Fwd: U.S.-Mexico Border Update: July 11, 2025
Molly Molloy
From: Adam Isacson <aisa...@wola.org>
Date: Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 11:54 AM
Subject: U.S.-Mexico Border Update: July 11, 2025
U.S.-Mexico Border Update: July 11, 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 Border Update, which follows a two-week break due to staff travel and a holiday, appears two days late due to production of other content. We will publish another Update on July 18, but due to upcoming work travel and staff downtime, production will remain irregular throughout the summer.
THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:
- Giant budget bill becomes law: A massive budget measure, signed into law on July 4, provides over $170 billion in new funding for the Trump administration’s border-hardening and mass-deportation programs. It passed narrowly, without a single vote from Democrats who remain divided on how forcefully to prioritize opposition to Trump’s immigration policies. The measure multiplies, between now and 2029, the amount of funding ICE and CBP have available for hiring agents, arresting undocumented people, holding large numbers in detention camps, deporting people by air, installing surveillance technologies, and building border wall segments.
- “Mass deportation” intensifies further: The tempo of DHS raids and confrontational displays intensified, especially in Los Angeles, amid a growing outcry over racial profiling and agents concealing their identities. The number of people in ICE custody reached new highs, along with the number in custody with no criminal charges. Reports continued to emerge of miserable conditions in detention centers, including a new facility that Florida opened in the Everglades. Immigration judges continue to be fired, allegedly for political reasons. The administration canceled TPS for citizens of Honduras and Nicaragua who have been in the United States for a quarter century. Polling shows a sharp drop in support for the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
- In the courts: A judge struck down the Trump administration’s suspension of asylum access at the border, but stayed his order pending appeal. A filing revealed that El Salvador’s government does not believe it has custody over Venezuelan men whom the United States has sent to a prison there. Kilmar Abrego Garcia revealed that he was tortured in that prison. A Supreme Court decision cleared the way for the Trump administration to send eight men from other countries to South Sudan. Texas’s draconian immigration law remains suspended after an appeals court decision, and a New Hampshire judge used a class certification to prevent the Trump administration from implementing its attempt to undo birthright citizenship.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Giant budget bill becomes law
The U.S. Congress passed, and President Trump signed into law, a bill that will provide more than $170 billion to U.S. border and immigration enforcement agencies over the next four years. H.R. 1, often called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act because it advances much of President Donald Trump’s agenda, passed the Senate on July 1 by a 51-50 vote with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking a tie in the Republican-majority chamber. On July 3, the bill passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 218-214. No Democrat voted for it. President Trump signed it on July 4, and it is now Public Law 119-21.
Supercharging spending on border hardening and mass deportation
The final bill’s contents do not differ greatly from what WOLA presented in its May 2, May 23 and June 20 border updates. On July 11, WOLA published a separate analysis of P.L. 119-21’s enormous impact on border wall-building, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) aggressive ongoing operations and personnel strength, detention and deportation capacity, for-profit contractors’ bottom lines, and the United States’ future as a free society.
If the table is not visible, click here. The amounts that Congress ultimately approved are in the “Senate Bill” column of this graphic, but the “House Bill” column, which closely follows it, gives a fuller sense of individual line items.
As that document explains, the new law gives ICE, an agency with an annual budget of about $9 billion per year, an additional $75 billion over the four years and three months between now and the end of the 2029 fiscal year. $45 billion of that goes to migrant detention, and another $15 billion to deportation operations. Approximately $65 billion more would go to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), $46.5 billion of it to build new border walls.
The ICE and CBP funding is just one of many controversial and unpopular items in a bill that makes regressive tax cuts and sharply reduces assistance to poor Americans. But Vice President J.D. Vance took to Twitter to declare that everything else in the bill “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
See WOLA’s July 11 analysis for a much fuller discussion of the bill’s border and migration provisions, explaining the dramatic scale of these funding increases and envisioning their likely impact. Of ICE’s vastly expanded detention capacity, for instance, that piece observed:
The prospect of hundreds of thousands of people warehoused in for-profit camps all around the United States is unlike anything the United States, or nearly any other democracy, has ever witnessed before. Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling On Tyranny, warns of “an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.” And the Trump administration now has the resources to do it.
The Democrats
Legislators from the opposition Democratic Party uniformly opposed the bill; party leaders used parliamentary maneuvers to delay votes and introduced amendments, which failed, to soften some of its provisions.
The border and migration elements of the “big bill” received less attention from Democratic Party leadership than did other provisions like regressive taxation and Medicaid cuts, though many individual members spoke out forcefully against the increased funding for border walls and the multiplication of ICE operations, detention, and deportation.
Still, the border and immigration did not figure prominently in leading Democratic legislators’ speeches and amendments. “If you ask the frontline members what they’re most comfortable talking about, it’s Medicaid” and the bill as a whole, said centrist political commentator Matthew Yglesias. “But it’s more like ‘eh’ on this immigration stuff.” (Yglesias, speaking on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast, noted that posts to his much-subscribed newsletter about the giant budget bill “do not perform as well as my articles on other things that have more juice.”)
Democratic Party “lawmakers have been more muted about the potential harms of the immigration provisions, a sign that the party continues to struggle to find a coherent message on the issue,” a Washington Post analysis concluded. “Democrats, I think, have still not gotten out of their defensive crouch on border and the immigration and we’ve been a little slow on this over the last few months,” added Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg on Greg Sargent’s New Republic podcast.
During the Biden administration, Democratic pollster Carlos Odio told the New York Times, aides to President Biden encouraged their boss to focus on other issues. “The through line in every decision they made around immigration was ‘What can we do to stop having to talk about this?’” The Times analysis noted that mainstream Democrats have been embracing more border security spending and limits on access to the U.S. asylum system. Former senator John Kerry, the party’s 2004 presidential nominee, even told the BBC on July 9, “Trump was right… I wish President Biden had been heard more often saying, ‘I’m going to enforce the law’” at the border.
“Mass deportation” intensifies further
As ICE seeks to fulfill White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s mandate to detain a record 3,000 undocumented people every day, the agency’s quickening tempo of aggressive raids, sweeps, and stops is generating a climate of fear throughout the U.S. interior.
“People are afraid to go out for groceries. They’re afraid to go to church,” El Paso’s Catholic Bishop Mark Seitz toldPuente News Collaborative. “I really don’t believe fear adequately describes it. It’s terror.” In McAllen, Texas, Mayor Javier Villalobos told the New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe, “You go to some subdivisions that are being constructed, and it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, and there’s nobody around there. It’s weird. It feels like ‘The Walking Dead.’”
Los Angeles
The fearful climate is arguably most pronounced in Los Angeles, California, where about half the population is of Latino descent and perhaps 10 percent is undocumented. The Trump administration has been focusing ICE operations there for more than a month, accompanying them with Border Patrol, National Guard, Marines, and other agencies’ personnel.
The frequency and abruptness of ICE raids are so intense, the Los Angeles Times reported, that neighborhoods face a growing challenge of dealing with abandoned items—like vehicles and yard equipment, at times left running or with keys inside—left behind after agents grab the owners.
“Between June 6 and June 22 alone, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reportedly arrested 1,618 people for deportation from LA and the surrounding areas of Southern California,” or 95 people per day, reported the open-source data reporting collective Bellingcat. Its review of videos of over 100 incidents in Los Angeles showed that raids often focus on Latino men, street vendors, and car wash workers, with multiple incidents showing individuals tackled, detained without warrants, or arrested in front of customers and bystanders. Agents, often armed with rifles and wearing military-style gear, frequently use physical force, batons, pepper spray, and aggressive takedowns, including against U.S. citizens filming raids.
A lawsuit that the ACLU of Southern California filed on July 2 detailed much of this over its initial complaint’s 65 pages. “Those who appear to be nonwhite have been categorically stopped, sometimes without even being asked for identification… In a typical encounter, agents and officers approach suddenly and in large numbers. Typically dressed in military style or SWAT clothing, heavily armed with weapons displayed, and masked, their vests may display only a generic ‘POLICE’ patch (if they display anything at all).”
“There’s no plan other than fear, chaos and politics,” said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. “Home Depot one day, a car wash the next, armed vehicles and what looked like mounted military units in a park the next day.”
Bass was referring to MacArthur Park, at the heart of a community with a large immigrant population, where dozens of heavily armed agents, some on horseback, staged an intimidating show of force on July 7. “What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” Bass told a news conference. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup.”
“I don’t work for Karen Bass,” Gregory Bovino, who is heading DHS operations in Los Angeles, told Fox News. “Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.” Bovino is the chief of Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, which includes eastern California, not Los Angeles (which is part of the agency’s San Diego Sector). He maintains an active social media presence with a penchant for provocative and borderline political statements; during the final days of the Biden administration he sent agents to carry out raids to arrest migrants in farmland around Bakersfield, California, which drew a rebuke from a federal judge.
Even as ICE agents get frequent public praise from President Trump and top DHS officials, “Morale is in the crapper”at the agency, as a former investigative agent told the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff. “Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.” Still, an official told Miroff, “ICE’s top officials are so scared of being fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push back” against Stephen Miller’s quotas.
Facial coverings
ICE and Border Patrol agents carrying out immigration sweeps are frequently operating in plainclothes, with no identifying information and their faces covered. Legislation introduced by Senators Alex Padilla (D-California) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) would require agents to display the name of their agency and their name or badge number, while operating with their faces uncovered (except for medical masks). House Democrats have introduced similar legislation, as have California state legislators.
DHS defends the masking with the argument that agents are preventing doxxing, the practice of revealing identities to enable harassment, threats, or retaliation. “Federal agents and their families deserve privacy and safety, but the government already has a means of protecting them,” pointed out Brandon del Pozo, a Brown University professor who was a police officer in New York and Vermont for 23 years, at the Atlantic. “It can enforce the laws against harassment and threats, online or in person… At any rate, everyone in government today is vulnerable to doxxing, including countless public servants who have no option to hide their identity as they work.” Del Pozo concluded: “The driving principle here is obvious: In a free society, people should know who is policing them.”
ICE detention numbers
The sharp increase in arrests has swelled ICE’s detained population. The U.S. Congress appropriated enough funding to ICE in 2024 and 2025 to hold 41,500 people at a time in its network of detention facilities, most of which are run by private corporations. Right now, though, the Trump administration has increased ICE detention in the U.S. interior so rapidly that the agency is now holding nearly, or more than, 58,000 people.
People whom ICE classifies as “Other Immigration Violators”—meaning that they have no prior convictions and face no criminal charges—now comprise 32 percent of the agency’s detained population; that is up from just 6 percent in January, noted Syracuse University analyst Austin Kocher.
Detention center conditions
At least 10 people have died in ICE custody since January 1, 2025. Reports abound of people forced to sleep on floors, unable to bathe for days, being fed as little as one meal per day, unable to get sufficient medical care, and getting so little access to water that adults compete with children for available bottles. Journalist Kate Morrissey reported on the grave condition of “José,” a Guatemalan man detained at ICE’s privately managed Otay Mesa facility near San Diego; he has spent months at the facility, losing blood daily as he suspects that he suffers from colon cancer.
Those in detention now have even less recourse if they are mistreated. The Trump administration has fired nearly every employee at two internal watchdog agencies: DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and its Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “By May 23, many employees were formally removed from their roles, leaving hundreds of unresolved complaints, including reports of medical neglect and wrongful deportation, according to court documents,” CNN reported.
Florida
ICE’s detention network has been leaning hard on 60 local, state, and federal prisons to increase its capacity. These include a disused municipal airport about 50 miles west of Miami, Florida, in the Everglades swamp, that the state of Florida is calling “Alligator Alcatraz.” Construction of tents at the site—which may eventually house 3,000 to 5,000people, far more than nearly any ICE detention center—began on June 28 and the first detained people arrived on July 3. Trump visited on July 2.
The facility’s operating cost, originally estimated at $450 million per year, has been revised upward to $600 million per year, according to leaked documents. This would be $329 per person per night at 5,000 detainees, and $548 per person per night at 3,000 detainees. ICE’s 2025 budget request to Congress reported that “average adult bed cost per day is $187.48 for FY 2023.”
The federal DHS will defray some of Florida’s operating costs with grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which was originally designed to assist shelters for migrants released into the U.S. interior. Further support may come from a $3.5 billion fund for states’ immigration control operations included in the massive spending bill that became law on July 4.
Reports from the new Everglades facility have been grim.
- From the Miami Herald: “women told the Herald that their husbands were unable to shower for several days after arriving. On Sunday, two women said their husbands complained that initially there was no water to flush toilets.”
- From NBC News: “Vladimir Miranda, a migrant from Cuba who has been at the facility since Sunday, said that ‘right now the generators apparently can’t cope and the electricity is going out,’ he told Telemundo 51 via telephone call. When the electricity goes out there’s no water and the phones and air conditioners don’t work… ‘There is no water here to bathe,’ Izquierdo said in Spanish to Telemundo 51 from inside the facility, adding it’s been four days since he showered. Izquierdo also alleged that ‘they give you food only once a day, food that even has worms in it’… A Colombian national said he’s been there for three days without access to medicine he needs.”
- From Forbes: “Immigration attorneys say they have been unable to see their clients.”
“I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps,” wrote Andrea Pitzer, author of the 2017 study One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, at MSNBC. “This facility’s purpose fits the classic model.”
Immigration attorneys who spoke to Forbes worried that Florida may seek to rebuild the airstrip at the facility, which would ease rapid deportations, making appeals impossible.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has meanwhile been pushing to have National Guard Judge Advocates General (JAGs, or military judges, who have no background in immigration law) hear the cases of immigrants held at the facility. While Trump said he approved of the idea, former JAGs interviewed by Samantha Michaels at Mother Jones said that it “would arguably violate the Posse Comitatus Act,” which prohibits military participation in law enforcement under most circumstances, and would be considered a component of “martial law.”
In other Florida military developments, the Defense Department has deployed 200 Marines to Florida to provide support to ICE. This support is “administrative and logistical,” according to U.S. Northern Command, and will not involve direct contact with people in the agency’s custody.
Immigration courts
Capacity to hear cases at the Justice Department’s national system of immigration courts is declining. The number of immigration judges in the Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review stood at 701 at the end of March, down from 734 in 2023 and 735 in 2024, even as the case backlog totals 3,923,439. Migrant Insider reported that the administration dismissed eight recently appointed judges, “a move Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates say appears to be part of a politically motivated purge aimed at shaping the bench to align with the White House’s hardline immigration agenda” and ease deportations.
Temporary Protected Status for Honduras and Nicaragua
On July 7 DHS announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), initially granted in 1999, for about 72,000 citizens of Honduras and about 4,000 citizens of Nicaragua inside the United States. (The New York Timesnoted that “roughly 21,000 Hondurans and 1,100 Nicaraguans have also obtained permanent resident cards.”)
The DHS announcement cited “notable improvements” in conditions in both countries that would allow citizens to return after a quarter-century in the United States. It made no mention of widespread human rights abuses committed by Daniel Ortega’s totalitarian regime in Nicaragua.
Contra Corriente, citing the Central American think tank Nodo, estimated that Honduran TPS beneficiaries have at least 53,500 U.S.-born children, and remit between $162 million and $211 million to the Honduran economy each year.
“The administration has now moved to dismantle TPS programs for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Venezuela,” CBS News noted, “dramatically expanding the pool of those eligible to be arrested and deported by federal immigration authorities.”
The National TPS Alliance and seven individual plaintiffs filed suit on July 7 against the TPS cancellations for Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal, citing violations of the Administrative Procedure Act.
Other “mass deportation” items
- On July 8 DHS published in the Federal Register the text of an Asylum Cooperation Agreement signed with the government of Honduras, which will allow the Trump administration to send some asylum seekers from third countries to the Central American nation, where they would have to apply for protection in Honduras’s system.
- Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border published a monthly report documenting 209 ICE removal flights in June, “the highest level since I started recording in January 2020” and 63 percent above the February-April average. Top removal destinations in June were Guatemala (51 flights), Honduras (43), El Salvador (22), and Mexico’s two southernmost states (17).
- “Instead of five or six per week, we now have 14” deportation flights, the head of Guatemala’s migration agency told the Washington Post. Between January 1 and July 3, Guatemala had received 22,123 of its citizens, 1,123 of them children and adolescents.
- While in Guatemala on June 26, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem signed a Memorandum of Understanding with her Guatemalan counterpart establishing a “Joint Security Program” that will assign CBP officers to Guatemala City’s airport to help identify “high-risk travelers.”
- Another U.S.-Guatemala memorandum establishes a “joint specialized security group, where the governments of the United States and Guatemala will place their security forces and armed forces at strategic points to develop intervention strategies in border areas,” along the Mexico-Guatemala border, according to Guatemalan Deputy Security Minister José Rolando Portillo.
- “The reality is, up until now, there haven’t been mass deportations,” a Baja California state official in Tijuana told the Washington Post in an analysis of the Trump administration’s deportations to Mexico. Deportations have been fewer than during the Biden and “Trump 45” years because the drop in apprehensions of Mexican citizens at the U.S.-Mexico border has been greater, so far, than the increase in Mexican citizens seized by ICE in the U.S. interior.
- Mexican government data show a sharp increase in the number of Mexican citizens deported aboard planes to the country’s two southernmost states, Chiapas and Tabasco. These flights began in February, and by April they accounted for 35 percent of all U.S. deportations into Mexico (3,803 of 10,742 people), a share that fell to 23 percent in May (3,141 of 13,810 people). Between March and May, the Trump administration sent one-quarter (25%) of deported Mexican citizens to Chiapas or Tabasco; Mexico has not yet provided data for June.
- The Observer-Reporter, a western Pennsylvania newspaper, reported on the anguish of Haitian migrants whose migratory statuses, granted by the Biden administration, have been revoked by the Trump administration. The report centers on Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a working-class town near Pittsburgh where about 2,000 immigrants settled during the Biden years; the town became a talking point for Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign. Many Haitian residents, who had found employment or started small businesses in Charleroi, are now seeking to emigrate to Quebec, Brazil, or Mexico. Their home country remains in violent turmoil: on July 5, for instance, nonstop fighting between gangs in the capital, Port-au-Prince, led to the destruction of its historic landmark Oloffson Hotel.
- The New York Times reported on the growing behind-the-scenes power of Stephen Miller, the principal architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. A Trump adviser told reporter Jason Zengerle, “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.” Conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan said that Miller is “the de facto attorney general,” while Zengerle concluded that among White House staff, “Mr. Miller is typically the final word.”
- Recent polling shows further deterioration in approval of President Trump’s performance on immigration policy. A Quinnipiac survey released June 26 found 41 percent approving and 57 percent disapproving of Trump on “immigration issues,” with 39 percent approving of ICE and 56 percent disapproving. The Washington Post cited an early June Ipsos poll finding 61 percent of respondents opposing the big funding bill’s $45 billion outlay for ICE detention, with just 24 percent supporting it. A Gallup poll published July 11 showed 35 percent approving of Trump’s handling of immigration, with 62 percent disapproving.
- Trump’s immigration policies may be costing him support in heavily Latino districts that voted for him in November, the New Yorker reported from south Texas and Efecto Cocuyo reported from Doral, Florida.
- “It’s right to be able to control our borders. However, what’s going on now is something far beyond that,” Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Archbishop of Washington, DC, told CNN. “It is a mass, indiscriminate deportation of men and women and children and families which literally rips families apart and is intended to do so… This is simply not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, it’s inhumane and is morally repugnant.”
In the courts
In July so far, federal courts have heard cases and handed down decisions on several major immigration issues. In addition to the recently filed lawsuits about Los Angeles raids and TPS noted above, at least six other cases saw notable movement.
Asylum suspension
A July 2 order from Washington D.C. District Judge Randolph Moss struck down the Trump administration’s January 20 executive order that has suspended the legal right to asylum or other protection for undocumented people arriving at the border. That executive order had claimed an emergency power enabling the administration to suspend asylum and other laws due to an “invasion” of migrants at the border. The ruling found that the Presidency does not have the authority to create “an extra-statutory, extraregulatory regime for repatriating or removing individuals from the United States” or “to adopt an alternative immigration system.” Judge Moss stayed his own order for two weeks to give the administration an opportunity to appeal it. If it survives appeal, Moss’s ruling would restore the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, which has been suspended for nearly six months.
Venezuelan men sent to the CECOT
For months, including in declarations to courts, the Trump administration has insisted that the approximately 252 Venezuelan men it has sent to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) prison are no longer in U.S. custody and cannot be brought back to the United States, because they are under the authority of the Salvadoran government. On July 7, however, attorneys challenging the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send about 138 of the men to El Salvador without due process produced a remarkable document. It shows the Salvadoran government repeatedly affirming to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances that it has no legal responsibility for the Venezuelan men in the CECOT; it is “the competent foreign authorities” (the United States) that have “jurisdiction and legal responsibility” for the prisoners. This underminesthe administration’s long-held claim that it cannot bring the men in the CECOT back to receive due process.
In another development about this case, the New York Times revealed a “botched” Trump administration effort to broker a prisoner exchange that would have sent the Venezuelan men held in the CECOT to Caracas if Venezuela released dozens of political prisoners and U.S. citizens from its jails. Part of the reason for this deal’s failure is that two administration officials were working at cross purposes: while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was floating the prisoner exchange to Venezuelan officials, Special Envoy Ric Grenell was offering the same officials relief from oil sanctions in exchange for the release of U.S. citizens. Neither deal happened, while “the top U.S. officials did not appear to be communicating with each other.”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
New revelations emerged in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was mistakenly removed to the CECOT on March 15, brought back to the United States in early June, and is now being prosecuted for alleged human trafficking in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys submitted an amended complaint detailing some of the abuse that their client received in the CECOT. “Plaintiff Abrego Garcia reports that he was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.” He said he was beaten repeatedly, forced to kneel and remain awake overnight, and threatened with the possibility of being held with gang members who would attack him. He lost approximately 31 pounds, which Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele sought to deny on Twitter.
Erez Reuveni, a Justice Department attorney originally assigned to Abrego Garcia’s case who was later fired, providedevidence in a whistleblower complaint that Trump administration officials knew they lacked proof that Abrego Garcia was a “leader” of the MS-13 gang. The revelations cast further doubt on administration officials’ repeated public statements that the sheet-metal worker they wrongfully sent from Maryland to the CECOT was a hardened criminal or “terrorist.”
Abrego Garcia could be released from jail pending his criminal trial in Tennessee as early as July 16. If that happens, he would be turned over to DHS, which is determined to deport him to a third country. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys are seekingto prevent that, even if it means keeping him in criminal detention. District Judge Paula Xinis, who has presided over Abrego Garcia’s CECOT case in Maryland, voiced frustration with the Trump administration, stating that getting clear answers from officials about their plans for Abrego Garcia is like “nailing jello to a wall.”
South Sudan and third-country removals
With a 7-2 decision on July 3, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to send eight migrants from third countries to South Sudan, staying an injunction preventing the eight men’s removal to the violence-torn African nation. The men, from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam, had spent weeks in converted shipping containers at a U.S. military base in nearby Djibouti as a Massachusetts District Court judge had halted their removal. They are now in South Sudan, and the administration’s ability to send migrants to third countries—without due process even if they have concerns about being tortured in those countries—has been strengthened.
In Mexico—a country that accepts all U.S. deportees and shares a land border, making such transfers very simple—President Claudia Sheinbaum said that her government was not informed about the transfer of Jesus Muñoz Gutiérrez to South Sudan. Before being flown to Africa, Muñoz Gutiérrez and the other seven men were being held a short drive away from Mexico, in South Texas’ Port Isabel Detention Center.
The Intercept’s Nick Turse revealed that after they had refused to sign documents assenting to their transfer to Africa, the men were put on a plane that ICE officials falsely told them would be taking them to Louisiana. They ended up in Djibouti.
Texas’s S.B. 4
In New Orleans on July 3, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld, by a 2-1 decision, a lower-court ruling preventingTexas from enforcing S.B. 4. That 2023 state law sought to empower Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, and allow judges to deport them. For now, states do not have the power to invent and enforce their own laws on immigration, a federal responsibility. The Trump administration had withdrawn the Justice Department from the Biden-era list of plaintiffs challenging the law, which includes migrant rights defense groups and local governments.
Birthright citizenship and universal injunctions
On July 10 a district court judge in New Hampshire issued an order that effectively reinstated a nationwide block on the Trump administration’s effort to undo birthright citizenship. On June 27 the Supreme Court had dismantled individual district judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions when plaintiffs challenged possibly illegal federal actions. The order from Judge Joseph LaPlante takes another route, classifying those who would be deprived of citizenship as a “nationwide class” of affected people.
Other news
- On July 2 DHS revealed that Border Patrol apprehended just 6,070 people at the U.S.-Mexico border in June, which appears to be the smallest monthly amount since the mid-1960s and a sharp drop from 8,725 apprehensions in May. The June drop comes after two months of modest increases in Border Patrol arrests in April and May. The reduction is almost certainly a result of the administration’s suspension of asylum (facing court challenges, as noted above) and the general climate of fear in the United States as “mass deportation” efforts gain momentum.
- A Freedom of Information Act response to the UCLA Deportation Data Project—a 25-megabyte Excel file—lists 106,463 ICE deportations between January 1 and June 11, 2025. It shows, for instance, that the agency deported48,578 people to Mexico during that period, of whom 2,792 were citizens of countries other than Mexico. CBP has carried out thousands of additional removals of people apprehended near the U.S.-Mexico border, which are not listed in this dataset.
- The Frontera Foundation obtained Mexican government data breaking down, by nationality, 70,525 citizens of countries other than Mexico whom the U.S. government deported to Mexico between January 1, 2023 and June 2, 2024, a period when the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy gave way to the Biden administration’s rules curtailing asylum access. Of the 70,525 individuals removed across the land border into Mexico, 43,558 were from Venezuela, 10,543 were from Guatemala, and 6,703 were from Nicaragua.
- The Trump administration has placed two more segments of the U.S.-Mexico border under military control, calling them “National Defense Areas.” One covers a fringe of border territory near Yuma, Arizona, and the other covers about 250 miles of riverfront in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. They are added to two other zones on either side of El Paso, spanning from the New Mexico-Arizona border to the town of Fort Hancock, Texas. These four zones, often as little as 60 feet wide, cover over 600 miles or nearly a third of the border. They are now considered the property of nearby military bases; migrants apprehended there—in some cases, temporarily by soldiers—may be prosecuted for trespassing on a military installation. Federal prosecutors have now filed such charges against over 1,400 people.
- The Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico put out a statement opposing the construction of a stretch of border barrier in rugged territory across Mount Cristo Rey, which straddles the border just west of El Paso. The imposing mountain, with a 27-foot statue of Christ at the top, is a longtime pilgrimage destination, but is also a frequent crossing point for migrants since it lacks a barrier. “For nearly a century, pilgrims have ascended Mount Cristo Rey in devotion and prayer,” read the Diocese’s statement, which warned that “a place of hope, faith, and communion would become a place of fear, exclusion and division” if the wall is built.
- “Smuggler’s Gulch,” a 350-foot stretch of rough topography between San Diego and Tijuana that lacked a border wall, has been sealed by new construction.
- DHS is moving ahead with plans to install 17 miles of “buoy barrier” in the middle of the Rio Grande near Brownsville, not far from where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. “At 17 miles, the massive new river structure will be far longer than the 1,000-foot-long river buoy structure that the State of Texas built as part of Operation Lone Star in Eagle Pass,” Border Report noted. Unlike Eagle Pass, it is also in a part of the river that is navigable throughout the year, which could create issues with binational boundary water agreements with Mexico and the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.
- Conservation groups in Arizona filed a lawsuit to challenge the Trump administration’s waivers of environmental laws to build border wall segments in Arizona. “The planned 27-mile border wall would block migration for dozens of imperiled species — including federally endangered jaguars and ocelots, as well as black bears, pronghorns and mountain lions,” warned the Center for Biological Diversity.
- “As of this week, there were 72 immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay, 58 of them classified as high-risk and 14 in the low-risk category,” CBS News reported, citing two U.S. officials. A total of 663 “immigration detainees” have passed through the U.S. naval base in Cuba since the Trump administration began using it for this purpose in early February. This mission is currently staffed by about 520 Defense Department and 130 DHS personnel. The current detainees come from a long list of countries, including many that freely accept deportations: “Brazil, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Russia, Somalia, St. Kitts-Nevis, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, and Vietnam.” A DHS statement named 26 of them.
- A 27-year-old man whose father said he suffered from mental health issues fired dozens of rounds at the entrance of a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, early on the morning of July 7. The shooter wounded a police officer before authorities, returning fire, killed him. The BBC reported that White House “Border Czar” Thomas Homan “sought to blame rhetoric from Democratic lawmakers for the attack, referring to Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) calling ICE ‘a terrorist force’ and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) likening the immigration agency to the Gestapo.”
- Concerns continue to mount about the economic impact of the administration’s “mass deportation” effort. “The foreign born in the U.S. labor force have declined by 735,000 since January 2025,” Forbes reported, citing “an NFAP analysis of data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.”
- An analysis from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS) highlights a new Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) advisory opinion as a landmark step in recognizing states’ obligations to protect climate-displaced individuals. The decision found that governments must act with heightened care and promptness to address climate harms, including risk assessments, human rights integration, and international cooperation.
Molly Molloy
From: Sarah Towle <sarahtow...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 5:26 AM
Subject: I Hope this will be of Interest to the Frontera List
June 2024, She Writes Press
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"A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.”
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“For anyone who wants to understand the reality of our dysfunctional immigration system beyond slogans, Crossing the Line is an absolute must-read.”
—Scott Allen, former editor of the Boston Globe Spotlight Investigative Team
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