Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: December 12, 2025

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Dec 12, 2025, 11:25:36 AMDec 12
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https://www.wola.org/2025/12/weekly-u-s-mexico-border-update-growing-military-role-abuses-in-detention-mexico-updates/

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: December 12, 2025

In 2026, to accommodate our increased defense and security work and to increase the regularity of our podcasts, WOLA’s Border Updates will switch to a biweekly publication schedule. The next Biweekly Border Update will appear on 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. 

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:

  • The U.S. military’s growing border and migration role: A new White House National Security Strategy would give the U.S. military a greater role in border and homeland defense. Senators documented at least $2 billion in defense budget money diverted to immigration enforcement. Military lawyers assigned to immigration courts are issuing removal orders at a greater rate than civilian immigration judges. A new “National Defense Area” covers most of the California border.
  • Mounting allegations of deteriorating detention conditions: Reports detail detention conditions that in some cases amount to torture at ICE’s massive new tent detention facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, and in Florida’s Everglades and Krome detention facilities. Conditions at the Dilley, Texas family detention center appear to be deteriorating as children are routinely staying in detention long past the maximum specified in a judicial settlement. The count of deaths in ICE custody since January 20, 2025 now stands at 25.
  • Notes from Mexico: Nearly 12,000 citizens of countries other than Mexico have been deported into Mexico since the Trump administration began. Long lines continue to form at the Mexican government refugee agency’s office in Tapachula, Chiapas. ICE is stationing agents at border ports of entry to detect undocumented people who might be traveling southbound into Mexico for the holidays.


THE FULL UPDATE:

The U.S. military’s growing border and migration role

President Donald Trump’s multi-pronged effort to involve the U.S. military in domestic border and migration enforcement—a very unusual role for the armed forces—was the subject of several developments over the past week.

National Security Strategy

The White House published a much-delayed National Security Strategy that prioritizes defense interests in the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere over missions elsewhere in the world. The document declares that “the era of mass migration is over” and that “border security is the primary element of national security,” calling for “targeted deployments” of military assets “to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.”

Senators’ report on Defense Department border and migration spending

Ten Democratic senators and three Democratic House members published a report finding that the Trump administration has “siphoned off at least $2 billion from the military budget for immigration enforcement,” including at least $1.3 billion for military deployments at the U.S.-Mexico border; at least $258 million for troop deployments in interior U.S. cities and a plan to use military Judge Advocates as immigration judges; at least $420.9 million to detain migrants at U.S. bases, including Guantánamo Bay ($55 million); and at least $40.3 million for military deportation flights. The report notes that the Defense Department expects to spend at least $5 billion more in 2026 on U.S.-Mexico border operations.

National Guard deployments

Federal District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard personnel to Los Angeles is illegal, but stayed his order until December 15; the administration is expected to appeal. President Donald Trump had claimed that the troops were needed to protect federal buildings and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel from protests against his crackdown on the migrant population. The mission took place over the objections of California’s and Los Angeles’ elected leaders.

In Washington, DC, an appeals court panel has stopped, for now, a lower court’s order to end the administration’s National Guard deployment.

Military lawyers’ denial rates

In late October, the Trump administration assigned 25 of what could eventually be as many as 600 military lawyers (Judge Advocates, or JAGs) to serve as immigration court judges. Bloomberg Law reported that in November, these substitute military judges issued removal orders more frequently than other judges. Data shared by the NGO Mobile Pathways revealed that in more than 100 rulings, JAG immigration judges issued removal orders in about 78 percent of cases, compared to 63 percent for all other immigration judges.

California National Defense Area

The Trump administration added a new “National Defense Area,” declaring an additional fringe of territory along the borderline to be part of a nearby military base. The latest zone is in California, stretching west from the Arizona border to the Otay Mountain Wilderness southeast of San Diego. In this narrow area, those arrested—including people held temporarily by soldiers, a very unusual domestic military role—may be charged with trespassing on a military installation in addition to improper border crossing. Similar zones established over the past seven months follow the border in western Arizona, all of New Mexico, far west Texas, and much of south Texas.

California National Guard and Mexico

The state of California signed a letter of intent with Mexico’s Defense Department to cooperate under the National Guard Bureau’s State Partnership Program on missions including border security.

Concertina wire

U.S. military personnel assigned to the U.S. Northern Command’s Joint Task Force-Southern Border are carrying out “the largest concertina wire emplacement in U.S. territorial history,” the unit announced. Since late October, troops have installed over 43,000 rolls of the razor-sharp wire extending hundreds of miles throughout all nine of Border Patrol’s U.S.-Mexico border sectors.

During the Biden administration in 2023 and 2024, Texas National Guard personnel acting on the orders of Gov. Greg Abbott placed about 100 miles of concertina wire along the Rio Grande. Reports of migrants cut and wounded by the wire numbered in the hundreds. Texas sued when Border Patrol agents cut through the wire to reach the riverbank.

NDAA reporting requirements

The House of Representatives passed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, the annual law authorizing Defense Department activities and spending) on December 10. It requires (in Section 1053) the Defense Department to notify Congress within seven days of any use of military aircraft to remove migrants; to provide quarterly reports about the number of migrants held at military installations, by location, and the total cost to the Department; a quarterly report on military support for immigration enforcement operations; and a semi-annual report on military operations against drugs, arms, human trafficking, and organized crime at the border.


Mounting allegations of deteriorating detention conditions

Abuse and human rights violations in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention were the subject of several reports over the past week.

Letter documents severe abuse at Fort Bliss detention site

A December 8 letter from the American Civil Liberties Union, Estrella del Paso, Human Rights Watch, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, and the Texas Civil Rights Project documented severe allegations of abuse committed against people being held at the “East Montana” facility on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a sprawling U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas.

The Fort Bliss site, a lot made up of tent structures, is now the largest ICE detention facility in the United States, holding about 3,000 people. DHS expects that, once fully built, Fort Bliss could accommodate more than 5,000 people. It is managed by Acquisition Logistics, a small, little-known government contractor awarded a $1.2 billion grant. ICE began bringing detained people to the site in August.

The groups’ letter to ICE documents allegations, based on interviews with more than 45 people and 16 signed statements from those held at Fort Bliss, including violent attempts to coerce non-Mexican people to self-deport into Mexico; physical and sexual abuse committed by guards; medical neglect; inhumane living conditions; lack of food and clean water; and denial of access to counsel.

In accounts describing separate events, detained men from Cuba told of being shackled and bused to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, west of El Paso. There, masked individuals allegedly urged them to cross into Mexico—in some cases by climbing over the border wall—with no involvement or apparent knowledge of Mexican authorities. If they refused to cross, the masked men told them they might be deported to prisons in Africa or El Salvador.

Noting that Fort Bliss is likely the first of several military installations to be used as ICE detention sites—Fort Dix, New Jersey, may come online soon—the groups’ letter calls for an immediate end to detention at Fort Bliss and a halt to third-country deportations.

Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs whose declarations are often contradicted by subsequent revelations, told the Washington Post that “‘no detainees are being beaten or abused’ and that all people being deported to third countries are given due-process protections.”

Death at Fort Bliss

The El Paso Times reported that Francisco Gaspar Andrés, a 48-year-old citizen of Guatemala who needed medical care, died of liver and kidney failure at the Fort Bliss detention camp on December 3. The office of Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso but not this part of Fort Bliss, confirmed to the El Paso Times that this was the first death at the “East Montana” facility.

Deaths in custody

Nationwide, “I’ve been notified of two more deaths in ICE custody in the last 24 hours—meaning that 25 people have now died in detention since Trump returned to office,” tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. “That’s the most in more than two decades. The cruelty and inhumanity of this administration must end.”

Amnesty International report on Florida

A report from Amnesty International, based on a September 2025 research mission, detailed “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” which “in some cases amount to torture,” at two detention centers in Florida. The first is the Everglades facility run by Florida’s state government, which Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration calls “Alligator Alcatraz.” The second is the Krome North Service Processing Center on the outskirts of Miami, one of ICE’s oldest detention facilities.

In addition to seriously unsanitary conditions and poor access to medical care, those detained in the Everglades facility reported “being put in the ‘box,’ described as a 2×2 foot cage-like structure people are put in as punishment—sometimes for hours at a time exposed to the elements with hardly any water—with their hands and feet attached to restraints on the ground.” At Krome, “Amnesty International staffers witnessed a guard violently slam a metal flap of a door to a solitary confinement room against a man’s injured hand.”

Dilley, Texas

CNN reported on filings in the Flores judicial settlement agreement, which governs conditions for children held in immigration detention, that document miserable conditions for families held at ICE’s contractor-run South Texas Family Residential Center, a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.

The Biden administration had closed the Dilley facility, but the Trump administration quickly reopened it. About 160 families (defined as parents with children) were held there as of November. Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights, told CNN of “denial of critical medical care, worms and mold in the food that result in children becoming ill, and threats of family separation by officers and staff… Families tell us that their children are weak, faint, pale, and often crying because they are so hungry.” DHS spokespeople deny this.

The Associated Press noted that December 1 ICE filings reported that, in August and September, about 400 migrant children were held in federal detention for more than the maximum 20 days specified by the Flores agreement, which seeks to avoid prolonged detention of children. Some were held in detention for up to 168 days.

Unaccompanied children brought to South Texas

Citing the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBar), Border Report reported that about 50 unaccompanied migrant children in ICE custody have been moved recently, from elsewhere in the U.S. interior, to four Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region. This is new, Laura Peña of ProBar said: “We understand it’s a pilot program here in the Rio Grande Valley, and that four ORR shelters are essentially holding children until their removal flight is scheduled.”

About 500 unaccompanied migrant kids are now in the Rio Grande Valley, of a total of about 2,000 in the entire ORR system.


Notes from Mexico

  • During a morning news conference on December 10, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum shared statistics about U.S. returns of migrants into Mexico:
    • 152,592 people have been returned since the Trump administration began on January 20:
      • 140,706 citizens of Mexico
      • 11,886 citizens of other countries
    • 217,109 people have been returned since October 1, 2024, when Sheinbaum’s term began:
      • 200,540 citizens of Mexico
      • 16,569 citizens of other countries
  • Visiting Washington on December 5, Sheinbaum held a meeting with Mexican people living in the area and called for “good treatment for Mexican women and men who live in the United States.”
  • San Diego-based journalist Kate Morrissey reported on a recent visit to Tapachula, Chiapas, near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, where she found numerous migrants either stranded by the Trump administration’s shutdown of asylum access or intending to settle in Mexico. Most were from Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, and are persisting with their applications for asylum in Mexico’s backlogged system. Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, suffered deep budget cuts after the Trump administration slashed U.S. assistance to the UN Refugee Agency. Joselin Zamora of the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center said that migrants do continue to arrive in Tapachula, even if the United States is no longer a near-term destination.
  • The Huffington Post revealed the existence of “Operation Irish Goodbye,” an ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) effort to station agents at U.S.-Mexico border crossings “to catch migrants who are in the U.S. illegally and are trying to return home voluntarily around the holidays.” They would especially target buses passing south into Mexico.
  • A statistical study by Oscar Contreras-Velasco of the University of California at Davis, published in the journal Social Forces, found that areas along Mexico’s northern border where organized-crime groups are actively competing are more dangerous for migrants than areas where one organized-crime group has consolidated its dominion. In general terms, the study found the border’s eastern region, particularly the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, to be where migrants run the greatest risk of falling victim to kidnapping and other violent crime.
  • The Mexican daily Milenio reported on recent social media videos, analyzed by the U.S. embassy in Mexico, indicating the alleged existence of “travel agencies” helping to smuggle people into the United States. In a YouTube video, a man testified that he crossed into Brownsville, Texas, on November 25 and found the experience “100 percent recommendable.” Smugglers with handles like “AmericanTour” or “SoyTuGuiaTraveling,” embassy sources told Milenio, are trying to convey the sense that those who contract their services will have a safe and normal experience.
  • The Mexican government continues to produce statistics about its security forces’ “Operation Northern Border” security campaign, begun in response to President Trump’s initial tariff threats in February 2025. These include the reported seizure, in northern Mexico, of 549 kilograms of northbound fentanyl and 7,000 heavy-caliber southbound firearms. About 75 percent of firearms seized in Mexico come from the United States, Interior Secretary Omar García Harfuch emphasized.


Other News

  • Nearly nine months after he was wrongly shipped to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, Kílmar Ábrego García was released from ICE detention on the afternoon of December 11, at the order of Maryland Federal District Judge Paula Xinis. His attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told the Associated Press that he “plans to return to Maryland, where he has an American wife and child and where he has lived for years after originally immigrating to the U.S. illegally as a teenager.” Still, the attorney added, the Trump administration “still has plenty of tools in their toolbox, plenty of tricks up their sleeve” to prevent Ábrego García from remaining free inside the United States. (Early on the morning of December 12, Judge Xinis issued a temporary restraining order preventing ICE from re-detaining Ábrego García.)
  • Leaked CBP data reported by The Center Square indicate that Border Patrol apprehended 245 people per day at the U.S.-Mexico border in November (which would be 7,350 apprehensions over 30 days). That would be a slight decline from October (258 per day) and September (280), but more than in the hot summer months of June-August (185).
  • The Deportation Data Project at the University of California at Berkeley obtained a new tranche of data from ICE, via the Freedom of Information Act, detailing arrests and detention stays from September 2023 to October 15, 2025. Relevant Research has fed this new data into a public “Immigration Enforcement Dashboard” that eases searches.
  • House and Senate Democrats held a “shadow hearing” (video) to hear from five U.S. citizens who endured harrowing experiences after being detained and assaulted by DHS personnel. In October, ProPublica reported counting 170 cases of U.S. citizens held by immigration agents, some of them “kicked, dragged, and detained for days.”
  • At the Bulwark, Adrian Carrasquillo covered rumors that Kristi Noem’s tenure as DHS Secretary might soon come to an end.
  • While noting that it is “premature” to recommend criminal prosecution of Noem, James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Washington DC District Court, is escalating his investigation of whether to hold administration officials in contempt of court, Politico reported. Boasberg is investigating whether the administration deliberately disobeyed his March 15 order to halt planes taking 137 Venezuelan men, without due process, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under an invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. He is seeking testimony from two of the Justice Department’s attorneys in the case, including one (Erez Reuveni) who was fired, probably for being insufficiently aggressive in pursuing the migrants’ rendition to El Salvador.
  • The administration has begun charging a $5,000 fee to some people apprehended after crossing the border improperly, implementing a provision in the giant funding bill that Congress passed in July. The fee is likely to be challenged in court, as the improper entry statute already specifies a maximum fine of $5,000.
  • Guatemala’s Prensa Libre covered the case of a Guatemalan man who, after losing a leg in an accident while migrating atop Mexico’s La Bestia cargo train in 2021, now faces $336,000 in fines, under a Trump administration policy of charging $998 per day for remaining in the United States past his removal date.
  • The Intercept covered a late November Border Patrol raid on a humanitarian aid post operated by the Arizona organization No More Deaths. Agents, claiming they were in “hot pursuit,” arrested three people and broke into a trailer without a warrant.
  • Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Arizona) was pepper-sprayed by “an agent in green fatigues,” and an agent fired a pepper ball at her feet, at a protest outside a Tucson restaurant raided by ICE, the Intercept reported. Journalist and author John Washington published a firsthand account of the protest response.
  • Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Homeland Security, joined four other Democratic House members on a letter requesting a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation into the Trump administration’s “widespread diversion” of DHS and Justice Department staff and resources into immigration enforcement. The abrupt shift in the missions of tens of thousands of officials, they allege, “has affected criminal investigations, including efforts to combat narcotics, human trafficking, and the exploitation of children.”
  • In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, the new chief of Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, Justin De La Torre, said that reduced migrant arrivals at the border are allowing his agents to patrol more deeply into southern California’s interior.
  • A CNN analysis covered the possibility that U.S. attacks on Venezuela, a looming possibility, could spur another wave of migration away from the beleaguered South American nation.
  • The City of Laredo, where most of the municipal council opposes the Trump administration’s plan to build a border wall along its downtown, is sending a delegation to Washington to “share how safe we are” without fencing marring its riverfront.
  • 2025 has been “a year of hell for immigrants,” read a grim overview of the Trump administration’s first 11 months by Isabela Dias at Mother Jones. “The impact of individual stories starts to dilute in an overwhelming news cycle where everything is ‘unprecedented’ and too horrific to contend with,” Dias wrote. “We look away.”
  • A new post-mortem of the Biden administration’s border policies, in the New York Times, documented strategic misjudgments and official inaction as the number of people arriving at the border jumped in 2021-2023. The analysis questioned why the Biden White House waited as long as it did to take the legally questionable step of curbing access to the U.S. asylum system at the border, although this was not the only policy option available, and although the severe Trump-era “Title 42” asylum restrictions were in place until May 2023.


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

Lucrative contracts

“So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan…”

The agency will spend nearly $140 million to buy the planes, funding that comes from a massive budget increase for immigration enforcement approved by Congress

Immigration restrictions tighten

The move was the latest in an intensifying crackdown on legal immigration after an Afghan national was charged with shooting two National Guard members

The Trump administration is considering expanding its travel ban to around 30 countries in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard soldiers

The Trump administration is spending millions to entice people to leave

Tech, cybersecurity, and civil liberties

The exact circumstances around the search are not known. But activist Samuel Tunick is charged with deleting data from a Google Pixel before CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team could search it

The app, called Mobile Identify, was launched in November, and lets local cops use facial recognition to hunt immigrants on behalf of ICE. It is unclear if the removal is temporary or not

Chicago

A Tribune review found immigration agents in Chicago routinely broke urban policing protocols meant to limit danger to themselves and others

The response to an information request contradicted the administration’s public testimony and raised concerns that it may be trying to evade oversight

Nayra Guzmán was arrested 15 days after her daughter’s difficult birth. Before Trump took office, postpartum immigrants were rarely detained by ICE

An ICE processing center in Illinois has become a stage for a new kind of border enforcement

New Orleans

State and federal authorities are monitoring online criticism and protests against the immigration crackdown in New Orleans

As the feds chase immigrants, a city chases the feds


Adam Isacson (he/him), Director for Defense Oversight

WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas (www.wola.org)

Signal adamisacson.98 Mobile/WhatsApp +1 202 329-4985

Mastodon: elefanti.co/@adam BlueSky: @adamisacson.com

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