Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 12, 2025
Adam Isacson
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: September 12, 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:
- Supreme Court upholds “roving patrols” and profiling: A September 8 Supreme Court “shadow docket” decision gave DHS a green light to resume carrying out sweeps and patrols targeting individuals based solely on “profiling” criteria like apparent race, ethnicity, language, location, or employment. The underlying lawsuit seeking to halt this practice continues, but six Supreme Court justices decided to allow profiling to proceed while the case moves through lower courts.
- Elsewhere in the courts: Updates on the administration’s effort to swiftly deport unaccompanied Central American children; its agreement with El Salvador for paid imprisonment of deported Venezuelan people; a decision calling for detention of all who entered the U.S. illegally while their immigration cases proceed; and a bit of good news—perhaps—for Venezuelan TPS recipients.
- Mass deportation in the U.S. interior: Updates on immigration enforcement surges in Chicago, Boston, and Washington; a new report on abuse suffered by deported Mexican citizens; a surge in ICE deportation flights to Mexico; conditions and deaths in ICE custody; the U.S. military’s role; and the economic impact of administration migration policies.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Supreme Court upholds “roving patrols” and profiling
In a brief September 8 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval, pending further consideration by lower courts, for aggressive immigration enforcement targeting individuals based solely on their apparent race, ethnicity, language, location, or employment. The decision lifts a July federal district court order to halt such enforcement in Los Angeles, which an appeals court had kept in place during its ongoing review.
As a result, the New York Times explained, “For American citizens of Hispanic descent in Los Angeles—especially people who speak with an accent or work as manual laborers—that means they will continue to risk being stopped and questioned whenever they go out. They may see it as a necessary precaution to always carry documents with them in a way that other Americans need not.”
The high court’s six Republican-nominated judges voted to undo the stay on roving patrols and sweeps by armed, masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and supporting agencies, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing a concurring opinion. The three Democratic-nominated judges voted to keep the stay in place and wrote a dissenting opinion.
An aggressive operation, halted
Between June 6, when the Trump administration launched a large-scale operation, and late August, ICE and affiliated agencies arrested 5,210 presumably undocumented people in the Los Angeles area, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated. Especially during its first month, the operation featured frequent “roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents,” as the New York Times described it, many of them caught on mobile phone videos shared widely on social media. Agents paid repeated visits to the same sites, while U.S. citizens of Latino descent reported being stopped more than once within spans of just a few days.
Analyzing ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, the Cato Institute’s David Bier found in early August that fully one-fifth of ICE arrests since January 20 were of Latino individuals taken off the streets with no prior criminal records and no removal orders. “This policy is a threat to the rights of all people in the United States,” Bier warned.
On June 20, several people caught up in these sweeps, along with Los Angeles-area legal defense groups, filed a potential class-action lawsuit in federal court. (The case is Vásquez Perdomo v. Noem.) On July 11, District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden appointee, granted the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order, noting a “mountain of evidence” that the sweeps were violating people’s constitutional rights.
This order halted all “detentive stops” by immigration personnel without “reasonable suspicion” of undocumented presence in the United States. It specified that reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on four criteria indicative of racial profiling: “(1) apparent race or ethnicity; (2) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; (3) presence at a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.); or (4) the type of work one does.”
On July 28, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously kept the restraining order in place, denying the government’s request to stay it. The four listed factors, the two Clinton-appointed and one Biden-appointed judges found, “describe only a broad profile and ‘do not demonstrate reasonable suspicion for any particular stop,’” legal analyst Chris Geidner explained.
ICE arrests dropped by 66 percent in the Los Angeles area following the restraining order, according to mid-August analysis of Deportation Data Project statistics by Cato’s Bier.
The Supreme Court lifts the restraining order
The restraining order is now lifted. The entire Supreme Court majority did not explain the reasoning behind its September 8 decision, which it rarely does when ruling, on its “emergency” or “shadow” docket, whether to keep policies in place while lower courts decide on their legality.
In his solo concurring opinion, though, Justice Kavanaugh asserted that a person’s ethnicity can be used as a “relevant” factor in determining whether an agent might stop someone. Kavanaugh voiced the view that when U.S. citizens are stopped, “questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” This does not describe the experience of plaintiffs in the Vásquez Perdomo case, and appears to imply that people at risk of racial profiling must never avoid going out in public without proof of citizenship.
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” read a dissenting opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
The case (not the restraining order) continues to move through the courts, with an appellate court hearing set for September 24.
“Going hard”
In the meantime, sweeps and patrols are resuming. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief placed in charge of “at large” mass deportation operations in Los Angeles, tweeted, “quite frankly the poorly written ( very poorly) temp restrainig [sic.] order was the worst i’ve ever seen. We are going hard in Los Angeles today and are hitting a location as I write this.“ A DHS tweet promised to “continue to FLOOD THE ZONE in Los Angeles.”
Geidner, the legal analyst who authors the Law Dork newsletter, warned that the high court’s move “makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches or seizures, with significant worrying consequences for all people in America—whether you lack documentation to be in this country or are a citizen of it.”
A statement from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) office went further: “Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws—it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses. Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family.”
“When ICE grabbed me, they never showed a warrant or explained why,” read a statement from the named plaintiff in the case, Pedro Vásquez Perdomo, a U.S. citizen. “I was treated like I didn’t matter–locked up, cold, hungry, and without a lawyer. Now, the Supreme Court says that’s okay? That’s not justice. That’s racism with a badge.”
Elsewhere in the courts
Unaccompanied Guatemalan children
In Washington DC federal district court on September 10, government lawyers retracted their earlier claims that, when they sought to send 76 unaccompanied Guatemalan children back to their country in the pre-dawn hours of the Sunday before Labor Day, they were granting the children’s families’ wishes to reunite them. Presented with evidence that virtually all of the children feared or were unwilling to return to Guatemala, Justice Department attorneys backed off from “family reunification” claims that they, and other Trump administration officials, had forcefully—and, it turns out, falsely—made on August 31. (See WOLA’s September 5 Border Update for a full narrative.)
The restraining order preventing the Guatemalan kids’ deportation expires on September 14. Attorneys representing the children asked Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee assigned to the case, to keep the deportations on hold more firmly with a preliminary injunction. They are also asking Kelly to add unaccompanied children of other nationalities to the class of plaintiffs. That includes a group of Honduran children who, according to the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, are at risk of a similarly swift removal.
In a detailed analysis at LawFare, Anna Bower contrasted the August 31 response of emergency on-call Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who kept the Trump administration on a tight leash to prevent planes from departing with the Guatemalan children, with the energetic but ultimately unsuccessful performance of Washington DC Judge James Boasberg in March, during a similar administration attempt to carry out a secretive, high-speed removal to a prison in El Salvador. Bower argued that the judiciary is on a “learning curve” regarding the executive branch’s overreach and basic trustworthiness.
Venezuelan men rendered to El Salvador
Also before Judge Boasberg is a suit from several migrant defense organizations that seeks to halt and reverse the State Department’s transfer of funds to El Salvador to imprison migrants there after their removal from the United States.
Between March 15 and July 18, 252 Venezuelan men were held in that country’s notorious Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) prison after the Trump administration sent them there, 137 under the little-used Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Since their release and return to Venezuela, the men have shared harrowing accounts of beatings, physical torture, sexual abuse, and other mistreatment.
On September 9, a filing in the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights v. Department of State case revealed a key piece of information: the March 22 written agreement between the Trump administration and the government of El Salvador governing the use of the CECOT.
This document committed the State Department to providing El Salvador $4.76 million from the account of its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which is legally authorized to fund anti-drug, crime-fighting, and justice programs—not the foreign imprisonment of migrants without charge. The money is meant to help El Salvador cover “law enforcement and anticrime needs, which may include costs associated with the detention of members of the Foreign Terrorist Organization Tren de Aragua”—approximately 300 of them.
The agreement “did nothing to meaningfully ensure that individuals disappeared from the U.S. to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison were protected from torture, indefinite confinement, or other abuses,” noted a statement from Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiff groups. However, it did “go to lengths to ensure that the funds the U.S. provided to El Salvador not be used to provide reproductive health care or to assist asylum seekers in accessing resources and counsel.”
In a reference to “section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act,” the agreement with El Salvador signaled diplomats’ awareness that the State Department money had to comply with the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign security-force units that grossly violate human rights with impunity. The Venezuelan men’s accounts of what they suffered in the CECOT (several cited in WOLA’s August 8 Border Update) indicate rather vividly that Salvadoran units did commit gross human rights violations after receiving U.S. aid.
At the New Yorker, reporter Jonathan Blitzer published a thorough narrative of the Venezuelan men’s experience, from their decisions to migrate to what they endured in U.S. and Salvadoran custody. The lengthy article explored the efforts of the Trump campaign and administration to portray Venezuelan migrants as a national security threat, often building on atypical or isolated cases.
Blitzer’s piece includes some new details and elements. It reports that, going back to the Biden administration, Border Patrol was “taking the lead” in elevating the Tren de Aragua threat, voicing a view that may not have been shared by investigative agencies like ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). It also recounts a “blond and light skinned” ICE agent grabbing by the hair, punching in the face, and swearing at a Venezuelan woman aboard one of the El Salvador-bound planes until another guard restrained him (the Salvadoran government rejected the rendition of a handful of women aboard the March 15 flights). And it includes further accounts of the constant beatings the CECOT guards administered: they “became so routine that the Venezuelans scored them on a scale of one to five—the higher the number, the worse the treatment.”
The most well-known of the Venezuelan ex-prisoners, Andry Hernández, gave a September 11 interview to Andrea Castillo of the Los Angeles Times. Hernández, a gay makeup artist apparently accused of gang membership because he had tattoos, recalled his six-month stay at ICE’s Otay Mesa Detention Center outside San Diego. “Immigrant detainees are given blue, orange, or red uniforms, depending on their classification level,” Castillo reported. “A guard once explained that detainees wearing orange, like him, could be criminals. Hernández Romero said he replied, ‘Is being gay a crime? Or is doing makeup a crime?’”
Prohibition of bond
Within the Justice Department, the Board of Immigration Appeals—which can review immigration judges’ decisions and set precedents—issued a decision that could signal a massive shift in immigration policy. The Board upheld a Trump administration policy requiring judges to detain all migrants who entered the United States illegally—such as those who crossed the border between ports of entry—while their cases proceed. This prohibition on bond releases could apply to millions of people.
The decision “is likely to send an immediate chill through immigration courts where judges for decades have released individuals on bond whom they did not deem a flight risk or danger,” the Los Angeles Times reported. In the past, detaining all improper border crossers would have vastly stretched ICE’s detention system far beyond capacity. Now, however, a $45 billion appropriation for ICE detention, part of the “big bill” that Congress passed in early July, has significantly expanded that capacity.
TPS for Venezuela
In a Northern District of California court on September 5, Judge Edward Chen ordered the restoration of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 600,000 citizens of Venezuela. This reverses, for now, the Trump administration’s termination of TPS for Venezuelans. Chen argued that the administration did not follow procedure, including a careful review of conditions in Venezuela, when it curtailed TPS.
Judge Chen’s ruling “means 600,000 Venezuelans whose temporary protections expired in April or whose protections were about to expire Sept. 10 have status to stay and work in the United States. It also keeps protections for about 500,000 Haitians,” the Associated Press reported.
“Protections and employment authorization for Venezuelans are back in place until October 2026,” Bloomberg Lawreported. “But they’ll have to re-register for TPS by Sept. 10.” However, that has been impossible to do, as DHS “hadn’t updated its website to show that the Venezuelans were still covered by T.P.S. and wasn’t allowing many of them to re-register as they needed to by a Sept. 10 deadline,” the New York Times reported on September 11. A government lawyer cited a “coding issue.”
On September 11, Judge Chen ordered that the website be operational within a day and that TPS recipients have sufficient time to re-register. It is not clear what, if anything, can be done for any Venezuelans who were deported after losing this now-restored status.
Mass deportation in the U.S. interior
As funding from the giant budget legislation approved in July continues to come online, the administration’s operations to arrest, detain, and deport migrants from the U.S. interior continue to accelerate. In what has become a regular component of WOLA’s Border Updates, this section offers links to coverage of some of the principal developments.
Operations in cities
As noted above, agents from ICE, CBP, and other federal law enforcement agencies poured into Los Angeles in June. In August, a surge began in Washington, DC. In both of these cities, the civilian law enforcement deployments came with contingents of military personnel, mainly National Guard, who have been less directly involved in migrant apprehensions.
Now, the administration is launching operations—so far, just with civilian law enforcement agencies, not military personnel—in Chicago and Boston. These are reportedly modeled on the Los Angeles operation. (ICE also carried out a large-scale raid last week at a big Hyundai manufacturing plant in Georgia, detaining hundreds of mostly Korean citizens and triggering diplomatic tensions with South Korea.)
The administration has officially launched what it is calling “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago. President Trump publicized it with a social media post featuring an AI image depicting himself in the role played by Robert Duvall in the movie Apocalypse Now, twisting Duvall’s famous line into “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” and threatening, “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
So far, though, there is no indication that Department of Defense personnel are deployed to Chicago, although ICE, CBP, and other civilian personnel who have moved from elsewhere, mainly Los Angeles, are operating out of Naval Station Great Lakes, north of the city. In the operation’s first days, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, “Details were scarce as videos surfaced of masked federal agents taking people into custody, with a smattering of arrests from the South Side to the west suburbs.”
Gregory Bovino, the politically outspoken Border Patrol agent who began 2025 as the chief of the agency’s El Centro Sector and was tapped to lead the Los Angeles operation, is now in Chicago. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a vocal Trump opponent who has called Bovino “a guy who desperately wants to be a reality TV star,” said that the Chief’s reported arrival is “evidence that they have terrible plans for the communities of Illinois.”
Bovino tweeted a photo of himself accompanied by dozens of uniformed agents with the Hollywood sign in the background, with the text “The mean green team is not going anywhere. We are here to stay.” The Chief’s face is the only one not blurred out.
In the past two weeks, Bovino has been profiled by the New York Times, CBS News, and the Associated Press, which noted, “Bovino carefully hones his image, both his own and the one projected to the country that shows well-armed officers moving swiftly into place to make arrests.”
In Boston and elsewhere in Democratic-governed Massachusetts, the administration has launched what it calls “Operation Patriot 2.0”; the “1.0” version was a surge that led to 1,500 arrests in Massachusetts during the spring. “The operation began late this week and was expected to last several weeks,” two sources told the New York Times for a September 6 report.
The most visible aspect of the Boston operation so far has been a war of words with the city’s popular mayor, Michelle Wu, who ordered that “no Boston police or local resources will be co-opted into federal immigration enforcement and their mass deportation agenda.” In a September 6 statement, DHS retorted, “Sanctuary policies like those pushed by Mayor Wu not only attract and harbor criminals but also place these public safety threats above the interests of law-abiding American citizens.”
Washington “has transformed from a place that proudly welcomed immigrants into one primed for their deportations,” with DC Metropolitan Police now working closely alongside ICE agents “who have detained people in front of schools and restaurants,” noted a Washington Post analysis that featured the heavy hands-on role of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller in directing the operation.
In the Virginia suburbs, where most out-of-state National Guard personnel are sleeping in hotels, an ICE raid on a construction site near the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) headquarters led some fleeing workers to try to scale the spy agency’s perimeter fence. The CIA, which ICE did not inform about the nearby operation, closed its gates for more than an hour.
With the school year now well underway, the Washington Post reported on a “walking school bus” that parents have organized to help children from mixed-status families feel at least somewhat safe on their way to and from classes.
Arrests
At her Beyond the Border newsletter, San Diego-based reporter Kate Morrissey noted that, since a court ruling against nationwide “expedited removal” has slowed ICE’s detentions of migrants reporting to immigration court (see WOLA’s September 5 Border Update), agents are now strapping electronic ankle monitors onto thousands who show up for their cases.
Now that it is no longer common for agents to start their workdays with specific individuals to target, NBC News reportedthat ICE no longer requires agents to complete a “field operations worksheet” with details about their targets. Instead, “broad street sweeps” with no specific targets are becoming the norm. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” a former ICE official told the network.
Among the many federal agencies losing personnel to the mass deportation effort is the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, Wired reported. Of the 2,500 officers on the force, which protects embassies and other U.S. installations, 600 have been deputized “to help with arresting and deporting illegal immigrants” and now must log the time they are spending on that mission.
Deportations
The Kino Border Initiative (KBI), which maintains a shelter near the border in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, released a reporton the experience of deported Mexican citizens. Since April, the Mexican government has granted KBI personnel “regular access” to the shelter for deported individuals that it set up in Nogales at the beginning of the year, in anticipation of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” campaign.
KBI staff conducted 278 brief surveys of returned migrants “to document patterns of repatriation, testimonies, and reports of mistreatment,” and the results are troubling. Fifty-seven percent of them had been living in the U.S. interior at the time of their arrest, as opposed to being apprehended upon arrival at the border: that is up from 5 percent of deported people last year. Of those apprehended in the interior, 57.5 percent had lived in the United States for more than five years, and 56 percent reported being separated from their families, “leaving behind children, partners, and other dependents.”
Since the Trump administration all but dismantled DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), the last five complaints—and nine of the previous 16 complaints—that KBI has filed on behalf of migrants who suffered abuse in U.S. custody have gone without even a response. “We have not even received the typical automatic acknowledgment of receipt that was standard in the past.”
At the Guardian, Maanvi Singh and Will Craft dug into leaked flight records and passenger manifests from ICE’s largest aerial deportation charter contractor, Global Crossing Airlines (GlobalX). In just over 100 days, they found, GlobalX operated 1,700 ICE flights, carrying 44,000 people, including nearly 1,000 children and 22 infants; nearly 3,600 individuals were moved five or more times. Secretive transfers, family separations, and flights to third countries complicate the defense of cases in immigration court, including access to attorneys.
The August report of Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor, which takes up the work of recently retired Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border, found a sharp rise in ICE deportation flights last month. The project recorded 240 removal flights in August, the most in a month since Cartwright began tracking in 2020. This included a striking 72 flights into Mexico’s interior, up from a January-July average of 21 per month. That is the most flights this project has ever recorded to a single country in one month.
ICE Flight Monitor observed that starting August 28, ICE flights into Mexico ceased and have not resumed. In a likely correlated development, Border Report noted a surge in land-border deportations into Tijuana during the first eight days of September: 74 deported individuals from San Diego each day, up from a February-August average of 36 per day.
Also in Tijuana, Border Report reported, the head of the non-governmental Migrant Pro Defense Council in Baja California, José Moreno, publicly accused municipal police of extorting deported people. Moreno alleged that corrupt cops are shaking down returned migrants outside the federal and Salvation Army shelters.
Spain’s El País reported on the secrecy and opacity of ICE’s deportations to third countries. July flights to Rwanda, South Sudan, and Eswatini “were not reported until weeks after they occurred, and the administration did not provide the identities of the deportees, who remain imprisoned in high-security facilities.” A Jamaican man sent to Eswatini despite the Kingston government’s willingness to take him, Orville Etoria, has disappeared: his lawyers “have been unable to contact him and fear for his safety.”
Eswatini, the monarchy formerly known as Swaziland, is the latest nation to which the Trump administration is threatening to send Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego García. The Maryland father whom the Trump administration mistakenly sent to the CECOT in March remains in ICE custody in Virginia with a judicial order not to deport him, as he considers applying for asylum: having left and re-entered the country, Abrego García may now be eligible to do so. The administration has stated its view that an asylum application would void Abrego García’s existing withholding of removal status, enabling his deportation to his home country, which he fled due to threats.
The government of Belize (population 400,000) has acknowledged that it is reviewing a proposal from the Trump administration to sign a “Safe Third Country” agreement, which would allow the U.S. government to send asylum seekers from third countries to seek protection within the Belizean system. “As of now, Belize has not agreed to the proposal, and further consultations are expected before any decision is made,” reported the local Love FM.
NBC News reported that downloads of CBP’s “CBP Home” app are dwindling as migrants are apparently choosing not to use it to “self-deport.” During five weeks in March and April, 356 people used the app to register their departures and, at least in some cases, to receive a $1,000 stipend, according to data NBC obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. However, DHS “didn’t respond to repeated requests” for updated figures. An estimated 91,000 people downloaded the app from within the United States, with most of them doing so during its first weeks.
Detention
At the 19th, Chabeli Carrazana documented the detention and deportation of Colombian mother Nicolle Orozco Forero, her husband, and their two young sons from Seattle after spending 21 days in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a “family detention” facility that the Trump administration has reopened in Texas. Orozco Forero’s son has a serious kidney condition, but she said that Dilley staff only offered him ibuprofen.
CNN reported on the grim, even subhuman, conditions prevailing in what are meant to be temporary “hold rooms” at ICE facilities, particularly in Miami and New York. The agency’s “policies for decades have required the agency to keep migrants in cramped hold rooms like this for no longer than 12 hours,” but 18 percent of detainees are now in those spaces for more time than that. At the troubled Krome Detention Center in Miami, hold room stays now average more than three days. Mobile phone videos show “Men sleeping head-to-toe on a crowded floor, exhausted detainees blocking out fluorescent lights with face masks, and dozens of people using cardboard boxes as mattresses.”
Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, a 32-year-old Mexican man who had lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, for so long that he had graduated high school there, died on August 31 while in custody at the state’s Central Arizona Correctional Complex in Florence. He had been in ICE custody for three weeks. The cause of death is unknown, though a family member alleged at a GoFundMe page that Batrez Vargas died “alone, likely from complications of COVID-19, and without the medical attention he deserved.” He appears to be the 13th person to die in ICE custody since the Trump administration began.
At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf interviewed George Retes, a 25-year-old Army veteran and U.S. citizen who spent days in custody after Border Patrol agents violently arrested him—he said he tried to comply with their orders—in California. “Held in a jail cell for three days and nights, he was not allowed to make a phone call, see an attorney, appear before a judge, or take a shower to wash off pepper spray and tear gas that the agents had used.”
The Washington Post reported on the Trump administration’s plans to reopen prisons and detention centers “that were closed by the federal government years ago over concerns about violence, medical neglect, and systemic understaffing.” Many are located in very remote rural areas, where hiring is challenging, requiring significant overtime, and oversight is difficult. The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reported on the administration’s fascination with “megaprisons,” guided by a hope that the facilities’ cruel reputations might succeed in “scaring more immigrants into voluntarily self-deporting to their home countries.”
The U.S. military role
The Washington Post and CNN reported on potential morale issues among National Guard personnel deployed to Washington DC. (While President Trump has ostensibly sent the soldiers on a crime-fighting mission, their arrival coincided with the ICE-led migrant detention operations discussed above.) An Army survey of media attitudes about the Guard deployment, accidentally sent to the Post, noted that September 5 social media posts “were assessed to be 53 percent negative, 45 percent neutral and 2 percent positive,” and highlighted “Mentions of Fatigue, confusion, and demoralization—‘just gardening,’ unclear mission, wedge between citizens and the military.” A soldier anonymously told CNN, “We haven’t gotten critically low on morale, but we’re falling fast” as they remain away from jobs and families with little to do in the nation’s capital.
The Trump administration’s plan to use military lawyers as immigration judges is unlawful and “should raise all sorts of alarms,” three former U.S. military Judges Advocate General (JAGs) turned law professors told Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School. At the Bulwark, Adrián Carrasquillo saw the proposal to transfer them to immigration courts on six-month missions as “an obvious effort to expedite removals.” Seven active-duty and reserve JAGs told the New York Times of their “concern that they would be expected to simply rubber-stamp deportations of migrants as the White House’s desired outcome.”
Public opinion
A local Times-Tribune report from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, one of the state’s three largest majority-Latino cities to vote for Donald Trump, finds residents “grappling with their decision” and objecting to arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants without criminal records. Despite those misgivings, however, many “still largely stand by the president.”
Podcaster Derek Thompson, co-author of the bestseller Abundance, told Vox that, amid deportations and self-deportations, 2025 could be the first year in history to see a decline in the U.S. population. A shrinking immigrant labor force could hit critical economic sectors: “little in life is more fundamental than the right to food, shelter, and medicine. So, it’s pretty important that immigrants play a disproportionate role in each.”
The mass exit of employed immigrants could be masking a deeper weakness in the U.S. economy, the New York Timesobserved: their involuntary abandonment of paid jobs may be creating openings at the same time that employers are cutting back on other hiring.
Essays
At his newsletter, journalist and author Garrett Graff warned that ICE’s recent expansion and unleashing mark a fundamental shift in American democracy. “We have never in US history seen a federal law enforcement agency operate the way ICE has operated this summer—it marks the arrival of a new style of domestic policing” marked by prioritization of immigration goals alongside weakening of due process, oversight, and accountability.
At the New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise adopted a globally comparative view of ICE and other federal agents’ insistence on wearing masks to hide their identity. “In Russia in the 2000s, I thought of masking as a peculiar feature of a wobbly post-Soviet state. Over time it became clear that it was a harbinger of a new era,” she wrote. “I cannot think of a democratic country with a reliable rule of law where security forces mask themselves,” said Harvard University’s Steve Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Other News
- Jesus Muñoz-Gutiérrez, the Mexican man whom the Trump administration sent to South Sudan in July following a green light from the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” is back in Mexico, Al Jazeera reported. He said that South Sudanese officials treated him well, while Mexico pledged not to subject him to “torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, or undue prosecution.” Of his treatment by the U.S. government, however, Muñoz-Gutiérrez said he “felt kidnapped.”
- Without a single Democratic member’s vote, the House of Representatives passed the Stop Illegal Entry Act of 2025, 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.
- The Guardian reported on fentanyl and gun trafficking across the border between Arizona and California, on the U.S. side, and Baja California and Sonora, Mexico, relaying the findings of a report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. The concentration of fentanyl seizures along these two states’ part of the border “could reflect the Sinaloa cartel’s dominance,” or it could reflect where law enforcement agencies have chosen to focus. “Between 1 January and 24 July last year,” meanwhile, “Arizona was the source of 57 percent of guns that were recovered in Mexico and traced to a purchase in the US less than a year earlier.”
- Reason sounded alarms about ICE’s deployment of Graphite, a mobile phone espionage malware product created by Paragon, an Israeli software company. DHS quietly lifted a “stop-work order” for the malware purchase that the Biden administration had imposed last October after Wired reported on it.
- 404 Media reported on a September 5 ICE purchase, valued at $3.75 million, of facial recognition technology produced by Clearview AI. This is not the first ICE contract with Clearview, “but those purchases did not explicitly say the technology would be used to identify people the agency believed were assaulting officers.”
- 404 also noted that Democratic members of the House Homeland Security Committee are demanding that DHS provide more information about another ICE-purchased facial recognition app called “Mobile Fortify.” This app “taps into an unprecedented array of government databases and uses a system ordinarily reserved for when people enter or exit” the United States.
- Rep. Henry Cuéllar (D), who represents a segment of borderland in south Texas, said that he has spoken to Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks about creating a “drone task force” to help protect against drones used by Mexican organized crime groups.
- The Houston Chronicle revealed that, even at a time of historically low migrant arrivals and a large military presence at the border, Texas’s state Department of Public Safety is on track to spend $77 million on overtime for officers assigned to the state’s “Operation Lone Star” border mission—more than it spent on overtime in 2023. Many are going weeks without days off and racking up annual salaries well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, often participating in “‘strike teams’ to help ICE find immigrants with outstanding warrants.”
- CBP notified about the March 31, 2025 death of a Mexican man who fell from the border wall between San Diego and Tijuana. A woman traveling with him also fell and was seriously injured, but survived.