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

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Mar 6, 2026, 5:54:29 PM (8 days ago) Mar 6
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https://www.wola.org/2026/03/u-s-mexico-border-update-turmoil-at-dhs-big-bend-border-wall-ice-detention-deaths-and-expansion/

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


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

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Our March 20 Border Update may be delayed or truncated as we publish a new report during the same timeframe.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

  • With Kristi Noem’s departure, turmoil continues at a partially shut-down DHS: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s controversial tenure came to an abrupt end on March 5, just after some combative hearing appearances in the House and Senate and allegations of obstruction of the Department’s inspector-general. DHS, meanwhile, remains shut down amid an impasse in Congress.
  • Border wall coming to the Big Bend: CBP plans appear to call for the building of some physical border wall in Big Bend National Park, a wilderness area that sits in the quietest, least-populated part of the entire U.S.-Mexico border. A growing outcry among residents is decidedly bipartisan. Updates point to a proliferation of opposition to planned or ongoing barrier projects all along the length of the border.
  • ICE detention expansion, warehouses, and in-custody deaths: Ten people died in ICE’s migrant detention system in January and February. The sprawling tent encampment at Fort Bliss may be slated to close after three deaths and a measles outbreak. Alarming reports continue to emerge about conditions in the Dilley, Texas family detention center. Widespread and often bipartisan outrage is accompanying ICE’s plan, unconsulted with host communities, to establish a $38 billion network of “warehouse” detention centers.
  • ICE recruitment and training: Whistleblower reports allege, and documents confirm, that in its rush to grow quickly, ICE has cut training for recruits from 72 to 42 days. ICE and CBP spent at least $144 million on new weapons and ammunition in 2025.
  • Notes from Mexico: New reports on conditions in Mexico include a Refugees International investigation of the U.S. government’s third-country deportations, a University of Texas Strauss Center report on conditions in Mexican border cities, and a report from several U.S. and Mexican organizations about the population being deported into Mexico as “mass deportation” accelerates.


THE FULL UPDATE:

With Kristi Noem’s departure, turmoil continues at a partially shut-down DHS

Secretary Noem is out

As this Border Update was nearing completion on March 5, President Donald Trump announced that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem is departing her position. Trump wrote on his social media site that Noem will now serve as “Special Envoy for the ‘Shield of the Americas,’” a Western Hemisphere security initiative being inaugurated in Florida this weekend with a gathering of like-minded Latin American presidents.

Trump’s nominee to replace Noem at DHS is Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R). Mullin does not sit on the Senate Homeland Security Committee; he is an appropriator but not a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.

“The decision capped an embattled two-year arc for the former governor of South Dakota, in which she went from a contender for vice president to the first cabinet member to be ousted from Mr. Trump’s second stint in the White House,” the New York Times observed. Her departure came after many calls for an end to her tenure, especially after the violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) operations in Minneapolis that killed two U.S. citizens in January. An impeachment resolution filed by Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL) had 188 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, all Democrats.

Rough hearing appearances

On March 3 and 4, Noem was the sole witness in some particularly combative hearings before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.

Some strong criticism came from Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who is retiring this year, called Noem’s leadership “disastrous.” He confronted Noem directly on the agency’s aggressive operations in Minneapolis: “We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong. It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”

Noem refused to retract her characterizations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens shot to death by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis in January, as “domestic terrorists,” a claim that she had made after each incident. In the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin pressed Noem on this six times, but Noem offered only variations of “condolences” rather than a direct answer. Raskin noted that acting ICE director Todd Lyons had already testified he had no knowledge that either was a domestic terrorist.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) confronted Noem about a $220 million advertising campaign that included a subcontract awarded to Ben Yoho, husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, for a company formed 11 days before it was selected.

Inspector General alleges obstruction

Hours before the Senate hearing, DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari released a letter to Congress outlining at least 11 investigations in which DHS leadership has denied his office access to records, calling the pattern “systematic obstruction” and, in the case of non-cooperation with a criminal investigation, “particularly egregious.”

The outcry is especially notable from Cuffari, an appointee from Donald Trump’s first term who has come under heavy fire for past ethical lapses and a decidedly non-aggressive approach to investigating wrongdoing at DHS agencies.

DHS set conditions on the Inspector-General’s access to a database in the criminal investigation; those conditions might have required disclosing details to people close to those being investigated. ICE revoked the Inspector-General Office’s (OIG) 10-year access to its Enforcement Integrated Database. Noem asked the OIG to provide a list of all pending investigations “so that she may consider whether any audits, inspections, or investigations should be terminated”—a very rarely invoked authority.

Tillis held up Cuffari’s letter at the hearing: “Does anybody have any idea how bad it has to be for the OIG in this agency to come out and do this publicly?”

Bovino under investigation

The Hennepin County, Minnesota (which includes Minneapolis) Attorney’s Office announced on March 2 that Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief who until January was reporting directly to Noem as an “at-large” commander of roving mass deportation efforts, is among 17 federal agents under criminal investigation for conduct during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Evidence includes footage showing Bovino throwing a gas canister at protesters and observers on January 21.

The CBP Office of Professional Responsibility separately opened an internal investigation into Bovino’s reported antisemitic remarks about Minneapolis U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. Bovino was apparently frustrated with Rosen’s observance of Shabbat, at a time when he was pressing prosecutors to charge protesters more aggressively. Weeks later in Minneapolis, Bovino would declare that his agents killed a disarmed and subdued Alex Pretti because the Minneapolis nurse “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

With Bovino’s departure from the spotlight, the administration’s “mass deportation” effort—now more closely managed by hardline White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan—will be at least as intense, but much less flashy and social media-ready. “No more Bovino bull---t. That show is shut down,” an unnamed Homeland Security official told CNN.

Shutdown continues

DHS, meanwhile, remains shut down, as Congress has not been able to agree on an appropriations bill for the agency since a February 13 deadline lapsed. (As explained in WOLA’s February 20 Border Update, DHS’s border and migration law enforcement components, ICE and CBP, remain funded and not shut down, as they are spending money from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress passed last July.)

Democrats continue to withhold support for the full-year DHS appropriation, demanding reforms to ICE and CBP after a rash of high-profile allegations of human rights abuses. In the House, Democratic leaders were urging “no” votes on a DHS funding bill as of March 3, arguing it contains no new restrictions. Republicans cited an “enhanced terror threat” following Donald Trump’s attacks on Iran as they demanded that Democrats yield and allow DHS to be fully funded. In the Senate, where at least seven Democrats would have to vote with Republicans to break a filibuster, only Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) appears willing to advance the bill.


Border wall coming to the Big Bend

Amid plans to build what it called a “smart wall” barrier in the remote Big Bend region of far west Texas, CBP has reclassified a planned 111-mile segment as a “primary border wall system,” awarding construction contracts with a 2028 completion target. This area includes Big Bend National Park, a wilderness site along the Rio Grande that is a major tourist attraction. A nearby 175-mile segment is also slated to receive a so-called “smart wall” barrier.

Using an authority granted by the REAL ID Act of 2005, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem signed waivers of 28 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, to allow wall construction to proceed. “This is the biggest incursion on the integrity of national parks since the construction of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park more than a century ago,” Bob Krumenaker, a former superintendent of Big Bend National Park, told Texas Monthly.

The Big Bend sector, the least populated part of the entire border, is the quietest of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors. 3,096 of Border Patrol’s 237,538 migrant apprehensions in 2025 (1.3%) took place in the sector, which incorporates 517 of the border’s 1,950 miles.

“A border wall in the Big Bend region is an absurd, wasteful, counterproductive idea that is loathed by nearly every person who has ever lived or visited there,” wrote Isaac Saul, the founder of the nonpartisan political newsletter Tangle, who lives in the region. Saul pointed out that any border-crosser who made it into the United States in this sparsely populated area would “have nowhere to go.” He noted that when the Brewster County judge, a Republican, recently pledged to a room full of Republicans that he would oppose wall construction in the area, he got a standing ovation.

Even Trump-supporting Republicans in the Big Bend area are largely opposed to building a wall there, Texas Monthly, the Big Bend Sentinel, and others reported. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who represents the region, texted Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson, “175 miles of smart wall approved. I’m pushing back against a physical wall because we already have a natural one.”

Dodson and Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland, joined by Presidio and Hudspeth County sheriffs, signed a statement urging federal authorities to consult with them before building physical border security infrastructure in their part of the Big Bend region. Interviewed by the Big Bend Sentinel, both were skeptical of the “smart wall” branding, with Dodson suspecting it means a traditional steel-bollard wall after stopping contractors and asking them directly.

“This should not be a partisan issue,” Cleveland, a former Border Patrol agent-in-charge with 44,000 Facebook followers, wrote. “A wall accompanied by stadium lighting and an extensive road network would permanently alter one of the last truly unspoiled stretches of borderland in the country.”

Reports of alarm about proposed wall construction are proliferating along the border’s entire length.

  • In Brownsville, Texas, about 50 protesters gathered to oppose CBP’s ongoing project to install what may eventually be 265 miles of cylindrical buoys down the center of the Rio Grande. “The first 17 miles of buoys will cost $96 million and will include fiber optic technology to detect if someone or something is on the objects,” Sandra Sánchez of Border Report reported.
  • Elsewhere in southeast Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region, CBP is clearing vegetation from islands in the Rio Grande near Roma, in Starr County. “CBP is planning to build a border barrier through Roma and place buoys in the river to block people from crossing, according to online maps,” Inside Climate News reported. At the Texas Observer, Scott Nicol recalled that past legislative language protecting historic and natural sites in the Rio Grande Valley was not included in the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that provided $46.5 billion for new border wall construction, which places those “irreplaceable border treasures” at risk.
  • In Laredo, where the Trump administration is preparing to seize private riverfront property through eminent domain proceedings, Mayor Victor Treviño told a newly convened advisory panel: “No. 1, the city does not support border walls, especially in sensitive areas. No. 2, the city has chosen to negotiate with the federal government under the guidance of outside legal counsel.”
  • In the biodiverse San Rafael Valley in southeast Arizona, the Sky Island Alliance projects that plans to build an additional 24.7 miles of border wall may reduce wildlife crossings by 86 percent. This could eliminate jaguars, only five of which have been documented in Arizona since 2011, from the United States.
  • In San Diego County, California, hikers planning to walk the 3,000-mile Pacific Crest Trail to the Canadian border can no longer begin their journey by touching the border wall, which is now off-limits as part of a “National Defense Area,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The Trump administration considers a 60-foot fringe of public land near the border to be part of a military base, and is prosecuting “trespassers.”
  • In the nearby Jacumba Wilderness along the California-Baja California border, scientists and conservationists worry about the effect of new barriers on the migration of bighorn sheep.

Writing about the explosion of CBP and ICE contracting at the New Yorker, Garrett Graff noted that CBP has issued $11.4 billion in new border barrier construction contracts since Donald Trump took office, “part of a goal of hitting two hundred and fifty miles of additional barriers by September.”


ICE detention expansion, warehouses, and in-custody deaths

10 deaths so far this year

Ten people being held in ICE’s migrant detention system died there during the first two months of 2026, a pace of in-custody deaths that is far beyond record-setting. News of the latest three emerged in late February and early March.

  • Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian asylum seeker who was being held at the Florence Correctional Center in Arizona, died on March 2 at a Scottsdale hospital from complications of an infected tooth. He first reported tooth pain on February 12 and was given only ibuprofen; a fellow detainee reportedly heard staff “laughing and saying he was faking” as Damas cried for help. Ultimately, he collapsed and went septic. ICE had arrested Damas, who entered the United States using the Biden administration’s Humanitarian Parole program and had a pending asylum claim, in Boston last September, and held him at Florence for four months. Arizona Daily Star reporter Emily Bregel cited a January report from the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project that had already documented dental care wait times of six months or more at Arizona facilities, with root canal treatments denied in favor of extraction only.
  • Alberto Gutiérrez Reyes, a citizen of Mexico, died at the ICE facility in Adelanto, California. His wife said he had diabetes and high cholesterol; “When my son went to go see him Sunday, my son goes every Sunday, he would tell me, ‘Mom, Dad’s skin is yellow. His face is yellow.’”
  • Jairo Garcia-Hernandez, a 27-year-old man from Guatemala being detained in Miami, died on February 16.

“There is no way to reconcile the claim,” expressed in ICE’s announcement of Gutiérrez Reyes’s death, “that ICE detention provides the best healthcare many detainees have ever received with what Emmanuel Damas experienced in the weeks before he died,” wrote immigration policy analyst Austin Kocher.

Kocher counts 39 deaths in ICE custody since the Trump administration began. That would make 29 in 2025, although Apurva Mahajan, Colleen Deguzman, and Lomi Kriel, writing for the Texas Tribune, counted 32 (which would make 42 deaths so far during the Trump administration). Nearly a quarter of their count occurred in Texas.

Camp East Montana (Fort Bliss) under measles quarantine, may close

The Washington Post revealed that ICE is taking steps to close Camp East Montana, the sprawling facility at the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso, which for months has been the largest facility in ICE’s network of detention centers. Camp East Montana opened in August 2025, and the Post noted that it was “once seen as the model for a new breed of makeshift tent encampments.”

DHS said publicly that “no decisions have been made,” but the facility’s population has already declined to about 1,500, roughly half its peak in January 2026.

An internal ICE document indicates that the agency is drafting a letter to terminate the $1.24 billion contract with Acquisition Logistics LLC (a Virginia company, headquartered at a modest residence in the Richmond, Virginia suburbs, with no prior detention experience). No timeline or reason was given, although Acquisition Logistics’ contract was to run through September 2027.

At Camp East Montana, the Post’s Douglas MacMillan wrote, “detainees live in enormous white tents, each as long as two football fields. Inside, temporary walls divide the cavernous spaces into smaller pods… Because the pods are open on top, without ceilings, the conversations, outbursts, and cries of hundreds of people create a cacophony day and night.”

Camp East Montana is now under full quarantine through March 19 or 20 due to a measles outbreak. As of March 3, there were 14 active measles cases and 112 individuals in isolation; ICE has been sending sick detainees to local El Paso hospitals. COVID-19 and tuberculosis outbreaks had already been recorded at the camp in February.

Lawyers are barred from in-person visits during the quarantine, forcing detainees to access legal counsel only virtually. Attorney Crystal Sandoval of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center confirmed the outbreak had been escalating for three weeks before the quarantine was imposed.

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents most of El Paso, with Camp East Montana within her district, has paid several inspection visits to the facility, during which “it became very clear to me early on that serious medical issues were being overlooked and, in some cases, medical attention was non-existent for urgent health issues. There has also been consistently sub-par access to hygiene, janitorial, and laundry services.” Escobar stated that she has never seen staff wearing masks during those visits, and worried that the outbreak endangers hundreds of El Paso residents employed at the facility and 56 Texas National Guard members.

Three people died at Camp East Montana in December and January (see WOLA’s January 23 Border Update).

  • The death of 48-year-old Guatemalan man Francisco Gaspar-Andres appeared to “partially be the result of poor medical care by staff,” the Texas Tribune reported, citing a January letter from Escobar and other members of Congress.
  • El Paso County’s medical examiner ruled that Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man, died of homicide: asphyxia while being restrained. It was the first such ruling involving ICE staff action in at least 15 years. After initially calling it a suicide, ICE later quietly updated its characterization of the incident to “spontaneous use of force.” Six detainee witnesses provided sworn statements describing Lunas Campos begging for asthma medication for days, and some said that they saw him being violently restrained. The federal government attempted to deport the witnesses before they could testify, and a judge temporarily blocked the effort.
  • Victor Manuel Diaz, a 36-year-old man from Nicaragua, died eleven days after Lunas Campos. Guards claimed that his death was a suicide; his autopsy was conducted at a U.S. Army hospital and has not been made public.

Separately, more than 45 detainees have told attorneys of suffering physical abuse, including a teen who said staff blocked security cameras before slamming him to the ground.

Family detention at Dilley, Texas

Very troubling reports continue to emerge from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, ICE’s detention facility for families in a Texas town near San Antonio. ICE held more than 3,800 children in detention nationwide during the first nine months of the Trump administration, according to an Associated Press analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project; of those who are held for more than 24 hours, most appear to end up at Dilley.

There, more than 30 children have been held over 100 days, well beyond the 20-day limit set by the 1997 Flores settlement agreement governing detention of children. Documented conditions include worms in food, lights on all day and night, cruel behavior from guards, undrinkable water, and medications withheld.

A 13-year-old girl, the Associated Press reported, suffered a mental health crisis after finding a worm in her food and being denied prescribed anxiety medications. She attempted suicide by cutting her wrist, yet Dilley’s discharge documents noted her condition without prompting a medical response. A 1-year-old baby with COVID, pneumonia, and other illnesses was given basic over-the-counter drugs.

“The decision to knowingly traumatize children and subject them to chronic stress, I just have no words for it,” Dr. Pamela McPherson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, told AP. McPherson had performed medical oversight for DHS until last year, when the Trump administration fired nearly all staff at the Department’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

ProPublica described how, following the outlet’s publication of heartbreaking letters and drawings from detained children, guards at Dilley have been rifling through detained families’ rooms, taking away crayons, colored pencils, drawing paper, and children’s artwork.

Reporters from NBC News and ABC News obtained 911 calls from Dilley documenting repeated emergencies, indicating a lack of preventative care. Dr. Anita Patel, a board-certified pediatrician, said that the facility’s staff showed “no ability to recognize potentially lethal or emergent situations.”

Patel and nearly 4,000 physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals sent a February 2026 letter to Secretary Noem calling on her to immediately release all children from immigration detention. Citing several recent examples, they recalled that detention inflicts predictable, severe, and lasting harm on children’s physical and mental health, and that current conditions pose both long-term developmental harms and “immediate and potentially life-threatening risks to children’s health.”

“The fact is being in detention is a choice,” Deputy Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis replied to ABC News, although many migrants pursuing asylum cases fear returning home. “We encourage all parents to take control of their departure by using the CBP Home app and receiving a free flight home and $2,600.”

The warehouses

ICE’s sweeping plan to purchase and convert commercial warehouses into a new model of mass detention (explained in WOLA’s February 6 and February 20 Border Updates, and in a briefing from the American Immigration Council) is running into intensifying political and local resistance. The $38.3 billion plan sets a target of 34 ICE-owned, warehouse-sized facilities that would be operational by September 30, 2026: 8 large-scale detention centers (7,000–10,000 each), 16 “processing centers” (1,000–1,500 people each), and 10 “turnkey” facilities. It would increase ICE’s detention capacity by 92,600 beds.

The El Paso Times documented community resistance to a planned 8,500-person mega-facility in Socorro, Texas, east of El Paso, where DHS paid $123 million for three warehouses without notifying local officials. Socorro’s all-Republican city council has directed an investigation into how to block the facility. More than 200 residents spoke at a seven-hour public comment session, raising concerns about water and electricity, and that the warehouses “were not meant to house people, much less 8,500 people.” Even a Trump-supporting former Marine living nearby said, “Everyone is pretty upset about it.”

This pattern of communities learning of plans to open giant warehouses through media rather than federal notification is common. Secretary Noem confirmed in writing to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) that “site selection was predicated on a ‘No Detrimental Effect’ determination” that the Department arrived at through internal assessments, without contacting local governments. A city council member in Surprise, Arizona told Straight Arrow News that he learned about the warehouse opening in his town from a conversation with a reporter, after the purchase was complete.

At least 12 proposed purchases have been blocked or abandoned. New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R) convinced DHS to abandon plans for a facility in Merrimack. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) deflected a Byhalia, Mississippi facility. An all-Republican town council in Roxbury, New Jersey unanimously opposed its facility, but hasn’t stopped it. A company selling a million-square-foot warehouse in Hutchins, Texas announced it would not sell to DHS after public outcry. Legislation introduced by New Hampshire’s Democratic senators (unlikely to pass in the Republican-majority Senate) would prohibit DHS from opening new detention centers without state and local officials’ consent.

In rural Washington County, Maryland (Williamsport), where ICE plans to convert a warehouse into a 1,500-person detention facility, the all-Republican county Board of Commissioners passed a resolution on February 10 supporting DHS and ICE, but faced a room full of protesters chanting “Cowards!” and “Shame!” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown has filed suit against the facility, alleging that required environmental reviews were bypassed; it is expected to begin operating next month.

An unnamed Trump official told Politico: “The mismanagement of Minneapolis lost us the narrative, and the dominos are falling as a result.”

More humane, and far less costly, options exist. Attorney and former DHS official Claire Trickler-McNulty told Kocher that ICE’s own data shows over 90 percent appearance rates at initial court hearings for people participating in alternatives to detention or case management programs, at roughly $7 per day compared to $200 to $300 per day for detention. Nonetheless, Trickler-McNulty observed, every alternative program has been shut down before participants’ cases were completed.

Trickler-McNulty joined former migration policy officials Andrea R. Flores and Deborah Fleischaker in an essay explaining how these more cost-effective case management programs have successfully ensured compliance with immigration proceedings.


ICE recruitment and training

42 days of training

Records obtained by the Washington Post confirm a whistleblower’s February 23 allegations that, in its haste to grow its ranks as fast as possible, ICE removed approximately 240 hours—more than 40 percent—from its basic training program. The cuts began in August 2025, as the Trump administration pushed to accelerate new hiring and double the number of officers in the field. The program shrank from 72 days to 47 days in August, then to 42 days in September.

The cuts included half of all firearms training, nearly all fitness training, and virtually all time devoted to evaluating immigration-specific and practical skills, such as firearms handling and driving tests.

The revelations “appear to directly contradict representations made under oath to Congress by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), a Senate Homeland Security Committee member who supported the whistleblower disclosure.

A CNN analysis found that ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division agents now receive less training than almost all peers across the 20 largest federal law enforcement agencies, including IRS criminal investigators, fisheries enforcement officers, and Bureau of Engraving and Printing police. “Only U.S. Court probation officers and federal prison guards require fewer training days than ICE deportation officers,” the analysis found.

In a February 23 briefing held by Sen. Blumenthal and other congressional Democrats, former ICE instructor Ryan Schwank testified that recruits “cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.” He noted that a unit on protesters’ rights was reduced from two hours to approximately 10 minutes. “Some of the mistakes you would make in training, now you’re making them in the field,” former Federal Law Enforcement Training Center instructor Marc Brown told CNN.

Schwank added that he was instructed to train recruits on the Trump administration’s new policy permitting agents to enter private residences without judicial warrants, just administrative warrants from DHS itself. However, he “was told he could not talk about the information publicly or even take notes after reading the memo” laying out the policy, the Washington Post reported.

More than 1,400 recruits attended the shortened program between August and January 1; the graduation rate fell from roughly 80 to 60 percent. As of January 1, 900 recruits had passed through this abbreviated training and were headed to field offices. ICE expects approximately 4,000 recruits to graduate by September 2026, as it seeks to hit a target of 10,000 new agents, at least 90 percent of whom will be assigned to ICE’s ERO division, not its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division.

Weapons purchases

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California) published an oversight report revealing that ICE and CBP spent at least $144 million on weapons, ammunition, and related equipment in 2025, a fourfold increase for ICE and a doubling for CBP. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent found that the contracts “are mostly for small arms (including AR-style rifles), ordnance, ammunition, and related accessories like gun sights and suppressors… A subcategory includes pepper spray, Tasers, tear gas, and other ‘non-lethal’ weaponry.”

These agencies’ purchases of surveillance technology, which raise strong privacy and civil liberties concerns, have also been increasing. Since 2023, ICE has spent over $121.9 million with the data-mining company Palantir, while CBP has awarded contracts worth at least $81 million to Microsoft, $158 million to Amazon, and $7 million to Google, Wired reported, calling them “minimum estimates.”

The government has meanwhile shut down FPDS.gov, the primary public tool for tracking contract spending, replacing it with SAM.gov, a resource that “frankly sucks,” according to Joseph Cox of 404 Media, a frequent investigator of federal surveillance contracting.


Notes from Mexico

Third-country deportations to Mexico

A Refugees International report, based on November 2025 fieldwork, documented the Trump administration’s increasing deportations of third-country citizens to Mexico. Under informal agreements to accept citizens from seven countries, the U.S. government has carried out more than 10,000 third-country removals to Mexico per year since the Biden administration expanded them in 2023.

Once DHS transfers them to Mexican authorities at the border, the Mexican government’s National Migration Institute (INM) buses migrants across the country to southern border-zone cities, principally Tapachula and Palenque, Chiapas, and Villahermosa, Tabasco. There, they face limited access to services, harsh and insecure conditions, and the possibility of prolonged detention.

The situation, Refugees International noted, is compounded by the Trump administration’s near-total elimination of support for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), and other entities that supported Mexico’s governmental and non-governmental efforts to integrate migrants and operate its asylum system. U.S. humanitarian funding that indirectly supported Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, was cut from $95 million in 2024 to just $85,000 in 2025, Refugees International found.

COMAR received more than 46,000 asylum claims in 2025, which is a drop from prior years, though much less steep than last year’s overall drop in encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Eric Reidy, writing for the New Humanitarian from Tapachula, found that COMAR’s office in the Chiapas city had received 34,000 applications by September 2025, 20,000 of them from citizens of Haiti. Reidy added, “local activists also estimate that there are around 18,000 to 20,000 Venezuelans in Chiapas, mostly in Tapachula.”

Strauss Center report on Mexican border cities

The University of Texas Strauss Center’s regular U.S.-Mexico border migration report, based on interviews with Mexican government officials and civil society organizations, estimated that approximately 5,260 non-Mexican migrants remained in Mexican border cities as of February 2026. That low number, a result of the Trump administration’s continued suspension of the U.S. asylum system at the border, is the fewest recorded by these quarterly reports since 2018-2019.

Migrants are less visible, with many having moved out of shelters and into rented rooms and apartments; there are no longer any tent encampments. COMAR is taking up to two years to process applications amid the sharp cuts in international support noted in the Refugees International report.

The Strauss report noted that between Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 inauguration and December 31, 2025, the U.S. government sent at least 12,983 non-Mexican citizens into Mexico. “The majority of these third-country nationals appear to be from Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Honduras, and they include nearly 700 minors. The vast majority of these third-country nationals are bused immediately to Villahermosa, Tabasco.”

Hope Border Institute report on deportations

A report from the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute and several Mexican migrant shelters and human rights defenders, based on interviews with 112 Mexican citizens deported in 2025, found a much higher proportion of deported people who had been living in the U.S. interior for some time. More than one in four had been in the United States for one to ten years. Nearly one in five had been in the United States for eleven years or more.

The report narrates the experiences of non-Mexican migrants who, upon being deported into Mexico by ICE, were whisked by Mexican authorities to the country’s southern border zone, as documented in the Refugees International report.

Other news from Mexico

  • Two Haitian girls, ages 4 and 5, were found dead in a septic tank at a migrant shelter managed by the state child and family welfare agency in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca on February 24. The Oaxaca governor fired two officials, and the state prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.
  • Shelters in Ciudad Juárez are operating at approximately 20 percent capacity amid the ongoing slowdown in migration, National Catholic Reporter documented. However, those who remain are stranded and staying in the shelters far longer, with stays lasting up to nine months.
  • Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s plan to rename the National Migration Institute (INM) as the “Institute of Human Mobility” has met with deep skepticism from civil society advocates. “It cannot be a small reform or a small cosmetic change, especially with the INM, which continues to behave like a center of intimidation, deportations without due process, and the creation of migratory complications,” Luis Xavier Carrancá of the Clínica Jurídica Refugiados Alaíde Foppa told El Universal.
  • Organized crime-related violence flared up in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, across from south Texas, after security forces killed Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes on February 22 in Jalisco state. Gun battles, blockades, and other violent incidents—including a drone attack on police between Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo—have since largely subsided for now.


Other news

  • A report from the Department of Defense Inspector General (DODIG) found that 708 migrants passed through the detention facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2025 after President Trump, in late January 2025, ordered that the base be used to hold noncitizens. Trump had originally called for 30,000 people to be held at the base, but plans were scaled back amid legal and logistical challenges. The average detention stay was 14 days. The Defense Department obligated $60.6 million from its budget for “Operation Southern Guard,” the Guantánamo detention operation, in 2025, and disbursed $35.2 million of it. DHS spent another $17.8 million on operations at the naval base. Combining those two expenditure categories yields a cost of $74,859 per detained person. Each military flight transporting detainees to the base cost an average of $708,000. U.S. military personnel assigned to the detention operation declined from 1,000 at the beginning of 2025 to fewer than 400 by the end of the year. Without providing a count of such incidents, the report noted that migrants were at times placed in “segregation housing” to discipline them after “disruptive conduct (such as fighting), aggressive behavior, insolence toward staff, property damage, and possession of prohibited items.”
  • The El Paso border zone saw another incident involving counter-drone laser weapons that, once again, exposed hazardous coordination failures among U.S. forces tasked with securing the border. On February 26, near the town of Fort Hancock east of El Paso, the U.S. military used a laser-based anti-drone system to shoot down a drone that belonged to CBP itself. The friendly-fire incident owed in part to CBP’s failure to notify the Pentagon about the flight. As noted in WOLA’s February 20 Border Update, on February 10 CBP had used a Pentagon laser to shoot down what turned out to be a metallic balloon, prompting a brief FAA closure of El Paso airspace. In both cases, lasers were deployed without FAA coordination. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) called on the inspectors general of the Defense and Homeland Security departments to conduct a joint investigation. “Now, we’re seeing the result of its [the White House’s] incompetence,” read a statement from senior Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee.
  • The latest report from Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor program documented 2,253 deportation flights to 79 countries in the Trump administration’s first year. That is a 46 percent increase in flights and a 76 percent increase in the number of destination countries over the previous 12 months. The top destination countries between February 2025 and January 2026 were Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia.
  • The Trump administration repatriated 1,498 citizens of Cuba aboard flights to Havana in 2025, El Toque reported. That is more than the total of all repatriations to Cuba under Biden (978), Obama (341), and Bush (416). In addition, according to a Mexican government document seen by WOLA, the U.S. government repatriated another 3,753 Cubans to Mexico last year. Predicting that Cuba’s regime “will fall very soon,” President Trump said of Cubans in the United States, “Maybe they want to go back. They’re going to have that choice.”
  • The IOM recorded 409 migrant deaths in the Americas in 2025, the fewest since the UN agency began collecting data in 2014. “This is likely due to fewer people taking dangerous irregular pathways,” as the Trump administration’s suspension of asylum and its “mass deportation” effort have reduced attempts to come to the United States.
  • Fewer than 3 percent of asylum cases decided in January were approved in U.S. immigration courts, reported the Los Angeles Times, citing data compiled by Mobile Pathways. That is a record low, down from 18 percent in January 2025. Amid fears of being detained at courthouses, 20 percent of asylum seekers missed their hearings nationally in January; in Los Angeles County courts, 56 percent failed to appear, up from 14 percent a year ago. The share of nationwide cases marked “abandoned” doubled to 41 percent of those decided in January. Los Angeles Times reporter Andrea Castillo pointed to an early February tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, architect of the Trump administration’s restrictionist immigration policies, conveying his view that “‘Asylum’ is limited to individuals fleeing extremely narrow categories of state persecution” and that virtually nobody from Latin America should qualify.
  • Colombia’s migration agency reported that more Venezuelans are leaving Colombia than entering, for the first time in years: since 2025, 418,303 entered Colombia at official crossings, and 433,315 exited. For those entering Colombia, the United States remained the top destination (21.6% of total). The aftermath of the January 3 U.S. operation that extracted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has not altered border mobility.
  • The Guardian interviewed Luis Muñoz Pinto, a 27-year-old Venezuelan robotics engineering student with no criminal record, whom the Trump administration deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison in March 2025, invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Now back in Venezuela, Muñoz said that ICE agents identified his rose tattoos, dedicated to his twin sisters, as Tren de Aragua gang markings. He is among 137 CECOT deportees whom a Washington, DC federal court has ruled must be allowed to return, if they wish, for due process hearings.
  • The number of U.S. immigration judges has fallen by approximately a quarter, from 726 at the start of 2025 to 553 as of late February 2026, after the Trump administration fired nearly 100, with dozens more retiring or resigning, NPR reported. Those who stay, including 52 military judge advocates-general serving temporarily, are under White House and Justice Department pressure to serve as “deportation judges.”
  • The administration proposed a regulation on February 20 that would effectively suspend work permit eligibility for asylum applicants for an indefinite, potentially generational, period. The rule would bar new work permit applications until U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) achieves an average asylum adjudication time of 180 days or fewer. Given a current backlog of 1.4 million applications (over 77% pending more than 180 days), DHS’s own estimate is that the wait could be 14 to 173 years.
  • In Massachusetts, federal District Court Judge Brian Murphy ruled that it is unlawful to deport people to third countries without notice and an opportunity to object. He paused his ruling for 15 days to give the Trump administration time to appeal.
  • Street Sense documented that ICE has been monitoring homeless service providers in Washington, DC. At least one deportee from Washington’s homelessness services system was murdered after being removed to El Salvador. He had been brought to the United States when he was eight, and ICE arrested him while he was looking for an apartment to rent using a newly acquired housing voucher.
  • At Salon, Nicholas Liu documented cases of Border Patrol and ICE failing to return detained migrants’ valuables and identity documents after their release. “Only a call from a persistent lawyer might motivate officers to actually find those items and return them by mail.” In Minnesota, 10 immigration lawyers interviewed by Julia Lurie for Mother Jones said that non-return of identity documents is widespread. “It’s more the rule than the exception that people generally are not given their stuff back,” one said.
  • A Project on Government Oversight and Investigative Reporting Workshop analysis found that DHS referred a record 274 assault cases to federal prosecutors in 2025 under Section 111 of Title 18, U.S. Code, which criminalizes assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering with on-duty federal law enforcement agents. The conviction record, however, has been poor: all five Section 111 cases tried in Los Angeles resulted in acquittals, and 16 of 22 Chicago prosecutions were dismissed.
  • In Arizona, the Tucson Sentinel, the Arizona Mirror, and the Border Chronicle documented covert CBP automated license plate readers (ALPRs) concealed in traffic cones, crash-cushion barrels, and the backs of highway signs at locations up to 132 miles from the border. Sheriff’s departments in San Diego and Orange counties have shared license plate data with Border Patrol despite a state law prohibiting such sharing, CalMatters reported.
  • CBP is using commercial advertising trackers to identify people’s precise locations over time, 404 Media reported. “This sort of surveillance can happen through all sorts of innocuous seeming apps, such as video games, news apps, weather trackers, and dating apps.”
  • More than 24,400 habeas corpus petitions have been filed in federal courts since January 2025, more than the three previous presidential administrations combined. This, Isabela Dias wrote at Mother Jones, is a consequence of the Trump administration’s July 2025 mandatory detention policy denying bond to anyone who, at any time, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border improperly. Habeas corpus cases—a “centuries-old legal mechanism” that prevents unlawful government detention—are the only way to free many people with pending asylum cases. Judges, including many Trump appointees, are overwhelmingly granting them.
  • ICE has been accused of ignoring these habeas corpus release orders so frequently that Austin Kocher, the immigration analyst, has called it a “soft suspension of habeas corpus” rights in the United States. Minnesota Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz (a George W. Bush appointee) threatened to hold officials in contempt after identifying 210 orders in 143 cases in which ICE officials did not comply. In New Jersey, Judge Zahid Quraishi found the U.S. attorney’s office had “intentionally” violated court orders in more than 70 cases, and had “lost its credibility.”
  • Attorneys defending unaccompanied migrant children filed a motion in a McAllen, Texas federal court seeking to halt a CBP policy allowing unaccompanied minors to voluntarily self-deport before reaching Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters. The “voluntary” self-deportations may be happening under pressure, which would violate protections in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. The attorneys cited at least 13 cases involving children signing documents under duress after being denied access to attorneys. “Some children told attorneys that agents threatened, yelled, and coerced them into signing documents they did not fully understand, sometimes due to language barriers,” the Associated Press reported.
  • An ACLU report, “Deputized for Disaster,” documents the dramatic expansion of the 287(g) program under which state and local law enforcement help ICE enforce immigration law. 133 agencies were participating in 287(g) agreements at the start of Donald Trump’s second term, and over 1,200 today. At least 32 percent of the United States now lives in a county with a 287(g) agency, including at least 17 state highway police forces. Florida has devoted more state and local law enforcement to immigration enforcement than any other state.
  • Border Patrol agents and Texas state troopers killed James Douglas McMillan, a resident of Wisconsin, following a March 4 high-speed pursuit on Interstate 10 in Sierra Blanca, west Texas. CBP reported that McMillan fled a checkpoint, shot at officers and civilian vehicles, then barricaded himself in his vehicle—which was reportedly stolen from Arizona—and pointed his weapon at officers.
  • Mario Carrillo of America’s Voice warned that what interior cities are experiencing—surveillance, checkpoint proliferation, racial profiling—is what border communities have lived with for decades: “Once the militarization starts, to stop it becomes increasingly difficult.”


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

Essays and analyses

In Springfield, Ohio, some Americans have converted their basements and spare bedrooms into shelters for immigrant families who could be targeted in raids

The Cruz family spent years building a life in New York. Then the risks of staying became too great

In immigrant communities, it feels like 2020 all over again

A shocking case in Buffalo, New York

The disabled man had been released from jail when federal officers showed up and drove him to a coffee shop. His family searched for him for days

A nearly blind Burmese refugee has been missing since Thursday after Border Patrol dropped him off at a Buffalo Tim Hortons

Turmoil at DHS

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Noem denied that Corey Lewandowski had any role in approving contracts. But internal DHS records and interviews with current and former agency staffers contradict her testimony.

GOP Sen. Thom Tillis has threatened to place a hold on additional nominees if he doesn't get data he requested from DHS

Kristi Noem’s DHS has acquired at least nine new aircraft in recent weeks, with another one on the way. Half are luxury jets

A forthcoming book reveals new details about Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski

Kristi Noem isn’t shaking up DHS, she’s doubling down on violence and propaganda

Law enforcement sources told The Intercept that Noem’s tale about a cannibal was a fabrication

The drama at the Department of Homeland Security, explained

DHS leadership says the department needs the jet for immigrant deportations and Kristi Noem’s travel. A brochure given to passengers who recently flew on it with Noem highlights its “exceptional interior design by renowned New York designer Peter Marino”

The Department of Homeland Security admitted that its website featuring what it calls the “worst of the worst” arrested immigrants was rife with errors and changed the site this week after receiving questions from CNN about it

In the courts

Federal appeals courts must defer to immigration judges’ findings on whether asylum-seekers show harms serious enough to qualify for protection, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously

“If the government may simply seize someone without due process, there is no check on its ability to seize anyone,” one judge wrote

Arrests and use of force

DHS regulations do not ensure that ICE warrants are supported by probable cause findings. This poses significant Fourth Amendment risks

Border Patrol in southern Arizona cited more than 100 people for not carrying their immigration documents in 2025 as part of Trump administration efforts to revive decades-old immigration laws

The Department of Homeland Security said the 23-year-old, who came from a family of Trump supporters, was shot after intentionally hitting an agent with his vehicle on South Padre Island

Federal immigration agents arrested 261 DACA recipients during the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, according to statistics shared with Congress

U.S. President Donald Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants since taking office in 2025

A passenger in the car with Ruben Ray Martinez wrote that the men were trying to comply with authorities before Mr. Martinez was shot. The passenger, Joshua Orta, died in a car accident on Saturday

Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot in South Padre Island, Texas, in March 2025. ICE's involvement in the shooting was not disclosed until more than 11 months after the shooting

Ruben Ray Martinez was shot through his driver's-side window in South Padre Island, Texas

A 23-year-old American was shot last March in South Padre Island. ICE’s involvement in the shooting was not disclosed until this week

The Trump administration plans to double down on targeted immigration enforcement, taking Tom Homan’s playbook in Minneapolis and applying it to multiple cities nationwide, according to current and former Homeland Security officials

Trump’s surge of federal agents is trending down but “certainly hasn't stopped and ... people are very much on edge,” he said

How immigration agents are using 18 US Code 111 to detain American citizens

Detention

For the second time this year, the agency has failed to publish the required information about immigration enforcement on schedule this week. Transparency isn't what you say, it's what you do

After visiting an Alabama center, Carmen Felisa Ramírez Boscán, a representative of Colombians abroad, asked President Petro to expedite proceedings to bring ailing detainees back home: ‘They prefer to die in their own country’

DHS is rewriting its detention rules to ignore the law—and entrap millions

The justices denied GEO Group’s bid to toss out a lawsuit claiming prisoners in Colorado were illegally forced to work

If President Dwight D. Eisenhower were alive today, he very well may warn of the ever-growing immigration industrial complex

Volunteer attorneys and law students describe alarming treatment of people transported from across the country to an El Paso ICE detention facility

Last year’s multibillion-dollar funding package has allowed the government to put more immigrants behind bars, often in worse conditions and with little oversight

Congress members write to Kristi Noem to express ‘grave concern’ over detention of Georgia barber Rodney Taylor

Rep. Adelita Grijalva visited with a detained asylum seeker with dementia, age 79, after learning about her from an Arizona Daily Star investigation

A Fifth Circuit ruling endorses detention without bond for undocumented immigrants. Will John Roberts and SCOTUS do their job?

Deportation

Any Lucia López Belloza was deported by mistake. A judge ordered her return by Friday. When the Trump administration sent a plane, she decided not to get on

"I understand what people are going through because I lived it myself"

Should a dad be deported for leaving his toddlers alone at home for a half hour 15 years ago? The Trump administration says yes in a pending court case with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems

A Beaverton family is grieving after the father, who was detained and deported by ICE, has now died

Trump has been deporting people to so-called third countries, or countries that the deportee typically has no connection to. A legal expert spoke to Isaac Chotiner about how he’s getting away with it

Faith-based communities’ responses

Some religious groups have sued for access, others have been denied entrance to detention facilities

The discussions centered on recent documents from the U.S. Catholic bishops calling for restoring access to asylum at the border, safeguarding due process, protecting family unity and pressing for limits on detention

Religious men and women in the borderland region accompany migrants on a daily basis in the federal courthouses and in immigration detention centers, seeking to provide solace, comfort and support

Thousands of congregations have sued over a policy change that opens the door for ICE raids at houses of worship

Privacy and civil liberties concerns

Two people claim they were punished for acts of protest, and an internal government memo suggests they may not be the last

After a Washington Post investigation, House Democrats are asking tech giants how they handle administrative subpoenas targeting DHS’s critics

Court documents in a case against Jeane Wong revealed the existence of the operation

DHS social media messaging

Experts say this kind of media campaign is unprecedented and paints a distorted picture of immigrants and crime

The military role

Why the One Big Beautiful Bill violates a forgotten constitutional check on funding standing armies and how Congress can enforce it now

Government agencies’ missions diverted to migration enforcement

WIRED spoke with workers across seven government agencies—from the IRS to HUD—about how their work has been contorted to support ICE and other immigration efforts

In recent months, federal judges have dismissed criminal indictments against defendants held in immigration detention, citing issues with clients being able to access lawyers and other concerns

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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