Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 5, 2025
Adam Isacson
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 5, 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:
- Court Halts Mass Removal of Guatemalan Unaccompanied Children: A federal judge and child advocates spent the Sunday of Labor Day weekend reversing a pre-dawn Trump administration attempt to repatriate dozens of unaccompanied Guatemalan children without the due process that relevant law requires. The administration’s claim that they were “reuniting families” was contradicted by the children and families themselves, as well as a Guatemalan judicial body’s investigation.
- In the courts: Several other challenges to the Trump administration’s border and immigration policies reached essential junctures in the federal courts last week. They included at least partial rebukes to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, the nationwide use of expedited removal, cancellation of TPS for Venezuelan citizens, and the use of the military in Los Angeles. Florida, however, prevailed in keeping its large detention facility in the Everglades open.
- “Mass Deportation” updates: A big Los Angeles-style migrant detention operation is imminent in Chicago. Operations continue in Washington. Six hundred military judges may be assigned to the immigration court system, despite their limited knowledge of immigration law. ICE’s detained population, 61,226 as of August 24, is probably a record. Questions surround a little-known Virginia company awarded a $1.2 billion contract to operate a big detention facility at Fort Bliss.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Court Halts Mass Removal of Guatemalan Unaccompanied Children
The Trump administration sought to fly 76 Guatemalan children from unaccompanied child shelters back to the Central American nation during the post-midnight hours of August 31, the Sunday of the U.S. Labor Day holiday weekend. This set off a frantic day of attorneys scrambling to halt the abrupt removals while a federal judge demanded repeated updates about the children’s status from the Justice and Homeland Security departments. By 1:30 a.m. on Monday, September 1, the administration confirmed that all children had been removed from the planes, were out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, and were back in their shelters for the time being.
In recent weeks, National Center for Youth Law attorney Becky Wolozin told the Associated Press (AP), agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division had begun interviewing children, mainly from Guatemala, who had arrived unaccompanied (without parents) at the border. The agents asked the children, who are in facilities run by contractors of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), about their relatives in Guatemala. On Friday, August 29, attorneys began receiving cancellation notices for their child clients’ upcoming immigration court hearings.
On the evening of Saturday the 30th, the Acacia Center for Justice, which supports legal representation for unaccompanied kids, was notified that “officials had drafted a list of children to return to Guatemala,” the organization’s executive director, Shaina Aber, told the AP. They would be placed on flights from Harlingen and El Paso, Texas.
How this is meant to work
A 2008 law signed by Republican President George W. Bush, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, states that when a child from a country other than Canada or Mexico enters U.S. custody at the border without a parent, that child cannot be deported immediately. (Guatemala has been the number-one nationality of children arriving at the border unaccompanied.) They must be allowed to appear before an immigration judge and have a chance to seek asylum or any other arrangement that is in the child’s best interest.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency that typically apprehends children arriving at the border, must quickly transfer them to ORR, which is responsible for sheltering them while they seek relatives or other sponsors to care for them. In the past, many of those relatives—often the children’s parents who had arrived in the United States before them—were undocumented, but authorities considered reunification preferable to long periods in the ORR shelter system. Citing concerns—some legitimate—that inadequate vetting of sponsors was easing child exploitation, the Trump administration has placed obstacles in the way of sponsors and relatives who would take kids.
ICE is now playing a far greater role, including a July 9 directive that requires would-be sponsors to undergo interviews with ICE. As a result, the average amount of time children spend awaiting placement out of ORR shelters ballooned from 37 days in January 2025 to 217 days in April, declining a bit to 171 days in July, the AP reported.
The scramble on August 31
The law and process described here do not contemplate abrupt removals of children who have not had their cases resolved. But that is precisely what the Trump administration, calling it part of a “first-of-its-kind pilot program,” sought to do with the 76 Guatemalan kids over Labor Day Weekend.
“Late Saturday and into the early morning hours of Sunday, staff at shelters woke children up—some of them crying or vomiting in fear, legal filings say—to prepare them to fly back to their home country,” CNN reported. As ICE loaded children on planes in Texas, attorneys filed suit and alerted the Washington DC Circuit’s federal judge on call, Sparkle Sooknanan, who said she was awakened at 2:30 AM on Sunday the 31st. The judge ordered a pause in removals and spent hours seeking to contact the Department of Justice to verify that the administration was following that order.
The scenario of a federal judge trying to verify that the Trump administration is not disobeying an order to stop deporting people without due process, even as planes are prepared to depart, is not novel. Something similar happened on March 15, when the administration—partially invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—sent three planeloads of Venezuelan and Salvadoran citizens to a prison in El Salvador, even as a Washington, DC judge sought to halt the flights. (See WOLA’s March 21 Border Update.)
The proceedings in Judge Sooknanan’s courtroom, detailed by Anna Bower of LawFare, involved an exasperated judge demanding repeated updates about the children’s status from Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign, who also represented the Trump administration during the March 15 Alien Enemies Act removals. “I have the government attempting to remove minor children from the country in the wee hours of the morning on a holiday weekend. That’s surprising,” the judge said.
The National Immigration Law Center, which brought the suit, reported that one plane carrying children to Guatemala was already in the air, but that the administration this time obeyed the judicial order and called it back to Texas.
While the children are currently back in ORR custody in the United States, Judge Sooknanan’s temporary restraining order blocks their removal only until September 14, as the case proceeds. On September 4, attorneys filed a motion for a preliminary injunction ordering the government not “to transfer, repatriate, remove, or otherwise facilitate” the Guatemalan children’s removal without due process.
The Washington, DC judge who will consider that motion is a Trump appointee, Timothy Kelly, not Judge Sooknanan, whose role was that of an on-call emergency judge.
What was agreed with Guatemala
It appears that these events were set in motion during a June visit to Guatemala of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who raised the possibility of repatriating more unaccompanied children. “A senior Guatemalan official told CNN that in diplomatic exchanges between the two governments over the summer Guatemala said it would be open to receiving unaccompanied minors as long as they received due process,” according to CNN. The nation’s president, Bernardo Arévalo, cited a figure of up to 150 children per week, depending on capacity to identify relatives inside Guatemala.
The Guatemalan government had emphasized a preference to receive children who were close to turning 18 years old, at which point they would become adults and leave ORR custody. “The head of the country’s immigration service said last month that the government was looking to repatriate 341” children, according to the AP. Sometime during the second half of July, however, the Trump administration sent Guatemala a list of 609 children, including some as young as 14, and perhaps younger, Reuters reported, citing a source who said Guatemalan officials were “taken aback” by the altered deal.
Strong doubts cast on the administration’s “family reunification” claims
At the August 31 hearing, Ensign, the Justice Department attorney, sought to portray the sudden removals as an effort to reunite families. “It’s outrageous that the plaintiffs are trying to interfere with these reunifications,” Ensign said, adding, “All of these children have parents or guardians in Guatemala who have requested their return.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller characteristically went further, posting to Twitter, “The Biden judge is effectively kidnapping these migrant children and refusing to let them return home to their parents.”
Evidence points to a far different reality. Lauren Fisher Flores with the south Texas legal assistance group ProBAR, which represents some of the children, told CNN of
a young girl who was “extremely distraught, crying and repeatedly saying that she could not go back to Guatemala.” At a different shelter, another girl vomited. And at another facility, a teenager expressed fear of being killed if returned to Guatemala. None of the parents in Guatemala requested the return of their children, according to Flores.
Reuters reported on a document from the Guatemalan government’s General Counsel’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Nación, PGN) detailing the agency’s own inquiries. Of the 609 children, the PGN had been able to contact the family members of 115. Of that total, “59 families expressed anger about the possibility of their children being returned to Guatemala, with some even describing it as intimidation.” WOLA has reviewed the document, which states that another 50 families indicated they would take the children back, “with the caveat that none of them were requesting such a situation.” One of those 50 said “that if their daughter returned, they would do everything possible for her to leave the country again, as she is under a death threat.” The other six children had either already been released from ORR custody or had already been returned to Guatemala.
Statements
“In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala. We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm,” read a statement from Efrén Olivares of NILC, the group that brought the August 31 suit.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had received advance warning from whistleblowers about the removals and sent an August 29 letter to the acting head of ORR, career ICE-HSI agent Angie Salazar, warning that “this move threatens to separate children from their families, lawyers, and support systems, to thrust them back into the very conditions they are seeking refuge from, and to disappear vulnerable children beyond the reach of American law and oversight.”
In the courts
The Guatemalan children’s case was far from the only challenge to the Trump administration’s border and immigration policies to reach an important juncture in the federal courts last week. The list of notable decisions and filings is extensive.
Alien Enemies Act
In New Orleans, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found, by a 2-1 margin, that the Trump administration misused the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) in March when it invoked it to remove Venezuelan citizens who it claimed were members of an organized crime group. The decision, from one of the most conservative bodies in the federal judiciary, bars future AEA removals from the Circuit’s jurisdiction (Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi), and tees up a Supreme Court challenge to the administration’s assertion that it can apply the 1798 law to those whom it considers to be members of a criminal group.
“This is the first full-blown appellate court decision on the subject. It is therefore an important precedent,” wrote George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, who worked with the Brennan Center for Justice, the Cato Institute, and others on an amicus brief in the case. The ACLU filed this case in April to stop the rapid removal of Venezuelan men from an ICE detention facility in north Texas.
On April 7, the Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling requiring the Trump administration to give defendants more time to challenge removals under the Alien Enemies Act (see WOLA’s April 11 Border Update). Another ruling, on April 19, suspended all AEA removals from northern Texas. (See WOLA’s April 25 Border Update).
The high court did not rule in April on the merits of applying the AEA, a law meant to swiftly remove foreign citizens during times of war, invasion, or state-sponsored “predatory incursion,” to alleged members of a criminal organization—in this case, Venezuela’s loosely organized Tren de Aragua.
The Fifth Circuit appeals court’s two-judge majority, one George W. Bush appointee and one Biden appointee, agreed that Tren de Aragua’s (probably slight) presence within the Venezuelan migrant population does not meet the definition of state-sponsored “predatory incursion” that Congress intended. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred. We therefore conclude that petitioners are likely to prove that the AEA was improperly invoked,” the opinion reads. The judges did not challenge the administration’s assertion—doubted by most of the intelligence community—that Tren de Aragua is under the control of Venezuela’s authoritarian regime.
The third judge, Trump appointee Andrew Oldham, filed a 131-page dissent insisting that the judicial branch cannot challenge the president’s determination of whether a “predatory incursion” or “invasion” exists. “If that’s true, the president could use the AEA to detain or deport virtually any noncitizens he wants, at any time, for any reason, so long as he proclaims there is an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’” Somin wrote in response, adding that declaring an “invasion” could even allow a president to suspend U.S. citizens’ habeas corpus rights under the Constitution’s Suspension Clause.
Expedited removal everywhere
On August 29, Washington DC District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb blocked the Trump administration from using expedited removal for “fast-track” deportations of people arrested in the U.S. interior.
The term refers to a procedure, created by a 1996 law, that skips immigration court, offering instead an asylum process that usually takes a few weeks, if an immigrant cannot prove that they have been in the United States for more than two years. Before the Trump administration, expedited removal was only applied to people apprehended near the border. Now, though, the administration has been seeking to apply it to people throughout the United States, including in immigration courts, where DHS has been closing immigrants’ cases and seizing them on the spot.
Judge Cobb’s decision, the result of a lawsuit brought by Make the Road New York, found that “the Trump administration had acted recklessly in a frenzied effort to quickly remove as many people as possible, likely violating due process rights and risking wrongful detentions,” as the New York Times put it. “While it will almost certainly be appealed, Friday’s order is a major setback for the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, including its campaign to arrest asylum-seekers at immigration courthouses,” noted CBS News. If the administration could apply expedited removal so widely, Cobb found, “not only noncitizens, but everyone would be at risk. The Government could accuse you of entering unlawfully, relegate you to a bare-bones proceeding where it would ‘prove’ your unlawful entry, and then immediately remove you.”
Venezuela TPS
In California, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Trump administration failed to follow procedure when it terminated a 2023 grant of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 348,000 citizens of Venezuela, before it was set to expire. However, the decision—the result of a suit brought by the National TPS Alliance and others—has little practical effect because the Supreme Court, in May, allowed the Trump administration to continue revoking TPS for Venezuelans while lower courts’ deliberations proceed.
On September 3, the Trump administration moved to terminate TPS for the second group of Venezuelan immigrants granted the status, about 268,000 people covered by the Biden administration’s 2021 grant. That status will expire on November 7. “Those who lose their TPS protections and don’t have any other legal means to remain in the U.S.—such as applications for asylum or permanent American residency—could face arrest and deportation by federal immigration officials,” CBS News reported.
In a statement, a group of UN human rights experts voiced alarm at “the arbitrary detention and imminent deportation of three Venezuelan political dissidents and a human rights defender” in the United States, who “the U.S. Government claims, without evidence,” are Tren de Aragua members.
Meanwhile, despite rapidly worsening tensions between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments, an ICE contractor deportation plane carried 319 people back to Caracas on August 29. “This year, Venezuela has received more than 10,000 migrants on 63 flights, including the one on August 29, according to official figures,” Efecto Cocuyo reported.
Abrego Garcia seeks a gag order
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador and returned in June, remains in ICE detention in Virginia as the Trump administration seeks to deport him to another country, possibly Uganda. A federal judge in Maryland has put that on hold for now.
The Maryland resident, granted withholding of removal to El Salvador by an immigration judge in 2019, asked a federal judge to order Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Noem to stop attacking him in public statements while he continues to face prosecution on a “human smuggling” charge. Bondi, Noem, and other Trump administration officials, along with official social media accounts like that of DHS, repeatedly allege that Abrego García is a gang member and human trafficker, among other claims that judges have not found convincing. Noem complained that CBS News edited some of her ad hominem attacks on Abrego García from the video of a recent interview.
Everglades detention facility
On September 4, in Atlanta, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling that ordered the state of Florida to close the massive detention facility it had recently opened in the Everglades, west of Miami. In late August, Miami District Court Judge Kathleen Williams had ordered the facility that Florida’s state government calls “Alligator Alcatraz” to close within 60 days because its construction violated environmental laws. The appeals court decided, though, that the federal environmental law did not apply because the facility was built entirely with Florida state government funding—even though detainees get transferred to ICE, a federal agency.
Before this latest ruling, DHS had been relocating detainees out of the Everglades to other detention sites around the country. About 120 to 125 detainees remained in the tent facility that Florida plans to expand to hold 5,000.
During the last week of August, a local Florida Spanish-language television station reported that a disturbance had occurred inside the facility. The Guardian reported on what it called a “mini-uprising”:
The incident took place after several migrants held there began shouting for “freedom” after one received news a relative had died, according to the outlet. A team of guards then rushed in and began beating individuals indiscriminately with batons, and fired teargas at them, the detainees said.
Detainees speaking by phone to Noticias 23 said that at least four were injured and that “alarms could be heard during the call.” Florida authorities denied that any incident had taken place.
Meanwhile, Louisiana became the latest state to offer space to detain migrants: part of the notorious Angola prison, built in the 19th century on land that had been slave plantations. The “prison farm” has a dark history of forced labor in its fields, which prisoners continue to perform today. Angola will be the 10th ICE detention site operating in Louisiana, USA Today noted.
Los Angeles
In California, federal judge Charles Breyer ruled that, as the state’s government has asserted, the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act—an 1878 law limiting U.S. military involvement in law enforcement—when it sent National Guard and Marine personnel into Los Angeles to accompany ICE operations in June. Breyer, who stayed his ruling until September 12, called the deployment “a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.”
Testimony in the Newsom v. Trump case revealed the extreme caution and trepidation with which the U.S. military has been carrying out this internal mission, ordered by Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A footnote in Breyer’s decision noted that when the two-star Army general in charge of the military component balked at participating in a June show of force in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, the Border Patrol sector chief in charge of the DHS operation questioned the general’s “loyalty to the country.” Hegseth ultimately overruled Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman; a July 1 Army planning document referred to the MacArthur Park operation as “extremely high” risk.
“Mass Deportation” updates
Chicago
That Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, was the subject of an August 29 New York Times profile that observed, “He has been testing the limits of politicized law enforcement, clashing on social media with California Democrats and producing Hollywood-style promotional videos of his masked, heavily armed officers marching to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DNA.’”
Bovino “may be tapped to recreate his aggressive Los Angeles raids in other American cities,” the Times noted, and two sources told CNN that he may lead an expanded operation that may begin shortly in Chicago. “The blueprint for the Chicago operation has been established in Los Angeles,” a team of CNN reporters observed.
“You’re going to see a ramp up of operations in New York; you’re going to see a ramp up of operations continue in L.A., Portland, Seattle, all these sanctuary cities that refuse to work with ICE,” White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan saidon August 28, adding, “You can see a ramp up of operation in Chicago, absolutely.”
ICE-led operations in Chicago could begin as soon as September 5 and last about 30 days, the AP reported. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 230 agents—mainly from ICE and CBP, most of them coming from Los Angeles—are being sent to a naval base north of the city and “are expected to leave the facility before dawn each morning to carry out President Donald Trump’s mission to curb crime and make immigration arrests.”
The presence of military or National Guard personnel is less clear, particularly given Judge Breyer’s ruling on the Posse Comitatus Act. However, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker alleged that the White House could be planning to send Texas National Guard personnel to the city. (Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) denied this.) Pritzker, an outspoken Trump critic, called on Chicagoans to record ICE’s activities “to keep them honest in doing the right thing,” the Sun-Times noted.
Washington DC
In the District of Columbia, which has less sovereign authority to resist federal deployments, ICE operations continue at a rapid tempo. Agents are accompanied by CBP, Washington city police, and other agencies, while National Guard personnel from DC and several other states tend to focus more on anti-crime and “beautification” efforts.
The 51st noted that city police cooperation with immigration agents is “making residents think twice about calling local police to report crimes they’ve witnessed – or been victims of,” weakening fragile bonds of trust between police and the community.
The Nation and The 51st reported on burgeoning, loosely coordinated citizen efforts, like “night patrols” and early warning systems, that communities are employing to monitor immigration enforcement activities throughout Washington’s neighborhoods.
Many of those detained in Washington end up held at ICE’s Washington field office in the northern Virginia exurb of Chantilly, where MSNBC’s Laura Barrón-López reported on “dire and inhumane conditions” for people detained in what is meant to be a short-term holding space. “The conditions include one meal a day that consists of a single burrito, some 40 to 90 people at a time crammed into a single room with no beds, and some detainees held as long as seven days with no ability to bathe.” Personnel routinely hang up on attorneys’ calls to the field office.
Military immigration judges
The Associated Press has seen an August 27 memo, approved by Defense Secretary Hegseth, that would send up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as immigration judges. The first group of Judge Advocates General (JAGs), whose transfers to the immigration court system would last for up to six months but can be renewed, could be named as early as this week.
On September 30, 2024, the Justice Department’s immigration court system had 735 judges to adjudicate over 3.8 million cases. The Trump administration has since fired many, leaving “about 600,” according to the judges’ union, as cited by the AP. That means sending Defense Department judges “would double their ranks.”
“While JAGs do have experience in various administrative hearings, I doubt many have ever even seen an immigration court session,” Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force general with long expertise in civil-military relations, told the New York Times. “JAGs are not routinely trained in immigration law, and I believe it would take significant training for them to become competent immigration judges.”
Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, was more blunt, telling the AP, “it makes as much sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement.”
ICE detention and arrests
The latest ICE statistics report that the agency’s population of detainees stood at 61,226 as of August 24. Analyst Austin Kocher called this ICE’s “highest verifiable point in several years—and possibly the highest point in history…Congress required ICE to begin publishing detention data regularly for the first time in 2019. Prior to that, we had only scattered data points that never crossed 60,000.” This number, Kocher pointed out, does not include people held at state facilities, such as the one in Florida, those in temporary holding facilities like the Chantilly field office discussed above, or those in the custody of U.S. Marshals.
Of the 61,226, 45 percent have never been charged or found guilty of any crime, including immigration offenses.
Kocher noted that “ICE’s arrests have declined since June, from over 30,000 to a little less than 29,000 estimated for the month of August,” which would be an average of less than 1,000 arrests per day. “David Bier [of the Cato Institute] has suggested that the decline could be due to a court order that limited ICE arrests in Southern California.”
“Privately,” CNN reported, “senior Trump officials remain frustrated with the agency, which continues to lag in immigration arrests. While roughly double what they were under the Biden administration, interior arrests have fluctuated between 1,000 and 2,000 arrests a day, according to internal data, short of a White House goal of 3,000 arrests a day.”
Deportation data
A “senior Homeland Security official” told CNN’s Priscilla Álvarez that ICE deported nearly 200,000 people during the Trump administration’s first 7 months. Adding CBP removals, Coast Guard removals, and verified “self-deportations” brings the figure up to 350,000. ICE could finish the 2025 fiscal year, which ends September 30, with over 300,000 deportations for the first time since 2014, when the Obama administration deported 316,000 people.
ICE personnel
The Cato Institute’s David Bier, citing data “given by ERO to someone outside the agency who shared it with Cato,” found that from 17,000 to 33,000 federal law enforcement officers have been taken off their regular duties and reassigned to support ICE migrant removal operations.
By comparison, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division has between 5,700 and 6,100 agents of its own, although the giant funding bill passed in early July will increase that number.
The scale of the transfers from other federal law enforcement is staggering. According to Bier, the diversion “includes one in five US marshals (650 of 3,892), one in five FBI agents (2,840 of 13,700), half of DEA agents (2,181 of 4,620), over two-thirds of the ATF (1,778 of 2,572), and nearly 90 percent of Homeland Security Investigations (6,198 of 7,100).”
This is affecting the non-immigration-related missions of those agencies. TRAC Reports has found significant recent drops in criminal referrals from the DEA, ATF, and U.S. Marshals.
Another 8,500 state law enforcement officers are now on task forces helping ICE to capture migrants. The Washington Examiner reported that the number of state and local jurisdictions that have entered into “287(g) agreements” to cooperate with ICE, in some cases with officers deputized to enforce immigration law, has increased from 135 to 896 since January. Due to new funding in the giant spending bill approved in July, “starting Oct. 1, DHS says partnering law enforcement agencies will be reimbursed up to 25% of an officer’s annual salary and benefits, including overtime pay,” according to Border Report.
Meanwhile, training is on hold for the rest of the year for non-ICE recruits at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Glynco, Georgia. Instructors’ “students—the National Park rangers, the military police, the inspectors general, the TSA recruits—have been told to come back in 2026,” reported Pablo Manríquez at Migrant Insider.
The Guardian, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post reported on ICE’s supercharged recruitment efforts, with the latter two outlets visiting a hiring fair at a convention space between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. The “reconciliation” funding bill that Congress passed in July gives ICE the resources to hire 10,000 more agents (see WOLA’s July 13 and earlier Border Updates).
All three reports raised concerns about “white supremacists and violent extremists” being attracted to employment with the agency. The Guardian’s Sam Levin noted, “Recent DHS recruitment advertisements have used language like ‘Defend your culture!’, ‘Secure the Golden Age,’ and ‘Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?’” Scott Shuchart, who served in ICE and DHS management roles under Democratic administrations, said, “The scary ones are the people who want to be Trump’s private army, the insurrectionists, the Proud Boys, the Klansmen, and others who might be coming out of the woodwork.”
At the Texas event, which the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff described as resembling “a poker tournament or an ESPN draft night,” one applicant—a former bantamweight MMA fighter—told the Washington Post’s Robert Klemko, “I keep seeing these memes where Indians are bragging about taking our tech jobs. So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement and send you home.’”
Miroff noted that ICE planned to issue 900 tentative job offers at the event in Texas. The Post added that DHS has received more than 130,000 applications overall.
Fort Bliss detention contractor
The Associated Press sought to investigate Acquisition Logistics, the little-known contractor chosen to build and operate a massive migrant detention facility made up of giant tents on a patch of land in Fort Bliss, a military base in El Paso, Texas.
The value of the contract, which is not publicly viewable, is $1.2 billion, and “Camp East Montana” will be the largest detention facility in the country. But Acquisition Logistics, which lacks a functioning website and lists the suburban Richmond home of its 77-year-old owner as its headquarters, has never managed a federal contract worth more than $16 million. AP reporters knocked on the door of the three-bedroom home in Henrico, Virginia, but nobody answered.
Contractors running flights
A Financial Times investigation examined charter air companies, such as GlobalX and Avelo, which are poised to reap a substantial windfall from ICE deportation operations that the new funding bill will significantly expand. ICE flights are already 58 percent of GlobalX’s business, and some contractors, like CSI Aviation, are big donors to Republican candidates and party organizations.
Guantanamo
In a statement, Human Rights Watch reported that it heard accounts of sharply abusive treatment of Venezuelan migrants detained at the U.S. military’s Guantánamo Bay facility in Cuba in February. The organization called for an immediate halt to the Trump administration’s use of the base to hold migrants detained in the U.S. interior, and to transfer out those who remain there now.
Firefighters
Border Patrol agents, apparently working with the Bureau of Land Management, carried out a raid of a firefighting crew while they were actively responding to a wildfire in Washington State’s Olympic National Park in late August. Agents arrested two of the firefighters, generating outrage, including from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Stateline reported that some of the firefighters on the team believe that their management “sent their crews into a trap.”
Shrinking immigrant population
The AP reported on a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data, which points to the possible disappearance of 1.2 million immigrants from the U.S. labor force between January and July. That is far more than the deportation statistic cited above, and could point to a larger-than-expected number of voluntary exits from the United States as a climate of fear deepens among both documented and undocumented immigrants.
The human rights ombudspersons’ offices of Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica produced a joint report on southbound migration resulting from this year’s hardening of U.S. policy toward migrants. It found that more than 14,000 people, most of whom were citizens of Venezuela, had made the treacherous southbound journey back to Colombia, usually along a maritime route that evades the Darién Gap, as they abandoned their ambitions of reaching the United States. The Associated Press covered the report’s key points.
“Migrants are mostly travelling back by bus through Mexico and Central American countries until they reach Panama, from where they take overcrowded boats to Colombia,” Harriet Barber reported for the Guardian from Panama. “On their way back south,” said Scott Campbell, who runs the Colombia office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “migrants are again exposed to gender-based violence, human trafficking, discrimination, kidnapping and extortion, as well as facing a lack of access to drinking water, food and shelter.”
Colombia’s migration agency, meanwhile, published an update counting 15,250 migrants arriving southbound from Panama between January and August 15—more than five times the 2,982 northbound departures the agency detected from the ports of Turbo and Necoclí.
Essays and analyses
- CNN profiled three prominent community members whom ICE has arrested around the United States in recent months.
- “The Border Is Invading America,” wrote Jean Guerrero at the New York Times. “Border Patrol—with its culture of Wild West impunity—is now operating across the country… Gun-toting agents, sometimes in cowboy hats, are treating places like Los Angeles and other cities deep in the United States as if they were lawless outposts on a hostile frontier.”
- Guerrero called out inaction among congressional Democrats. So did former Obama and Biden official Andrea Flores, who noted in the Times that only 56 Democrats have cosponsored a resolution to terminate and condemn the Trump administration’s takeover of Washington, DC.
Other News
- After falling to a new 60-year low in July, it appears that Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants increased sharply in August. Citing DHS on August 29, the New York Post found that Border Patrol agents had apprehended more than 7,200 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 4,601 in July. The reason, a “Homeland Security source” said, was that recently deported people are “trying to sneak back into the United States.” NewsNation also reported on a 400-person increase in migrant apprehensions in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley sector, as of August 26. And indeed, CBP did not accompany the new month with a press release offering an August apprehension estimate, as it has after months showing reductions; that official figure should become public by the middle of the month.
- Next week, the full House of Representatives plans to bring to the floor the “Stop Illegal Entry Act” (H.R. 3486), which, among other things, would increase—from two to five years’ imprisonment—the penalty for people caught crossing the border without authorization for a second or higher time. It also holds out the possibility of life in prison for any undocumented migrant convicted of another crime normally punishable by more than 1 year of imprisonment.
- “We have approximately 220 human remains that have been buried or interred in cemeteries. We are talking about almost complete corpses” of people who died trying to cross the Darién Gap, the director of the Panamanian government’s medical examiner’s office told Agénce France-Presse.
- On a visit to Mexico City, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that in addition to President Trump’s crackdown, the recent drop in migration numbers at the border owes “also to the efforts of the authorities here in Mexico, who have viewed irregular migration as a threat to their own security.” The U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to create “a high-level implementation group that will meet regularly” and will, among other missions, “strengthen security at the border” and “eliminate clandestine trans-border tunnels.”
- The Documentation Network of Migrant Defenders’ Organizations (REDODEM), a network of Mexican migrant shelters, issued its latest annual statistical report, covering 2024. It found a 29 percent decrease in its shelters’ population from 2023 to 2024 as the López Obrador and Biden administrations intensified a crackdown on U.S.-bound asylum seekers crossing Mexico. Women (31.7%) and families (65.2%) made up an increasing share of the population staying at the shelters last year. “Migrant women reported mainly suffering kidnappings, physical assaults, psychological torture, and sexual violence. In contrast, male migrants most frequently mentioned kidnapping and robbery as forms of violence during transit.”
- “For the first time since monitoring began, a higher share of respondents indicated Mexico (43%) rather than the United States (14%) as their intended destination,” found the latest quarterly Mixed Movements Monitoring report produced by UNHCR, WFP, and UNICEF. The report is based on 1,398 surveys of migrants in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras between April and June.
- The U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division will soon form part of the Trump administration’s military mission at the U.S.-Mexico border, Task and Purpose reported. The overall troop levels under the U.S. Northern Command’s “Joint Task Force–Southern Border” will remain at about 7,600 after the 101st arrives.
- Palabra reported on a rare permitted visit to the converted shipping containers at Fort Huachuca, in the southeast Arizona desert, from which DHS personnel operate MQ-9 Predator-B drones to surveil the border for possible illicit activity. Reporter Steve Fisher observed that DHS “allocated 12,000 hours of MQ-9 drone flight time this year at the Fort Huachuca base, and states that the flights cost $3,800 per hour. However, a 2015 inspector general report estimated the cost to be closer to $13,000, factoring in personnel salaries and operational costs.” That would be a total annual cost of $46 million to $156 million.