Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: January 9, 2026

[Adam Isacson]

https://www.wola.org/2026/01/u-s-mexico-border-update-venezuelan-migration-notes-from-mexico-border-barriers/

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: January 9, 2026

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

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• Venezuelan Migrants’ Plight Little Changed by U.S. Military Intervention: As the rest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s regime remains in power, the January 3 U.S. military operation that extracted him makes little difference, for now, to the reality faced by Venezuelan migrants, including those in the United States who have borne the brunt of Trump administration policies ranging from TPS and humanitarian parole cancellations to travel bans to invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Still, DHS messaging is encouraging Venezuelans to return.
• Notes from Mexico: Links to reports discussing smuggling trends, the situation of non-Mexican migrants now living in Tapachula and Nogales, and the impact of SpaceX launches on a Mexican village at the border’s easternmost point.
• Notes About Border Barriers: What could be 500 miles of buoy barriers have begun installation in the Rio Grande in Brownsville. San Diego is suing the federal government for laying concertina wire on city property. More than 400 people fell from the border wall in 2025. Environmental defense groups warn of significant harm from border wall construction in Arizona.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Venezuelan Migrants’ Plight Little Changed by U.S. Military Intervention

Venezuelan citizens living in the United States and elsewhere are voicing cautious optimism in the aftermath of the January 3 U.S. military operation that extracted the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. Few are making plans to return, however, since the remainder of Maduro’s regime is still in power and apparently working with the Trump administration. “Most of my clients were very, very happy in the immediate aftermath, but are now concerned you’re going to have the same group of individuals in power in Venezuela,” Helena Tetzeli, a Miami-based immigration attorney with around 100 Venezuelan clients, told CNN.

The uncertain current moment affects nearly 8 million Venezuelan citizens (about a quarter of the country’s population) who have fled their country since the mid-2010s. Venezuelan people entered Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody at the U.S.-Mexico border 831,473 times since 2020, and about 6.91 million are living elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the UNHCR/IOM Regional Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V). Hundreds of thousands more migrated to Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.

In the United States, the Trump administration has pursued several severe measures to encourage recently arrived Venezuelan migrants to abandon protection claims and leave the country. They include:

• Cancellation or non-renewal of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 600,000 Venezuelan citizens living and working in the United States. The Supreme Court allowed the TPS termination to proceed while lower courts consider challenges.
• Cancellation of a two-year humanitarian parole status that the Biden administration had offered to hundreds of thousands of citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
• A freeze in consideration of ongoing asylum applications from citizens of Venezuela and 18 other countries, implemented after the November 2025 shooting, by a man from Afghanistan, that killed a National Guard member and wounded another in Washington, DC.
• Inclusion of Venezuelans in travel bans prohibiting the entry of citizens from 39 countries.
• Inclusion of Venezuela in a list of 38 countries whose citizens must pay a $15,000 bond to apply for a visa to enter the United States.

To this list, of course, must be added the administration’s March 2025 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelans without due process on suspicion of ties to the Tren de Aragua organized crime group. Courts have since blocked Alien Enemies Act removals, requiring advance notification and opportunities for defense.

Nonetheless, the New York Times reported on December 27 that, in internal deliberations, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “told officials that if the United States and Venezuela were at war, the Trump administration could again invoke the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law, to expedite deportations of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans the administration stripped of temporary protected status.” The Justice Department cited Maduro’s extraction in a January 5 filing defending its Alien Enemies Act invocation before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Venezuela is “more free today than it was yesterday,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News on January 4. “Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love,” read a DHS post on Twitter.

Noem added that Venezuelans in the United States who have lost their TPS can return to their homeland and apply for refugee status—an impossibility since there is no U.S. diplomatic or consular presence in Venezuela, and because the Trump administration has almost completely undone the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

Anticipating disorder, Colombia’s government responded to the U.S. military operation by deploying up to 30,000 soldiers to the country’s long border with Venezuela and preparing a refugee response with support from the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM). So far, though, there has been no new exodus of Venezuelans. “We are calm because the flows have not increased in our monitoring,” said the director of Colombia’s migration agency, Gloria Arriero.

At least 500 Venezuelan citizens remain in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, according to an official from the Mexican state of Chihuahua. “The few that remain in Juarez have been approached about returning to their country, but the Venezuelan regime says that if you are Venezuelan and abandon your country, you cannot return, and that is a humanitarian tragedy,” state Secretary of Government Santiago de la Peña told Border Report. (Some Venezuelans do return, at times with IOM assistance, but flights are few and they need valid passports to travel by air.)

Notes from Mexico

• “On the US-Mexico border,” read an InSight Crime analysis of migrant smuggling trends at a time of reduced migration, “smuggling services have become more sophisticated to evade heightened surveillance and may include air travel, forged documents, or routes that are less visible and more dangerous.” Manuel Ayala of the Tijuana-based, migration-focused media organization Nómadas Press added, “The cost to cross from Tijuana was previously around $8,000, and it can now go up to $20,000 to cross through the Sonoran Desert or even $30,000 to travel via sea.”
• In Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, a representative of the Catholic diocese told EFE that settlements of stranded migrants, mainly from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, and El Salvador, have increased in the city. EFE noted that according to unpublished data, Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, received 52,000 asylum requests in 2025, two-thirds of them (34,000) in Chiapas. That is the fewest COMAR asylum requests since 2018, except for the pandemic year of 2020. Cuban migrants with whom the news agency spoke, convinced that U.S. policy may only harden, said they planned to settle in Tapachula.
• The Mexican government’s National System for Comprehensive Family Development (NSDIF) closed a three-year-old shelter for unaccompanied adolescent migrants in Huixtla, Chiapas, not far from Tapachula. A source cited by the daily Milenio cited the decline in arriving migrants following the Trump administration’s January 2025 suspension of opportunities to seek asylum or protection at the U.S.-Mexico border. The shelter was housing just three children in December, from a 2024 peak of about 120.
• Eileen McKenzie, a Franciscan nun who works with the Kino Border Initiative shelter in Nogales, Sonora, wrote at Global Sisters Report that the Trump administration’s January 20, 2025 cancellation of the CBP One smartphone app’s use to schedule appointments at ports of entry left hundreds of non-Mexican migrants stranded in the border city. Nearly a year later, many remain: “some are settling in Nogales, Sonora, where they are applying for asylum in Mexico or waiting for the political winds to change.” McKenzie finds them “discouraged, yes, but hopeless, no.”
• A report from the Washington Post’s Terence McCoy covered Playa Bagdad, the easternmost point of Mexico’s border with the United States, on the Gulf of Mexico. The small fishing village is just a few miles from where Elon Musk’s SpaceX carries out test launches of its rockets, which generate “noise, explosions, and trash” that residents allege are killing off fish and other marine life.
• The Mexican government reported having arrested more than 10,000 people, interdicted more than 7,000 firearms, and seized more than 600 kilograms of fentanyl since the February 2025 launch of “Operation Northern Border,” a security surge that the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum had launched in response to President Trump’s threats of increased tariffs.

Notes About Border Barriers

• DHS Secretary Noem was in Brownsville, Texas on January 7 to show off new buoy barriers that the Trump administration plans to install in the middle of the Rio Grande. DHS is spending $96 million to install 17 miles of barrier in the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Border Report reported. It is part of a plan to install 500 miles, mainly in Texas, using funds from the massive budget bill that Congress passed in July 2025. Unlike the roughly 1,000 feet of buoys that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) installed during the Biden administration, the new barriers are not spheres: they are 15-foot-long cylinders and are not interspersed with serrated metal disks.
• The city of San Diego, California is suing the Homeland Security and Defense departments to stop Marines from laying down concertina wire on city property near the border in the Marron Valley area southeast of the city, calling the operation unauthorized trespassing. “The suit contends that the construction of the fencing barrier has caused property damage and ‘adverse environmental impacts,’ including damage to plants, vernal pools, and wildlife habitats for endangered and protected species,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The city’s Marron Valley area either abuts or overlaps with a “National Defense Area,” the narrow fringe of territory along five parts of the border that the Trump administration has reclassified as a military facility, enabling soldiers to retain migrants (over 3,000 so far border-wide), some of whom then get charged with trespassing on a military installation.
• A tweet posted by the U.S. embassy in Mexico City on Christmas Day warned, in Spanish, “More than 400 people fell while trying to climb the border wall in 2025,” with the hashtag #NiLoIntentes, or “don’t even try it.”
• A coalition of environmental groups, led by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and the Tohono O’odham Nation San Xavier District, submitted an extensive comment to CBP opposing 222 miles of new border “barrier system” construction in Arizona, on environmental protection grounds. The project, they warned, “threatens one of the most biologically rich and culturally significant regions in North America,” adding, “No other society before has attempted to wall off an entire continent from ocean to ocean.” While the border agency has ample funding to build the new walls and associated infrastructure, the comment urges that their design include wildlife passages, less intense lighting, and floodgates to manage cross-border flows of streams and rivers.

Other News

• Eight unnamed officials at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) told Austin Public Radio that, in early November 2025, ORR leadership issued verbal orders to stop releasing unaccompanied migrant children to their relatives or sponsors “until further notice.” This applies even to children who have cleared the vetting process. While during October 2025 ORR released about four children per day to sponsors, it has been nearly zero since then. With unaccompanied children’s stays in ORR shelters now stretching into many months, the shelters are resembling detention facilities.
• Politico covered how the Trump administration is seeking to rely on safe-third-country agreements to terminate asylum cases and send asylum seekers elsewhere. The piece recalled how the immigration court system’s Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA, whose membership the Trump administration has altered sharply) decided in October that “judges should weigh third-country removal before an asylum case is considered in the U.S.”
• Team Brownsville, a non-profit that received asylum seekers released from CBP custody, among other humanitarian services in the Texas border city and across the border in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, is closing its doors. Border Report noted that some of Team Brownsville’s members have formed a new organization, Madrinas de Justicia (Godmothers for Justice), affiliated with the New York-based nonprofit Grannies Respond. The closure is a consequence of the Texas state government’s hostile posture toward groups that provide services to immigrants.
• A total of 3,091 migrants passed through the treacherous Darién Gap region straddling Panama and Colombia during 2025, according to Panamanian authorities cited by EFE. That is a 99 percent reduction from the more than 250,000 per year who passed through the Darién in 2022, 2023, and 2024—a result of the impossibility of seeking asylum upon arrival in the United States. Through November, the top five nationalities of people who passed through the region were Venezuela (nearly half of the total), Colombia, Nepal, Cameroon, and Ecuador.
• The Catholic publication Crux reported on migrants from other continents who remain in Panama nearly 11 months after the Trump administration sent them there aboard two planes in February 2025, with the understanding that the group of 299 people would then return to their home countries. At least 120 feared for their lives if returned, however. While most of that group has departed Panama—some of them returning to the United States and ending up deported again—at least 15 remain in the country in precarious conditions, mainly assisted by church-affiliated shelters. “Many managed to find work” in Panama, Crux noted.
• California Federal District Court Judge Trina Thompson issued a summary judgment on December 31, voiding the Trump administration’s suspension of TPS for about 60,000 citizens of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal. The judge’s ruling, CBS News reported, found that DHS Secretary Noem’s termination “was preordained and pretextual rather than based on an objective review of the country conditions as required by the TPS statute and the (Administrative Procedures Act).” It reaffirms a July ruling from the judge, which an appeals court had paused in August.
• In more than 1,600 cases, 308 immigration judges have ordered the release of migrants subject to the Trump administration’s policy, instituted in July, requiring the detention of all asylum seekers who had initially arrived in the United States without authorization, usually by turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents between U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Just 14 judges, 11 of them Trump appointees, have sided with the administration. “Federal judges are increasingly exasperated by the Trump administration’s effort to lock up nearly everyone facing deportation proceedings,” Kyle Cheney of Politico reported. Immigrant rights advocates told Cheney that “the win-loss record is beside the point,” as the administration is using this and other policies to wear out asylum seekers and get them to give up on their claims. As most of these cases occurred on an individual, emergency basis, they have not led to a nationwide block on the detention policy.
• The Trump administration is allowing TPS for about 350,000 citizens of Haiti in the United States to expire on February 3, 2026. Most are in South Florida, El País reported. With the Caribbean nation reeling from anarchic gang violence, this population faces extreme uncertainty.
• Thirty Democratic senators signed a letter to President Trump, DHS Secretary Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi voicing “profound alarm” at the reassignment of thousands of agents from the FBI, Marshals Service, DEA, and other agencies, who have been tasked with enforcing immigration—often targeting non-criminal migrants—instead of their fundamental duties. The letter was initiated by Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) and signed by all Democratic members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee except Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) and John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania). The letter notes that “technology companies that submit tens of millions of suspected child abuse files each year have already reported a collapse in follow-up from federal investigators.”

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

A killing in Minneapolis

Holmes Lybrand, DHS Says Woman Attempted to Run Over ICE Officers Before Being Shot in Minneapolis. Here’s What the Videos Show. (CNN, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

Three videos taken of the scene and reviewed by CNN show nuance. What took place prior to the shooting remains unclear

Albert Sun, Chris Hippensteel, Jill Cowan, Deadly Minneapolis Encounter Is the 9th ICE Shooting Since September (The New York Times, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

All those targeted in the shootings were fired on while in their vehicles

Joseph Cox, Dhs Is Lying to You About ICE Shooting a Woman (404 Media, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality

Shaila Dewan, Authorities Often Justify Motorist Shootings by Saying the Vehicle Was a Weapon (The New York Times, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

Federal officials said the Minneapolis driver who was shot by an immigration agent was using her vehicle as a weapon, a claim that local officials have disputed

Matt Sledge, Chicago Woman Shot by Border Patrol Reacts to Minneapolis ICE Killing: “of Course This Happened” (The Intercept, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

“Unfortunately, it is going to continue to happen,” said the lawyer of Marimar Martinez, another woman who was shot by a federal agent in October

Confrontations with U.S. citizens

Clayton Dalton, Could Viral Protest Videos Create a Backlash Against ‘Less Lethal’ Weapons? (The New York Times, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

They were developed during the civil rights movement to reduce harm, but their rampant use during anti-ICE protests has led to a new kind of violence

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, Border Patrol Chief Admits They’re Arresting U.S. Citizens (The New Republic, Wednesday, December 31, 2025).

CBP Chief Greg Bovino practically bragged about arresting protesters

Christy Gutowski, Joe Mahr, Madeline Buckley, Rioters? Agitators? Immigration Agents’ Claims Against US Citizens Mostly Fall Apart in Court. (The Chicago Tribune, Tuesday, December 30, 2025).

Time and again, Donald Trump’s immigration agents claimed horrific crimes at the hands of protesters in Chicago. Those allegations of abuse did not withstand the scrutiny of judicial review

Noah Hurowitz, The Feds Keep Prosecuting Protesters Against ICE — and Losing (The Intercept, Wednesday, December 31, 2025).

Prosecutors for the Trump administration have been quick to bring charges against ICE protesters. They’ve also been quick to lose the cases

Andrew Couts, The New Surveillance State Is You (Wired, Monday, December 29, 2025).

Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them

Challenges to accountability

Nancy Gertner, Why the Supreme Court Is Giving ICE So Much Power (The Atlantic, Monday, December 29, 2025).

The Constitution inarguably applies to federal immigration agents—but the Supreme Court has taken away the hope of ever holding them to that standard

ICE’s recruitment drive and DHS messaging

Drew Harwell, Joyce Sohyun Lee, ICE Plans $100 Million ‘Wartime Recruitment’ Push Targeting Gun Shows, Military Fans for Hires (The Washington Post, Wednesday, December 31, 2025).

A strategy document shared among immigration officials details plans to use influencers and geo-targeted ads to supercharge their push to hire thousands of deportation officers nationwide

Brady Brickner-Wood, ICE’s New-Age Propaganda (The New Yorker, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

With its string of “wartime recruitment” ads, often featuring pop songs and familiar meme formats, the agency has weaponized social media against itself

Ken Klippenstein, This Insane Post Foreshadows the Year to Come (Ken Klippenstein, Thursday, January 1, 2026).

Why 2026 is a year for the big, bold and brazen

“Bounty Hunter” contract

Sam Biddle, Blackwater Successor Hunts Immigrants for ICE (The Intercept, Saturday, January 3, 2026).

Constellis Holdings, which traces its roots to Erik Prince’s mercenary firm Blackwater, landed an ICE contract as a bounty hunter

Minnesota hotel briefly bars ICE agents

Natasha Lennard, Three Cheers for Hilton Hotel Workers Who Banned ICE — Until Their Corporate Bosses Stomped Them Out (The Intercept, Tuesday, January 6, 2026).

Big businesses like Hilton will always side with fascistic forces like ICE, so we need to stand up for the workers who push back

Joseph Cox, Hilton Hotel That Refused DHS Reservations Backpedals (404 Media, Monday, January 5, 2026).

The hotel told 404 Media in a statement “We are in touch with the impacted guests to ensure they are accommodated”

Chicago

Andrew Carter, Caroline Kubzansky, Gregory Royal Pratt, Laura Rodriguez Presa, 64 Days in Chicago: The Story of Operation Midway Blitz (The Chicago Tribune, Sunday, December 28, 2025).

President Donald Trump’s federal immigration enforcement operation led to most surreal autumn in Chicago history. What happened during those 64 days will be remembered for a long time

Daniel C. Vock, Cost of Operation Midway Blitz: $59m and Counting (The Chicago Tribune, Sunday, January 4, 2026).

A Tribune review of court filings, databases and other public records detailing the scope of the incursion and typical costs shows how much the federal government has spent since September

Cases involving Kilmar Abrego García, now free, continue

Alan Feuer, Justice Dept. Leaders Pushed to Charge Abrego Garcia, Emails Show (The New York Times, Tuesday, December 30, 2025).

The release of the emails raised serious questions about whether the Justice Department had misled a judge in telling him that local prosecutors had acted alone in charging Mr. Abrego Garcia

Chris Geidner, The Latest Effort to Hold Gregory Bovino Accountable for His Disregard of the Rule of Law (Law Dork, Friday, January 2, 2026).

The Border Patrol official is the subject of a sanctions request in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case in Tennessee

Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Unsealed Court Order Suggests Trump Officials Pushed to Prosecute Abrego Garcia After Wrongful Deportation (CBS News, Wednesday, December 31, 2025).

A court order suggests the Trump administration pushed to prosecute Kilmar Abrego Garcia only after he challenged his deportation, with one top DOJ official calling it a “top priority”

Coverage of Stephen Miller’s role

Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Nick Miroff, The Wrath of Stephen Miller (The Atlantic, Wednesday, January 7, 2026).

The man who turns President Trump’s most incendiary impulses into policy

Greg Sargent, Stephen Miller Is the New Republic’s 2025 Scoundrel of the Year (The New Republic, Wednesday, December 31, 2025).

He was counting on a nation of haters. He was wrong