U.S.-Mexico Border Update: February 6, 2026

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https://www.wola.org/2026/01/u-s-mexico-border-update-detention-deaths-dhs-appropriations-ice-warrants-december-data/

U.S.-Mexico Border Update: February 6, 2026

With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here.

Your donation to WOLA is crucial to keeping these paywall-free and ad-free Updates going. Please contribute now and support our work. 

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

  • ICE is purchasing warehouses to hold massive numbers of people in detention: Using some of the $45 billion appropriated last year for migrant detention, ICE is pursuing a plan to purchase about two dozen warehouses around the United States to hold people arrested by the agency. This is happening at a time of mounting allegations of abuse in ICE detention facilities as members of Congress go to court for the right to carry out inspections.
  • Organizational culture at border and migration agencies: The killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is shining a bright light on longstanding concerns about professionalism, lack of accountability, recruitment, training, morale, and other institutional issues at ICE, CBP, and CBP’s Border Patrol component. This section highlights recent analyses of these concerns and reform proposals.
  • DHS faces February 13 shutdown deadline: The killing of Mr. Pretti happened six days before a deadline to approve the 2026 DHS budget, and Senate Democrats lined up to oppose the funding legislation unless it includes a series of reforms to DHS law enforcement agencies. Negotiators now have until February 13 to reach an agreement and pass it, or else DHS will shut down—although ICE and CBP will still have funding from the “big bill” Congress passed last July.
  • Courts consider mandatory detention and TPS: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the first challenge to the Trump administration’s July 2025 memo mandating the detention of all people with pending immigration cases who arrived by crossing the border illegally. The Ninth Circuit rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelan citizens, but an earlier Supreme Court decision prevents them from regaining that protection. A district court judge, for now, has saved citizens of Haiti from losing their TPS, citing the administration’s “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

THE FULL UPDATE:

ICE is purchasing warehouses to hold massive numbers of people in detention

Bloomberg reporters Fola Akinnibi and Sophie Alexander revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is pursuing a “plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents” all around the United States. Flush with $45 billion in funding for detention from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that Congress’s Republican majority passed in July 2025, the agency is purchasing large indoor spaces that, in many cases, were originally “designed and marketed as e-commerce distribution facilities.”

Examples of purchases, which cover just the land and empty buildings, include:

  • A warehouse near Hagerstown, Maryland (capacity 1,500), for which ICE paid $102 million.
  • A warehouse in Surprise, Arizona (capacity 1,500), for which ICE paid $70 million.
  • A warehouse in Hamburg or Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, valued at $87,402,500.
  • A warehouse in Hutchins, Texas, with 9,500 bed capacity. This appears to be the largest.
  • A warehouse or complex of warehouses (price unknown) probably in Socorro or Clint, Texas, near El Paso, which “could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds,” Bloomberg noted.
  • An 8,500-bed facility in Social Circle, Georgia.
  • An 8,500-bed facility in Byhalia, Mississippi.

“ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas, and then run them as detention centers,” Akinnibi and Alexander recalled.

The detained population

The Bloomberg reporters’ full list of potential new warehouse sites totals 76,500 additional ICE detention beds. As of January 25, ICE had a record 70,766 individuals in its detention system, up from 39,703 at the end of the Biden administration. So the “warehouse” plan could potentially double ICE’s capacity to nearly 150,000 people detained at any one time.

A new analysis from the Deportation Data Project, which has obtained large datasets on ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) arrests, detentions, and deportations, found that the Trump administration quadrupled ICE arrests during its first nine months, compared with the final nine months of the Biden administration.

ICE street arrests (i.e., arrests not at jails) went up by over a factor of eleven. Street arrests at this order of magnitude are a new phenomenon. For both types of arrests, ICE was much less likely to target people with criminal convictions. These changes led to over a sevenfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions.

As of January 25, 74 percent of ICE’s detained population had never been convicted of any crime (26% were charged with crimes, but not convicted).

Pushback

Planned warehouse facilities are facing opposition from local governments and rights advocates, even in some Republican-leaning areas.

  • Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) wrote to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to oppose the planned warehouse purchase in Byhalia, Mississippi, arguing that the site is important to the town’s economy.
  • The majority-Republican Township Council in Roxbury, New Jersey, voted unanimously to oppose a planned 1,500-capacity warehouse.
  • In Ashland, Virginia, “Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale” of a warehouse meant to hold 1,500 people, reported the New Republic’s Greg Sargent. The Board of Supervisors opposed it, and the warehouse’s owner, a Canadian billionaire, backed out of the sale.
  • A 1,500-capacity warehouse in Oklahoma City will not be sold to ICE after the city’s mayor voiced opposition.
  • Demonstrators have held protests in Merrimack, New Hampshire; Salt Lake City, Utah; San Antonio, Texas; Social Circle, Georgia; and Hagerstown, Maryland. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) spoke at a Hagerstown protest.

New Mexico’s state legislature, meanwhile, approved the Immigration Safety Act, which prohibits state or local government agencies from signing agreements for ICE detention and cancels existing agreements. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed it into law on February 5, and it goes into effect on May 20. There are currently three contractor-managed centers in New Mexico—Torrance, Cibola, and Otero; all have faced frequent allegations of poor conditions and abuse of detainees.

Sargent pointed out that a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 64 percent of American respondents oppose keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided, compared to 35 percent in favor.

Abuse allegations

“Imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation,” wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie of the expanding ICE detention system. Recent reports about detention conditions, some cited in Bouie’s January 24 column, are unremittingly grim.

  • Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) released a new report, building on earlier findings, laying out 1,037 credible reports of human rights abuses in detention. These included 206 reports of medical neglect; 181 reports of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions; 139 reports of denial of adequate food or water; 88 reports of physical and sexual abuse; 44 reports of family separation; 40 reports of mistreatment of children; and 26 reports of mistreatment of pregnant women.
  • A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that CBP frequently failed to follow its own policies and standards for medical care of people in the agency’s custody. Between August 2023 and August 2024, “57 percent of adults with a potential illness or injury and 20 percent of pregnant individuals did not receive medical assessments.”
  • In a lawsuit brought by people who claimed they were abused and held in subhuman conditions at the Broadview ICE facility outside Chicago, the government did not fulfill the suit’s demand for release of surveillance footage documenting conditions. At first, ICE claimed that footage was lost in a vendor company’s “system crash,” but later acknowledged that the video was never recorded in the first place, 404 Media reported.

The Dilley family detention center

ICE “halted all movement” at the South Texas Family Residential Center, ICE’s detention site for parents and children in Dilley, Texas, after medical staff confirmed two cases of measles there.

This 2,400-bed facility was opened during the Obama administration, closed during the Biden administration, and reopened under the Trump administration. It currently holds about 1,000 parents and children. It is run by the private prison company CoreCivic. “ICE has the authority to release these families, who are not flight risks, on parole,” but it is choosing not to do so, even as many in custody did not violate any immigration laws, explained Elora Mukherjee of Columbia University in a New York Times column.

The Dilley facility “is a hellhole,” Mukherjee continued. “Children and parents consistently report not having access to sufficient potable water, palatable food (both children and parents have told me they found worms in their meals), adequate medical care, or meaningful educational opportunities. Lights are left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep. Officers have repeatedly threatened to separate families, including those I represent.”

“The guards are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities,” immigration attorney Eric Lee, who witnessed a January 24 protest there, told Texas Public Radio. “This is not a place that you would want to have your child be for even 15 minutes.”

“There were a lot of sick people in there, and no doctors,” an eight-months-pregnant asylum seeker told USA Today after being one of 240 people quietly released from Dilley in January. “No one tried to do anything like separate sick people from healthy people,” said another person who was released.

ICE is holding many children with their parents in Dilley for more than 20 days, which goes against the 1997 Flores legal settlement governing humane treatment of children in migrant detention, which the Trump administration has gone to court to seek to overturn. One family told a Laredo shelter operator that “they had been locked up at the Dilley facility for eight months,” according to USA Today reporters Lauren Villagran and Rick Jervis.

The Dilley facility’s profile was raised after ICE sent 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father there following the father’s January 20 arrest in Minnesota. Photos of the boy in custody wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat went viral, along with accounts of how ICE agents used him as bait to draw his father out of their house. On Jan. 31, Judge Fried Biery of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ordered ICE to release Liam and his father. His scathing ruling noted, “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” Nonetheless, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now seeking to place the father and child in expedited removal proceedings in order to quickly resolve their asylum claim and presumably deport them.

Fort Bliss

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), whose El Paso district includes the part of the Fort Bliss army base where an ICE contractor is running what right now is the largest detention facility, paid her fifth visit to “Camp East Montana”—a complex of tents holding over 3,100 people, including over 325 women—on January 28. “Things are not getting better, they are getting worse” at a facility where three people died in a 44-day span in December and January, Rep. Escobar said to the El Paso Times.

Rep. Escobar shared alarming details about the conditions suffered by women who were arrested in the ongoing ICE-CBP offensive in Minnesota, then brought to the camp, which is managed by a company, Acquisition Logistics, that got a $1.2 billion contract.

Most of the women have been wearing the same clothes—even Minnesota snow boots—for three weeks. Guards allow them to use a cellphone to talk to their lawyers—for two minutes, once per week. “They were tearfully describing how they were trying to get in touch with their lawyers, but they’d call their lawyers. They’d be put on hold, then the two minutes would be up, and the guard would grab the phone and hang it up. They would have to wait another week before trying again,” Rep. Escobar said.

It remains unclear whether local El Paso authorities will be able to prosecute the January 3 death of Gerardo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man, which the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled a homicide, according to the Texas Tribune.

The family of Victor Manuel Diaz, a Nicaraguan man in his mid-thirties who died in the camp on January 14, is demanding an investigation. ICE has said Diaz may have died of suicide, but the agency had offered that same explanation in Lunas Campos’s case, only to be contradicted by the medical examiner and by witnesses who said the Cuban man was in a scuffle with guards.

The Nicaraguan man’s family’s lawyer said it is “suspicious” that this time, the autopsy will be performed by the U.S. Army, not the county medical examiner. Diaz, an asylum seeker with a pending case who ICE arrested at the Minneapolis Korean restaurant where he was working, had been at East Montana for eight days when he died.

Contractors

Beyond Acquisition Logistics, ICE’s private contractors have been the subject of recent journalistic and NGO reports, as well as litigation.

  • The advocacy group Our Revolution released a report noting that two detention companies (GEO Group and CoreCivic) and a deportation aircraft company (CSI Aviation) received $11,063 in new contract revenue from the Trump administration for every dollar in campaign donations that they made in 2024.
  • Jacobin reported on a lawsuit accusing GEO Group of “medical neglect at its ICE processing center in Adelanto, California, citing two recent deaths at the facility.”
  • Mother Jones reported on Omni, the ICE contractor that handles a large and growing number of deportation flights outside the Western Hemisphere. These multi-stop flights can last for as many as 50 hours, which migrants on board usually spend fully shackled for the entire duration.
  • The government of France is “seeking answers” from Capgemini, a French consulting company, about a $4.8 million contract with iCE for “skip tracing”—helping to locate and track people down, the New York Timesreported.
  • Border and migration laws that have become “instruments of punishment” are now entangled with the profit-driven motives of the private detention and surveillance industries,” read a report by the National Immigration Project and the American University Washington College of Law Immigrant Justice Clinic.

Congressional oversight

To conduct an inspection visit at Fort Bliss, Rep. Escobar had to request access from DHS a week in advance, despite a 2024 law stating that members of Congress cannot be denied access to ICE facilities. This was because, as explained in WOLA’s January 23, 2026 Border Update, a judge briefly upheld a DHS policy requiring advance notice, citing a budgeting technicality.

On February 2 the same judge, Jia Cobb of the Washington DC District Court, sided with Congress against DHS, overturning the “advance notice” requirement.

The difference was the scope of the 2024 law, which, as a budget bill, was worded to prohibit DHS from using funds to deny legislators access to ICE facilities. In a January 8, 2026 memo, Secretary Noem argued that the Department could block lawmakers using a different “pot of money,” the $75 billion in funds approved for ICE last July in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Judge Cobb ruled that DHS could not really separate the two budget streams (regular budget and “beautiful bill” budget) when blocking members of Congress from performing oversight in ICE facilities. Her ruling is a temporary restraining order; the issue will be revisited in two weeks. But at least for now, legislators should be able to pay unannounced visits.

Organizational culture at border and migration agencies

Incidents driving concern

The January 24 killing of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent and CBP officer in Minneapolis, the second killing of a U.S. civilian in the city that month, generated a flood of analyses and commentary voicing concern about the organizational culture at DHS border and migration agencies. These concerns about aggressive, abusive, unprofessional, and unaccountable behavior, familiar to U.S.-Mexico border-area human rights defenders, are mounting now that a torrent of money from the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is driving rapid growth at ICE, CBP, and CBP’s Border Patrol component.

  • The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, “deplored the use of large-scale enforcement operations by U.S. immigration and other agents who have recurrently used force that appears to be unnecessary or disproportionate” in a January 23 statement. It read, “Under international law, the intentional use of lethal force is only permissible as a measure of last resort against an individual representing an imminent threat to life.”
  • The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that “federal immigration officers have shot and killed at least four other people in recent months,” listing Silverio Villegas González in Chicago; Isaias Sanchez Barboza in Rio Grande City, Texas; Keith Porter, shot by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles; and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
  • In the Minnesota cases, the Marshall Project noted, “officers did not perform CPR or any other medical aid, and when physicians at the scene attempted to help, federal agents either delayed or stopped them from doing so.”
  • The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on gun violence, “has identified 20 incidents in which immigration agents shot at people since Trump’s operations began last year,” and 40 more “incidents in which agents held bystanders, protesters, or other people at gunpoint under questionable circumstances.”
  • An MS NOW review of court records and media reports found 15 incidents in which ICE or Border Patrol agents shot at people in their cars. This violates most law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force policies, arguably including DHS policies, for common-sense reasons including the harm that a driver could do to bystanders after being incapacitated by gunfire. Of the 15 cases, 2 drivers were killed (Villegas and Good), and MS NOW could only identify 4 drivers who still face criminal charges, despite DHS claims that they threatened officers’ lives.
  • Unraveled, a Chicago-based independent news site, identified some of the El Paso-based agents from Border Patrol’s BORTAC, a SWAT-like tactical unit, who have “been recorded repeatedly attacking people with chemical weapons in both Chicago and Minneapolis.”
  • The Colorado Sun and the Intercept reported that ICE agents in Colorado have been leaving customized ace of spades playing cards in the left-behind vehicles of people they have detained. The Colorado Sun recalled that ace of spaces cards “have been used by white supremacist groups as a racist symbol and were called “death cards” by some during the Vietnam War.”

Professionalism

Concerns abound regarding federal agents’ failure to display the professionalism expected of any law enforcement agency.

  • “Streets across the country are flooded with agents who do not necessarily have appropriate training for the operations they’re conducting,” MS NOW paraphrased a former high-level Biden-era DHS official, who continued, “They’re trained to start off at 10 out of 10 as far as aggression and perception of risk.”
  • Interviewed by Politico, Janet Napolitano, the former DHS secretary under Barack Obama, placed some blame on high Trump administration officials, like Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who are urging agencies to meet arrest quotas: “they need 3,000 arrests a day. And so you end up with these roving raids and these sweeps and the targeting of communities and the kinds of inappropriate and abusive [actions].”
  • DHS Secretary Noem is apparently echoing this “blame the quotas for the lack of professionalism” argument. “Noem’s team has this week privately pointed to the arrest quotas pushed by Miller at the White House as a cause of the problems,” reported Michael Scherer and Nick Miroff at The Atlantic. Part of the problem, they contend, is the administration’s crackdown adopting an “improvisational approach, not an institutional one, with blurred leadership roles and no clear chain of command.”
  • A multi-author New York Times analysis of a “crisis of confidence for ICE and Border Patrol” noted, citing a 2021 GAO report, that even as they confront protestors violently, “most ICE agents do not receive specialized training in crowd control,” nor do those from some other agencies assigned to the deportation mission (FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service).
  • That piece cited Gil Kerlikowske, a former Obama-era CBP commissioner, characterizing agents’ tactics as “far outside standard practices in law enforcement.”
  • Another Times analysis recalled that Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief who until recently led deportation operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minnesota, gave this crowd-control guidance to agents in August: “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. It’s all about us now.”
  • Six policing experts interviewed by The New York Times said that use of force directives “appeared to be muddled and they passed up opportunities to de-escalate the situation—missteps and breaks with protocol that culminated in a barrage of gunfire” in Alex Pretti’s case.
  • A remarkable analysis at Wired from an active military officer “using a pseudonym out of concern for retribution from the Trump administration” hammered ICE for unprofessional behavior. Among numerous hard-hitting quotes: “ICE tactics rarely seek to de-escalate but instead ramp up violence via threats, intimidation, and assault. These tactics vaguely resemble the worst of U.S. military operations in the war on terror, which left embedded bitterness and hatred in the local populations.”
  • The New York Times published some strong critiques of ICE and Border Patrol’s lack of professionalism from active and former police chiefs around the country. The police chief in Mendota Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, told of a Border Patrol agent who encountered her outside of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she was acting, out of uniform, as a legal observer. “‘He told me to get a job, and that I was a paid agitator,’ she said. ‘I would have been embarrassed if he had been one of my officers.’”
  • “The tactics you’re seeing used by ICE and CBP are absolutely not in line with best practices in American policing,” Art Acevedo, the former police chief in Houston, Miami, and other cities, told MS NOW. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

Accountability

Analyses have also focused on the lack of accountability for abuse, misuse of force, and unprofessional conduct, which creates incentives for further violations because agents perceive a low probability of consequences. Statements from top Trump administration officials blaming and denigrating victims, along with concerns about the Justice Department’s independence from the White House, have contributed to a climate of likely impunity.

  • “What remains unclear is whether DHS or any of the agencies under its umbrella are following up with officers after their operations go awry,” noted an analysis from David Noriega and Kay Guerrero at MS NOW. “When an agent fires their weapon, standard DHS protocol suggests placing the agent on administrative leave while ensuing investigations run their course,” and it is not clear that this is consistently happening.
  • “Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has repeatedly urged ICE agents to escalate their tactics and increase arrests, and he broadcast to agents that they had ‘federal immunity,’” the anonymous military officer wrote at WIRED. (That immunity claim “is broadly true, though legal experts caution that immunity is not absolute if an officer has broken the law,” the Washington Post’s Maria Saccheti pointed out.) “Since that last remark in October 2025, ICE tactics have become far more violent.”
  • The Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli, in a reported article, and former CBP Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) director Daniel Altman, writing at Just Security, conveyed officials’ perplexity that the DHS investigation of Alex Pretti’s killing is not following established procedures. Secretary Noem assigned ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office to lead the investigation, instead of OPR and the FBI. “HSI is a capable law enforcement organization, but it does not have CBP OPR’s mandate, policy authority, or institutional role in examining the actions of CBP personnel,” Altman wrote. “Substituting it for OPR is not a neutral administrative adjustment. It is a rollback.”
  • “Leadership within these agencies were allowed to operate largely with impunity and do what they wanted with little to no consequences,” Chris Magnus, who briefly served as CBP commissioner during the Biden administration, told the New York Times. “That sets a tone.”

Morale issues

In the wake of these incidents, current and retired DHS officials and agents have told reporters that morale is low.

  • “No one is really capturing what the federal law enforcement officers on the ground are thinking. The truth is that they’re fed up and have been for weeks,” wrote investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein. “As someone who has been covering this for months, I am struck by how angry homeland security officers are with their own agencies, and their blunt dismissal of the Washington leadership.”
  • More than 20 “current and former immigration officials” interviewed by the New York Times “said that long hours, arrest quotas, and public vitriol were taking a significant toll on morale.” Kerlikowske, citing Border Patrol agents, said “morale is in the dumpster.” A current ICE official said, “We lost all trust. I’m not sure I can see how we exist three years from now.”
  • An ICE official told the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff that recent ICE hires, particularly those brought back from retirement, “are having second thoughts.” Of the hundreds of returning officers sent to Minnesota, some “have been so cold and miserable that they’ve already quit, and ICE officials have held calls to figure out how to deal with the sudden resignations.”

Border Patrol’s longstanding issues

Some analyses looked at the role of Border Patrol agents—who do receive crowd-control training—in many recent abuse allegations, and sought to place it in the context of the border agency’s often-troubled history.

  • “The fatal killing of protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month reflects what critics say is a longstanding ethos of aggressiveness that permeates the agency and was imported into U.S. cities through President Trump’s immigration crackdown,” read a piece from New York Times reporters Eileen Sullivan and Jazmine Ulloa.
  • Reece Jones, a professor at the University of Hawaii and author of the 2023 book Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, recalled in a New York Times column: “How the Border Patrol operates can be traced back to the agency’s origins in Wild West frontier policing. The United States Border Patrol was established in May 1924, days after the signing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which set very small quotas for immigrants from most of the world except Northern Europe.”
  • Journalist Garrett Graff, including off-duty arrests of agents, found: “CBP’s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES higher than other federal law enforcement agencies—and, in fact, if you look over the last decade, the arrest rate of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents (.5%) has been HIGHER than the arrest rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States (.4%). To frame that a different way: In rough terms, the workforce of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents commit crimes at an equal or even greater rate PER CAPITA than the population of undocumented immigrants do in the United States.”

Border-area human rights advocates note that Border Patrol concerns they have long voiced in their home region are now coming to light in the U.S. interior. “We’ve been having these conversations from the southern border for a long, long time,” Andrea Guerrero, of Alliance San Diego, which coordinates the 60-organization Southern Border Communities Coalition, told the New York Times. The Coalition’s director, Lilian Serrano, told the American Prospect, “We have been raising the alarm for many, many years about the situation at the border, about the violence and the way in which Border Patrol operates without accountability. And it was always justified that ‘Well, it only happens [at] the border,’ignoring that there are millions of people who call the border home.” Jones, the author and professor, added: “This is how the agency has operated since it was created, though for decades those activities have been hidden in the remote borderlands.”

Recruitment and rapid growth

This is happening at a time when Border Patrol and especially ICE are experiencing staggering growth. The giant legislation Congress passed in July 2025 provided more than $13 billion to hire at least 10,000 new ICE agents (its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Division had about 5,500 agents nationwide), and over $6 billion for more than 8,000 new positions at CBP, including 3,000 more Border Patrol agents (Border Patrol had 19,357 agents in 2022).

The Atlantic’s Miroff reported that after receiving more than 220,000 applications in 2025, ICE “signed up 12,000 new officers, agents, and legal staff in about four months. No federal law-enforcement agency has ever expanded this fast.” It may take five or six months for a full complement of 10,000 ICE deportation officers to be fully ready and deployed. When that happens, Miroff noted, instead of surging in one location at a time (Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis), “the new hiring surge will give the administration enough personnel to target multiple cities at once.”

Some recent press coverage is sounding alarms about these new hires’ qualifications, training, and fealty to the Trump administration’s political agenda.

  • “These are people who have no business setting foot into our office,” a senior ICE official told Miroff, “describing new recruits who appeared physically unfit for the job and ‘who would have been weeded out during a normal hiring process.’”
  • “The brand new agents are idiots,” an “experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations” toldKlippenstein. A new ICE recruit said of his fellow recent hires, “A lot of the guys are honestly pretty sketchy,”adding that some “have some weird tattoos.”
  • At the Atlantic, Ali Breland reported on concerns that members of white supremacist or fascist-aligned groups or militias, like the Proud Boys, are among the recruits. He cited a December 9 report from Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in which a U.S. citizen detained by ICE “noticed several of the agents had tattoos that expressed support for the Proud Boys.”
  • Recruitment advertising appears to be aiming for personnel with MAGA-adjacent political views. “Many homeland security hiring ads feature military-style imagery, like officers wearing tactical gear and driving combat vehicles,” the New York Times reported. “They refer to immigration as an ‘invasion’ and immigrants as ‘enemies.’” Paul Rosenzweig, a Bush-era deputy assistant DHS secretary, noted at the Atlantic, “ICE’s recruitment efforts appear to deliberately echo white-nationalist rhetoric.”
  • Concerns abound regarding the inadequacy of recruits’ training. Miroff reported, “The Trump administration slashed the length of the training course from about five months to 47 days last summer—because Trump is the 47th president, three officials told me at the time—then cut it further. Now it’s 42 days,” including just four hours specifically dedicated to de-escalation tactics.
  • Comparing ICE tactics to what is common in action movies or video games, the anonymous military officer writing at WIRED observed, “Given that training for ICE officers has dropped down to about six and a half weeks, TV and movies might be their biggest source of knowledge.”

Reform proposals

“With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path,” wrote Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker.

Faced with that possibility, many analysts are proposing reforms (as are Democratic Party legislators, discussed below).

  • Reece Jones called for banning racial profiling and sending Border Patrol agents back to the border zone, while altering a 1953 regulation designating that zone as all U.S. territory within 100 miles of a border or coastline.
  • Janet Napolitano called for having the Justice Department “announce an open and transparent investigation” into Good and Pretti shootings, and work with state and local police and prosecutors “so that there’s a sense of fairness here.”
  • Paul Rosenzweig, the Bush-era DHS official, called for reforms across four areas: personnel, operations, accountability, and organizational culture. Recruitment “will need to focus on applicants with relevant experience, not just those with aligned political views.” Training should last at least four months, with more focus on constitutional law and less “emphasis on SWAT-like uses of force.” Agents should again be banned from entering sensitive locations, unmask and identify themselves, stop using pepper spray, and stop racial or ethnic profiling, while Border Patrol should be restricted to a 10-mile zone. “ICE agents could, by law, be limited to quasi-civil enforcement authorities, such as detention and seizure,” and most could be disarmed. Congress could undo a recent Supreme Court ruling and allow those injured by DHS agents to sue.
  • Obama-era White House official Ben Rhodes called in the New York Times for focusing ICE operations on people convicted of crimes, prohibiting forced entries without judicial warrants, and transferring immigration enforcement from DHS to the Department of Justice. “Customs and Border Protection could stay within a smaller DHS, but it should focus on securing our borders — not enforcement operations within them. DHS should not have domestic policing, enforcement, detention, or intelligence-gathering functions. Let the Justice Department do that.”
  • Journalist Garrett Graff, who has written extensively about border and migration agencies’ organizational culture, offered six recommended reforms, including basic uniform standards and unmasking, removing CBP and ICE from crowd-control missions, restricting Border Patrol to a smaller border zone, respecting sensitive locations, insisting on judicial warrants, ensuring the ability to sue, eliminating bonuses or awards for meeting quotas, tightening hiring and training standards, limiting use of surveillance technologies, deeply reforming detention, and, in general, a full overhaul of “the functions and culture of these agencies.”

DHS faces February 13 shutdown deadline

WOLA’s January 23 Border Update indicated that the 2026 DHS appropriations bill (bill text – explanatory statement) was “nearing passage” in the U.S. Congress, having just cleared the House of Representatives and needing just a maximum of seven Democrats to support it in the Senate.

That changed drastically after the January 24 killing of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis. Democratic senators have since lined up in opposition. They hold 47 of 100 seats, and Senate rules (the filibuster) require 60 votes to end debate and proceed to vote on most bills. Their opposition forced the chamber’s Republican leadership to remove the DHS appropriation from a six-bill budget package that was signed into law.

Instead, Congress added to the bill a measure to keep DHS funded at 2024-25 levels through February 13. This allows some time for negotiations over Democrats’ demands for reforms to ICE and other DHS border- and migration-enforcement agencies.

If they do not pass a bill or grant another extension, DHS will “shut down” again, which would hobble component agencies such as FEMA, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, and others. However, ICE and CBP would be largely unaffected because the “big beautiful bill” that passed last July provided those agencies with over $150 billion in separate, few-string-attached funding through 2029.

The wave of national outrage following the January killings in Minneapolis may have made the Trump administration and some congressional Republicans more willing to negotiate reforms. “If you truth-serumed every elected [Republican] in D.C., like 90 percent of them are going to be pretty uncomfortable with some of what’s been going on,” an unnamed Republican operative involved in Senate election races told The Hill’s Al Weaver. “It’s not hard to see them taking this opportunity to kind of rein in the administration without directly confronting the administration.”

In an uncharacteristic move, President Trump even called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) to propose negotiations. (Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) “made it clear that he didn’t want to be involved in negotiations at all; he thinks Democrats and the Trump administration should talk directly,” the American Prospectreported.)

On February 5, Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) published a non-detailed list of 10 proposed reforms as conditions for supporting the DHS bill. This expanded on a significantly less extensive list that Schumer had floated on January 28.

The Democratic leadership’s demands include ten items: targeted enforcement, “no masks,” require ID, protect sensitive locations, stop racial profiling, uphold use of force standards, ensure state and local coordination and oversight, build safeguards into the detention system, “body cameras for accountability, not tracking,” and “no paramilitary police.”

Other legislators have sought to go further:

  • In debate over the multi-bill budget package and continuing resolution, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced an amendment seeking to claw back $75 billion that the “big beautiful bill” had allocated to ICE. It narrowly failed, 49-51, with votes from two Republican senators, Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).
  • A joint statement from the centrist New Democrat Coalition and the left-leaning Congressional Progressive Caucus called to “ensure ICE and CBP immediately leave Minneapolis and stop terrorizing American cities and communities” and to remove DHS Secretary Noem. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and Congressional Black Caucus echoed the call to fire Noem, among other demands.
  • “Non-negotiable policy positions” from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus include the above, plus investigations into deaths in DHS detention, eliminating arrest quotas, prohibiting the use of children as bait, strengthening hiring and training standards, banning military-grade equipment, protecting whistleblowers, and returning Border Patrol to the border.
  • Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) called for an immediate end to the DHS operation in her state. “I agree with my colleagues who want ICE agents to wear body cameras and undergo better training—but we are well beyond that now,” she wrote at the New York Times. She called not just for the firing of Noem, but of former “at large” commander Gregory Bovino and of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

The Washington Post and New York Times looked into proposals for more widespread use of body-worn cameras, a measure that has received specific funding for years but that DHS has only partially implemented. Post reporter Maria Sacchetti noted June 2025 House Homeland Security Committee data showing that ICE, with a workforce of 22,000, had 4,400 cameras, while CBP had “13,400 cameras for a workforce of at least 45,000 armed officers.” The 2026 budget bill had included $20 million for cameras, but “stops short of requiring officers to wear cameras, and some congressional aides and analysts said this week that the extra money is meaningless if the cameras are not mandatory,” Sacchetti wrote.

Secretary Noem pledged that all personnel in Minneapolis would begin wearing body cameras, and that the program would expand nationwide “as funding is available,” but did not specify a requirement that agents keep the cameras on during operations. In fact, Sacchetti recalled, the administration’s 2026 budget request to Congress had called for “massive cuts” to ICE’s body-worn camera program.

As of February 6, the probability of a DHS shutdown after February 13 is high. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, rejected the Democratic leadership’s 10-point reform proposal as “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), another appropriator, said he opposed Democrats’ demands that ICE be limited to judicial warrants to enter homes, and instead called for a ban on funding to “sanctuary cities.” Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana), another appropriator, told Migrant Insider, ”What I smell coming is a long, long shutdown for DHS.”

Courts consider mandatory detention and TPS

Mandatory detention

A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the more conservative components of the federal judiciary, heard oral arguments on February 3 in a case that is the most advanced challenge yet to a July 8, 2025 ICE memorequiring that all migrants who arrived in the United States by crossing the border illegally be detained, without bond, until their cases are adjudicated.

The memo, which makes millions of people vulnerable to detention, applies even to asylum seekers, many of whom have been detained at their hearings after living and working in the United States for months or years. Because the Supreme Court has barred the use of class-action lawsuits in immigration detention cases, the memo has led to a deluge of habeas corpus petitions—filings seeking the release of individual detainees—that is choking the federal court system. There have been more than 1,300 such filings in the federal court system’s Western District of Texas alone, El Paso Matters reported.

The panel of judges meeting in Houston “appeared split,” Bloomberg Law reported, “with Judge Dana Douglas [a Biden appointee] skeptical of the government’s view and Judge Edith Jones [Reagan] more inclined to support it. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan [Trump] also sat on the panel.”

The Trump administration is arguing that the law (Section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act) requires mandatory detentions. Arguing against the detention mandate, Michael Tan, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told the judges that this is a novel interpretation “that covers millions of people, and that somehow escaped everyone’s notice for the past 30 years.” Tan added that when the U.S. Congress passed the Laken Riley Act at the Trump administration’s urging last year, calling for mandatory detention of migrants accused of some crimes, it would have been doing something redundant if the law had truly required detentions already.

It is not clear when the appellate judges will issue a decision, but regardless of the outcome, an appeal to the Supreme Court is likely.

TPS for citizens of Venezuela

In California on January 28, three judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that DHS Secretary Noem acted unlawfully when she ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 600,000 citizens of Venezuela residing in the United States. TPS is a renewable status that allows noncitizens to live and work in the United States for 18 months when conditions in their home countries make it unsafe for them to return.

This was the first time an appeals court had ruled on the substance of the Trump administration’s terminations of prior TPS grants. The judges, a Clinton appointee and two Biden appointees, found that Secretary Noem’s “actions fundamentally contradict Congress’s statutory design, and her assertion of a raw, unchecked power to vacate a country’s TPS is irreconcilable with the plain language of the statute.”

In a concurring opinion, Judge Salvador Mendoza Jr. added, “I find it necessary to

address the ample evidence of racial and national origin animus in the record,

which reinforces the district court’s conclusion that the Secretary’s actions were

preordained and her reasoning pretextual.”

The ruling, however, does not allow Venezuelans in the United States to recover their protected status: the Supreme Court, in May and October, allowed the Trump administration to end TPS for Venezuelans while appeals were pending. “Now, the federal government could ask the full Ninth Circuit [not just a three-judge panel] to rehear the case, or it could appeal to the Supreme Court,” the New York Times explained.

TPS for citizens of Haiti

On February 2, hours before the Trump administration was to allow TPS to expire for about 350,000 Haitian nationals, Washington, DC District Judge Ana C. Reyes temporarily stayed the termination. Judge Reyes, a Biden appointee, arguedthat Secretary Noem acted unlawfully, violating TPS termination procedures and the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Reyes’s opinion found it “substantially likely” that Noem was motivated by “hostility to nonwhite immigrants,” noting a December 2025 tweet in which she called citizens of 19 nonwhite countries “leeches,” “entitlement junkies,” and “foreign invaders” who “suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars.”

“There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes’s opinion concluded.

If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that the Department plans to appeal the ruling. The decision provides at least a reprieve for Haitians in communities around the United States, who fear forced return to a nation convulsed by gang violence, political instability, and economic collapse.

  • In Springfield, Ohio, a town whose Haitian population was subjected to false and demonizing rhetoric by the Trump-Vance campaign in 2024, a planned surge in ICE enforcement operations has been postponed for now.
  • In Boca Raton, Florida, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported from a retirement home where residents—some of them Holocaust survivors—have asked if they can hide Haitian staff members in their apartments.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has sought to terminate TPS for citizens of Afghanistan (8,105 people), Burma (3,670, postponed), Cameroon (4,920), Ethiopia (4,540), Haiti (330,735, stayed), Honduras (51,225, vacated), Nepal (7,160, vacated), Nicaragua (2,910, vacated) Somalia (705), South Sudan (210, stayed), Syria (3,860, stayed), and Venezuela (605,015, see above). It remains in place for citizens of El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen.

Other News

  • Secretary Noem, who has been under fire following the killings in Minneapolis, was in Nogales on February 4 to announce a year of dramatically fewer encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol encountered 6,073 people at the border in January, the fourth straight month of decline, 405 fewer than in December and the third fewest of any of the past 12 months. That makes 85,877 Border Patrol apprehensions in the first 12 full months of the Trump administration. The last time a U.S. fiscal year recorded that few apprehensionswas 1967 (73,973). The yearly drop owes to the administration’s suspension of asylum and other policies discouraging migration. The monthly drop is likely seasonal, as migration often declines in winter.
  • An analysis from three law professors at Just Security disputed claims that the Trump administration should get credit for the drop in migration, noting that migration was increasing when Biden took office and was dropping before he left. At Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera disputed Secretary Noem’s claim that “This border has had zero people come into this country illegally in the last eleven months in a row,” recalling that “People are still crossing the border—hundreds a day. CBP’s own numbers affirm that.”
  • While CBP has not yet released detailed statistics for January, its release accompanying Noem’s visit to Nogales reported nationwide (not just U.S.-Mexico border) seizures of four drugs.
    • Fentanyl seizures (816 pounds) were 10 percent below the previous 12 months’ average.
    • Methamphetamine seizures (12,241 pounds) were 21 percent below the previous 12 months’ average.
    • Marijuana seizures (17,639 pounds) were 3 percent above the previous 12 months’ average.
    • Cocaine seizures (5,386 pounds) were 6 percent below the previous 12 months’ average—not a dramatic decline given that the Trump administration has carried out 34 attacks on boats suspected of carrying cocaine, killing at least 127 people.
  • During a January 26 meeting with President Trump, Noem reportedly “spoke at length” about the pace of border-wall construction, the Atlantic reported. An official said, “The president is pissed,” and internal DHS discussions have included the possibility of hiring a private management contractor to run the building project. The Washington Examiner noted that as of January 26, CBP had built 29.5 miles of border wall, “far ahead of where it was at the same point in” Trump’s first term. The agency is averaging two miles per week and intends to increase that to 10 miles per week.
  • The Defense Department announced the fifth and sixth “National Defense Areas,” usually 20-yard fringes of territory along the border that are now considered parts of military bases, allowing apprehended migrants to be charged with trespassing on military property. They are in southeastern California, making the entire California-Mexico borderline a National Defense Area, and in mid-Texas, from Del Rio to the Falcon Dam.
  • The New York Times’s Carol Rosenberg, who covers the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reported on the situation of about 50 Cuban men whom ICE took to the base in December. The men, some of them with active asylum cases and work permits, were told that they were being deported to Cuba, but ended up at Guantánamo, in the prison space used in the past to hold Al Qaeda suspects. It may be an effort to pressure the government of Cuba, which allows one repatriation flight per month, to permit more deportations.
  • The Trump administration is negotiating with the government of Argentina a deal to allow deportations of third-country nationals, “with the idea that from there they would potentially be offered flights to return to their home countries,” the New York Times reported. If it goes through, Argentina would join Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Paraguay on the list of Latin American countries that, in some form, have accepted U.S. deportations of third-country nationals during the Trump administration.
  • Border Patrol agents exchanged fire with a suspected migrant smuggler in the desert near Arivaca, Arizona, on January 28. Patrick Gary Schlegel allegedly shot at a Border Patrol helicopter following a pursuit, and an agent returned fire; he was hospitalized in critical condition. CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI, and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department are investigating.
  • Border Patrol apprehended a man from Mexico and a man from Ecuador dressed as construction workers as they sought to cross into the United States at a construction site along the border west of El Paso. Construction in the area includes detonations on the face of El Paso’s Mount Cristo Rey to enable new border wall segments.
  • In Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, the mayor is claiming a 25 percent drop in homicides over the 52 months since he took office. However, tariff and trade concerns have contributed to the loss of 67,000 jobs in the border city’s manufacturing sector, according to the National Association of Importers and Exporters of the Republic of Mexico (ANIERM). The organization has counted 143,000 job losses in Mexico’s border cities since August 2023.

Links: “mass deportation” and human rights in the U.S. interior

Minneapolis: Alex Pretti shot to death on January 24

The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez

With the Trump administration accusing local police of dereliction and some in the community feeling unprotected, outnumbered Minneapolis officers find themselves facing difficult choices

Using more than a dozen videos related to the shooting of Alex Pretti, The Times worked to establish what is called ground truth: what happened, how it happened and who might be responsible

Within minutes of the shooting, the Trump administration and right-wing influencers began disparaging the man shot by a federal immigration officer on Saturday in Minneapolis

The administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Alex Pretti, even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account

Minneapolis: a city besieged

Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol field leader, made disparaging remarks in reference to the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, an Orthodox Jew, people with knowledge of the phone call said

ICE agents can stop anyone they suspect of being undocumented. Now, residents are weighing their rights and their pride against their own safety

In the city where George Floyd was killed, Trump hastens a new social breakdown

President Trump and top administration officials, in trying to shift blame over two recent shootings, have mounted an array of arguments for the influx of federal agents

Federal agents began Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities late last year. After the deaths of two U.S. citizens, many residents say they feel overwhelmed

ICE has increased flights of immigrants detained in Minnesota to El Paso, data collected by advocates suggest as deportation flights in 2025 increased

With the Trump administration accusing local police of dereliction and some in the community feeling unprotected, outnumbered Minneapolis officers find themselves facing difficult choices

Minneapolis: Resistance

Feds stockpile 35,000 munitions in Minneapolis – but suddenly withdraw

Six weeks into the immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities, observers say federal agents are employing violence more frequently and with little apparent restraint against citizens and noncitizens

It’s impossible to ignore the administration’s blend of violent repression and overwhelming cringe

What ICE’s opponents are doing in Minnesota is part of a long and successful historical tradition: dissidence

Americans took to the streets to defend their neighbors in the nineteenth century, too

We built a guide to patches worn by ICE and CBP to help the public determine which federal agents are in their communities

What it takes to defend democracy from autocracy is suddenly crystal clear

We need to protect our right to carry cameras to document ICE’s violence

In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening

Minneapolis: Judicial and state government actions

This DOJ is no longer capable of doing its job

The Biden appointee finds the state’s legal case too weak to grant an injunction

The chin-out rhetoric of Democratic governors about holding Trump administration officials responsible for violence in their cities may be more political than practicable

Efforts to curtail federal law enforcement tactics began last year, but with the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democratic lawmakers are pushing harder

The civil rights law that has allowed lawsuits against local and state police doesn’t apply to federal agents

State and local prosecutions could produce deterrent effects that are so desperately needed now

It is far rarer and more difficult for state authorities to try to investigate federal law enforcement officials than the other way around

State officials have resorted to unconventional methods as they press forward with their own inquiries into the killings of Alex Jeffrey Pretti and Renee Good

Democratic lawmakers have few options that wouldn’t trigger something like civil war

Minneapolis: Bovino departure and partial drawdown

About 2,000 personnel will be left in Minnesota, where President Trump’s immigration crackdown has generated outrage

The White House border czar wants to focus more on getting immigrants already in jails. He’ll have to persuade Democrats to do it

Tom Homan, explained

After taking over federal immigration operations in Minnesota following the killing of two U.S. citizens, border policy advisor Tom Homan said street operations in the state would wind down if the agents are allowed into local jails

A year ago, Greg Bovino was the little-known head of a Border Patrol office in California. He rose quickly to become the face of Trump’s immigration policy

The White House is scapegoating Greg Bovino for killings in Minnesota. But Trump has spent years urging police brutality and mob violence

The most notable difference between Tom Homan and Greg Bovino is that Homan has deported a lot more people — and done it at a national scale

The news of Mr. Bovino’s impending departure came hours after President Trump sent his border czar, Tom Homan, to take control of ICE operations in the state

The departure of Gregory Bovino, whose tactics have drawn sharp criticism, is an indication that officials see Alex Pretti’s killing as a political threat to President Trump

The Border Patrol chief has been ousted from his role as “commander at large,” and will return to El Centro

Top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino and some of his agents are expected to leave Minneapolis on Tuesday and return to their respective sectors, according to three sources familiar the discussions, sidelining a key player in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown

Elsewhere in the U.S. interior

The Trump administration has claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But new documents make no mention of the gang and reveal federal agents had information about “illegal aliens unlawfully occupying apartments”

The former commander-at-large of Border Patrol, Gregory Bovino, clashed with other administration officials over immigration enforcement tactics months before fatal shootings in Minneapolis

The detainees’ lawsuit claims that their First Amendment rights are being violated

Mother whose visa application was pending says she will send girl back to US soon accompanied by another relative

The U.S. military role

More than 1,500 active-duty troops had been on standby to deploy to Minnesota, but were quietly taken off heightened alert over the weekend

A report from the Congressional Budget Office reveals the immense expenses of the Trump administration’s military occupations

ICE operations without warrants

The memo suggests the rules are designed to give ICE greater flexibility to quickly arrest unauthorized immigrants who are not the original targets of an operation

An internal memo changed the standard from whether people are unlikely to show up for hearings to whether they could leave the scene

The ruling in federal court in Minnesota lands as Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces scrutiny over an internal memo claiming judge-signed warrants aren’t needed to enter homes without consent

ICE defying court orders

A conversation with the law professor Ryan Goodman, who has been cataloguing the Trump Administration’s defiance of court orders since the start of the President’s second term

Judges across the country are fed up with the Trump administration’s refusal to follow orders requiring it to give bond hearings to detained immigrants

What’s less commonly understood is that the administration also carries these types of misrepresentations into judicial proceedings

The judge had ordered acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to appear in court Friday and explain why ICE was violating a court order related to the detainee’s case

Reported divisions within the administration

Even some Republicans have begun calling for the Homeland Security secretary’s resignation

Officials overseeing Trump’s mass-deportation campaign are fighting one another for power

The president’s decision to replace the leadership of his immigration enforcement efforts marks a triumph, at least temporarily, for a faction of administration officials that had been sidelined by some of his advisers

Kristi Noem’s aggressiveness has sometimes given President Trump heartburn. She got a rebuke after a second killing by federal immigration agents but soon seemed to be back in his good graces

Political fallout

The president has turned his biggest political asset into a liability

This is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing

As Homeland Security chair, the Kentucky Republican has significant power to shape Congress’ response to the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good

There is rising anxiety among Americans that the presence of an armed federal force in cities is actively making life less safe for people who live there

President Trump often blusters his way through a crisis, refusing to back down. Minneapolis tested the limits of that strategy

Outrage followed ‘would-be assassin’ lie but experts say architect of ICE drive too dominant a figure to be shunned

Voters still want a secure border but reject ICE’s inner-city tactics nowhere near the Mexican border

Top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino and some of his agents are expected to leave Minneapolis on Tuesday and return to their respective sectors, according to three sources familiar the discussions, sidelining a key player in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown

Mass deportation and U.S. democracy

Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be

Face coverings may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to make it easier for them to do unconstitutional things

Trump can’t legally force “sanctuary” cities to help ICE. So he flooded Minneapolis with federal agents. Here’s what comes next

The anti-government militia leader can’t make sense of his allies’ support for ICE violence

Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse gunned down by federal agents, represents one set of values. Gregory Bovino, who until a few days ago commanded federal agents in Minneapolis, represents a different set

Effort to manipulate killing of Alex Pretti collapsed after footage torpedoed ‘domestic terrorist’ claim – could this be a turning point?

The broken relationship between Minnesota and the federal government

The Minnesota Democrat on the battle between his city and the federal government

The state is in a standoff with the federal government over who has the power to investigate the killing of protesters. It’s not a fair fight

In Minnesota, I saw scenes that reminded me of the chaos and violence in civil wars I’ve covered in other countries

Masks have become the central symbol of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement wilding sprees across America in 2025. They are emblems of a secret police

It’s worth exploring what those are and how the administration’s use of ICE compares with the ways paramilitaries have been deployed in other countries

Scenes from the violent unrest in Minneapolis played on a loop in many American households over the weekend, prompting reflection about where the nation is heading

Technology and civil liberties

Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said

Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine asked the inspector general of the DHS about a host of surveillance technologies, including Flock, mobile phone spyware, and location data.

Immigration policy

These bureaucratic maneuvers are making it harder for immigrants to work, learn, and live in the United States

A Republican member of Congress argues that neither Biden nor Trump had the right solution on immigration

New census estimates show the effects of falling birthrates and President Trump’s anti-immigration policies. As his term continues, immigration is expected to drop even further



Adam Isacson (he/him), Director for Defense Oversight
WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas (www.wola.org)
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