Fwd: Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: October 10, 2025
Molly Molloy
From: 'Adam Isacson' via Border call <borde...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Subject: Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: October 10, 2025
Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: October 31, 2025
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- CBP publishes fiscal 2025 border and migration data: The U.S. government’s 2025 fiscal year ended on September 30, and Border Patrol reported the fewest apprehensions of migrants since 1970. The reduction owes to the Trump administration’s elimination of nearly all humanitarian reception of people fleeing danger and the climate of fear associated with its “mass deportation” campaign. However, while still historically low, apprehensions increased 83 percent from July to September, especially in Arizona.
- Regional ICE directors purged, some replaced with Border Patrol agents: Impatient with the pace of arrests of undocumented people in the U.S. interior, the White House is reassigning at least a dozen directors of ICE field offices. It plans to replace many of them with Border Patrol agents, indicating a likely proliferation of the aggressive tactics that Border Patrol’s participation has brought to immigration operations in Los Angeles and Chicago.
- Cybersecurity and civil liberties issues: Stories over the past week detail new uses of defense databases, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, phone searches, and “smart walls”—much of it funded by the “big bill” that Congress passed in July. Many of these measures raise concerns about privacy and civil liberties.
- Links: ”mass deportation” and human rights in the U.S. interior: Links to update about tactics in the administration’s ongoing “blitz” in Chicago, conditions in ICE detention, contractors and hiring challenges, efforts to oversee ICE and CBP activities, and polling showing increased disapproval of the “mass deportation” effort.
THE FULL UPDATE:
CBP publishes fiscal 2025 border and migration data
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published data on October 24 about border security and migration through September 2025, the last month of the 2025 fiscal year.
Fewest Border Patrol apprehensions since 1970
The agency reported that its Border Patrol component apprehended 237,538 undocumented migrants between the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry during fiscal 2025. That is the smallest apprehension total since 1970 (201,780), and 76 percent of it occurred during the fiscal year’s first four months, from October 2024 to January 2025, when Joe Biden was still president.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
Adding 206,133 people who came to the border’s ports of entry—87 percent of them during the Biden administration, when the “CBP One” app allowed appointments at the ports—makes a CBP-wide total of 443,671 encounters with migrants at the border in fiscal 2025.
The sharp drop in CBP encounters (a 79 percent decrease from fiscal 2024) owes to the Trump administration’s severely restrictive policies, especially the suspension of nearly all humanitarian reception of people fleeing danger. In January, the White House suspended access to the U.S. asylum system, a move that continues to face legal challenges, and has now gone five months without a single encountered migrant being released into the U.S. interior to pursue a claim outside of detention. The administration’s ongoing “mass deportation” campaign has meanwhile fed a climate of fear in the U.S. interior that discourages would-be migrants from considering the United States to be a destination. A softening U.S. job market could be a third factor.
Despite that overall trend, Border Patrol’s apprehensions appear to have bottomed out in July and have stopped decreasing. The agency’s 8,386 apprehensions in September were 83 percent more than in July (4,592).
If chart is not visible, click here
It is not yet clear whether the increase is a trend that is likely to continue, or whether it is a reversion to a seasonal pattern of greater migration in the spring and fall when border-area weather is milder. Asylum-seeking migrants did not follow this seasonal pattern as closely, but the Trump administration’s ban means that they are not a significant part of the population currently encountered at the border.
Sectors
Border Patrol divides the U.S. border into nine geographic sectors; the growth since July has principally taken place in its Arizona and southern Texas sectors.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
Tucson (Arizona) led all of Border Patrol’s sectors in migrant apprehensions in September, for the first time since May 2024.
If chart is not visible, click here
Demographics
Just 33 percent of Border Patrol’s apprehensions were of family units (parents with children) or unaccompanied children; that is the smallest share for a non-pandemic year since 2015. From February to September, the Trump administration’s first full eight months, the child-and-family share dropped to 17 percent (7.5% families, 9.8% unaccompanied children).
If chart is not visible, click here
Since July, though, “family unit members” have seen by far the largest growth, among demographic categories, in Border Patrol’s apprehensions. Arrivals of parents with children increased 210 percent (from 316 to 979 apprehensions) over a two-month period.
If chart is not visible, click here
More than half of those family-unit apprehensions occurred in Arizona (Border Patrol’s Tucson and Yuma sectors), increasing from 47 in July to 521 in September.
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Nationalities
Of all migrants entering U.S. custody at the border (Border Patrol apprehensions plus port-of-entry encounters) in fiscal 2025, 40 percent were citizens of Mexico, up from 34 percent during 2020-2024. During February-September, the full months when the Trump administration was in place, Mexico’s share rose to 75 percent of a much smaller total.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
“Right now we’re back to what I would call old-school norms on the border, where the majority of people we’re arresting are from the country of Mexico,” CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told The American Conservative. “The exotics, the countries with a very high threat for terrorism around the world, have all dropped off.”
Ports of entry
At the land border’s ports of entry, CBP’s recorded encounters with migrants plummeted the moment that the Trump administration canceled use of the CBP One smartphone app to make appointments. The CBP Office of Field Operations averaged 48,860 encounters per month during the last eight full months of the Biden administration, and 3,463 (93% fewer) during the first eight full months of the Trump administration.
Data Table - If chart is not visible, click here
Elsewhere in the hemisphere
During the first eight full months of the Trump administration, Mexico’s encounters with non-Mexican migrants dropped 91 percent compared to the last eight full months of the Biden administration, falling from 769,507 to 70,910 encounters.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) published a dispatch from Tapachula, Chiapas, a city near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. There, because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on migration and suspension of asylum, “thousands of stranded migrants and asylum seekers” continue to live “in increasingly precarious conditions.” MSF’s facility in Tapachula has provided 128 percent more medical consultations and 53 percent more mental health consultations than it did in 2024.
In Panama, where migration through the Darién Gap has stalled to nearly nothing, the number of migrants registeredcrossing the treacherous jungle region totaled 753 during the Trump administration’s first full eight months, down 99.5 percent from 162,936 during the final eight full months of the Biden administration.
Instead, some migrants have given up on seeking protection or opportunity in the United States. The latest report from Colombia’s migration agency counted 17,701 migrants, mostly Venezuelan citizens, detected traveling southbound from Panama since February 1. The number of southbound migrants in September (1,200) was less than half of what it was in May (2,654), indicating that this flow is easing. Those who plan to abandon the northward journey and return to South America are fewer in number than they were earlier in the year.
A drop in fentanyl seizures at the border
CBP’s September data also include the agency’s seizures of illicit drugs along the U.S.-Mexico border. WOLA’s next weekly Border Update will cover these trends, but it is worth noting that border seizures of fentanyl dropped 46 percent from fiscal 2024 to 2025. The drop, which may indicate a decline in overall cross-border flows, began in mid-2023, well before Donald Trump took office.
Data table - If chart is not visible, click here
Regional ICE directors purged, some replaced with Border Patrol agents
Over the October 25-26 weekend, according to several media reports, the Trump administration relieved at least a dozendirectors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) 25 field offices of their command, including those in Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and San Diego. In a significant but still unclear number of cases—at least half, according to NBC News—they are to be replaced with hand-picked Border Patrol agents.
According to several reports, including those linked from this narrative, the White House is unhappy with ICE’s operational pace. In May, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, demanded that ICE increase its interior U.S. arrests to 3,000 per day. The agency has rarely hit 2,000; 21 days into September, it had totaled 21,293 “book-ins” for the month, according to a regular report that has not been updated due to the government shutdown.
The administration is instead turning to Border Patrol, an agency idled at the border by the reduced migration levels discussed above, which has broad authorities to enforce immigration law in the U.S. interior, especially within 100 miles of any coast or international border. Border Patrol already has 1,500 of its 19,000 agents deployed in at least 27 U.S. cities.
Chief Bovino’s role
NBC reported that the list of officials replacing the purged ICE directors has been compiled by Corey Lewandoski, a onetime Trump campaign manager now acting as a “special advisor” to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, together with Gregory Bovino, the controversial and publicity-seeking “at large” commander of DHS operations in Chicago and previously in Los Angeles.
Though he started 2025 as the chief of the agency’s relatively quiet El Centro (California) sector, Bovino is now outside of Border Patrol’s chain of command: an unnamed law enforcement official told NBC that “Bovino does not report to the chief of Border Patrol or CBP’s commissioner, as other Border Patrol sector chiefs do,” he “reports directly to Noem.”
Having “brought militarized operations once primarily used at the border into America’s largest cities,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, Bovino “is not viewed as the exception to the norm, but the new standard for what is to come at ICE,” an unnamed official told the Washington Examiner.
Morale
The moves indicate that Border Patrol has the upper hand in a growing inter-agency rivalry. “ICE employees are not happy about any of it, feeling replaced and exhausted from the past nine months. Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents are ecstatic,” four sources told the Washington Examiner. One of those sources said that border agents are “eager” to carry out ICE’s internal duties because “the perception is that they [ICE] are always dragging their feet. They weren’t good team players.”
Meanwhile, morale at ICE “is declining due to the infusion of outside employees and leaders,” the Examiner added. “They are under constant threat; people are ground down; it’s a culture of fear” at ICE, Claire Trickler-McNulty, a Biden-era senior ICE official, told the New York Times.
Border Patrol’s harder organizational culture
White House officials like Miller are fond of Border Patrol’s more “cowboy” tactics like rappelling from helicopters in an alarmingly violent raid of a Chicago apartment building or chasing day laborers around Home Depot parking lots, officials told NBC News.
Indeed, many of the more controversial videos of masked agents’ aggressive and confrontational arrest and crowd control tactics in Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere show those agents wearing dark green Border Patrol uniforms. Dan Altman, who headed CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility during the Biden administration, explained to the Los Angeles Times that while ICE agents “lean heavily on investigations and typically know when they set out for the day who they are targeting,” Border Patrol is accustomed to patrolling the borderlands and confronting anyone whom they suspect of being undocumented.
With the leadership changes, more interior U.S. cities will likely see the aggressive tactics that Border Patrol has brought to Los Angeles and Chicago. While that is likely to cause more of a public outcry, unnamed officials tell conservative media outlets, it may not benefit the administration’s “mass deportation” campaign. “Border Patrol just comes in more heavy-handed. They don’t make more arrests, but they make more headlines,” a source told the Washington Examiner. “Since Border Patrol came to LA in June, we’ve lost our focus, going too hard, too fast, with limited prioritization,” a senior DHS official said to Fox News. “It’s getting numbers, but at what cost?”
Cybersecurity and civil liberties issues
AI-driven military databases in use at the border
“We’ve really evolved with operations on the border” in the “use of AI, big data, and networks,” the U.S. Army’s chief data and analytics officer, David Markowitz, told Breaking Defense. Though the Army and U.S. Northern Command, the Defense Department unit responsible for all services’ military activities in North America, have different mandates and legal authorities, “they both manage masses of data using AI software from the same contractor, Palantir.”
This lets Army personnel assigned to the Trump administration’s border mission, an unusual internal role for the military, integrate their databases with “Maven Smart,” a Palantir AI product for Northern Command that “integrates things the Army could never legally have access to, like law enforcement data, Homeland Security information, things we can’t touch, but by their joint command [authorities], with their relationships, they can.”
Facial recognition
On the streets of U.S. cities, ICE and CBP agents are using facial recognition technology to verify individuals’ U.S. citizenship, 404 Media reported. Videos of interactions with agents show them pointing their phone cameras at people, “in stops that seem to have little justification beyond the color of someone’s skin, to then look up more information on that person, including their identity and potentially their immigration status. It is not clear which specific app the officers in the videos are using.”
Services that can query personal data include an app called Mobile Fortify and datasets run by LexisNexis, Clearview AI, and others. If Mobile Fortify facially identifies someone as a noncitizen, even other evidence like a birth certificate may not be enough to prevent their detention.
AI surveillance trucks
Wired reporter Dell Cameron revealed that DHS has published a pre-solicitation notice for another big domestic surveillance project made possible with funding from the “big bill” that Congress passed in July. The Department seeks contractors to support “a Modular Mobile Surveillance System, or M2S2.”
This would allow Border Patrol agents to park four-wheel-drive vehicles, raise a telescoping mast equipped with AI, radar, high-powered cameras, and wireless networking. These could detect motion several miles away, distinguishing between people, animals, and vehicles, using “computer vision” algorithms originally developed for military drones.
Phone searches
Also at Wired, Cameron and Matt Burgess reviewed fiscal year-end CBP data and found a 17 percent increase, from fiscal 2024 to 2025, in CBP’s searches of individuals’ mobile devices. Agents and officers conducted approximately 55,424 searches at all nationwide ports of entry in 2025, up from 46,958 the previous year. (“All nationwide ports of entry” includes the Canadian border, airports, and other sites not along the U.S.-Mexico border.)
The record 2025 total includes simple searches—an agent scrolling through an individual’s unlocked phone, laptop, or similar device—and more advanced searches using tools to copy and analyze devices’ contents. “Advanced” searches totaled 4,363 in 2025. Border personnel have “broad powers” to search electronic devices without warrants, raising concerns about privacy and civil liberties violations, Cameron and Burgess noted.
“Smart wall” surveillance
While the Trump administration does not plan to build new barriers in Big Bend National Park, an ecologically important and very remote area of west Texas where illegal crossings are relatively rare, it does plan to implement new surveillance technologies in the region, the Houston Chronicle reported.
The administration’s wall-building plans, supported by a $46.5 billion allocation in the giant funding bill that passed in July, would leave about 536 of the U.S.-Mexico border’s 1,970 miles without a physical barrier but with new “detection technology” installed. This includes “camera, sensors, and radar instead of traditional fencing in difficult terrain,” the Chronicle noted.
The area without barriers appears to include 363 miles of Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector, the quietest of the nine geographic sectors into which the agency divides the border. One percent of Border Patrol’s southern-border migrant apprehensions occurred in the Big Bend Sector between 2020 and 2025.
Instagram ruse to seek ICE-spotting accounts
404 Media reported that DHS is seeking to compel Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, to reveal the identities behind social media accounts that post about ICE activity. The Department is arguing that Meta must shut down an account posting about ICE activities in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, because it is purportedly violating a customs law about the “importation of merchandise.” 404 noted that ACLU “lawyers fighting the case say the move is ‘wildly outside the scope of statutory authority.’”
Other news
- Under pressure from Gov. Greg Abbott (R), the city council of Laredo, Texas will pave over a giant street mural near city hall that since 2020 has read “DEFUND THE WALL – FUND OUR FUTURE.” For the time being at least, Laredo—part of one of the quieter of Border Patrol’s nine southern border sectors, ranking seventh with 4 percent of 2020-2025 migrant apprehensions—lacks a border barrier along its riverfront facing Nuevo Laredo. Gov. Abbott had threatened to withhold $1.6 billion in transportation funding unless the city removed the mural.
- Writing for El Paso public media (KTEP), veteran border reporters Alyda Muela, Angela Kocherga, Anita Snow, and Dianne Solis portrayed the work that religious organizations along the border are doing to protect and care for immigrants amid the Trump administration’s crackdown. Citing Catholic and other denominations’ social teaching, faith-based groups and churches are forming defense teams and creating an “underground railroad” of assistance.
- CBP issued three more notifications of migrant deaths, made public on October 24. One detailed an October 12 vehicle pursuit during evening rush hour in western El Paso that killed a citizen of Mexico and a citizen of Guatemala. Another reported the death of a 20-year-old Cuban woman of a preexisting medical condition shortly after entering CBP custody in Laredo. The third narrated the September 9 death of a Mexican man of apparent heat exhaustion and dehydration in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. CBP posted seven such notifications on October 23 and 24.
- Despite the Trump administration’s rapidly deteriorating relations with Colombia’s government and its escalating military pressure on the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela, deportation flights to both countries continue uninterrupted. “U.S. removal flights to Caracas continue biweekly, typically on Wednesdays and Fridays,” while flights to Bogotá—some run by Colombia’s Air Force—run on Wednesdays and Thursdays, noted the ICE Flight Monitor project. Even as a U.S. aircraft carrier steams to the Caribbean near Venezuela’s coast, the regime’s Ministry of Interior and Justice stated that it “will continue to give continuity to this mission” of accepting deportation flights, EFE reported.
- Spain’s El País reported on the Trump administration’s secretive deportations of third-country citizens to nations in Africa, where five governments (Ghana, Eswatini, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Uganda) have already agreed to accept some such removals. Aboard a 16-hour U.S. military flight to Ghana, four people “were put in straitjackets, because they refused to board without speaking to their lawyers,” a citizen of Gambia said.
- A federal judge criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Noem for making inflammatory statements about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Politico reported. While District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw, an Obama appointee based in Nashville, did not issue a gag order, he recalled that their allegations that Abrego García is an MS-13 gang member and human trafficker violated rules about opining on an ongoing criminal case. Since his return to the United States in June after being wrongfully deported to prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration has been seeking to convict Abrego García of human trafficking based on a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee.
- DHS has begun issuing $5,000 fines for “illegal entry” to unaccompanied migrant children living in Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters under a provision in the big funding bill that passed in July, The Intercept reported. The U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez issued a new warning about a blanket application of this “inadmissible alien apprehension fee” to those who cross the border without inspection, Norte reported.
- An October 4 theft of 180 kilos of seized cocaine, and a 78 percent passage rate for integrity checks, demonstrate that organized crime-tied corruption remains a big challenge for municipal police in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, reported Revista Zeta.
- Andrea Flores, who worked on migration policy at the White House early in Joe Biden’s administration, wrote a two-part newsletter post narrating the difficulty of selling a new vision of the U.S.-Mexico border, and an ambitious asylum reform, amid a historic increase in migrant arrivals and unprepared senior leadership. “When I returned to the White House, it often felt like no one really knew who was in charge of immigration policy, which made getting anything done much harder.”
Links: ”mass deportation” and human rights in the U.S. interior
While WOLA continues to closely monitor the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” operations in the U.S. interior, these have expanded to such an extent that we lack the staff resources necessary to produce a weekly narrative. We present this section as a categorized list of links to key sources.
Chicago
Border Patrol, with its more heavy-handed tactics, is leading the administration’s high-profile “Midway Blitz” operation
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Border Patrol Takes Lead Role in Trump Administration’s Chicago Crackdown, Carrying Out More Arrests Than ICE (CBS News, Wednesday, October 29, 2025).
- Border Patrol agents have been responsible for more Chicago-area arrests than ICE amid “Midway Blitz,” an unprecedented shift that has caused some internal tensions
Incidents and concerns, including aggressive crowd control measures
Claire Galofaro, Chicago’s Children Are Getting Caught in the Chaos of Immigration Crackdowns (Associated Press, Associated Press, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- In Chicago, children and families have been traumatized by an immigration enforcement action involving tear gas
Andrea Cavallier, US Citizen, 67, ‘Has Six Ribs Broken’ by Border Patrol Agents, His Running Club Says (The Independent (UK), Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- The incident unfolded Saturday in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood, where residents say federal agents disrupted a children’s Halloween parade
Autumn Billings, Federal Immigration Agents Accused of Tear-Gassing Peaceful Protestors, Pointing Gun at Veterans in Chicago (Reason, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- The actions would violate a federal order imposed by an Illinois judge to limit the use of nonlethal weapons and other crowd control tactics
Julie Bosman, Tensions Mount as Agents, Including Gregory Bovino, Clash With Chicagoans (The New York Times, Thursday, October 23, 2025).
- Mr. Bovino, a Border Patrol leader, appeared to use tear gas during a confrontation with residents on Thursday. Plaintiffs in a suit over federal tactics say that violated a court order
Bennett Haeberle, Videos Raise Questions About if Border Patrol’s Actions Violated Use of Force Policy, Judge’s Order (NBC 5 Chicago, Sunday, October 26, 2025).
- Videos raise questions about if Border Patrol actions violate the agency’s use of force policies and a federal judge’s standing order
Mitch Smith, Tear Gas Can Be Dangerous. The Rules on How to Use It Vary. (The New York Times, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- The repeated use of tear gas by federal immigration officers in Chicago has renewed a debate about how chemical irritants should be used by law enforcement personnel
Todd Feurer, Laugh Factory Manager Charged With Assaulting Border Patrol Agent Outside Chicago Comedy Club Last Week (CBS News, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- The night manager at the Chicago Laugh Factory has been charged with assaulting U.S. Border Patrol agent during a confrontation outside the North Side comedy club last week
Chief Bovino appears in federal court, where a judge had ordered restraint in the use of force, including chemical irritants
Jason Meisner, ‘Not How Any of Us Want to Live’: Judge Orders Border Patrol Boss Bovino to Court Daily to Report Use of Force (The Chicago Tribune, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- A visibly displeased federal judge Tuesday ordered Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino to start coming to court every day to detail any confrontations his immigration enforcement officers have had
Julie Bosman, Judge Admonishes Border Patrol Leader for Tactics in Chicago (The New York Times, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who has become a public face of President Trump’s crackdown, was ordered to give the federal judge a daily report on the actions of his team from now on
A Democratic congressional candidate with a big social media following, Kat Abughazaleh, was indicted for participation in a protest that blocked a federal vehicle at an ICE facility
Cameron Peters, DOJ Indicts a Congressional Candidate in Chicago (The Logoff, Vox, Wednesday, October 29, 2025).
- Kat Abughazaleh described her indictment as “a political prosecution”
Brandy Zadrozny, Lisa Rubin, Kat Abughazaleh Indicted Over Protests Outside Chicago-Area ICE Facility(MSNBC, Wednesday, October 29, 2025).
- The progressive Democratic congressional candidate’s videos of confrontations with federal agents have fueled right-wing calls for her arrest
The whereabouts of as many as 3,000 people detained by ICE are unknown
Chuck Goudie, Katy Smyser, Lisa Capitanini, Nathan Halder, Could ICE Have ‘Lost’ 3,000 Immigrant Arrestees in Chicago? (NBC 5 Chicago, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- At least 3,000 jailed immigrants have vanished from federal records, according to human rights attorneys and organizations
No resolution yet to the legal challenge to Trump’s plan to deploy other states’ National Guard personnel in Illinois
Chris Geidner, Scotus Holds Off Ruling on Trump’s Nat’l Guard Request, Leaving Troops Blocked From Illinois for Now (Law Dork, Wednesday, October 29, 2025).
- Court orders briefing about a part of the law the Trump admin is using to federalize National Guard troops. Also in Illinois: Protesters indicted and an attempt to protect Bovino
James D. Zirin, Supreme Court Set to Rule on National Guard Troops in Chicago (Washington Monthly, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- It could give President Trump permission to send the National Guard nationwide to support federal law enforcement
Nicole Sganga, 2 Illinois National Guard Members Speak Out: “I Won’t Turn Against My Neighbors” (CBS News, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- Staff Sgt. Demi Palecek and Capt. Dylan Blaha say they’ll defy federal orders regarding Trump’s immigration enforcement operation in Chicago
Elsewhere in the U.S. interior
Washington, DC: an ICE HSI shooting incident
Mitch Ryals, A Federal Agent Shot at a Driver in D.C. An MPD Officer Was Told to Omit the Shooting From His Report. (Washington City Paper, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- An HSI agent fired three times into a vehicle police claimed was trying to flee. The charges were dismissed during a preliminary hearing
Virginia: A Honduran man died fleeing ICE
Nina Lakhani, Honduran Immigrant Dies While Fleeing ICE, Bringing Raids Death Toll to Three (The Guardian (Uk), Saturday, October 25, 2025).
- Jose Castro Rivera, 24, was killed Thursday morning after running on to a highway and being struck
Deaths and conditions in ICE detention
Rep. Pramila Jayapal @Repjayapal on Twitter (U.S. House of Representatives, Twitter, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- Tonight, I was notified of yet another death of a person in ICE custody. That is 22 immigrants who have died in custody since Trump came to office
Pablo Manriquez, Don Beyer Decries Rotten Food and Retaliation in ICE Detention Center (Exclusive) (Migrant Insider, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- Congressman condemns retaliatory threats after detainees served unsafe food with worms, promising direct intervention and tougher oversight
The Navy Supply Systems Command is contracting to build and maintain detention space
Natasha Bertrand, Priscilla Alvarez, Looking to Speed Up Building Network of Migrant Detention Centers, Trump Administration Turns to the US Navy (CNN, Friday, October 24, 2025).
- The Department of Homeland Security is funneling $10 billion through the Navy to help facilitate the construction of a sprawling network of migrant detention centers
Nana Regional, an Alaska Native detention contractor
Michael Smith, Polly Mosendz, Rachel Adams-Heard, Trump’s Unlikely ICE Detention Giant Is an Alaska Native Company (Bloomberg, Thursday, October 23, 2025).
- Nana Regional Corp. is supposed to uphold Iñupiat values. Some shareholders say its role in the president’s deportation machinery makes a mockery of that
Continued “Kavanaugh stops” of U.S. citizens
Chris Geidner, The Kavanaugh Stop, 50 Days Later (Law Dork, Saturday, October 25, 2025).
Julián Aguilar, Houston Teen Says Immigration Agents Detained, Choked Him. He’s a U.S. Citizen. (The Houston Chronicle, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
Scrutiny of DHS’s strident and inflammatory social media messaging
Drew Harwell, Joyce Sohyun Lee, We Checked DHS’s Videos of Chaos and Protests. Here’s What They Leave Out(The Washington Post, Wednesday, October 29, 2025).
- Trump administration videos purporting to show the triumph of recent immigration operations used footage that was months old or recorded thousands of miles away, an analysis found
Matthew Gault, Trump Admin’s Racist Halo Memes Are ‘a New Level of Dehumanization of Immigrants’ (404 Media, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- “The White House just marked the end of the console wars; DHS is posting deep fried Halo memes. We are somewhere else entirely”
ICE’s hiring and staffing challenges
Garrett M. Graff, ICE’s Hiring Surge Is Already a Disaster (Doomsday Scenario, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- It’s cutting standards and racing to hire exactly the wrong people, precisely as predicted
John Pfaff, ICE Lowered Its Standards and Is Still Struggling to Hire Officers (Fordham Law School, MSNBC, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- DHS is spending millions of dollars on an aggressive television ad campaign targeting local police officers — but it’s not getting nearly enough applicants
Oversight, accountability, and reform
Steve Vladeck, When Can States Prosecute Federal Officers? (One First, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- Stephen Miller claims that ICE officers have “immunity” for anything they do while enforcing immigration law. Even as an argument about state criminal prosecutions, that claim is overstated at best
Kyle Cheney, Myah Ward, Another Shutdown Consequence: Democrats Can’t Visit ICE Detention Facilities(Politico, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- Democratic lawmakers had been suing the Trump administration over their previous attempts to visit ICE facilities
Ailsa Chang, Ximena Bustillo, Are ICE Agents Covering Their License Plates as Well as Their Faces? (All Things Considered, National Public Radio, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
- The Trump administration appears to be relying on unmarked vehicles in immigration enforcement, NPR has learned
Pablo Manriquez, States Build an ‘ICE Tracker’ Network (Migrant Insider, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- Hotlines, AG portals, and Chicago’s agent profiles turn crowdsourced tips into evidence banks aimed at abusive tactics
Pablo Manriquez, Inside “ICE Tracker Dot Gov” (Migrant Insider, Thursday, October 23, 2025).
- House Democrats are building a digital paper trail of immigration abuses — and a new front in Washington’s war over transparency
Paul Waldman, ICE Is Out of Control and Beyond Repair (Public Notice, Monday, October 27, 2025).
- This agency needs to be stripped down to the studs. Dems should start preparing now
Working for ICE is less risky than is portrayed
Noah Lanard, How Dangerous Is It Really to Work for ICE? (Mother Jones, Wednesday, October 29, 2025).
- According to ICE’s own data, none of its officers have been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s history
The variety of federal agencies and local police participating in “mass deportation”
Bora Erden, How to Make Sense of the Federal Forces on the Streets (The New York Times, Friday, October 24, 2025).
- As President Trump deploys ICE, Border Patrol, the National Guard and other forces to U.S. cities, here’s how to tell them apart — and what their powers are
Alicia A. Caldwell, Michael Smith, Myles Miller, Trump Enlists an Army of Local Cops to Deport Millions(Bloomberg, msn.com, Tuesday, October 28, 2025).
Public opinion appears to be turning against “mass deportation”
Pablo Manriquez, Mass Deportations Quickly Became Wildly Unpopular (Poll) (Migrant Insider, Sunday, October 26, 2025).
- A 52% majority says the ICE funding surge has gone too far as voters still back due process and legal pathways—even with widening partisan splits (PRRI)
Adriana Gomez Licon, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux, How Hispanics’ Views of Trump Have Changed Since January, According to a New AP-NORC Poll (Associated Press, Associated Press, Friday, October 24, 2025).
- A new poll shows President Donald Trump’s favorability has fallen among Hispanic adults since the beginning of the year, a potential warning sign from a key constituency that helped secure his victory in the 2024 election
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
