Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: a quiet border, mass deportation, military flights

Adam Isacson, Director for Oversight at WOLA

Adam Isacson

Adam Isacson, Director for Oversight at WOLA

Adam Isacson

Director for Defense Oversight

Adam Isacson has worked on defense, security, and peacebuilding in Latin America since 1994. He now directs WOLA’s Defense Oversight...

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.

This Update is the product of interviews and the review of over 270,000 words of source documents since January 23. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to keeping these paywall-free and ad-free Updates going. Please contribute now and support our work.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

The many actions and changes following Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration force a change in this week’s Border Update format. Instead of narratives organized under three or four topics, this Update organizes brief points under the following headings:

THE FULL UPDATE:

An already quiet border gets quieter

  • “In the past seven days, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 4,577 individuals attempting to enter the country illegally, a significant 55% decrease from the previous week’s 10,281 apprehensions,” tweeted Michael Banks, the Trump administration’s newly named Border Patrol chief.
  • If sustained over 31 days, that pace of Border Patrol apprehensions (20,200 in a month) would be the fewest since July 2017.
  • Combining Border Patrol apprehensions and encounters at ports of entry, the total for January 20-26 was 7,287 irregular migrants encountered, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data shared with Fox News. “That compares to 20,086 encounters in the seven days in the final days of the Biden administration (Jan 13-19) prior to Trump’s inauguration,” Fox reported. While that points to a sharper drop (-64%) than Border Patrol’s 55 percent noted above, the difference mainly reflects the new administration’s cancellation of appointments that migrants had made at ports of entry using the CBP One smartphone app.
  • “Fewer than 600 people crossed illegally into the U.S. on Sunday,” January 26, Fox added.
  • Migration similarly plummeted in the first months of Donald Trump’s last administration, though numbers quickly recovered then and rose to levels, by mid-2019, higher than those measured during the Obama administration.
  • President Donald Trump claimed that border encounters plummeted by 93 percent on his first full day in office, to just 43 on January 21. The Border Patrol  and CBP numbers make clear that while the drop has been sharp, Trump’s figure is not accurate.
  • Conditions are so quiet that Associated Press reporters accompanying Border Patrol on a six-hour ride-along in San Diego encountered no migrants until the final half-hour.

Mass deportation

  • In the week since Donald Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported deporting 7,300 people. That includes people removed from the border by CBP and its Border Patrol component, and people removed from the U.S. interior by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reporter Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner tweeted that ICE’s removals during those first seven days totaled 2,373 people.
  • During the seven days between January 22 and January 28, ICE reported on its Twitter account arresting 5,537 migrants inside the United States, and issuing “detainers”—requests for state and local law enforcement to hand over people in their custody—4,333 times.
  • This amount is not a radical departure from what it was during the Biden administration, Vox and the Associated Press noted.
  • President Trump is reportedly unhappy with this daily pace of ICE arrests and is prodding the agency to carry out more. The Washington Post revealed that on January 25, the Trump administration communicated to senior ICE officials a “quota” of 75 arrests per day for each of the agency’s 25 field offices—1,875 arrests per day. Interviewed by CNN, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that number is “a floor, not a ceiling.”
  • The result is likely to be a vast increase in arrests of migrants with no criminal records and many ICE agents pulled away from other missions like fighting organized crime and human trafficking, a former senior ICE official, Deborah Fleischaker, told Greg Sargent of the New Republic.
  • The newly confirmed secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, was shown accompanying an ICE operation in New York that arrested 20 people, 8 of whom had no criminal records. TV personality “Dr. Phil” McGraw had a similar photo op in Chicago. “This desire to popularize fear is unconscionable and abhorrent,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said of McGraw’s appearance on January 28.
  • The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott (R), issued executive orders on January 29 requiring state agencies to cooperate fully with federal immigration and border law enforcement, including lending them land that might be used to detain and deport immigrants. Abbott directed Texas’s Department of Public Safety to activate “tactical strike teams” to help arrest undocumented immigrants with active arrest warrants.
  • A group of Quaker congregations has filed suit against the Trump administration’s revocation of a directive that generally prohibited DHS personnel from entering sensitive areas like churches, hospitals, and schools.
  • Immigration operations in and near schools are sowing “a climate of fear and desperation” among U.S. educators, Adrian Carrasquillo wrote at the Bulwark.
  • NBC News reported that stepped-up immigration operations are netting U.S. citizens with darker skin color, including members of Native American tribal nations. People from Puerto Rico, who are U.S. citizens, have been detained in New Jersey and Wisconsin. Nearly half of people arrested on January 26 had no violent criminal record or no criminal record at all.
  • White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt incorrectly stated that all undocumented migrants are “criminals” because their presence violates U.S. law. In fact, being undocumented in the United States is a civil, not a criminal offense.
  • The Texas Tribune documented a traffic stop in Lubbock, Texas, at which agents seized a man with no criminal record who was applying for a green card, separating him from his U.S. citizen wife and 4-year-old son who were in the car with him.
  • In Pima County, Arizona, which includes Tucson, the county attorney’s office issued a recommendation that all county facilities’ reception areas post signs, with large type, instructing people to request warrants, names, agencies, and badge numbers of any federal law enforcement agents.
  • While U.S. authorities have been issuing alerts and posting videos about stepped-up deportation flights, it is not clear that the pace of those flights has actually increased over what it was during the Biden administration, Mother Jones observed.

The U.S. military role

Troops to the border

  • President Trump’s order of 1,500 active-duty military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border is being executed, as members of some units are “ scrambling” to relocate from the U.S. interior.
  • These include members of these Army units, many of them military police:
    • The 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, New York;
    • The 23rd Military Police Company, based at Fort Drum, New York;
    • The 41st Combat Engineer Company-Armored, based at Fort Riley, Kansas;
    • The 66th Military Police Company, based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington;
    • The 82nd Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Liberty, North Carolina;
    • The 89th Military Police Brigade, based at Fort Cavazos, Texas;
    • The 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky;
    • The 202nd Military Police Company, based at Fort Bliss, Texas;
    • The 401st Military Police Company, based at Fort Cavazos, Texas;
    • The 530th Combat Engineer Company-Armored, based at Fort Stewart, Georgia;
    • The 549th Military Police Company, based at Fort Stewart, Georgia;
    • The 569th Combat Engineer Company-Armored, based at Fort Carson, Colorado;
    • The 716th Military Police Battalion based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky;
    • The 720th Military Police Battalion, based at Fort Cavazos, Texas;
    • The 759th Military Police Battalion, based at Fort Carson, Colorado; and
    • The 977th Military Police Company, based at Fort Riley, Kansas.
  • They are joined by 500 Marines from Camp Pendleton, California, from:
    • 1st Combat Engineer Battalion of the 1st Marine Division;
    • The California Detachment from the 7th Engineer Support Battalion; and
    • The 1st Marine Logistics Group.
  • The Air Force, which has devoted four aircraft to the deportation effort discussed above, has not specified which units are participating in the border and migration mission. Military.com noted the 62nd Air Wing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and the 60th Air Mobility Wing at Travis Air Force Base in California.
  • The active-duty personnel will carry loaded service weapons, which is unusual for a federal military border mission on U.S. soil.
  • Plans may include “infantry soldiers equipped with 20-ton Stryker combat vehicles,” officials told the Washington Post.
  • They will join about 2,500 National Guard and Reserve personnel who have already been at the border in a behind-the-scenes support role, part of a series of federal deployments that have continued, with occasional breaks, since the George W. Bush administration.
  • On CNN January 28, Stephen Miller reiterated a possibility raised in an executive order issued on January 20: that the administration might invoke the rarely-used Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the president sweeping powers to use the military on U.S. soil.
  • Writing at Just Security, Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute and George Mason University Law School warned that if the Trump administration succeeds with its claim that migration at the border constitutes an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution, Trump could use the existence of an “invasion” to justify abusing the Alien Enemies Act, and even restricting U.S. citizens’ fundamental rights, including habeas corpus.
  • A Quinnipiac University poll found 60 percent of U.S. respondents favoring the deployment of military personnel to the border. A Reuters-Ipsos poll, which saw some slippage in Donald Trump’s approval since January 20, found 48 percent of respondents backing Trump’s overall approach to immigration, and 41 percent disapproving.
  • Texas Gov. Abbott (R), a supporter of the Trump administration’s policies, announced that the state government would augment its own existing deployment of National Guard members at the border by 400 more troops. That deployment already consisted of about 4,500 troops.

Detention of people to be deported

  • ICE’s currently funded detention capacity is 41,500 beds, and as deportation operations intensify, the agency “is running out of space to hold migrants” and “now turning to the military to expand detention space,” tweeted Camilo Montoya-Gálvez of CBS News. “We’re going to need more ICE beds, at a minimum of 100,000,” said “Border Czar” Tom Homan on ABC News. “A memo indicates more military bases could be converted into detention sites.”
  • The Department of Defense agreed to allow ICE to use part of the Buckley Space Force Base, near Aurora, Colorado, “to stage and process criminal aliens.” During the 2024 election campaign, Donald Trump amplified reports about the alleged activity of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua organized crime group in Aurora, near Denver; the city’s Republican mayor sought to downplay those reports.
  • The U.S. Coast Guard operated a lateral deportation flight, taking a planeload of migrants pending removal across a notably non-maritime space from California to Texas.

Guantánamo Bay

  • On January 29 President Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act, Republican-introduced legislation that mandates detentions of migrants accused, but not necessarily convicted, of minor crimes and empowers state attorneys-general to sue to challenge aspects of U.S. immigration law.
  • At the signing event, Trump said he will instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to use the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a site to detain “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” A brief White House memorandum soon followed, calling for the detention facility to increase to “full capacity.”
  • Guantánamo has a military detention facility (current population: 15 inmates) where suspected “war on terror” combatants have been held for 22 years, and a Migrant Operations Center principally for holding migrants intercepted at sea, many of whom get transferred to third countries to seek asylum there. No migrant apprehended in the United States has ever been sent to Guantánamo.
  • A September 2024 New York Times report raised serious human rights concerns about conditions at this Center which, due to its location, is very difficult for outside monitors to access. White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan said that ICE would manage the migrant detention space.
  • Trump said that Guantánamo can hold 30,000 migrants. It is unclear how Trump came up with that number: the existing Migrant Operations Center “has nowhere near the capacity to house the 30,000 people Trump said could be sent there,” the Associated Press reported. This alone would represent a nearly 75 percent increase in ICE’s current nationwide detention capacity.
  • The rationale that Trump offered for holding people at a distant military base, instead of inside the continental United States, was that “some of them [the migrants] are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send them out to Guantánamo.” An unnamed administration official told the Associated Press that the base would hold migrants who are considered “dangerous criminals” or “hard to deport.”
  • U.S. military personnel have used the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station since 1903, shortly after the Spanish-American War. The U.S. government pays a nominal fee as a “lease” of the 45-square mile facility in southeastern Cuba, which the Cuban government refuses to accept.

Controversies about military deportation flights to the Americas

  • The Defense Department is now using four cargo planes—two C-17s and two C-130s—to help ICE, which has regular access to just over a dozen contract aircraft, deport migrants to other countries. Military aircraft have carried out deportation flights to Ecuador and Guatemala, but have received pushback from leaders in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
  • The latter three countries received a combined 312 deportation flights in 2024, according to data compiled by Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border: 170 to Mexico, 126 to Colombia, and 16 to Brazil. Those, however, were all civilian flights operated by ICE contractors—not military aircraft.

Mexico

  • Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, refused to allow the U.S. government to send deportees aboard a military plane on January 23. Sheinbaum said that all deportation flights to Mexico City since Donald Trump took office have been civilian. (Most deportations to Mexico occur across the land border.) Mexico tightly restricts the U.S. military presence in its territory, rarely even allowing U.S. military personnel to bear weapons when in the country for training events.
  • Cartwright’s flight tracking shows that U.S. military deportation planes have been avoiding the airspace of Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

Brazil, Guatemala, Ecuador

  • The Brazilian government is establishing a reception center for deportees in Confins, in the central state of Minas Gerais. This comes after the country’s foreign ministry complained about “degrading treatment” endured by 88 Brazilian citizens aboard a U.S. military aircraft on January 25, who were kept in handcuffs even as technical problems, including air conditioning failures, forced an unscheduled stop in the Amazon region city of Manaus.
  • “There were demands to stay seated, shoving, shouting, children crying, passengers fainting and agents blocking exits, according to interviews with six of the deportees aboard the flight,” according to a New York Times account of the chaotic flight. “Finally, passengers pulled the levers to release two emergency exits, and shackled men poured out onto the plane’s wing, shouting for help.” One man told Folha de São Paulo, “I spent nearly 50 hours chained, not eating properly. I haven’t showered in five days.”
  • “Brazil has permitted the use of handcuffs in exceptional circumstances, but not indiscriminately and there must be an evaluation of risk,” a source told the Associated Press. Reuters reported that bilateral talks to develop a new agreement about deportees’ conditions are continuing.
  • A returned Guatemalan woman told the Associated Press that her handcuffs while aboard a military flight were painfully tight and made it difficult to eat. Guatemalan authorities stated on January 29 that they will dialogue with U.S. counterparts to limit or stop the use of handcuffs aboard flights. Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry plans to appeal to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make deportations more “orderly” to avoid overwhelming the government’s capacity to absorb returnees.
  • Upon arrival in Ecuador, a man told the Guayaquil daily El Universo, “I have never felt so denigrated in all my life, and I believe I will never allow it to happen to me again,” noting that people aboard the flight from Louisiana were shackled until the last 20 minutes when they entered Ecuadorian airspace.

Colombia

  • On January 26, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, refused permission for two U.S. deportation aircraft to land, after the planes were already in the air. Petro reportedly made that decision in an abrupt and improvised way, without consulting his foreign ministry or other advisors. People aboard the C-130 told of being seated for 10 hours, only to land in Houston.
  • “The treatment was despotic, humiliating,” a man told the Wall Street Journal. “The CBP, they mostly spoke Spanish, they handcuffed us and pushed [us] around as if we were in jail. I understand the military has some procedures, but there were children, families,” one of the returned migrants told CNN. “They had their heads on their knees for the entire trip. They were taunted if they tried to go to the bathroom,” El País reported. A man from Medellín said that some mothers were shackled in front of their children, Newsweek and EFE reported.
  • “We were being scolded because we had them in shackles in an airplane and he said ‘this is no way to treat people.’” Trump said on January 27, adding, “You’ve got to understand, these are murderers, drug lords, gang members, just the toughest people you’ve ever met or seen.” In fact, Colombia’s foreign minister stated that his government had “verified” that the returnees did not have criminal records; indeed, most or all had been recently apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • Petro issued defiant messages on Twitter, and Trump responded with a very quick escalation. The U.S. president took to social media to order an imposition of steep tariffs on Colombian goods; a closure of the U.S. consulate’s visa office; extraordinary cargo inspections; cancellation of visas to Colombian government officials, their families, and “allies and supporters”; and sanctions on financial transactions.
  • Spain’s El País and the New York Times reported that members of Colombia’s political and economic elite, from across the political spectrum, including ex-presidents, interceded with contacts in the Trump administration and prodded President Petro’s team to seek a resolution to the nine-hour crisis.
  • By the end of the 26th, Colombia appeared to have given in. The White House declared, “The Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.” Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed like a mobster next to a sign reading “FAFO,” a term popular among social media users that stands for “f— around and find out.” Trump added on January 29, “Colombia apologized to us profusely. Within an hour… the tough talk won’t mean anything… they’re gonna take them back, and they’re gonna like it.”
  • Due to Trump’s orders, people returning to the United States on flights from Colombia were still made to wait on long, separate airport lines and secondary inspections to re-enter the United States as late as January 29.
  • Some subsequent coverage, including a Bloomberg analysis, found that Colombia’s government has secured face-saving concessions from the Trump administration. U.S. military flights have not yet restarted; in recent days, Colombia has been sending military planes to the United States to pick up deportees. Colombian diplomats were in Washington this week to discuss adjustments to the conditions that deported migrants endure while in custody and transport. Citing Colombian diplomats, the New York Times reported that Colombian citizens would not be handcuffed or photographed aboard flights, and would be escorted by DHS, not military, personnel.
  • Colombia, which has received about $14 billion in U.S. assistance since an initial “Plan Colombia” aid package in 2000, had been considered the United States’ closest ally in Latin America—although Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others in the new administration do not hide their dislike for Petro, an elected leftist.
  • The government of Honduras was going to host a January 30 meeting of the Conference of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a region-wide body that it currently chairs, to discuss a regional response to U.S. migration policies. President Xiomara Castro ended up canceling the meeting, though, citing a lack of consensus.
  • Still, analysts noted the foreign policy risks of using bullying and humiliating tactics with a friendly major country. The constant threat of tariffs and other sanctions gives Colombia and other nations an incentive to reduce their exposure to the United States and expand their trade, investment, diplomatic, and security relationships with other countries, particularly China, noted Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Politico, and, at the Atlantic, Quico Toro and Will Freeman.

The impact on Mexico

  • “President Trump’s plan to carry out the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history is squeezing Mexico like no other country,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a likely coming wave of U.S. deportations; asylum seekers from other countries stranded in Mexico’s territory after the Trump administration suspended use of the CBP One phone app; and new arrivals of migrants, though probably in smaller numbers, at Mexico’s southern border.
  • The Trump administration is sending some non-Mexican citizens into Mexico from the border. Most appear to be people quickly deported from the United States without a chance to seek asylum under an executive order that purports to “suspend the physical entry of any alien engaged in the invasion across the southern border of the United States.” Under a revived “Remain in Mexico” program, some of these migrants may soon be asylum seekers made to await their U.S. hearing dates inside Mexico.
  • Mexican President Sheinbaum said that during the Trump administration’s first week in office, Mexico received 4,094 deported migrants, “the vast majority of them Mexican” citizens.
  • Returned non-Mexican citizens included two busloads of Venezuelan people whom the Mexican government immediately bused to Mexico City from the Santa Teresa port of entry west of El Paso on January 24, as reported by Border Report and Norte. “The reason for these transfers, according to what migrant support organizations have explained, is that there are countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Cuba with which the United States does not have diplomatic relations,” Norte noted. “That is why Mexico accepts that they be deported through its territory and from there sent to their countries.”
  • “It was as if we were in a funeral procession,” the director of the Casa de la Misericordia shelter in Nogales, Sonora told the Arizona Daily Star of the mood in her facility after the Trump administration’s cancellation of CBP One. The shelter offers long-term stays to 120 migrants considered “most vulnerable.”
  • “International organizations estimate that the move stranded more than 200,000 migrants, mostly non-Mexicans, who had been waiting for CBP One appointments,” the Wall Street Journal noted.
  • Asylum seekers are now waiting in very long lines to apply at the Mexico City, Tapachula, and Tijuana offices of the Mexican government’s Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR). COMAR processed well over 100,000 asylum applications in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but that number fell to 78,975 in 2024 as CBP One offered another option to many. With that option gone, demand for protected status inside Mexico is rising very fast.
  • About 5,000 to 6,000 non-Mexican migrants may now be stranded in Ciudad Juárez, across the river from El Paso, Texas, the local newspaper Norte reported. At least 20,000 may be in Tapachula, Chiapas; people there continue to form migrant caravans—probably more to pressure the Mexican government to help them obtain documentation than to attempt to reach the U.S. border nearly 1,000 miles away.
  • Sheinbaum said that Mexico’s economy has 50,000 job openings that deported people could fill. She touted the “Mexico Embraces You” program that her government is setting up to receive deported Mexican citizens, which is to include 10 large reception centers, with large tents on empty lots, in border cities.
  • In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s government has nearly completed the construction of a large tent facility. Tijuana has prepared a facility on the top floor of a shopping center about 10 miles south of the border crossing.
  • Writing in the Washington Post, Leon Krauze cast strong doubt on the Mexican government’s ability to guarantee deported migrants’ security from powerful organized crime groups.
  • The Mexican national human rights ombudsman voiced concern that the government’s migrant holding facilities have “a prison-like design, with corridors, doors, filters, bars and bars that close from the outside and, in some cases, with padlocks.”
  • Fewer migrants are arriving in southern Mexico, though. Northbound migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama has fallen to levels not seen since the first year after the COVID pandemic began: just 2,134 migrants during the first 29 days of January. Panama was measuring more people than that in a single day in August and September 2023.
  • The Trump White House has been repeating a threat to begin imposing a 25 percent tariff on Mexican and Canadian goods on February 1. “We don’t think it’s going to happen, really,” President Sheinbaum said on January 29. “And if it happens, we also have our plan.”
  • Diplomats from the United States and Mexico have reportedly formed a working group to discuss migration and other issues on a regular basis.
  • Migrants will “need our services more” now that the Trump administration has blocked migration pathways and tightened border security, an unnamed organized crime group member told ABC News reporter Matt Rivers. “Joe,” a U.S. citizen involved in migrant smuggling, told CBS News that “since the Trump administration took office, the going rate for smuggling people over the border and across the U.S. has doubled, and in some cases, tripled.”

El Salvador may receive deported migrants from other countries

  • CBS News revealed that the Trump administration is near agreement with the government of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, on a “safe third country” arrangement that would allow U.S. authorities to send asylum seekers from third countries to the Central American nation. They would then be expected to seek asylum in El Salvador’s system.
  • The agreement might also empower the Trump administration to send to El Salvador suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan organized crime group.
  • President Bukele has overseen a security crackdown that has imprisoned roughly 3 percent of the country’s male population, most of them in pre-trial detention, on suspicion of working with gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, resulting in mass human rights violations. It is more than likely that Bukele’s government could imprison suspected Tren de Aragua members, too, rather than release them into El Salvador.
  • A January 20 executive order raises the possibility of using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily detain and deport non-citizens suspected of ties to Mexican organized crime, El Salvador’s MS-13 gang, or Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua criminal group. This ancient law, last used during World War II to intern citizens of Japan, Germany, and Italy, allows deportations without due process.
  • Combined, these initiatives raise the possibility of Venezuelan migrants being rounded up in the United States, accused of Tren de Aragua ties under the Alien Enemies Act without due process, and then shipped to El Salvador’s prisons.
  • El Salvador is on the agenda for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first foreign trip as secretary, which will also take him to Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Panama.

Incidents reported along the border

  • Border Patrol agents reportedly exchanged fire with Mexican criminals at Frontón Island, along the Rio Grande border in Starr County, south Texas, on January 27. The security chief of Mexico’s border state of Tamaulipas sought to downplay the incident, voicing the view that while “shots were heard,” perhaps between rival gangs, “there was no attack” on U.S. personnel.
  • Border Patrol reported that agents returned fire after being shot at from across the border in the San Elizario area southeast of El Paso on the evening of January 27, according to the El Paso Times. No injuries were reported. Not far from there that evening, a convoy of armed assailants shot at Mexican soldiers and National Guard personnel on the Mexican side of the border.
  • CBP reported that two hikers, a U.S. and a Canadian citizen, were accosted by armed men in the Jacumba wilderness, near California’s central border with Mexico. The assailants stole their backpacks and cellphones and shot one of the hikers in the leg.

Other news

  • Reversing a last-minute move by the Biden administration, DHS Secretary Noem revoked an extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 600,000 citizens of Venezuela living in the United States. These people’s ability to live and work inside the United States now expires in April 2024 for some and September 2024 for others. According to the notice, If Noem does not decide by February 1 whether to grant an extension under the Trump administration, those protections will automatically extend for six more months. If TPS is not extended, court challenges are likely.
  • The top vote-getter in Venezuela’s July 2024 elections, which ended up being stolen by sitting president Nicolás Maduro, warned the Trump administration not to reach a deal with Maduro to ease deportations. Edmundo González said that “negotiating directly with Maduro would allow the autocrat to ‘use returning Venezuelans to his political advantage,’” the Washington Post reported.
  • “In many cases, actions that would have seemed unfathomable just years or even months before were now regarded as essentially normal,” read an analysis of Donald Trump’s executive orders by Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker. “Others were more obviously alarming.”
  • Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose ranking member is Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), released a lengthy report based on a months-long investigation of failures to provide adequate medical care to migrants held in CBP custody. It notes “understaffing, lengthy detention of children, the failure to document and assess medical records, unclear and inadequate guidance for treating children and other vulnerable individuals, and CBP’s failure to conduct meaningful oversight of its medical contractor.”
  • Donald Trump called on Congress to provide funding to allow his administration to “finish” building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Within a few weeks, majority Republican leaders of both houses will take up a very large spending package that could include funding for the wall, “mass deportation,” DHS hiring, and much else.
  • The Department of Justice has suspended funding for a program that funded attorneys to provide legal advice and services to detained immigrants. Attorneys were instructed to “stop work immediately.”
  • The administration completely shut down payments for services to people who have arrived in the United States to assist in their resettlement under the State Department-managed U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
  • CBS News confirmed that the new administration is closing the “Safe Mobility Offices” that the Biden administration had established in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. These provided several thousand migrants access to legal migration pathways, like refugee resettlement and humanitarian parole, while avoiding treacherous asylum-seeking travel to the U.S. border.
  • An analysis from the American Immigration Council challenged the Trump administration’s use of a never-before-invoked “mass influx” statute to justify deputizing willing states’ law enforcement agencies to carry out immigration enforcement.
  • Texas Gov. Abbott is calling for the Trump administration and Republican-majority Congress to reimburse his state for $11.1 billion it spent on its border security crackdown, “Operation Lone Star,” since 2021. Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) took to the Senate floor on January 28 to endorse Abbott’s request. In percentage terms, Operation Lone Star did not achieve a deeper reduction in Border Patrol migrant apprehensions than other states, particularly Arizona.
  • “I completely, 100 percent, wholeheartedly disagree with the premise that the border is insecure. I think it’s dishonest, and it’s a slap in the face to the unbelievable job that our federal and state and local law enforcement officials do,” said the judge (top official) of the south Texas border county of Cameron, Eddie Treviño Jr. Donald Trump won Cameron County, long considered a Democratic Party stronghold, last November.
  • “Biden’s success in the second half of his term provides a clear lesson: Complex problems require complex solutions,” wrote Edward Alden in a Foreign Policy piece lamenting the Trump administration’s dismantling of its predecessor’s management of migration through a precarious patchwork of carrots and sticks.

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