Giant spending bill advances in Congress: The House of Representatives is edging closer to passing a bill that would inject more than $150 billion in new resources into the Trump administration’s border-hardening and “mass deportation” priorities.
A new provision added this week would tax non-citizens’ remittance payments. The bill could pass the House by the end of next week, and may pass the Senate in July, as it will not need a single Democratic member’s vote.
Administration floats a suspension of habeas corpus: Top White House official Stephen Miller told reporters that the White House is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the fundamental right to challenge one’s detention in court, citing
a view that the United States is facing an “invasion” of migrants even amid a sharp decline in arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border. Legal scholars dispute Miller’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, while concern grows about the stability of U.S. democracy.
Notes on El Salvador renditions: A judge in Pennsylvania became the first to rule that the Trump administration’s claim of a “predatory incursion” from Venezuela justified invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The judge did require that migrants
get a clear chance to defend themselves before the Act is used to render them out of the United States. The White House fired intelligence officials after a National Intelligence Council estimate found no collusion between the Venezuelan government and the
Tren de Aragua criminal group in any “predatory incursion.” Video of a former congressman’s visit to El Salvador’s CECOT prison gave Venezuelan family members a fleeting glimpse at some of their loved ones inside the facility.
Mass deportation notes: A two-year-old toddler was returned to her mother in Venezuela. Details emerged about the May 7th plan to send some migrants to Libya. Nine people have died in ICE detention since January 20th. Images of ICE arrests, with
plainclothes, masked people picking people up off of U.S. streets, are generating a public-opinion backlash. DHS has requested that 20,000 National Guard troops participate in mass deportation, while the FBI is requiring agents to devote one-third of their
time to immigration cases. U.S. immigration courts decided and denied more asylum cases in March 2025 than any other month during the previous 20 years.
The military at the border: A federal magistrate judge in New Mexico threw out 98 prosecutions of migrants arrested for trespassing on a military installation, now that a fringe of territory stretching along the border throughout New Mexico and West
Texas is considered a “military base.” A top Senate Democrat gave a floor speech voicing strong opposition to the military role in immigration enforcement. It appears that the administration has spent $42,000 per passenger to transport people aboard military
aircraft to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.
Notes on human rights and accountability at CBP: A Senate committee advanced the nomination of Rodney Scott to be the next CBP commissioner along a party-line vote, amid controversy over his past stance on holding agents accountable for abuse. Two
organizations used interviews with third-country migrants rendered to Costa Rica and Panama to reveal abuse suffered during their time in CBP and ICE custody in the United States. CBP quietly rescinded four Biden-era policies governing humane treatment of
vulnerable people in custody.
Border Patrol apprehensions increased slightly from March to April: Border Patrol apprehended 279 migrants per day at the US-Mexico border in April, up from 232 per day in March. Migration from Mexico accounted for the entire increase. In April,
90 percent of migrants came from Mexico or northern Central America, and 84 percent were single adults. Mexico’s forces are encountering inside its territory more than twice as many migrants as CBP is encountering at the border.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Giant spending bill advances in Congress
After a marathon session on May 13th, the House Ways and Means Committee voted along
party lines to approve its component of a gigantic spending bill that would throw well over $150 billion into the Trump administration’s border hardening and immigration crackdowns. (See WOLA’s May 2 Border
Update for an overview of this bill’s provisions.) Unless the Republican majority fails to reach internal consensus,
the House Budget Committee will meet on May 16th to join the parts of the bill, which emerged from various committees’ party-line votes, into one piece of legislation.
The bill then goes to the full House of Representatives and then to the Senate’s committees. Both houses have narrow Republican Party majorities, and this bill, which includes tax legislation in addition to the border and migration provisions, is high on
Republican President Donald Trump’s agenda. The funds it approves will be central to paying for the administration’s promised “mass deportation” campaign.
It is often called the “Reconciliation” bill; the term refers to an infrequently invoked Senate rule that would allow it to move through the chamber with a simple majority, without a filibuster, and pass without a single Democratic vote.
In addition to giant outlays like $45 billion for immigration detention, $46.5 billion for border wall construction, and $15 billion for deportations, the bill would charge migrants a series of fees for procedures and permits. For example, people fleeing
threats would have to pay $1,000 to apply for asylum. It would also exclude any immigrant without a firm status from Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance,
including those whose applications are being processed.
The Ways and Means Committee’s draft would levy a 5 percent excise tax on all remittances,
or transfers of funds out of the country by non-citizens. Remittances from the United States significantly contribute to the economies of many Latin American nations. The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, said that this measure “would damage the economies
of both nations and is also contrary to the spirit of economic freedom that the U.S. government claims to defend.”
In the House, where Republicans can only afford to lose three votes to keep their majority, passing the bill may involve some delay and negotiation.
While much of the party’s internal disagreement has to do with taxes, some Texas representatives like Tony
Gonzales (R), who represents a district spanning over 800 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, are saying that they will not vote for a bill that fails to reimburse Texas’ Republican state government for what it spent on its “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown
during the Biden administration.
A likely—though far from certain—timetable would see the House passing the bill in a week, before the U.S. Congress begins its Memorial Day recess on May 23, and the Senate taking it up in June and passing it sometime in July. If that happens, the
Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign will ramp up tremendously as it is flooded with new funds over the second half of 2025.
Administration floats a suspension of habeas corpus
Unhappy with adverse rulings on immigration cases in federal courts, the Trump White House is floating the idea of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, a right in the U.S. Constitution that can be traced back to the Magna Carta and English
common law since the 13th century. Habeas corpus stops governments from detaining people arbitrarily by allowing them to challenge their detention in court.
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the principal architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies, delivered shocking remarks to
reporters gathered in the White House driveway on May 9th.
“Well, the Constitution is clear—and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land—that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So it’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look,
a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
Appearing before the House Homeland Security Committee on May 14th,
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said that a suspension of habeas corpus would be up to President Trump, but voicedher agreement with
the notion that recent migration to the United States constitutes an “invasion,” the term which Miller cited as a reason to suspend it.
Miller and other Trump administration figures are frustrated by the possibility that immigration court hearings and habeas corpus challenges could slow their aspiration of massively deporting several million non-citizens from the United States in the coming
years. Courts, including the Supreme Court, have already slowed the Trump administration’s attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily deport Venezuelans without due process, on mere suspicion of ties to the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.
A consensus among legal scholars holds that Miller’s interpretation of the Constitution is incorrect. Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck said,
“His argument is factually and legally nuts.” At his newsletter, he explained why Miller’s words were “both (1) wrong; and (2) profoundly dangerous.”
Vladeck noted that a “near-universal consensus” holds that the U.S. Congress, not the president, is empowered to suspend habeas corpus. The one time a president did suspend it unilaterally—Abraham Lincoln at the outset of the Civil War—happened when Congress
was out of session for months, and Congress eventually approved it. The U.S. government has only suspended habeas corpus three other times, all by acts of Congress, explained Jacob
Sullum at Reason: the last time was in the territory of Hawaii after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Trump and top officials are basing their argument on the notion that immigrants constitute an “invasion” requiring a suspension of rights, even though arrivals of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border have been falling steadily since January
2024. “If illegal migration and cross-border drug smuggling are “invasion,” that means we are in a state of invasion at virtually all times,” pointed
out George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, who for some time has been warning that the Trump administration might use its “invasion” rhetoric as a pretext to invoke the Constitution’s suspension clause to withhold basic rights.
“This is a perilous moment,” warned Ruth Marcus at the New Yorker. “For all the extreme legal steps the Administration has already
deployed, suspending habeas corpus would be an act far more radical than any that has come before. That we are compelled to take Miller’s suggestion seriously is a measure of the gravity of the threat to American democracy.”
“The one power you cannot give the executive is the power to arbitrarily imprison people who oppose the regime,” said Sen. Chris
Murphy (D-Connecticut), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security, said at a rally in Sarasota, Florida. “Today it may be an El Salvadoran immigrant or a foreign student, but tomorrow it is you or me. The
slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.”
Notes on El Salvador renditions
The Alien Enemies Act
In a March 15th presidential proclamation, the White House had claimed
that a “predatory incursion” from the Venezuelan government, working through the Tren de Aragua criminal group, justified the fourth-ever invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Using the authority it claimed, the administration flew
137 Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador without any chance to defend themselves. Also on the plane were about 151 other Venezuelan and Salvadoran individuals who purportedly had final removal orders from U.S. immigration courts.
In habeas corpus cases around the country, four different federal judges have ruled that the activities of Tren de Aragua do not qualify as
a “predatory incursion” justifying the 227-year-old law’s invocation.
On May 13, however, the administration had its first partial judicial victory. Judge Stephanie Haines of the Western District of Pennsylvania, a Trump appointee, accepted the notion that Tren de Aragua’s activities constitute a predatory incursion.
However, Judge Haines did not uphold the administration’s attempt to deny migrants’ due process: she ordered that migrants
have at least 21 days’ notice to defend themselves before their removal under the Alien Enemies Act.
The judge’s decision applies only in
her district, which is part of Pennsylvania.
“We disagree with the ruling and will appeal because the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime measure that cannot be used during peacetime to address migration or criminal activity,” said ACLU
attorney Lee Gelernt, in the New York Times. “But we are pleased that the court rejected the government’s argument that they can remove people in a mere 12 hours.”
On May 12th, DHS sent an emergency request to the Supreme Court to allow it to resume Alien Enemies Act removals from the Northern District of
Texas. The High Court had ordered a pause to those removals in the pre-dawn hours of April 19th. The administration’s request stated that
this order is stopping it from removing 176 Venezuelan migrants currently in the Northern District of Texas.
Most or all of these men were being held in the Bluebonnet detention facility in Anson, Texas. The Department argued that 23 of those migrants had staged a protest on
April 26th, barricading themselves inside a housing unit for several hours, covering surveillance cameras, and threatening to clog toilets. On those grounds, the administration is promoting the idea that these people, who were desperate to avoid indefinite
rendition to a Salvadoran prison, are too unruly and violent to detain for long periods.
Intelligence report authors fired
As noted in WOLA’s May 9 Border Update, a declassified April 7th memo from
the U.S. government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence punctured the notion, laid out in the White House’s March 15th proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, that the Venezuelan government and the Tren de Aragua were colluding in a “predatory
incursion.” This week, the White House director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired the
top two officials at the National Intelligence Council. The move was an apparent retaliation for the content of their Venezuela memo.
“The Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community,” said a spokesperson from Gabbard’s office.
Notes about renditions and related issues
By a party-line vote, the Senate rejected a
resolution, introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, that would have required the administration to report on El Salvador’s human rights situation and compliance
with court orders regarding renditions to the CECOT.
Interviewed at WBUR’s On Point program, Venezuela and criminology expert Rebecca Hanson of the University of Florida contended that
U.S. policies—especially the White House’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act—vastly overstate the domestic threat that Tren de Aragua poses in the United States. Hanson noted that most of the criminal group’s reported crimes involve petty offenses, and claims
of transnational coordination remain unsubstantiated, adding, “it’s precisely in 2024 that Tren de Aragua starts to become a less powerful, less organized group that doesn’t really have control over how its name is even being used in Latin America.”
Former Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, who was briefly Donald Trump’s nominee to be Attorney General, visited El
Salvador’s Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) prison on May 9th as he recorded a show for the right-wing OANN cable network. Salvadoran officials allowed Gaetz to visit the wing of the prison where many of the Venezuelan men are confined. Relatives
of some of the men were able to see their loved ones for the first time in the video,
which shows many chanting “Freedom!” and “Venezuela!”
or making a fist with four fingers over their thumbs, a signal requesting help.
“With no answers from U.S., Salvadoran or Venezuelan authorities,” relatives in Venezuela of men in the CECOT “say they have no choice but to keep protesting,” read a feature in New/Lines by
Shaylim Castro Valderrama.
“There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” said Secretary Noem at a May 8 hearing of
the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, referring to the Salvadoran man rendered to the CECOT on March
15 despite an immigration judge’s order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador. “Your advocacy for a known terrorist is alarming,” Noem said to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who met with Abrego Garcia during an April visit to El Salvador. (DHS has
offered scant, disputed proof of Abrego Garcia’s ties to El Salvador’s MS-13 gang.)
At a May 14th hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Representative
Robert Garcia (D-California) asked Noem if it would be possible to carry out a proof of life and welfare check on Andry Hernández, the gay Venezuelan stylist whom the Trump administration sent to the CECOT on March 15th. The Secretary repeatedly
refused to take that step, telling Garcia to ask the Salvadoran government to check on Hernández’s well-being.
404 Media received Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor flight manifests obtained by individuals who hacked into the servers of charter company GlobalX. These included lists of people aboard the planes the Trump administration hired
to send Venezuelan and Salvadoran people to the CECOT on March 15. One manifest includes Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan
man whom ICE detained in Detroit but whose name did not appear in a list of rendered Venezuelans that had leaked to CBS News. 404 Media observed:
“That means a private charter flight company might have more accurate information on where people are being deported than the government, experts say, and raises questions about the process being used to deport people.”
Politicoreported that Democrats on the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, including ranking member Gary Peters
(D-Michigan), sent a May 7 letter to the committee’s chairman, Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), demanding an immediate hearing with top cabinet officials to investigate the Trump administration’s denials of due process and possible defiance of court orders in its renditions
to El Salvador.
On a recent visit to Brazil, Reuters reported, U.S. diplomats told Brazilian government counterparts that the country’s two
largest criminal networks, the First Capital Command and Comando Vermelho, are present in 12 U.S. states. Brazilian officials turned down the idea of adding those two groups to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Now, Isabela Dias
at Mother Jonesreports that the son of far-right former Brazilian president
Jair Bolsonaro is urging the Trump administration to send alleged U.S.-based members of those groups to the CECOT.
At LawFare, Katherine Hawkins of the Project on Government Oversight explained that many of the Trump administration‘s immigration enforcement
practices—invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, CECOT renditions, third-country transfers, use of the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba—constitute “enforced disappearance,” as they render migrants incommunicado, detain them without due process,
and often deport them to foreign prisons.
WOLA has posted highlight notes and embedded video of an April 30th webinar with three noted Latin American experts
on enforced disappearances, who shared observations and recommendations for the current U.S. context.
A statement from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights observed that “many family members” of CECOT detainees
“interviewed by the UN Human Rights Office voiced deep distress at not knowing where, and in what circumstances, their loved ones are detained,” and that “those removed from the US to El Salvador have been unable so far effectively to challenge their detention
there.” The statement does not use the term “enforced disappearance.”
Representing a dozen families of people rendered to the CECOT, the Boston University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS), the Global Strategic Litigation Council (GSLC) and Robert F. Kennedy Human
Rights (RFKHR) have requested that the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission issue emergency
precautionary measures against El Salvador to prevent further harm to the migrants imprisoned there without due process.
Mass deportation notes
The Trump administration permitted the return, aboard a May 14 deportation flight to Venezuela, of Maikelys
Espinoza, a two-year-old girl taken from her asylum-seeking Venezuelan parents. Without offering proof, DHS accused the girls’ parents of
being active members of Tren de Aragua. The father is now in the CECOT prison, and ICE deported the mother back to Venezuela at
the end of April without her daughter. The wife of President Nicolás Maduro and other top figures in Venezuela’s authoritarian regime were on hand to receive the toddler.
Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border recalled that the May 14 flight that returned Maikelys, with 226 people aboard, was the 17th U.S. deportation flight to Venezuela
this year. “This makes 2,918 US deportees and 1,500 Returns from Mexico (5 planes) for a total of 4,418 this year.”
CNNreported more details of what appeared to have been a very real Trump administration plan to send some detained Southeast Asian
migrants to Libya on May 7. (See WOLA’s May 9 Border Update.) About 13 detainees were
loaded onto a bus, according to their account, then taken to a military plane. At least one of the detainees was told that they were going to be sent to Libya, according to an attorney for a Filipino migrant. They did not disembark the bus, which, after a
few hours, returned them to their detention facility. It appears that they may have been saved by an order from a Massachusetts judge who, on March 28, had blocked third-country deportations carried out without offering migrants a chance to challenge them.
The acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on May 14. In answer to representatives’ questions, Lyons revealed:
Nine people have died in ICE detention since January 20. (Spain’s El País had reported seven
deaths during Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office.)
Though ICE is currently funded to hold 41,500 detainees, its current “bed count” is now over 52,000—28 percent above the appropriated level.
ICE’s records show that approximately 1.1 million undocumented people in the United States have final deportation orders. (A November 2024 ICE document obtained by Fox
News had shown over 1.4 million people with final orders of removal.)
Writing at the Atlantic, Nick Miroff noted that ICE operations around the country, often captured on video, are
causing a growing political backlash. “Many Americans have recoiled at these scenes, comparing officers’ tactics to those of authoritarian regimes. Yet the arrests in the videos do not show conduct outside the bounds of typical ICE protocol.
This is what immigration enforcement looks like. It’s messy and emotional, and requires officers to arrest people for an offense that many Americans do not view as a crime.”
Outcry has followed the May 9 arrest of the mayor of
Newark, New Jersey, outside a detention facility in his city, and video frequently showing ICE and related agencies’ personnel operating in plainclothes throughout
the country, usually with their faces covered. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump observed that these operations resemble “the emergence of a secret police force acting on behalf of the chief executive.” Journalist Radley Balko,
who has written extensively about policing in the United States, told Bump that masking has been a growing trend, though “There was really no safety reason for it. It was mostly about intimidation.”
Two U.S. officials told the New York Times that DHS has made a request to the Defense Department for 20,000
National Guard soldiers to support the administration’s “mass deportation” effort in the U.S. interior. The Pentagon is considering the request, which would be a historic new internal role for U.S. military personnel, but few details about the potential
mission have emerged.
A May 9 White House proclamation had called for DHS to act within 60 days to supplement its deportation force with “no less than
20,000” people from other federal, state, and local agencies, including “former Federal officers” and “other individuals.”
CNNreported that the administration is planning to deploy hundreds more non-ICE officials this week to the mass deportation
campaign in the U.S. interior. Many would probably be Border Patrol agents, and about 45 percent would be FBI agents.
The FBI issued a May 12 order to devote about one-third of FBI agents’ time to immigration enforcement, and less to enforcing “white-collar crime” like
“public corruption, foreign bribery, kleptocracy, and foreign influence,” Reuters reported.
The New York Timesreported on
customer backlash against Avelo Airlines, a small carrier that has begun to carry out transfer and removal flights for ICE. “Commercial carriers typically avoid this kind of work so as not to wade into politics and upset customers or employees.”
“The Trump administration has hired the International Organization for Migration [IOM, a UN agency] to help implement” its program offering undocumented migrants in the United States $1,000 to self-deport, the Washington Postrevealed.
“At the request of the U.S. government, IOM is providing AVR [Assisted Voluntary Return] to people in the U.S. who register to voluntarily return to their countries of origin,” read an IOM statement.
“Our involvement begins only after an individual gives informed consent to receive assistance.”
A feature by Rachel Monroe at the New Yorker examined the crisis of the U.S. asylum system, viewed through
the struggle of a Venezuelan political activist arrested for illegal entry at the border and unable to seek asylum because of the Trump administration’s decree shutting down access.
At his newsletter, data researcher Austin Kocher found that immigration court judges decided more asylum cases (10,933) in March “than in any other single
month since at least 2001.” Even more notably, judges denied asylum in 76% of these cases, which is “the highest denial rate on record for any month in more than two decades.” Kocher concluded: “This is not an accident—this is a policy decision”
as the Trump administration seeks to clear dockets by denying as many cases as possible. “Judges on the whole seem to be following orders to deny, deny, deny.”
At Beyond the Border, Kate Morrissey reported that “the immigration court system under President Donald Trump is moving to further restrict
the ability to win protection in the U.S. for people whose cases are already pending.” The article indicates that, according to a recent Board of Immigration Appeals decision, fear of being sent to a prison in El Salvador may no longer be grounds for asylum
or Convention Against Torture protections.
Researchers Adam Sawyer and Austin Kocher looked beyond a “smoothing effect” in ICE’s data reporting to uncover a spike in the estimated population
at some ICE detention centers. At the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, for example, they found a 27 percent increase in the detainee population since January.
A Bloomberg investigation explored
how private prison companies like CoreCivic have become economically intertwined with depressed rural communities like Estancia, New Mexico, through lucrative contracts to run ICE detention centers. Estancia is where CoreCivic manages the very troubled Torrance
County detention facility; the Bloomberg piece describes medieval conditions there, including lengthy water shutoffs. ICE pays the company $2.3 million per month to accommodate 505 people—about $150 per person per day—and more if the facility’s population
increases beyond that. Sawyer and Kocher reported that the population at Torrance is “around 679.”
On a call with investors, the Interceptreported, the CEO of CoreCivic made the pitch that using his company’s services would draw
fewer legal challenges for the Trump administration than even more controversial options like sending people to prisons in El Salvador.
A ProPublica and Texas Tribuneinvestigation highlighted how the Trump administration has moved rapidly to turn
the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services that places unaccompanied children with relatives or sponsors—into a tool for migration enforcement by coordinating much of its operations with
ICE.
The National Center for Youth Law and Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit in Washington, DC federal court seeking to undo Trump administration
ORR procedures, like demanding documentation of status, that have made relatives or sponsors fearful of taking in unaccompanied children. As a result, children who arrive at the border unaccompanied are now spending an average of 112 days in ORR shelters awaiting
placement or reunification with relatives, up from 37 days in January. Waits have grown even though only 924 non-Mexican
children arrived unaccompanied in February, March, and April.
The military at the border
Arrests for trespassing on military property
A federal magistrate judge in Las Cruces, New Mexico has thrown out charges against 98 migrants whom the
Trump administration had sought to prosecute for trespassing on a military installation.
The “installation” in question is a very narrow fringe of territory stretching along the border from the New Mexico-Arizona line to about 50 miles east of El Paso, Texas.
An April 11 presidential memo had declared that this stretch of territory
is now considered an extension of existing military bases for at least the next three years. As a result, anyone setting foot in this area could be charged not just with improper entry, but with trespassing on a military facility, a misdemeanor carrying penalties
of up to a year in prison. (See WOLA’s May 9 Border Update.)
In a May 9 video posted to Twitter, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that charges including “damaging government property” could lead to penalties of up to 10 years in prison.
As he threw the 98 cases out, Judge Gregory Wormuth, the New York Timesreported, found on May 15 that the government “had
failed to show that the migrants actually knew they were unlawfully entering a restricted military area.”
As of May 13, the Associated Pressreported, prosecutors had filed “roughly 400 cases” against migrants
in Las Cruces criminal court. Arrests began May 2 in the El Paso, Texas “defense area,” Border Reportreported,
and they totaled 87 cases in Texas by May 8. This combined number is a multiple of the 98 whose cases Judge Wormuth threw out on May 15.
The zone in Texas, established on May 1, “comprises 2,000 acres of land, including the banks and bed of the Rio Grande River,” according to a Northern Command spokesperson’s response to
an inquiry from the Border Chronicle.
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, sent Hegseth a letter demanding answers to
several questions about the new “defense area” comprising virtually all of his state’s borderline. “Local residents along New Mexico’s southern border use these lands for hiking, mountain biking, hunting, camping, and experiencing New Mexico’s natural heritage,
while ranchers depend on them for grazing access critical to their livelihoods,” the Senator noted, voicing concerns for “United States citizens who may be stopped and detained by U.S. Army soldiers for trespassing on an unmarked military base.”
The view from Mexico
In other military news at the border, U.S. Northern Command posted photos of “mirrored patrol operations” carried out alongside Mexican military counterparts along an unspecified
stretch of desert border.
Ricardo Monreal, a leading ruling-party member of Mexico’s Congress, published a statement voicing
alarm at the U.S. military deployment at the border: “Mexico has sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. government expressing its concern about the military deployment and requesting a clear explanation of the scope and duration of the operations… This
is a measure that strains our collaborative and cooperative relations.”
Sen. Reed objects
Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, took to the Senate floor on May 8th to deliver a blistering
critique of the Trump administration’s misuse of the U.S. Armed Forces at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The moderate, measured Senator used uncharacteristically strong language: “Once he uses the military for this reason [border security], it will be easier for him to use it for other purposes. And given the tenor of his public statements, it is a reasonable
fear that he may someday order the use of the armed forces in American cities and against American citizens… Ultimately, U.S. military members are trained to engage the enemies of the United States abroad with deadly force, not to arrest migrants on the Southern
Border or to deport them from U.S. cities… When we allow the military to be used in the routine exercise of the police power, the nation teeters on the brink of autocracy and military rule.”
Reed called out a March 30 military flight that delivered migrants from the U.S. Navy’s Guantanamo Bay base in southeastern Cuba to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, with no DHS or other civilian personnel aboard. “Military personnel maintained both custody and
control of the migrants, contrary to longstanding DOD policy and practice.”
Guantánamo
Tweets from New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg continue to be the most consistent source of data reporting about the migrant operation at Guantánamo. As of May 13, Rosenberg noted that
ICE was holding 69 migrants at the base, “all ostensibly held for deportation,” of whom 26 were in the military-run “Camp 6” prison originally built for combatant captives during the Bush-era “war on terror.” Earlier, Rosenberg tweeted that
Guantánamo was hosting “680 Pentagon and Homeland Security workers staffing the operation,” down from about 1,000 in February, when detainee operations launched at President Trump’s orders.
Citing figures provided to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, NBC Newsreported that
the Defense Department spent about $21,087,300 to transport “just under 500” migrants on 46 military flights between January 20 and April 8. That is about $42,000 per passenger.
Notes on human rights and accountability at CBP
The Senate Finance Committee voted on May 13 to advance the nomination of Rodney Scott, a former Border Patrol chief, to be the next commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Scott did not receive a single vote from the Committee’s
Democrats. He was an outspoken critic of the Biden administration after he retired from Border Patrol, and he faces accusations of shielding agents from accountability in a 2010 fatal use of force case, among other incidents.
Three dozen organizations had sent a letter to the Committee urging a “no” vote.
In responses to Questions for the Record submitted by Finance Committee senators, Scott replied on four occasions, “I will
follow all legal court orders,” leaving open the question of whether he would follow a court order that he, or the Trump administration, decides is not “legal.”
The chief of Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector tweeted that agents shot and wounded a “suspect” following an “altercation” in Brownsville, Texas, on May 13.
A joint report by Refugees International and Human Rights First, titled This
Is an Order from Trump, documented enforced disappearances, unlawful removals, and the expulsion of asylum seekers to third countries like Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador. Interviews with many of the 499 third-country migrants whom the Trump administration
expelled in February to Costa Rica and Panama offered a vivid window into the cruelty and mistreatment to which they were subjected during their time in CBP and ICE custody in the United States.
CEJIL, the Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM), and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) published a report documenting
grave human rights violations suffered by the 200 third-country migrants whom the Trump administration expelled to Costa Rica in February. Much of the group, fearing return to their nations of origin, were forced to spend two months confined to a rustic facility
near the Panamanian border, with no legal assistance or proper information about their status or rights.
A report from Amnesty International, based on field research at ICE’s El Paso Service Processing Center (EPSPC), revealed “systemic
mistreatment, arbitrary detention, and a disregard for international and U.S. human rights standards” at the facility.
Wiredrevealed that CBP, in a May 5 memo, quietly rescinded four Biden-era policies governing humane treatment of pregnant
women, infants, the elderly, and people with serious medical conditions in the agency’s custody.
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC), and the Urban Justice Center (UJC) filed a
motion asking a judge to restore three DHS internal oversight agencies that the Trump administration has all but dismantled. The groups requested an injunction to reopen the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Ombudsman Office, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.
CBP plans to use cameras to log the faces of every person who leaves the United States by vehicle at land border crossings and match them to their travel documents, reportedWired.
Border Patrol apprehensions increased slightly from March to April
A 20 percent increase in daily Border Patrol apprehensions
CBP reported an increase, from March to April, 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 8,383 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in April, or 279 per day, up 20 percent in per-day terms from 7,184 (232 per day) in March, similar to 8,345 (298 per day) in February, and down sharply from 128,895 (4,297
per day) in April 2024.
Migration from Mexico more than accounted for the March-to-April increase. While all Border Patrol migrant apprehensions at the border increased by 1,199, apprehensions of Mexican citizens increased by 1,369. Citizens of Mexico accounted
for 73 percent of all Border Patrol apprehensions in April, far higher than their 34 percent share over the past five and a half years.
Overall, CBP—which combines Border Patrol agents operating between ports of entry (official border crossings) and Field Operations officers operating at the ports of entry—took 12,035 people into custody last month, up from 11,019 in March and 11,708 in
February, but down from 179,737 in April 2024. The April 2024 figure had included 50,842 people at ports of entry, most with CBP One appointments—a program that no longer exists.
Seventy-nine percent of migrants encountered by all of CBP at the border in April were citizens of Mexico, far more than the 34 percent share that Mexican people represented since October 2019. For the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic, 90
percent of the migrant population is from Mexico or northern Central America(El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras).
Border Patrol agents released two migrants from custody into the U.S. interior in April, down from a revised five in March, 2,558 in January, and 68,155 in
April 2024.
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 3,652 people or 122 per day in April, down from
3,835 or 124 per day in March, 3,363 in February, and 50,842 in April 2024.
Ninety-three percent of migrants encountered at ports of entry were citizens of Mexico. Only 242 in April and 267 in March were from elsewhere.
Eighty-four percent of migrants encountered in April were single adults, 8 percent were family unit members (parents and children), and 7 percent were unaccompanied children. That is vastly different than the proportions between October 2023 and January
2025 (57 percent single adults, 37 percent family unit members, 5 percent unaccompanied children).
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.
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 third straight month. The El Paso sector’s
1,959 apprehensions were 23 percent of the April total, the same percentage as in March. The Rio Grande Valley Sector (Texas, 1,342), Tucson Sector (Arizona, 1,327), and San Diego Sector (California, 1,317) were in a near-tie for second place.
Mexico’s data
After a six-month pause to “restructure” its methods, the government of Mexico has resumed reporting data on its authorities’ encounters with migrants.
The data is current through February 2025; it shows Mexican migrant encounters decreasing along with U.S. encounters. Mexican authorities encountered 24,327 migrants in February 2025, down from 63,457 in January, 68,911 in December, and a near-record 118,865
in February 2024.
Venezuela (24 percent of February’s total) remained the most-encountered nationality inside Mexico in February.
Mexican authorities are apprehending inside Mexico significantly more migrants than U.S. authorities are apprehending at the U.S.-Mexico border. February’s 24,327 encounters were more than double the 11,708 that CBP reported at the border
that month. Mexico is brown in this chart, CBP’s components are blue and green:
Panama released data showing a near-total halt in northbound migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous 60-plus-mile jungle route through which 1.07 million people passed between
2022 and 2024.
Just 73 people passed through the Darién route in April, the fewest in any month since August 2020, during the pandemic’s earliest months. This is down from 194 in March, 408 in February, and 29,259 in April 2024.
Other news
Data obtained by the Project on Government Oversight revealed that of more than 5.8 million migrants apprehended by Border
Patrol between 2022 and 2024, just 249 were carrying illegal drugs.
The Mexican government’s Secretariat of Foreign Relations reported that 181 citizens of Mexico have died while attempting to cross into the United States during the first four months of 2025, up from 81 in the first four months of 2024, according to Border
Report.
Only 2.1 percent of crimes reported against migrant women in Mexico during 2021–2022 resulted in convictions, revealed the Mexico City-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI). The organization’s “alternative
report”to the UN Human Rights Council noted that prosecutors lack resources and gender-sensitive, mobility-informed protocols.
The government of Mexico reported that its “Operación Frontera Norte,” a deployment of 10,000 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border
region launched on February 5 in response to a Donald Trump tariff threat, has resulted in 3,252 arrests and the seizure of 177.77 kilos of fentanyl.
The governor of the Mexican border state of Baja California, which includes Tijuana and Mexicali, has had her U.S. visa suspended along with that of her husband. The Tijuana investigative publication Zetacited “U.S.
authorities” who acknowledged that Governor Marina Ávila Olmeda is under investigation for possible “relationships with illegal groups.”
Volunteers with the humanitarian group Border Angels, which leaves supplies and looks for migrants in distress along the California border, have experienced “a more consistent flow of nasty messages and emails from the public” since Inauguration Day, the Guardianreported.
CBP reported that 34,650 people applied to be Border Patrol agents in the first four months of 2025, a 44
percent increase in applications over the same period in 2024.
A Washington, DC federal court largely struck down the June 2024 Biden administration rule that severely restricted
access to asylum for people who crossed the border between ports of entry. The ruling, responding to litigation brought by several organizations, has no practical effect at
the moment since the Trump administration has shut down virtually all asylum access at the border. That shutdown policy, citing an “invasion” emergency, also faces a challenge in
federal court.
The Trump administration’s cuts to aid programs helping to integrate migrants in other countries, like Venezuelans in Colombia, are making it more difficult for those migrants to settle in those countries and could encourage more migration to the United
States, reported Christina Noriega at Foreign Policy.
“Through pressure, influence, or affinity” with the U.S. government’s sharp hardline turn, “different governments in Latin America are implementing more pronounced anti-immigration policies and measures to contain and forcibly return migrants, restricting
the right to asylum, residence, and other basic rights of protection,” read a column from
Doctors Without Borders’ Latin America head of operations, Víctor Escobar.
Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona), the recently elected junior senator from Arizona, published a five-pillar
plan for reforming immigration, staking out a position of
building up strict border security while speeding up asylum and pathways to citizenship.
Fourteen exiled Cuban dissidents living in the United States sent a letter voicing fear that the Trump administration might deport them back to Havana if they cannot achieve a more permanent documented status, reported Juanita
Goebertus of Human Rights Watch.
A Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll found that U.S. respondents still approve of President Trump’s performance on border security, with 52 percent approving
and 42 percent disapproving. Trump is in negative territory, with 47 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving, regarding the overall issue of immigration. Disapproval of Trump’s immigration performance increases sharply if respondents are first asked
their views of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.
Adam Isacson (he/him), Director for Defense Oversight
WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas (www.wola.org)
