and those targeting cities.
In the Courts
Denying bond for people with active immigration cases
At Politico, Kyle Cheney and Myah Ward reported on federal judges’ overwhelming rejections of a Trump administration policy, launched on July 8, that allows indiscriminate detention of undocumented immigrants with active immigration court cases, regardless of how long they have lived in the United States or their lack of criminal history.
The policy seeks to reinterpret the law to mandate detention (deny bond) for undocumented immigrants who entered the United States improperly, by reclassifying them as “applicants for admission.” The measure threatens the freedom of millions of asylum seekers who crossed the border between ports of entry and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents, and have since been living and working in the United States while their cases proceed.
The Justice Department immigration court system’s Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which now has a supermajority of Trump-appointed judges, upheld the policy earlier this month.
Some are now kept in detention even after immigration judges grant their release, using an infrequently employed mechanism called an “automatic stay.”
This has led immigrants’ lawyers to recur to the federal court system. “Their lawsuits have led to dozens of recent rulingsfrom gobsmacked judges who say the administration has violated the law and due process rights and is threatening to do so for millions more,” Cheney and Ward wrote (the hyperlinks in the quote are theirs). They added, “Immigrant advocates say the goal is clear: make the process so excruciating that people give up and accept deportation—even if they have meritorious asylum claims or pathways to legal status.”
Four ACLU offices, the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, and two law firms filed a class-action lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court to challenge the policy. The suit calls the denial of bond hearings “a violation of statutory and constitutional rights, upending decades of settled law and established practice in immigration proceedings.”
TPS for Venezuelan citizens
The Trump administration’s solicitor-general asked the Supreme Court on September 19 to reinforce its May “shadow docket” decision allowing the administration to proceed with canceling Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 300,000 citizens of Venezuela in the United States. That decision had lifted a stay imposed by Judge, Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. In early September, Judge Chen again put a hold on the TPS cancellation: “He said he was not bound by the Supreme Court’s order in May, noting that it ‘did not provide any specific analysis,’” the New York Times explained.
Other News
- MSNBC first revealed that the FBI recorded video of Tom Homan, the senior White House advisor known as the “border czar,” accepting a bag from a fast-casual restaurant filled with $50,000 in cash in September 2024. The handoff came from undercover FBI agents seeking favorable consideration for contracts if Donald Trump, whose campaign Homan was accompanying, were to win the November election. The episode appeared to be an advance bribe, but after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, the incoming Justice Department shut down the investigation. While not explicitly denying that he took cash, Homan told Fox News, “I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal.” Congressional Democrats demanded public release of the FBI video.
- A man fired a sniper rifle at an ICE field office in Dallas on September 24, killing a detained person and wounding two more before turning the gun on himself. The chief of the Dallas FBI office told reporters that ammunition rounds found near Joshua Jahn, age 29, were marked with messages that were “anti-ICE in nature.” Preliminary reports on Mr. Jahn’s social media presence showed him to have led a heavily online life, but little evidence of political views.
- An in-depth, gossipy piece by Ben Terris at New York magazine dug into the power struggles within DHS, including the politicized internal enforcer role played by former Trump campaign official Corey Lewandowski—“technically an unpaid and temporary special government employee”—who is rumored to be romantically involved with Secretary Kristi Noem. The article examines the impact on the Department of the Trump administration’s push to prioritize illegal immigration enforcement over other critical missions, as well as other issues like conflicts of interest, backlogs of unapproved contracts, and authoritarian excess.
- Over 14,000 Venezuelan migrants are attempting dangerous southbound journeys back to South America due to the administration’s immigration crackdown, the Associated Press reported, building on the findings of a late August study from the human rights ombudspersons’ offices of Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. Many are taking cheaper but riskier routes, such as boarding boats through rough seas between Panama and Colombia. “In June, one of those boats carrying 38 people crashed at sea, injuring a pregnant woman, children, and a person with a disability who lost their wheelchair.”
- Adrián Rengel, one of the 252 Venezuelan men whom the Trump administration sent to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, now free in Venezuela, has filed a Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) suit against DHS seeking $1.3 million in damages, Tim Padgett reported at Florida’s WRLN. “We’re tracking a list of about 191 of those that were at CECOT that have shown an interest in wanting to file an FTCA claim,” Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), told Padgett.
- Austin Kocher, the migration data expert cited above, launched an online dashboard that visualizes some of the information obtained by the Deportation Data Project through the Freedom of Information Act. (Some of the ICE arrests and deportation data were released as Excel tables with more than 1.3 million rows.)
- Of 901 Guatemalan children returned by the United States in 2025 (as of September 18), 14.3 percent had arrived in the United States unaccompanied. That is up from 2.4 percent of deported children in 2024, according to a report from the Guatemalan government’s Migration Institute covered by Prensa Libre. The study noted that deported children often lack any support after they leave the government’s reception centers, and some have trouble enrolling in school.
- CBP has flown some of its fleet of approximately 10 drones, including MQ-9 Predators, at least 50 times between March 2024 and March 2025 in support of ICE, according to flight logs obtained by Joseph Cox at 404 Media. “This is especially concerning, given ICE’s ongoing unlawful immigration sweeps and this administration’s concerted effort to suppress any dissent,” said Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- Writing for Puente News Collaborative and the Los Angeles Times, Steve Fisher documented the use of Predator drones to monitor anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in June, which raised concerns about civil liberties and First Amendment rights. The L.A. City Council endorsed a bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California), to ban military drones from flying over demonstrators.
- Wired and the Guardian reported on a Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology analysis of newly obtained government data showing that CBP “collected the DNA of nearly 2,000 U.S. citizens between 2020 and 2024 and had it sent to CODIS, the FBI’s nationwide system for policing investigations.” About 95 of those individuals were minors. This is part of a larger set of 2.6 million DNA profiles of non-citizens that DHS has contributed to CODIS since 2020.
- A DHS document renewing a “finding of mass influx of aliens” included a few data points almost certainly unavailable elsewhere. “As of September 8, 2025, with 22 days left in the fiscal year, ICE removed 144,989 aliens for FY 2025.” ICE recorded “aliens assaulted or used force” against 18 agents in August, up from 10 in February. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division “currently has 6,204 ERO Officers, with 9,960 vacancies due to surge hiring from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
- DHS issued a new waiver to bypass environmental laws, enabling the construction of additional border wall segments near San Diego, iNewSource reported. The waiver notification aimed to justify the move by citing migration numbers, which are very low today, and drug seizures, which overwhelmingly occur at ports of entry, not where barriers would be built.
- Border Patrol agents posing as migrants arrested two suspected migrant smugglers by pretending to be migrants in El Paso’s rural Lower Valley, the El Paso Times reported.
- Speaking at a UN event in New York, Mexico’s foreign minister criticized the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “Criminalizing migration is simply unacceptable,” Juan Ramón de la Fuente said.
- “I am not exaggerating when I say that the institution of the asylum worldwide is under more threat now than it has ever been,” nearly 75 years after the UN Refugee Convention’s signing, said Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner for protection, in an online briefing with reporters documented by the Associated Press.