Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: August 8, 2025
Adam Isacson
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: August 8, 2025
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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Border Updates are back, for now, following weeks of staff travel. (See dispatches from Honduras, Guatemala, and Tapachula, Mexico; another from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico is coming shortly.) WOLA will publish another update on August 15, then pause again for two weeks of staff vacation. We will resume a regular schedule on September 5.
THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- Freed Venezuelan men tell of what they endured in El Salvador: Following their July 18 release after four months’ captivity in El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, some of the 252 Venezuelan migrants whom the U.S. government sent there have given harrowing testimonies of the systematic abuse, torture, and inhumane conditions they suffered. The extremity of the cruelty is more than expected given the very high international profile of their case and the direct role of the U.S. government, including a $6 million payment from the Trump administration.
- Notes on “mass deportation”: Flush with resources from the “big bill” that Congress approved in early July, the Trump administration is pursuing a host of operations and initiatives to step up arrests, detentions, and deportations of migrants from the U.S. interior. The administration appears to be backing away—for now—from a 3,000 arrest-per-day “quota,” even as reports point to a dramatically worsening human rights situation in the nation’s opaque network of ICE detention facilities.
- In the courts: An appeals court partially overturned the Trump administration’s January 20 ban on asylum access at the border. A district court halted expedited removals of migrants who came to the United States with Biden-era grants of humanitarian parole. An appeals court upheld a ban on “roving” immigration raids and evident racial profiling in Los Angeles. A district court stopped the administration, for now, from ending Temporary Protected Status for some citizens of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal.
- Notes from Mexico: A caravan formed in Tapachula with an apparent goal of reaching Mexico City. Reports discussed non-Mexican migrants’ struggle to start new lives in Mexico after being stranded by the Trump administration’s measures. Scholars discussed the daily lives of smugglers, including children, in Ciudad Juárez while the already tense security situation grew more severe in Reynosa.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Freed Venezuelan men tell of what they endured in El Salvador
In the weeks since their July 18 release after four months’ captivity in El Salvador’s Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) mega-prison, some of the 252 Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration sent there have been sharing their stories with U.S. media outlets. What they have revealed about the abuses they suffered there is more serious and alarming than expected, given the very high international profile that their cases received and the financial support that the U.S. government provided El Salvador for holding them in the prison.
Reporters from the Washington Post spoke with 16 of the former captives who are now home in Venezuela following a prisoner swap that released 10 U.S. citizens from Venezuelan jails. A team from ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News talked to nine of the men.
Their matching accounts reported systematic abuse, torture, and inhumane conditions at the CECOT, some fitting well within the definition of crimes against humanity. Former detainees described constant beatings, sexual assault, denial of medical care, and torture in an isolation cell known as “La Isla.” They reported overcrowding, 24-hour lighting, exposure to feces, and psychological torment, such as being told they would only ever leave the prison “in a black bag.”
The violent treatment began as soon as the men arrived in San Salvador aboard three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor planes on March 15. An ICE agent aboard a plane appeared to cheer the brutality.ProPublica reported:
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point.
As depicted in an initial video that the Salvadoran government shared on social media, guards forced the shackled men to run from the planes to waiting buses, and then to the prison. One prisoner told ProPublica that “the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way.” Frengel Reyes, who ICE had detained in Florida, told local public radio that “he was kicked in the ribs and saw others being kicked in the face. He said he still feels the pain in his abdomen months later.”
Upon their arrival at the CECOT, the facility’s director addressed the men. The Washington Post reported:
Here, the director said, the men would have no rights—no right to a lawyer, no access to the sun. They would not eat chicken or meat for the rest of their lives.
“The only way that you will leave,” he said, according to multiple detainees, “is inside a black bag.”
The guards’ beatings, ProPublica reported, “were random, severe, and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets.”
Florida Public Radio added:
Every morning, guards woke the prisoners at about 3 or 4 o’clock, he [Frengel Reyes] said, and made them kneel on the floor for hours. The food made people sick, but they were beaten if they didn’t finish their meals, he said.
“You were beaten for practically everything,” Reyes said.
Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas, who had Temporary Protected Status when ICE detained him, told the Washington Post that medical personnel were no help. “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile,” Basulto said. “It was the most perverse form of humiliation.”
Andry Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist whose case received the most attention during the men’s four months in captivity, told the Washington Post of sexual abuse at the hands of the CECOT guards.
Disobeying rules proved costly. When Hernández’s head ached from the heat, he tried to cool down by bathing. He forgot to tell his friends to watch for guards.
“Get up, piece of sh–,” an officer told him, he said. He was taken to La Isla, where a tiny hole in the ceiling provided only a needle of light and almost no air.
Four men entered and began touching him with their clubs and putting them between his legs. One forced Hernández to perform oral sex on him, he said.
“If that’s how they treated us, knowing we were just migrants, I don’t even want to imagine how they treat the regular inmates—the ones who’ve actually committed crimes,” Hernández told the Guardian. “President Donald Trump and President Nayib Bukele must face the consequences of everything we went through in that prison. International authorities need to take action.”
(Hernández appeared poised and positive in a 15-minute interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, posted on August 7. “We entered as 252 strangers, and left as 252 brothers,” Hernández said of his fellow former prisoners.)
U.S. State Department spokesperson Natalia Molano sought to deny any U.S. government responsibility for what happened to the men that it handed over to the Salvadoran government, paying it $6 million to help fund their captivity. ProPublica reported, “If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, ‘the United States is not involved in the conversation.’”
“An international panel is preparing a report on El Salvador and investigating whether any of those crimes were committed,” the Washington Post noted, quoting the view of veteran human rights lawyer Santiago Cantón, a member of the panel, that “there are reasonable grounds for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.”
Underscoring the recklessness of the Trump administration’s handling of the entire matter, the New York Times reportedon the State Department’s discovery that one of the ten men whom it had requested Venezuela to release was wanted in Spain for committing a 2016 triple murder. Dahud Hanid Ortiz appeared smiling in a photo with a U.S. diplomat, holding a U.S. flag along with the other released captives. The Times revealed an email in which Michael Kozak, the career diplomat currently running the State Department’s Western Hemisphere Bureau, wrote, “Well then we probably should not have asked for him. Can we now extradite him to Spain? We did get the S.O.B. released.”
Notes on “mass deportation”
Maybe not 3,000 per day after all
Citing recent court filings, Politico noted that the Trump administration appears to be backing away from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest at least 3,000 migrants per day in the U.S. interior. Miller had been widely reported as issuing that order in a late May meeting, and repeated the number shortly afterward in a Fox News interview. In subsequent weeks, ICE operations intensified around the country, and agents began arresting far more undocumented people without criminal records.
According to a Justice Department attorney’s statement to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “has confirmed that neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law.”
Overall ICE arrest numbers and locations
ICE told the Washington Examiner that agents arrested 149,084 people in the U.S. interior between January 1 and late July, “including nearly 50,000 over the past eight weeks.” Arrests have risen steadily “to 25,645 in May, 34,962 in June, and 19,763 as of mid-July.”
If ICE maintains that roughly 1,100-per-day pace through the second half of 2025, it will end the year with nearly 350,000 arrests, which could be a record for arrests of noncitizens in the U.S. interior.
CBS News reported that citizens of Mexico are the nationality most frequently arrested, making up nearly 40,000 of those taken into the agency’s custody. “Nationals of Guatemala and Honduras followed with around 15,000 and 12,000, respectively. Nearly 8,000 were citizens of Venezuela and over 5,000 of El Salvador.”
Arrests are still happening most frequently in states where local police forces cooperate closely with ICE: nearly a quarter of arrests between January 20 and June 27 occurred in Texas and another 11 percent in Florida, followed by 7 percent in California, 4 percent in Georgia, and 3 percent in Arizona.
The New York Times reported that ICE removals (as distinguished from arrests) of noncitizens from the United States are happening at an even faster pace, “averaging almost 1,300 daily removals in the two weeks ending July 26.” If that pace sustains through January, the first year of the Trump administration could see the most removals (about 380,000) since 2012, when Barack Obama was president.
Family separation
The New York Times uncovered at least nine cases in which the Trump administration has revived the practice of family separation—not at the border as in 2018, but within the United States—as a coercive measure to pressure asylum-seeking families to accept deportation orders. Reporter Hamed Aleaziz narrated the terrible dilemma faced by a Russian family who remain detained while their eight-year-old son is now in foster care because they feared being sent back to Moscow.
“I’m not aware of ICE previously using family separation as a consequence for failure to comply” with deportation orders Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official, told the Times.
Sen. Ossoff reports on detention abuses
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) released a report, covered by NBC News, claiming that his office has
received or identified 510 credible reports of human rights abuse against individuals held in Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and Health and Human Services (HHS) facilities, county jails, and federal buildings across 25 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, at U.S. military bases (including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti), and on chartered deportation flights.
These abuses include “41 credible reports of physical and sexual abuse of individuals in U.S. immigration detention, 14 credible reports of mistreatment of pregnant women, and 18 credible reports of mistreatment of children.” Some of the most serious allegations center on mistreatment of pregnant women in custody, including “not receiving urgent care when needed” even when complications occur, “being denied snacks and adequate meals, and being forced to sleep on the floor due to overcrowding.”
In an analysis of the big increase in ICE’s budget resulting from the giant spending bill passed in early July, Caitlin Dickerson of the Atlantic observed that the bill also puts in place a very low cap (800) on the number of immigration judges available to hear cases. As that will increase backlogs and slow adjudication, Dickerson observed, it is very likely to further inflate the population in ICE detention. “They’re not really serious about getting rid of as many people as they can. They’re serious about causing human pain and suffering,” a former high-level ICE official told Dickerson. “Putting someone into detention isn’t a removal, it’s a punishment.”
Fort Bliss
The Trump administration plans to detain its first 1,000 migrants by August 17 in a large tent facility known as “Camp East Montana” at Fort Bliss, the sprawling U.S. Army base near El Paso, Texas. The first people arrived on August 1.
The site’s capacity may expand to 5,000 detention beds; it will be used “to help ‘decompress ICE detention facilities in other regions’ and will serve as a short-term processing center,” the Guardian reported. The El Paso Times posted aerial images of what appears to be a very spartan site with rows of white tents. It may be the first of several “soft-sided facilities” housing migrants around the United States, Mother Jones reported.
The Florida detention “model”
Mother Jones noted that the tent facility that Florida’s state government is managing in the Everglades “was holding about 900 immigrants in July and could have capacity to detain thousands more by the end of August.”
“We know of detainees who have been held at Alligator Alcatraz for nearly a month now without having the opportunity to not only meet with their lawyers, but also with an immigration officer or judge,” the Miami New Times reported. “Detainees say their arrival dates are being falsified, reportedly altered when their wristbands are scanned, to hide the fact they’ve been held longer than the 14-day legal limit.”
A guard who was making $26 per hour until she was fired after contracting COVID told a Florida NBC News affiliate that each tent at the Everglades facility includes “eight large cages, which hold 35 to 38 inmates, which means each tent holds close to 300 detainees… ‘They have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days’” and “The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”
U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz, a Trump appointee, ordered the Florida state and federal governments to produce legal agreements explaining how Florida’s state government has the authority to hold migrants with federal immigration cases, and clarifying who has legal custody over those detained at the facility.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told CBS News that she expects the state-run Everglades facility to “serve as a model for state-run migrant detention centers,” with potential new sites “already under consideration in Arizona, Nebraska, and Louisiana.”
CBS noted that the Florida facility, when full, will cost about $245 per detainee per day, while “according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, the estimated average daily cost of detaining an adult migrant in fiscal year 2024 was about $165.”
Talking Points Memo reported that 94 pages of contracts issued to companies providing services for the Everglades facility were taken down from a state website and replaced with brief summaries, in apparent violation of state transparency laws.
Street arrests and profiling
A data analysis by the Cato Institute’s David Bier concluded that “one in five ICE arrests is a Latin American on the streets without a criminal history or a removal order.” There have been about 15,000 street arrests of people who had no prior contact with law enforcement, occurring in “non-specific” areas, between January and June, which Bier called “the telltale sign of illegal profiling.” Seven thousand of those arrests happened in June alone, and 90 percent were citizens of Latin American nations.
Bonuses for fast deportations
The New York Times reported that on August 5 ICE issued, then withdrew, an internal email offering $200 cash bonuses “for each immigrant deported within seven days of being arrested and $100 for those deported within two weeks.” The article noted that “the email canceling the program was sent shortly after The New York Times inquired about its existence.”
Big bill spending
Dickerson’s Atlantic analysis of the massive ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spending in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” noted a strong likelihood that large amounts of money could be misspent: “The bill placed few guardrails on ICE or Customs and Border Protection—both of which have a history of financial mismanagement—and dedicated no money to oversight.”
Former officials told Bloomberg Government’s Ellen Gilmer of “a serious risk of spending boondoggles” resulting from the bill, even as DHS plans to spend a whopping $44 billion or so during the 2026 fiscal year that starts on October 1.
Of companies getting contracts, former Obama-era CBP commissioner Gil Kerlikowske asked, “Are they capable, or have they shown the proper genuflection to Trump? That seems to drive a lot of the contracts.” Chris Cummiskey, DHS’s under secretary for management during the Obama administration, voiced concern that no Senate-confirmed officials are in his former position or that of chief financial officer at DHS, which significantly weakens “quality controls for the department’s acquisitions.”
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), told Gilmer that DHS is stonewalling his efforts to provide even basic oversight: “We have a real hard time getting the department to respond to any of our inquiries. I don’t know if that’s always the case when Republicans are asking, but they seem pretty dismissive of oversight attempts generally.”
Arizona wants BBB money
The “Big Bill” provides $12 billion to reimburse states (mainly Texas) for expenses they incurred to harden the border and deter migrants during the Biden administration. The Democratic governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, is also seeking$760 million in funds from this provision, much of it to reimburse spending by her predecessor, Republican Doug Ducey, who built—and was forced by a court to take down—a “wall” made from shipping containers.
National Guard support for ICE
The Defense Department revealed on July 24 that it is deploying 1,700 National Guard personnel—a 500-person increase over an existing 1,200-person contingent—to support ICE with back-office tasks. These include “case management, transportation and logistical support, and clerical support for the in- and out-processing” of arrested migrants. A defense official told the Arizona Republic that processing migrants includes soldiers “taking DNA swabs, photographs, and fingerprints of people held at ICE facilities.”
The National Guard personnel—soldiers working under the command of state governors—may operate in as many as 21 states with Republican governors. In Florida, they will replace 200 Marines who have been supporting ICE there since early July.
FEMA detailees
Some recently hired employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, part of DHS) received emails on August 5 informing them that DHS has reassigned them to ICE. If they do not accept the assignments, as “probationary employees” with less than a year’s tenure, they may be fired from the civil service, the American Prospect reported.
Witness at the Border report on ICE flights
“In July there were 207 removal flights, just under 209 in June which was the highest level since I started recording in January 2020,” reads the latest monthly report on ICE deportation flights from Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border. “Removal flights totaled 606 over the past 3 months, up 167 (38%) over the same period in 2024, and July was 58 (39%) above the prior 6-month average.”
Guatemala once again was the number one destination of deportation flights, with 54 planes in July, followed by Honduras (49), El Salvador (22), and Mexico (17—all to the country’s two southernmost states).
Attempted expedited removal of a 29-year resident
A Guatemalan mother of three U.S. citizen children, who has been in the United States since 1996, is in court fighting a DHS effort to remove her without an immigration court hearing using “expedited removal,” a rapid procedure meant for individuals who have been in the United States for less than two years. Mirta Amarilis Co Tupul’s lawyers told the Los Angeles Times that “they provided extensive evidence of her longtime residence and were told she would remain in expedited removal proceedings anyway.”
Third-country deportations
“The Trump administration says that some serious criminals need to be deported to third countries because even their home countries won’t accept them,” reported Reuters, whose reporters Kristina Cooke and Ted Hesson reviewed recent cases and found that in fact, at least five people recently removed to third countries ended up being sent to their native countries “within weeks.” U.S. law states that third-country removals should only happen when removal to the individual’s country of citizenship is “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible.”
Costa Rica deal
Reuters revealed a State Department notification to Congress indicating that the Department is giving Costa Rica’s government $7.85 million from a development aid account to help the Central American nation deport migrants. The grant apparently intends to help Costa Rica deport U.S.-bound migrants passing through the country, rather than help the nation serve as a stopping point for third-country migrants en route to their home countries, as the Trump administration sought to do in February.
Very few northbound people are passing through Costa Rica right now: just to the south, Panama’s government counted10 people emerging from the Darién Gap in June and 7 in July.
Guatemalans in the U.S. cite “terror”
“These are moments of terror. I have never seen anything like this in the 46 years I have lived in the US,” Miami-based Marlon González, leader of the Misión Guatemala-USA association, told the daily La Hora. “This was a place where free speech was valued and protected; now, that freedom is being lost and rights are absent,” Guatemalan activist Ben Monterroso, who has lived in California for 48 years, told the daily Prensa Libre.
Lewandowski at DHS
CNN reported that Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump political operative who ran the President’s 2016 campaign for a time, is exercising heavy influence over DHS as an advisor to Secretary Kristi Noem. Although he is a “special government employee” meant to serve for just a few months, Lewandowski is “the de facto chief of staff in the department. Everyone is terrified of him because he has almost singular authority to fire people,” a source told the network. “When he wants to kill a proposal, he’s been known to scrawl ‘Denied’ or ‘No’ across documents in thick Sharpie, leaving no doubt about who truly holds the reins.”
ICE media campaign
A 404 Media review of contracting records reveals that ICE “is urgently looking for a company to help it ‘dominate’ digital media channels” as the agency, flush with funding from the “big bill,” embarks on a massive recruitment drive. Documents indicate that ICE seeks to advertise heavily on social media platforms and streaming services, targeting “former military and law enforcement personnel, legal professionals, and ‘Gen Z and early-career professionals.’” 404notes that a week ago, ICE said that it had already made 1,000 “tentative” job offers—pending background checks and other steps—since July 4.
Asylum seekers giving up cases and choosing removal
At Capital and Main, Kate Morrissey reported that DHS is scaring many migrants into giving up legitimate asylum claims with the threat of long-term detention amid miserable conditions. “The officers make people afraid and stressed by telling them that they’ll be in there for a year,” said a man recently released from the San Diego-area Otay Mesa Detention Center.
“I get messages all the time now from migrants who have upcoming court dates who are terrified to go to court,” Father Brian Strassberger, a priest based in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley who (among other duties) co-hosts the Jesuit Border Podcast, told PBS NewsHour.
Secretary Noem told CBS News that during a meeting back in March, she asked Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum “how many people may have come back to Mexico that we may not know about.” Sheinbaum, Noem said, responded that “500,000 to 600,000 people have come back to Mexico voluntarily since President Trump’s been in office.” In Ecuador a week ago, Noem said that President Daniel Noboa estimated 100,000 voluntary returnees. While voluntary returns are indeed happening, both figures appear to be wildly inflated.
Public opinion
“About a year into the first Trump term, the politics of immigration turned on the Administration’s extraordinary cruelty in its treatment of undocumented children, thousands of whom were separated from their parents while in detention,” wrote Benjamin Wallace-Wells at the New Yorker. “This time, the issue might hinge on the increasingly deep cuts that ICE operations are making in American communities—the way they’re drifting away from the worst of the worst, or even from people with criminal records, to meet their numbers.”
In the courts
Asylum ban partially overturned
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld a district court’s July 2 decision overturning a January 20 White House executive order that, citing an “invasion” of migrants, had shut down the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border and required all undocumented people to be returned. In their unanimous decision, however, the three judges (two Obama appointees and one Trump appointee) scaled back the earlier ruling: the ability to apply for asylum has not been restored, but people who claim fear of return to their countries may still qualify for “withholding of removal” or Convention Against Torture protections.
This means that CBP personnel “have been directed to stop deporting migrants under President Trump’s ban on asylum claims.” Those who claim fear at the border are still likely to be placed in expedited removal—a process that usually involves a rapid screening interview with an asylum officer while still in CBP custody—and, if they pass credible fear screenings, kept in detention while their asylum claims are adjudicated. Still, there could be a trickle of releases from CBP custody in coming weeks.
Courts have yet to decide the merits of the case, including the legitimacy of claiming that migrant arrivals constitute an “invasion” worthy of invoking emergency powers that supersede immigration law. Both sides in the ongoing litigation are to file briefs by September 26.
Expedited deportations of parolees
A district court judge in Washington, DC temporarily paused the administration’s effort to apply expedited removal to migrants to whom the Biden administration had granted humanitarian parole. The Trump administration had revoked this temporary status for as many as 1.5 million people who entered at the U.S.-Mexico border with CBP One appointments or who had taken advantage of a special program for 30,000 citizens per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Judge Jia Cobb’s order, CBS News reported, could at least partially halt the Trump administration’s practice of closing some migrants’ immigration court cases so that ICE agents might detain them in the courthouse corridors.
L.A. raids
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals mostly upheld a lower court’s restraining order halting DHS’s “roving” immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, agreeing that CBP, ICE, and other agents could not detain people based on, as CBS Newsput it, “people’s race or ethnicity, the fact that they speak Spanish or have an accent, their presence in a location, or their occupation.” A hearing for a preliminary injunction, a stronger measure halting “profiling” as the lawsuit moves through courts, is scheduled for September.
On August 6, Border Patrol agents in Los Angeles carried out an operation that appeared to defy this court order. A Penske rental truck pulled into a Home Depot parking lot in the Westlake neighborhood. As its driver told would-be day laborers that he had work to offer, agents burst out of the back of the truck and began chasing people, capturing about a dozen. In a statement, the Penske rental company said that it did not authorize this use of its vehicles, which includes a prohibition on transporting people in trucks’ cargo areas, and would raise the issue with DHS.
TPS for Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal
A district court judge in California temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for tens of thousands of citizens of Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua. If San Francisco Judge Trina Thompson’s order is upheld, people from those countries—the Central Americans have been here for a quarter century—will be able to remain at least through November 18, when she has scheduled a merits hearing for an ongoing lawsuit challenging the TPS cancellation.
Catholic Charities
A Texas state appeals court ruled that Sr. Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which manages a shelter for released migrants in McAllen, does not have to give a deposition to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), who along with Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has accused migrant aid organizations of “planning and assisting illegal border crossings into Texas.” In fact, shelters like Catholic Charities gave CBP and Border Patrol a place to take released asylum seekers so that they would not end up homeless on border cities’ streets.
Notes from Mexico
WOLA/WRC Tapachula dispatch
Staff from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission traveled to several places in Latin America where the Trump administration has stepped up deportation flights, to find out what is possible to learn about migrants’ treatment in U.S. custody. We have published “dispatches” from our visits to Honduras, Guatemala, and Tapachula, Mexico. A post from Ciudad Juárez will be up soon.
In Central America, we heard of mounting problems with family separations, mistreatment of pregnant and lactating women, non-return of large amounts of personal valuables, and abuses of trans women. In Mexico, it is more difficult to get information because the Mexican government limits monitors’ access to returned migrants, and the security climate poses a vexing challenge.
Caravan and Villagran arrest in Tapachula
A “caravan” of about 300 migrants departed Tapachula, in Chiapas state near the border with Guatemala, on August 6. Traveling on foot, the participants, from several countries, do not intend to reach the United States, the Associated Pressreported. Their goal is no longer to be stranded in the poor southern Mexican city and to relocate elsewhere in Mexico, like Mexico City. They also seek to pressure the Mexican government’s migration and refugee agencies, which are battered by budget cuts, to attend to their cases.
Mexico’s prosecutor-general’s office (FGR) ordered the August 5 arrest of Luis García Villagrán, an activist who has accompanied and helped organize many past “caravans.” García Villagrán had been vocally denouncing corruption within Mexico’s immigration force (National Migration Institute, INM) and refugee agency (Mexican Refugee Aid Commission, COMAR), including a formal complaint filed with the FGR on June 23.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said that an arrest order for García Villagrán had been pending for years, telling reporters that he is “not an activist” and stands accused of profiting from migrant smuggling. The AP cited a statement from the FGR and the security forces alleging that the activist obtained false documents allowing northbound migrants to cross Mexico.
Migrants stranded in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez
Spain’s El País reported on migrants continuing to struggle to settle in Mexico now that the Trump administration’s border asylum access shutdown, and general climate of fear in the U.S. migrant community, have made the United States less of a destination. The director of a shelter run by Mexico City’s government estimated that about 5,000 mostly Latin American migrants are living in the capital today, in one of 15 shelters or in private dwellings in poor neighborhoods. Several hundred, or more, had been living in encampments in public parks, which the city’s government dismantled.
In Ciudad Juárez, an unknown number of non-Mexican migrants have mostly moved out of the city’s shelters, which are at about 10 percent occupancy. (WOLA and WRC heard “less than 30 percent” on a visit to the city last week.) Many of them “live crowded in rented housing awaiting some change in U.S. immigration laws; others have already settled there with the idea of remaining in Mexico.”
The U.S. government deported Mexican citizens to Mexico 70,316 times during the first half of 2025, according to newly updated Mexico government data. That is down from 102,217 during the first half of 2024—but the number of deported Mexican citizens who were arrested in the U.S. interior after living there for years, rather than recent border crossers, is doubtlessly far greater this year.
Smuggling and children in Anapra, Ciudad Juárez
Norte reported on the research of Martha Aurelia Dena Ornelas of the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, who interviewed convicted migrant smugglers at a Ciudad Juárez prison. In the city’s poor western neighborhood of Anapra, across from New Mexico, many young people “don’t finish high school, and they turn to human trafficking because that’s what people do there. There is no other context, they don’t leave, they always live there, and they will always do that.”
El País reported on the work of Georgetown University researcher Gabriella Sánchez, who has investigated the so-called “circuit children” (niños de circuito) in Ciudad Juárez, whom organized crime employs for cross-border tasks like guiding migrants because, as minors, they will be returned to Mexico instead of sent into the U.S. criminal justice system.
Like the smugglers in Anapra, their lives often involve “dropping out of school, being recruited by smugglers, and seeing this way of life as being the only viable economic possibility… A teenager can earn about $100 in a single crossing. Sometimes, even more.” Some are also participating in ransom kidnappings in Ciudad Juárez.
Remittances
Mexico’s national bank (Banxico) reported a 6 percent year-to-date drop in remittances sent from people in the United States to Mexico. Remittances in June ($5.2 billion, the third monthly decrease in a row) were 16 percent below June 2024, Border Report reported.
Sonora border division
The governor of Mexico’s state of Sonora, which borders Arizona and New Mexico, inaugurated a “Border Operations Division” of the state’s security forces. Milenio reported that the unit “will operate from bases in Sonoyta and Agua Prieta, reinforcing actions in San Luis Río Colorado and Nogales to cover the state’s main access points… with the goal of protecting the border through intelligence, technology, and coordination.” The Division received training from CBP, according to the U.S. consul in Sonora’s capital, Hermosillo.
Drug trade shifts
A Texas Observer study of U.S. counter-fentanyl strategy finds it to be too focused on border seizures and unable to keep up with cartels’ rapid adaptation. “The drug war is less centered on tunnels or border fences and more on encrypted communication, synthetic chemicals, and financial systems that remain poorly regulated,” wrote author Angeles Ponpa.
Security in Reynosa
In the often violent Mexican border city of Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen and Hidalgo, Texas, gunmen assassinated Ernesto Cuitláhuac Vázquez, the FGR delegate to Tamaulipas state, in broad daylight on one of the city’s main avenues.
While almost certainly an organized crime hit, likely in retaliation for a recent crackdown on lucrative illegal fuel smuggling, it is not clear which of the criminal groups contesting control of Reynosa carried it out. Milenio, citing InsightCrime, noted that two splinter factions of the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel and a Nuevo Laredo-based faction of the Zetas Cartel have been fighting in this part of Mexico’s border region for some time. However, the newspaper cited a Mexican Army document claiming that by early 2024, the ever more powerful and violent Jalisco Cartel had aligned with one of the Gulf Cartel factions and become the strongest force in the city.
Border stations in Tamaulipas
The government of Mexico plans to build 15 so-called “safe stations” (Estaciones Seguras)—sites hosting security forces in areas of known high crime rates—along the border in Tamaulipas. However, “only four of the fifteen required sites have been secured so far,” Elefante Blanco reported, because the government has had trouble acquiring land for them.
Other news
- The organization No More Deaths has published a map and database of known deaths of migrants in the border zone between 2002 and April 2025. It is the only source that combines CBP’s count of migrant remains—generally agreed to be an undercount—with data from medical examiners and local law enforcement. It totals 12,926 known cases in the United States and 1,111 in Mexico.
- At Rolling Stone, reporter Lillian Perlmutter documented the death of Ada Guadalupe López Montoya, a Salvadoran woman who perished crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico just west of El Paso. Hers is one of over 500 cases of human remains found in a 25-square-mile patch of desert near Sunland Park, New Mexico—within walking distance of services, not a remote wilderness—since 2022. Ms. López’s remains remained out in the desert, “sitting in the dust” unrecovered, for three months after volunteer humanitarian workers found them in August 2024.
- CBP announced that Border Patrol agents apprehended just 4,598 people at the U.S.-Mexico border in July, with just 88 apprehensions border-wide on July 20. That is the lowest monthly total so far this year, and appears to be the fewest in a month since 1965, when apprehensions for the year averaged 4,369 per month.
- Border Report revealed that the chief of the agency’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in south Texas, Gloria Chávez, was abruptly replaced. “This came after reports that veteran Chávez was escorted from the Edinburg headquarters of the RGV Sector less than three years after she took command.” The media outlet cited a CBP statement with references to “disciplinary actions” and “misconduct.” One of the agency’s most senior officials with over 30 years of experience, Chávez had earlier headed Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector.
- CBP is seeking to re-hire Border Patrol agents who retired between July 2020 and July 2024, Border Report noted. “CBP is indicating that retirees who return may be able to receive full retirement and full salary at the same time,” which is unusual and requires a waiver.
- The Defense Department has officially designated a “National Defense Area” covering 32 miles of the border near Yuma, Arizona. This strip of federal property closely following the border is, for now, considered U.S. military property—part of Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, itself part of Arizona’s Barry Goldwater military complex. Those who set foot in the area, particularly migrants, risk being criminally charged with trespassing on a U.S. military installation. As in other “National Defense Areas” in New Mexico, west Texas, and south Texas, armed forces members’ duties in this piece of U.S. soil include “patrolling, temporary detention of unauthorized personnel, maintenance, construction, and upgrade of existing and planned border barrier.”
- CBS News accompanied military units operating along the border in Arizona and found that they do not have much to do besides laying down concertina wire and carrying out patrols and surveillance. A sergeant said that in the past three months, her unit has “seen just four people” but “a lot of animals.”
- The New York Times, drawing from a July report by the Center for Biological Diversity, explained the threat to wildlife habitat and migration posed by the Trump administration’s plan to build 25 miles of wall through Arizona’s San Rafael Valley and Patagonia and Huachuca Mountains. The sheriff of Santa Cruz County, which includes Nogales and part of the valley, said “illegal crossings [of migrants] were practically unheard-of in the area.”
- Border Report noted that the Trump administration is increasing the height of seven miles of border-wall bollards, formerly six feet tall, built along levees near the Rio Grande in south Texas during the Biden administration.
- At the American Prospect, James Baratta reported on the “panopticon effect” that “nearly ubiquitous surveillance,” such as “autonomous surveillance towers, drones, spy blimps, license plate readers, and motion-activated cameras,” is having on border residents. “They’re scanning the whole community and… zooming in on just regular day-to-day people going about their life,” said Santa Cruz, Arizona County Sheriff David Hathaway (also cited in the New York Times border wall story linked two paragraps above).
- 404 Media reported that ICE is planning to buy facial recognition technology, including a package that identifies people by the irises of their eyes, for its deportation agents in the field. The Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System (MORIS) and Inmate Recognition and Identification System (IRIS) are both made by Massachusetts-based BI2 Technologies.