U.S.-Mexico Border Update: June 20, 2025
Adam Isacson
U.S.-Mexico Border Update: June 20, 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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Due to staff travel for work and the July 4 holiday, we will not publish Border Updates for the next two weeks. The next edition will appear on July 11.
THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- Operations intensify in, and beyond, Los Angeles: While protests against stepped-up ICE raids continue in Los Angeles, along with a large military deployment, President Trump is urging the immigration enforcement agency to step up operations in other Democratic-run U.S. cities. Data is showing a big increase in detentions of migrants with no criminal records, while the agricultural, hospitality, and restaurant industries are sounding alarms about labor shortages and public opinion is showing increased disapproval of the administration’s immigration approach.
- Massive “reconciliation” spending bill emerges in Senate and resembles House bill: Senate committees began revealing the text of their version of a massive bill that would add about $170 billion for the Trump administration’s border-hardening and mass-deportation plans. Analysis shows that amounts in the bill resemble those in legislation that narrowly passed the House of Representatives in May. It is far from clear whether the Republican-majority Congress will send a final bill to President Trump by July 4, as the White House has urged. Many intra-party disagreements remain, including key senators’ objections to the size of the border and immigration spending.
- CBP reports on May migrant encounters: While migration at the U.S.-Mexico border remains near 60-year lows, data reported by CBP shows that migrant encounters in May increased slightly over March and April. Apprehensions of unaccompanied minors grew by more than a quarter. Of Border Patrol’s nine geographic U.S.-Mexico border sectors, El Paso, in west Texas and New Mexico, was the busiest for the fourth straight month. That sector has also seen a dramatic increase in recoveries of remains of migrants who perished of dehydration and exposure. Meanwhile, surveys of migrants along the U.S.-bound route show far fewer declaring an intention to settle in the United States.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Operations intensify in, and beyond, Los Angeles
Public protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids continue in Los Angeles; although they were always limited to a small part of the city, their intensity has declined. Still, the tempo of immigration raids remains very high.
Reports of agents carrying out sweeps in the Los Angeles area remain very frequent, whether at immigration courthouses, flea markets, or even at the entrance to Dodger Stadium. In some cases, those involved are not ICE agents: they are Border Patrol personnel “supporting” ICE.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has tapped Gregory Bovino, the chief of Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector in southeast California, to head Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) operations in support of ICE in Los Angeles. Bovino was seated alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on June 12 when California Senator Alex Padilla (D) was shoved out of the room, thrown to the floor and handcuffed after interrupting the Secretary to ask a question. The Sector Chief had made headlines during the final days of the Biden presidency, when he ordered Border Patrol agents to carry out sweeps in Kern County, California, near Bakersfield, arresting dozens of farmworkers. A judge later found that Bovino’s operation violated people’s constitutional rights.
On June 15, President Donald Trump took to his social media network to order ICE agents to “do all in their power” to expand their operations in “the Democrat Power Center,” urging more detentions in “Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
The military role
The ICE presence in Los Angeles continues to be augmented by 4,100 federalized National Guard soldiers and about 700 active duty Marines, despite legal challenges. The troops’ ostensible role is to protect federal facilities and functions, including ICE’s functions. The most recent unit to arrive is the Army’s 49th Military Police Brigade, the first contingent of soldiers to have specific law enforcement training.
It is very unusual for military personnel to do law enforcement work on U.S. soil, and so far they have detained just one civilian: a U.S. citizen whom Marines handcuffed, then released, after they stopped him rushing to an appointment in a Veterans Affairs office in a federal building they were guarding.
Late June 12, when WOLA’s June 13 Border Update was nearing completion, a California federal judge had sided with Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and ordered a halt to the National Guard deployment. Later that same evening, though, Judge Charles Breyer paused his temporary restraining order pending appeal, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals permitted the National Guard to continue operating while it deliberated. When the Appeals Court met to hear arguments on June 17, the three-judge panel, which includes two Trump appointees, “seemed sympathetic to President Donald Trump” and his claim to have broad power to federalize the state Guard above the governor’s objections, Courthouse News reported.
CNN reported that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the military on domestic immigration-related operations was not taken abruptly. Planning had been in the works “as early as February” and, as a “source familiar with the matter” put it, “They are clearly inclined to repeat the L.A. playbook elsewhere.”
Planning includes a likely use of military bases to hold detained migrants. Among potential bases that CNN cited are “Travis Air Force Base in California; Camp Atterbury in Indiana; JB McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey; Dover Air Force Base in Delaware; Camp Parks in California; and Fort Walker in Virginia.”
The Hill reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the mobilization of up to 700 troops to carry out logistical, administrative, and clerical duties at ICE detention facilities in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. “They will not directly participate in law enforcement activities,” a June 17 Defense Department press release noted.
In May, as discussed in WOLA’s June 13 Border Update, DHS had formally requested that the Defense Department supply 20,000 National Guard personnel to assist ICE with a host of duties in the U.S. interior. “I think it’s a very bad idea to use military for that,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), who had sent Virginia National Guard personnel to the border when serving as the state’s governor two decades ago, told the Washington Post. “People want to believe that the military is there to protect this nation and they don’t want to think it’s being weaponized against them.”
ICE in overdrive
Citing internal government data, CBS News reported that “So far in June, ICE has averaged more than 1,300 arrests each day, a more than 100 percent increase from President Trump’s first 100 days in office, when the agency recorded a 660 daily arrest rate.” White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan told the Washington Post “that arrests had increased to around 2,000 a day” nationwide.
That is still far short of the 3,000 per day that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the main architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, ordered ICE and DHS to reach during a contentious late May White House meeting.
Miller’s edict, which spurred the increased tempo of ICE raids that has heightened tensions around the country, has placed stress on the agency. “All that matters is numbers, pure numbers. Quantity over quality,” an ICE “insider” told the New York Post. “We are working constantly at an unmaintainable pace, added another New York Post source within ICE. “It takes hours to process one person who is illegally in the country and to be told that what you’re doing still isn’t good enough is killing agents’ morale.”
The stress is also budgetary. Axios reported that the agency “is already $1 billion over budget by one estimate,” and could run out of funds by July—two months ahead of the end of the 2025 fiscal year. If Congress doesn’t pass a giant spending bill (discussed below) by then, the White House might declare a national emergency to redirect money to ICE, perhaps from the defense budget, as Donald Trump did to fund border wall construction in 2019.
Citing internal agency data, Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported that ICE’s detention centers are now holding 57,000 people, even though their current congressionally appropriated level funds 41,500 detention beds. Conditions in the agency’s mostly private contractor-run detention facilities are more grim than ever, according to multiple reports. Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Arizona) told John Washington of Arizona Luminaria about a recent visit to the state’s Eloy detention facility:
“So many of the detainees shared that they do not have reliable access to basics like food and water or essential medical care when they are in crisis,” she said after her visit. “Detainees described overcrowded, moldy cells, forced and dehumanizing marches outside in the Arizona heat, constant berating from guards, conditions worse than prison.”
Probably because its stepped-up operations have filled ICE’s interior detention centers, CNN reported, migrants are spending very long periods in CBP’s jail-like holding cells along the U.S.-Mexico border. The temporary cells at Border Patrol stations and ports of entry have been holding migrants, including families and children, for many days or weeks at a time. These are not meant to keep people detained for more than 72 hours except in emergency circumstances—and no such circumstances exist at a time of decades-low Border Patrol migrant apprehensions at the border (see below).
CNN related a court filing telling of a mother and toddler separated from the child’s father and spending 42 days in a CBP facility in California. They were in “a room where 23 women and children were held with no windows… ‘It was so crowded that we couldn’t even step forwards or backwards… We didn’t see the daylight.’”
With more non-criminal detentions, more anger and fear
In another story, CNN cited ICE records belying claims that the agency has been focusing its detention operations on hardened, violent criminals, or “the worst of the worst” in DHS’s frequently used term. “More than 75 percent of people booked into ICE custody in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal conviction other than an immigration or traffic-related offense, according to ICE records from October through the end of May,” the network reported, “And less than 10% were convicted of serious crimes like murder, assault, robbery or rape.”
The Guardian reported on “numbers gathered from ICE and the Vera Institute of Justice” showing an 807 percent increase in arrests of migrants with no criminal record from January to June. Arrests of people with some past criminal charges or convictions—including minor crimes like traffic or immigration violations—rose 91 percent, noted Reuters.
Reports continue to emerge of Latino U.S. citizens being caught up in immigration sweeps. One incident in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello, which was caught on video and received much media attention, involved Border Patrol agents, presumably under the command of Chief Bovino. Agents grabbed Jason Brian Gavidia, pressing him against a fence at his auto body shop while he protested that he is a U.S. citizen, and then failing to return his ID. “He violated my rights as an American citizen,” Gavidia told the Los Angeles Times. “It was the worst experience I ever felt. I felt honestly like I was going to die. He literally racked a chamber in his AR-15.” Montebello’s mayor, Salvador Melendez, alleged racial profiling (which Border Patrol is generally allowed to do) in remarks to the New York Times: “They came in over here looking for a specific look, which is the look of our Latino community.”
Reports point to the increased tempo of ICE operations terrifying Latino communities, citizens and non-citizens alike. A farmer in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley told Nexstar that he has had “zero workers on his farm for the past week.” Nick Bilman observed, “I would say within the last three weeks, it started to slow, but this last week has been huge.”
In the Southern California city of Santa Ana, Puente News Collaborative spoke to small business owners whose customer base is drying up. “I haven’t seen it like this since COVID,” a seafood restaurant owner said. “It shouldn’t be this dead right now,” a boutique owner said. “People are too scared to go out. Even if you’re a citizen, but you look a certain way. Some people don’t want to risk it.”
Farms, hotels, restaurants
The climate of fear is worsening labor shortages for business sectors that often trend Republican. Associations representing industries like farms, hospitality, and food service have been quietly conveying concerns to the administration and Congress. Six Republican legislators sent a letter to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons calling on the agency to redirect its efforts back to migrants with criminal records. “Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives,” read the communication led by border-zone Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).
President Trump appeared, at least briefly, to respond to those concerns. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” the President said on his social network on June 12, promising that “Changes are coming!”
That day, the Washington Post reported, a DHS official sent an email telling ICE agents to “hold on all worksite enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” A source told CBS News that “the President was not aware of the scale of the agency’s operations” and “once it hit him, he pulled it back.”
The pause proved to be short-lived. By June 16, ICE officials received guidance that they could continue carrying out raids and other enforcement at farms, hotels, and restaurants, “as long as they are targeted in nature” as CBS News put it.
“The White House’s policy reversal appeared to reflect opposing factions within the administration that have pulled the president in two directions on the issue,” CBS added. The factions are represented by Miller, who opposes obstacles to reaching his 3,000 arrest-per-day quota, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who hears often from labor-starved agribusiness.
Public opinion
The steady drumbeat of stories of masked ICE agents grabbing families or handcuffing lawmakers is reducing support for the Trump administration’s immigration approach, columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote at the New York Times. “The result is a growing number of Americans who have turned against the White House out of anger and outrage over what they see as overreach.”
Polls now consistently show more American respondents disapproving of the Trump administration’s immigration policies than approving. Until recently, immigration was the one major issue on which polling still had Trump in positive territory. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed 44 percent of Americans approving of Trump’s immigration approach and 49 percent disapproving. A Pew Research Center survey showed 42 percent of Americans approving on immigration and 47 percent disapproving.
60 percent of those surveyed by Pew disapproved of suspending asylum, 59 percent disapproved of ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and 54 percent disapproved of increasing ICE workplace raids. However, Pew found 56 percent support for building a border wall, up from 46 percent in 2019. Among Latino respondents, 42 percent supported wall-building, up from 24 percent in 2019.
“It was never going to be possible to deport millions of people, as he promised, without stomping through American communities,” wrote the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind at the New York Times. “This remains both the administration’s signature political issue and the lens through which Trump officials appear to see the world: rights for some and a show of force for others.”
Massive “reconciliation” spending bill emerges in Senate and resembles House bill
The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” an enormous package of tax cuts, benefit cuts, and new spending reflecting Trump priorities that narrowly passed the Republican-majority House of Representatives on May 22, is now inching its way through the Republican-majority U.S. Senate.
As discussed in WOLA’s May 2 and May 23 Border Updates, the House’s version of this bill would provide DHS and other agencies with over $160 billion in new border and immigration enforcement resources over the next four and a half years.
A May 22 WOLA analysis noted, “We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill.” It would enable the Trump administration to pursue the “mass deportation” plan, with vastly increased ICE detention and deportation operations, that is just getting underway, at current budget levels, in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Over the past week Senate committees, led by the chamber’s Budget Committee, have been publishing their piecesof the Senate’s version of the bill. As this comparison indicates, the Senate’s Republican leadership would spend even more than the House on border and immigration measures, with over $170 billion in its draft.
The Homeland Security and Judiciary provisions advanced by Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) preserve the House bill’s plan to spend $46 billion on border barriers, $45 billion on ICE detention capacity, more than $14 billion to transport deported people, and resources to hire more than 10,000 ICE and CBP personnel.
As giant federal spending on border wall construction appears imminent, the state government of Texas has quietly stopped funding its own project to build barriers along its border with Mexico, the Texas Tribune reported. Texas has spent more than $3 billion to build about 65 miles of state border wall, with another 20 miles under construction. Most of the $46 billion under consideration in the “big” bill would go to building barriers in Texas, where most borderland is in private hands and would have to be purchased from landowners.
The $45 billion for detention, which is about 12 times ICE’s current annual detention budget, promises to be a boon for private contractors that run jails and detention facilities or build temporary tent structures. Bloomberg reported that ICE has identified 41 companies that can bid for detention contracts as part of an emergency acquisition process that will move faster than normal bidding procedures.
Senate leadership will advance the bill under an infrequently invoked legislative rule called “reconciliation,” allowing it to pass the Senate on a simple majority vote without the filibuster rule, which usually requires 60 of 100 votes to end debate and vote. The bill can pass without a single Democratic vote, as long as it meets the rule’s requirement that all of its provisions have an impact on the federal budget.
Republicans don’t agree on the bill’s contents, however. While most disagreements surround the extent of tax and spending cuts, at least one top Republican senator disagrees with the level of new border and immigration spending. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), the libertarian-leaning chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has criticized the bill’s contribution to the federal government’s debt and told DHS Secretary Noem in a May hearing that the proposed amounts were too high. Paul appeared to be backed up by another “deficit hawk” on the Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin).
Sen. Paul has issued alternative bill language (reflected in the graphic above) that would reduce spending on Trump administration border and immigration priorities by about three quarters. The Homeland Security Chair would, for instance, reduce border wall outlays from the proposed $46.5 billion to $6.5 billion, and would cut detention spending in half. “I respectfully disagree with Chairman Paul’s proposal to cut the Trump plan by more than 50 percent,” said Sen. Graham of the Budget Committee.
The Trump administration is prodding congressional leadership to pass the bill and send it to the President’s desk by the July 4 holiday, two weeks from now. That is appearing less likely to happen, as Republican senators continue to disagree on these and other issues and must reconcile significant differences with a House of Representatives that only managed to pass its bill by one vote.
Meanwhile, to the extent that U.S. citizens know about this bill and its provisions, its poor-to-rich income redistribution and benefit cuts are deeply unpopular. “Republicans know they have a big, beautiful problem: The centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s agenda is polling like garbage,” Punchbowl News reported on June 19.
CBP reports on May migrant encounters
Data
CBP reported a slight increase from April to May in the number of migrants its agents and officers encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border. Still, numbers remain near 60-year lows amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on migration and near-total ban on asylum access.
Border Patrol apprehended 8,725 migrants between ports of entry (official border crossings) at the U.S.-Mexico border in May, or 281 per day, up from 8,382 (279 per day) in April and 7,182 (232 per day) in March, and down sharply from 117,905 (3,803 per day) in May 2024.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
72 percent of Border Patrol’s apprehended migrants were citizens of Mexico, similar to April (73 percent). That is far higher than the 34 percent share of the apprehended migrant population that has come from Mexico since fiscal 2020. 90 percent of Border Patrol’s May apprehensions were of citizens of Mexico or northern Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador); it was the first time since November 2020 that those nationalities combined to reach 90 percent.
CBP’s release noted that Border Patrol did not release a single asylum seeker or other migrant into the U.S. interiorin May: 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 unaccompanied minors jumped 28% from April to May, from 789 to 1,008. Nearly all children arriving without parents were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.
Overall, CBP—which combines Border Patrol agents operating between ports of entry and Field Operations officers operating at the ports of entry—took 12,452 people into custody last month, up from 12,030 in April and 11,017 in March, but down from 170,716 in May 2024. The May 2024 figure had included 52,811 people at ports of entry, most with CBP One appointments—a program that no longer exists.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
Of all migrants entering CBP custody, 84 percent were single adults, much higher than the 64 percent share of single adults since fiscal 2020. 7 percent were members of family units (down from 30 percent since 2020) and 8 percent were unaccompanied children (up from 6 percent since 2020).
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
The main reason for the shift from families to single adults is the unavailability of asylum: parents with children were more likely to turn themselves in to seek protection than to attempt to evade Border Patrol.
Migrants encountered at the ports of entry remained few, as the Trump administration ceased use of the CBP One smartphone app to help asylum seekers make appointments. CBP’s port of entry encounters totaled 3,727 people or 120 per day in May, down from 3,648 or 120 per day in April, 3,835 in February, and 52,811 in May 2024.
Data Table - If chart is not visible, click here
Ninety-three percent of migrants encountered at ports of entry in May were citizens of Mexico, the same share as in March and April. Only 278 in May and 242 in April were from elsewhere.
Of the nine geographic sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, El Paso, which includes far west Texas and all of New Mexico, was the number one sector for migrant apprehensions for the fourth straight month. The El Paso sector’s 2,014 apprehensions were 23 percent of the May total, the same percentage as in April. The Tucson Sector (Arizona, 1,588) was second, followed by the Rio Grande Valley Sector (Texas, 1,439), and San Diego Sector (California, 1,395).
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
Migrant deaths
The El Paso Sector—once among the least deadly for migrants—has become the most lethal since Texas extended its Operation Lone Star enforcement there in late 2022, a deeply reported Texas Tribune story revealed. Volunteers and human rights advocates blame militarized policies for pushing migrants into remote and dangerous desert areas in New Mexico, where people perish from dehydration or exposure to excessive heat or nighttime cold, and bodies often lie undiscovered or unidentified for months.
“From January 2023 to August 2024, 299 human remains were reported in the El Paso sector, the most of any sector along the southern border” and “more than double the number of cases reported during the 20 months prior, when 122 remains were recorded before El Paso had adopted Operation Lone Star,” the Texas Tribune noted.
Border-zone deaths may increase this year—at least as a percentage of the overall migrant population—as the ongoing shutdown of asylum and buildup of border security push people to take more dangerous desert routes, NBC Newsreported. A Border Patrol agent told Noticias Telemundo that migrant smugglers are increasingly directing their customers into wilderness areas and guiding them remotely via mobile phone. Humanitarian workers cited in the NBC story reported finding the remains of 154 migrants in Arizona’s deserts last year, and they expect this year’s migration flow to shift to the western part of the Sonoran Desert which is “even more remote.”
In Mexico and further south, fewer see the United States as a destination
Across from the San Diego Sector in Tijuana, Baja California, the migrant population has declined sharply, the New York Times reported. A manager of the city’s large “Ambassadors of Jesus” migrant shelter reported that the facility’s population was down to 700 mostly displaced Mexican citizens, down from 2,500 during much of 2022 through 2024.
“The 30,000 people whose appointments with US immigration officers were cancelled are now hard to locate,” wroteMilli Legrain at the Guardian. “Many are thought to have dispersed across Mexico. Some have been deported by the Mexican government. Others have flocked to cities such as Monterrey or Mexico City in search of work. Many are stuck in desperate conditions in the southern city of Tapachula, bordering Guatemala. And some are applying for asylum in Mexico.”
A UNHCR report published this week covering 2024 found that 41 percent of non-Mexican migrants surveyed last year named Mexico as their final destination, up from 26 percent in 2023. Those who most cited Mexico as their destination country were citizens of Cuba (82%), Haiti (64%), El Salvador (56%), Nicaragua (46%), Honduras (45%), and Guatemala (40%). UNHCR-WFP-UNICEF Mixed Movements Monitoring report covering the first quarter of 2025 along the entire migration route found only 48 percent of surveyed migrants intending to reach the United States. 26 percent of migrants, many of whom had hoped to seek protection in the United States that is now unavailable, were considering returning to their origin countries, up from 7 percent in the last quarter of 2024.
“We have seen people who are not Mexican citizens decide to return to their home country with the thought, ‘If I’m going to die, at least let me die at home in a place that’s familiar with the people that I love,’” Nicole Elizabeth Ramos of the San Diego and Tijuana-based service organization Al Otro Lado told Voice of San Diego. “We have seen similarly Mexican citizens, some of them, return to their hometowns for that same reason.” Ramos said that non-Mexicans who had stayed in Mexico awaiting canceled CBP One appointments have difficulty applying for asylum now that they are stranded there, as Mexico requires applicants to start the process within 30 days of arriving in the country.
In Honduras, the director of the country’s National Institute of Migration (INM) reported receiving almost 300 asylum requests so far in 2025, far more than its year-long average of 100 to 200 cases.
Other news
- By a strictly party-line vote of 51-46 on June 18, the Senate confirmed Rodney Scott to be the Trump administration’s new commissioner of CBP. Scott is a career Border Patrol agent who was the force’s chief during the final period of the Trump administration and the first months of the Biden administration. He resigned over disagreements with the Biden team—including, as the Washington Examiner reported, on use of the term “illegal alien”—and went on to be a fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee that advanced Scott’s nomination, spoke on the Senate floor in opposition to Scott, who has been questioned for his role in past investigations of Border Patrol human rights abuses and his membership in a Border Patrol Facebook group that included lewd and racist posts, among other issues.
- The Washington Post and other outlets reported on a State Department cable proposing to ban travel to the United States from an additional 36 countries. Earlier this month, the administration imposed a full ban on entries into the United States of citizens from 12 countries (including Haiti) and a partial ban on 7 others (including Cuba and Venezuela). The new cable would expand the ban to a long new list of countries, which includes four small Caribbean states, unless they meet conditions regarding screening and acceptance of deportations, potentially including deportations of migrants from third countries.
- According to a June 16 federal court filing, out of 531,199 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela whom the Biden administration had granted two years of humanitarian parole under a program that the Trump administration abruptly canceled, 66 percent (351,523) had applied for some other status during their time in the United States. That includes 65 percent of Cuban citizens, 85 percent of Haitians, 32 percent of Nicaraguans, and 61 percent of Venezuelans. Unfortunately, in many cases that other status was Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which the Trump administration has also been seeking to curtail.
- Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez, the former Miami mayor who now represents part of south Florida in the House of Representatives, told local news that the parole cancellation has been a hardship for businesses in his district. “Even insurance agents, calling and saying, ‘I’ve got to lay off 150 people… and they are all licensed insurance agents, but they had a work permit and now they don’t have a work permit’… We need to change that.”
- Another south Florida Republican, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Noem raising concerns about the ICE detention and potential deportation of Gregory Antonio Sanabria Tarazona, who had spent three years in a Venezuelan prison, enduring torture, after participating in 2014 protests against Nicolás Maduro’s regime. “I’m increasingly concerned with the growing cases of people in the United States who have fled oppressive regimes and are being detained and held for possible deportation,“ Diaz-Balart wrote. ICE had detained Sanabria when he attended a routine check-in.
- Following a June 17 deportation flight from Texas and a June 19 flight from Mexico, the United States (6,126) and Mexico (about 2,100) have now returned more than 8,200 Venezuelan people to Caracas so far this year, reportedTom Cartwright of Witness at the Border.
- The Texas Tribune reported on the case of Pedro Luis Salazar Cuervo, a 28-year-old Venezuelan who the Trump administration sent to El Salvador’s Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) prison in March. Salazar Cuervo has no known gang affiliations, but after he turned himself in to Texas state police at the U.S.-Mexico border on New Year’s Eve, police found a photo on his phone depicting him with someone else who had tattoos. A Texas judge ordered prosecutors to request that the federal government bring Salazar Cuervo back to Texas to receive due process and face a state trespassing charge.
- A Huffington Post investigation sounded alarms about the “erasure” of at least 24 U.S. immigration court cases of people sent to the CECOT. Cases, mainly asylum pleas, are being closed in absentia because the Trump administration moved the Venezuelan defendants out of the United States. “Imagine having to explain to someone’s mother, as a United States immigration attorney, that their son has an immigration hearing, and the government attorneys fighting his case say that they have no means of being able to connect you with your client—when the United States government has paid for the detention of that individual in a third country,” said Margaret Cargioli of the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
- Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man wrongfully sent to the CECOT in March and brought back to the United States in early June, appeared at a hearing in Tennessee on June 13. Federal prosecutors are seeking to jail Abrego Garcia on charges of migrant smuggling based on a 2022 traffic stop in that state. A federal magistrate judge did not decide to release Abrego Garcia, who has a U.S. citizen wife and children in Maryland, pending trial.
- Federal prosecutors secured their first conviction of a migrant, a man from Ecuador, for trespassing on what is now military property in the so-called “National Defense Area” that the Trump administration created in the 50 westernmost miles of the Texas-Mexico border, one of two such zones. A fringe of territory ranging from 60 feet to 3 miles, from the Arizona-New Mexico border to the Texas town of Fort Hancock, is now considered the property of two nearby military bases; those caught trespassing there may face up to a year in prison in addition to charges for illegally crossing the border. In New Mexico, Reuters reported, no one really seems to know exactly where the National Defense Area begins, as its width varies along the borderline.
- The U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is holding 43 migrants, the New York Times’ Carol Rosenberg reported on June 12. As of that date, the Trump administration’s migration operation at Guantanamo was being staffed by 540 Defense Department personnel and 130 people from Homeland Security, many of them ICE contractors.
- “Armored vehicles belonging to the U.S. Army,” some of them parked about 100 yards from people’s homes on the other side of the borderline, “are causing fear and curiosity” in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, which borders Nogales, Arizona, Proyecto Puente reported. A local student “expressed outrage that there were guns pointed at houses in Mexico, as this puts families at risk,” but most residents were reluctant to talk to reporters. “Some local politicians refused to give interviews, as they fear that the US government will cancel their visas.”
- UNHCR published its 2024 report on protection monitoring in Mexico (cited above), which contains data based on about 6,000 interviews with 14,000 refugees and migrants in the country, carried out by the UN agency and other humanitarian groups. 53 percent of those polled last year said that being a victim of violence, threats, or intimidation was their main reason for fleeing their countries of origin. 43 percent cited generalized violence or insecurity, and 37 percent cited economic reasons. 76 percent said that they would face threats if returned to their countries of origin; 60 percent said that those threats were specifically aimed at them.
- A UNHCR-WFP-UNICEF Mixed Movements Monitoring report covering the first quarter of 2025, cited above, noted a sharp decline in northbound migration as a result of the Trump administration’s suspension of asylum and other crackdowns. Panama saw a 97 percent drop through the Darién Gap, Honduras 89 percent, and Mexico 68.8 percent. The report noted growth in southbound reverse movements, particularly among Venezuelans, Colombians, and Ecuadorians. 36 percent of migrants polled during the first three months of the year reported eating only one or no meals the day before.