Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: January drop, Darién Gap, Panama and Costa Rica, Guantanamo, Budget

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:

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:

• Migration dropped in January in anticipation of Trump asylum shutoff: Customs and Border Protection reported a 36 percent drop in migrant encounters at the border from December to January, deepening a 13-month-long decline in migration. Restrictive Trump policies are the main cause for the new drop. Border Patrol apprehensions are now averaging 285 per day.
• Darién Gap migration declines sharply: Migration through the treacherous jungle route from Colombia to Panama dropped to 72 people per day in January, the fewest since February 2021.
• Deportation flights send third countries’ citizens to Panama and Costa Rica: In what is being called “bridge deportations,” the Trump administration sent 299 migrants from mostly Asian countries to Panama and 135 to Costa Rica. Both countries are keeping people in remote camps pending their repatriation. The situation of those with protection needs is uncertain.
• Guantánamo detainees sent back to Venezuela via Honduras: The Trump administration sent all but one of 178 Venezuelan migrants whom it had been holding at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba to Honduras, where a Venezuelan government plane retrieved them and brought them to Caracas.
• Congress readies a massive border and deportation spending package: The Senate passed a framework bill that could pave the way for $175 billion in new border hardening and “mass deportation” spending, which could pass without a single Democratic vote. The timetable is uncertain, though, as House and Senate Republican leaders disagree on the way forward.
• “Mass deportation” updates: Top Trump administration officials are dissatisfied with the “flagging” pace of Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations so far. The administration plans to cancel Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.
• Notes on the impact in Mexico: Mexico has still not seen a big increase in cross-border deportations from the United States. For now at least, migrant shelters in Mexico are emptying while smugglers raise their prices.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Migration dropped in January in anticipation of Trump asylum shutoff

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported a sharp drop in the number of migrants that its agents and officers encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2025, a month during which the Biden administration managed the border for the first 19 1/2 days, and the Trump administration took over for the final 11 1/2 days.

The numbers

CBP, which incorporates Border Patrol agents operating between ports of entry (official border crossings) and Field Operations officers operating at the ports of entry, took 61,465 people into custody last month. That was 36 percent fewer than in December 2024, 65 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since September 2020.

Data table

Thirty-two percent of migrants encountered in January were citizens of Mexico, which is not unusual: since October 2023, Mexican people have made up 31 percent of all encountered migrants. Of the 16 nationalities that CBP reports that had more than 100 encounters, all decreased from December to January; the nationalities that dropped most steeply were Guatemala (-51%), Brazil (-51%), Honduras (-46%), Colombia (-45%), Nicaragua (-44%), and Haiti (-44%).

Migration had been falling steadily at the border for 13 months, since Mexico’s government launched a crackdown on northbound migration in January 2024, and since the Biden administration implemented a rule in June 2024 that ended asylum access between ports of entry in most cases. The further December-to-January drop is a result of the Trump administration acting on January 20 to close the border to all undocumented people and shut down asylum access.

Between the ports of entry in January, CBP’s Border Patrol component apprehended 29,116 people. That was 38 percent fewer than in December 2024, 77 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since May 2020.

Data table

Border Patrol agents released 2,572 migrants from custody in January (9 percent of apprehensions). That was 63 percent fewer than in December 2024, 96 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest interior releases since January 2021. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks told CBS News on February 20 that the agency has released only two migrants from custody since January 20, and those individuals “were released to assist with criminal prosecutions as witnesses.”

At the ports of entry, the Trump administration abruptly stopped honoring appointments that the Biden administration had been allowing asylum seekers to arrange using the CBP One smartphone app. As the new administration canceled CBP One’s use for appointments, CBP’s encounters at ports of entry between January 20-31 were 93 percent fewer than the preceding 11 days’ average. As a result, the number of migrants encountered for the entire month of January 2025 dropped sharply after holding steady since July 2023, when the CBP One program had begun functioning at 1,450 daily appointments.

Data Table

At the ports of entry in January, CBP’s Field Operations component encountered 32,349 people. Port-of-entry encounters exceeded Border Patrol apprehensions during the third straight month, and almost certainly for the third time ever. January’s port-of-entry encounters were 34 percent fewer than in December 2024, 38 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since April 2023.

Sixty-one percent of migrants encountered in January were single adults, 34 percent were family unit members (parents and children), and 5 percent were unaccompanied children. That is similar to proportions measured overall since October 2023 (57 percent single adults, 37 percent family unit members, 5 percent unaccompanied children.)

Data table

Of the nine geographic sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, San Diego, the westernmost sector in California, was the number one sector for migrant apprehensions with 6,397, or 22 percent of the total. San Diego has been the number-one sector for migrant apprehensions since June 2024, with the exception of December 2024, when agents apprehended more migrants in the easternmost sector, the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas.

Data table

While data since Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration are not yet fully available, we do know the following:

• CBP reported that the number of Border Patrol apprehensions from January 21-31, 2025 was 85 percent fewer than the same period in 2024. As noted above, the entire month of January 2025 saw 77 percent fewer Border Patrol apprehensions than the entire month of January 2024, so the last 11 days’ decline was somewhat sharper.
• Border Patrol Chief Banks told CBS News that the agency’s apprehensions averaged 285 per day over the 7 days between February 13-19. If sustained over 30 days, that would mean 8,550 apprehensions in a month, which would be the fewest of any month since October 1999, the earliest date for which Border Patrol’s monthly data are available. (The smallest monthly apprehension number of the 21st century was 11,127 in April 2017, when migration plummeted following Donald Trump’s first inauguration.)
• If we estimate that there are currently about 26,000 Border Patrol agents and soldiers stationed along the U.S.-Mexico border (16,500 agents, 3,600 active-duty troops, 2,200 federalized National Guard, about 4,500 Texas state National Guard), then there was 1 migrant apprehended per day for every 100 agents or troops over the February 13-19 period.
• On Monday, February 17 White House “Border Czar” Homan tweeted that Border Patrol agents had encountered just 229 people over the previous 24 hours.
• In south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, agents have been apprehending about 50 people per day, the Associated Press reported.
• In the Del Rio Sector (mid-Texas), agents have been apprehending fewer than 50 people per day since late January, the Washington Post reported.
• In the El Paso Sector (far west Texas and New Mexico), agents have been apprehending about 70 people per day, Border Report reported, noting that “few if any migrants are claiming asylum.”

Restrictive policies

The drop in migration is a direct result of the impossibility of seeking asylum at the border under the Trump administration’s border policies, like summarily deporting all undocumented people and ending CBP One appointments, which several organizations are currently challenging in federal court.

“The right to seek asylum in the United States is non-existent at the U.S.-Mexico border,” read a February 20 Amnesty International brief based on fieldwork in Tijuana, which found that thousands are stranded and vulnerable in Mexico as a result.

Banks, the Border Patrol chief, agreed in a CBS News interview that asylum is no longer an option for those who cross between ports of entry. “You do not cross the border illegally and then make an asylum claim,” he told CBS reporter Camilo Montoya-Gálvez. “You can go to the port of entry, or you can go to one of the embassies in your country and make your claim for asylum.” Those options are nearly impossible to pursue, however, as ports of entry and embassy entrances are tightly guarded.

The new administration is adopting a layered approach, stacking overlapping bans on asylum access on top of each other.

First, and most indiscriminately, a January 20 executive order suspended the entry of undocumented migrants to the United States under any circumstances, using the presidential power to block the entry of classes of people granted by Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This order restricts people from invoking the right to asylum at the border, citing the existence of an “invasion” under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Border Patrol agents and CBP officers are essentially authorized to ignore asylum claims.

A Just Security analysis from Elizabeth Goitein and Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice warned that Trump is using his invocation of an “invasion” as a way “to lay claim to vast presidential powers that don’t exist in peacetime or wartime, launching a direct assault on the constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law.”

Second, CNN reporter Priscilla Álvarez revealed that the administration is about to unveil a new block: a public health order banning asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants “as risks for spreading diseases.” Although there is no pandemic threat, sources told Álvarez that internal discussions have cited measles and tuberculosis. (Scholars have pointed out that the racist notion that migrants spread disease has a long history in the United States.)

Meanwhile, even as it professes concern for cross-border spread of disease, the new administration has fired hundreds of federal health inspectors who had been posted at ports of entry to detect communicable diseases in arriving cargo and people, the New York Times revealed.

Third, one of the January 20 executive orders would revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which sends asylum seekers into Mexico to await their U.S. immigration court hearing dates. While the administration refuses to hear asylum claims, it is not clear who would be sent to Mexico to await asylum proceedings.

Darién Gap migration declines sharply

The government of Panama published data about migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling its border with Colombia, in January. It reported that just 2,229 people—72 per day—migrated through the Gap last month. That was 54 percent fewer than in December 2024, 94 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since February 2021.

Data table

As in every month since February 2023, Venezuela was the number-one nationality of people who migrated through the Darién route. However, Venezuelan citizens made up just 50 percent of the migration flow, the smallest share since December 2023. Venezuela (1,114 people) was followed on the list of nationalities by Colombia (136), Nepal (122), and Iran (100). Minors were 17 percent of the total. Women and girls were 34 percent.

The number of people traveling through the 70-mile Darién Gap route has declined sharply despite the January inauguration of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who—as a February 17 Carter Center final report makes clear—declared himself re-elected after a fraudulent July 2024 vote. There has not been a new wave of migration away from the entrenched dictatorship in part because it is known that the United States has inaugurated a president promising a historic crackdown on migrants.

Deportation flights send third countries’ citizens to Panama and Costa Rica

The Trump administration has begun to implement so-called “bridge deportations”: compelling nations to accept deported migrants who are citizens of third countries, whom those nations would then have to repatriate, apparently at U.S. expense. These deportations appear to be taking place without taking into account the deported migrants’ fear of returning to their home countries.

Panama

Between February 12 and 15, the U.S. government sent three military planes to Panama carrying migrants from several Asian nations. In response to a direct request from the Trump administration, Panama’s government agreed to receive 299 individuals from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and likely elsewhere.

Panamanian officials could produce no document or agreement explaining the legal basis for this transfer of people from third countries.

Upon arrival, the deported people were confined to a hotel in Panama City and barred from leaving for several days, their passports and most mobile phones taken away from them. “Lawyers have said it is illegal to detain people in Panama for more than 24 hours without a court order,” the Times noted. Several migrants told the New York Times reporters that at least one person in the hotel attempted suicide and another broke his leg trying to escape.

At the hotel, a vivid New York Times report documented, many communicated to reporters by cellphone or by writing on windows and holding up signs. An Afghan woman, using hand gestures through the hotel window, communicated that she could be killed if returned to Kabul. Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year-old citizen of Iran, fled her country because, as a convert to Christianity, she could be executed in her home country. “I would rather jump off a plane than go back to China,” a Chinese Christian man told the Times.

Though Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that “not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody,” it is not clear whether they had the opportunity to do so, or whether they were listened to. Panamanian officials said that more than 40 percent of the deported people (128 of 299) have indicated that they fear return to their home countries, and will not go back voluntarily.

On February 19 the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) assisted the voluntary repatriations of 12 people from Uzbekistan and India, the Times reported.

Those who refuse repatriation are now being taken to the San Vicente reception center on the edge of Panama’s Darién Gap wilderness, about a five or six-hour drive from the capital, where they will be confined for an unclear amount of time.

The San Vicente center was built as temporary dormitory housing for processing northbound migrants emerging from the Darién Gap route. Now that migration through that route has declined sharply (see above), it stands largely empty. Conditions at San Vicente, which has a capacity of about 500 beds, were always primitive, as documented in a March 2024 Human Rights Watch report. When the deported migrants were confined to the Panama City hotel, Panamanian authorities were reportedly preparing the San Vicente facility.

On the night of February 18, Panamanian authorities transferred 97 people to San Vicente, the New York Times reported. Ghasemzadeh said, “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages. They gave us a stale piece of bread. We are sitting on the floor.”

Costa Rica

A February 20 flight from San Diego brought 135 citizens of Uzbekistan, China, Afghanistan, Russia, and other countries to Costa Rica. About half were children and at least 2 were pregnant women. The government of Costa Rica is transporting them to a facility along the Panama border, about six hours’ drive from the capital, that had been used to register northbound migrants arriving from the Darién Gap.

They will be held at that site, unable to leave, for “four, five, six weeks,” Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves said, as IOM helps arrange their U.S.-funded repatriation to their home countries. It is not clear whether those repatriations will be voluntary and what might happen if people express fear of death, torture, or imprisonment upon return.

President Chaves told reporters that Costa Rica is helping its “economically powerful brother from the north,” in part to avoid economic retaliation. “If they impose a tax in our free zones, it’ll screw us,” Chaves said. “I don’t think they’ll do it, thank God … love is repaid with love … 200 will come, we treat them well and they will leave.”

A statement from an IOM spokesperson characterized the UN agency’s role as “providing humanitarian support and facilitating return when it is safe to do so.” When it is not safe to do so—for instance, when people credibly fear return to their countries—it is not clear what the agency’s role might be. Faced with long-term confinement in a primitive camp in a remote part of a Central American country, some threatened individuals might opt for a highly risky return. Badilla said that some may have the option to seek refugee status in Costa Rica.

Other countries

El Salvador and Guatemala have also agreed to accept third countries’ citizens, but no such “bridge deportation” flights have yet arrived. Honduras, as discussed below, received Venezuelan citizens sent from the U.S. base in Guantánamo, Cuba, but they never left the airport before being transferred to Venezuela.

In Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, where many Venezuelan migrants are stranded and homeless, the Mexican government’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) is offering to fly people back to Caracas aboard voluntary “humanitarian flights,” Chiapas Paralelo reported. While they do not want to return to Venezuela, some migrants interviewed by reporter Ángeles Mariscal said they were considering moving south to Costa Rica because the United States is closed off and conditions in Mexico are too hostile.

The Miami Herald noted that Venezuelans stranded in Mexico who lack passports cannot purchase plane tickets home even if they want to, “because the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico is refusing to issue a letter of safe conduct to return home.”

Guantánamo detainees sent back to Venezuela via Honduras

Developing note: On the afternoon of February 20, a civilian Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight took 177 Venezuelan citizens from the Guantánamo Bay base to Honduras. There, a Venezuelan government plane retrieved them and brought them back to Caracas.

As of late February 20, we lack more information. A February 20 Justice Department court filing noted that 178 people were detained at the base on February 19. Of that number, all but one, who was brought back to the United States, are now in Venezuela. The base in Cuba is, at present, empty of detained migrants.

What follows is the text of this update’s original Guantánamo narrative, drafted before this big, late development:

The Trump administration has, as of February 19, transported more than 175 men to detention facilities at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, according to a thorough New York Times examination of information that reporter Carol Rosenberg has been able to uncover. (CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, citing federal data shared with the network, cited 142 people on February 19th.)

They have arrived aboard 13 military aircraft. “All have been described as Venezuelans who have been issued final deportation orders,” the Times explained. “But it is not known why these men in particular were sent there.”

Rosenberg reported that about 700 military and 150 civilian personnel are now carrying out migrant operations at the base. “A military blueprint for the migrant operation shows plans to house more than 3,500 U.S. forces near tent encampments for more than 11,000 migrants.” The Times overview discussed “concern about mission creep and the militarization of a civilian security challenge,” as well as “whether it is legal, or a misappropriation of funds.”

Of the 178 people being held on February 19, 127 were considered “high threat” detainees, held at Camp 6, the medium-security military prison that held so-called “enemy combatants” during the United States’ 2000s-2010s “global war on terror.” The rest are in the base’s Migrant Operations Center, a DHS-run facility that for three decades has held migrants apprehended on the high seas.

Reports continue to emerge about detainees at Guantánamo who have no criminal records. At his “Huddled Masses” newsletter at the Bulwark, Adrián Carrasquillo spoke to the mother of Mayfreed Durán-Arape, a 21-year-old man who had been in ICE detention for 18 months after being apprehended at the border, only to get sent to the U.S. base. His mother said that he faces charges after he “intervened to stop an officer from repeatedly hitting a friend during an altercation” in the detention center where he was being held last November.

Following a February 13 Armed Services Committee hearing at which they could not get satisfactory answers, Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) sent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a letter requesting information about the Guantánamo operation’s cost and impact on military readiness and morale.

“Long seen as a legal black hole, Guantánamo has historically evaded traditional government oversight, and immigrants previously detained there have faced mistreatment,” read an analysis by Nicole Narea at Vox. “You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse… and the inability to contact the outside world is intense,” Yael Schacher of Refugees International told the Guardian.

Congress readies a massive border and deportation spending package

The U.S. Senate met through the night on February 20-21 to consider and approve a budget resolution that would create a framework for massively increasing spending on tough border measures and mass deportation. The bill is moving forward despite disagreement between House and Senate Republican leadership about how to proceed, which will likely delay consideration well into March.

The budget resolution would pave the way for a future bill granting DHS an additional $175 billion, with more going to the Departments of Justice and Defense. (For comparison, currently the entire annual DHS budget—including non-border agencies like FEMA, the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard—is just over $100 billion.)

An unidentified Senate Republican aide told the Washington Post that the $175 billion “is expected to go toward pay raises, hiring and retention bonuses for ICE agents; immigration judges and support staff; assistant U.S. attorneys; the border wall; additional detention space; and local and state law enforcement agencies to support ICE.”

Senate Republicans control 53 out of 100 seats. Normally, a Senate rule (the “filibuster”) requires 60 votes to end debate and proceed to a vote. This spending measure, however, is proceeding under a complicated rule called “reconciliation,” which can only be invoked occasionally but allows a bill to pass with a simple majority—without a single Democratic vote—if all of its provisions can be shown to have a budgetary impact.

Under that procedure, senators spent the night of February 20-21 considering dozens of amendments, mainly brought by Democrats. These failed along party lines but were introduced for their symbolic value. Politico had reported that most expected Democratic amendments would center on Trump administration cuts, taxes, and spending freezes—not border or migration issues.

The Senate passed the budget resolution at 4:46 AM on February 21. The House is expected to pass a different version next week or possibly the following week. At some point, though, both houses must pass an identical resolution. “Both chambers must pass the same resolution in order to kick off reconciliation in earnest. Then Republicans can begin constructing the package that will contain the policies in Trump’s agenda,” Punchbowl News explained.

That may not happen right away. House and Senate Republican leaderships disagree on whether the resolution should separate the party’s priorities—taxes and “border plus immigration”—into two bills or one. Senate leaders favor two bills, and are moving ahead with border-immigration first. House leaders, with a razor-thin Republican majority that might not sustain two votes, want to combine taxes and border-immigration into one bill, and President Trump has endorsed that approach.

The bill that Senate Republicans just passed, then, is “widely seen as a backup plan for now,” and not the actual framework for the big spending package, Punchbowl News explained.

In other budget developments, the Washington Post revealed a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instructing the U.S. military to prepare for an 8 percent budget cut over the next 5 years. One of 17 Defense Department categories that would be exempted from cuts is military “operations at the southern U.S. border.”

“Mass deportation” updates

• White House “Border Czar” Homan told CNN on February 16 that ICE had arrested 14,000 migrants since January 20, adding that he was unhappy with this pace.
• “ICE arrests have sagged so far this month, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security, declining from about 800 per day in late January after Trump took office to fewer than 600 during the first 13 days of February,” reads a Washington Post analysis of agency data.
• Syracuse University Prof. Austin Kocher analyzed this data at his newsletter, concluding that arrests of migrants with no criminal histories are the main reason for the largest biweekly increase in ICE’s detained population since 2021.
• At Arizona Luminaria, John Washington told the story of “Yesenia,” a Venezuelan citizen deported to Mexico with two of her four children after being pulled over for driving too slowly in Tucson. Agents did not allow her to communicate with her other two children, ages eight and fourteen, who remain in the United States. Mexican authorities transported her 2,000 miles across the country to Villahermosa, Tabasco. Yesenia said that Border Patrol agents “asked if I was a member of the Tren de Aragua,” the Venezuelan organized crime group, and threatened to send her to Guantánamo. An agent asked her six-year-old daughter whether her father was a gang member.
• Of the 190 people aboard two Venezuelan government planes that flew to Texas to retrieve deported people on February 10, 2 were former soldiers who had deserted the Venezuelan armed forces. The Venezuelan dictatorship’s feared interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, said that the two individuals delivered by the United States face the “aggravating circumstance to commit the crime of desertion… while in a foreign country“ and “are being given the appropriate treatment with due respect for human rights.”
• USA Today reported that DHS has ordered all 6,000 agents at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, basically detectives who investigate organized crime, terrorism, narcotrafficking, and other transnational crime in addition to migrant smuggling, “to shift priority to the Trump administration’s mission of deporting people in the U.S. illegally.” Said former HSI supervisory agent Chris Cappannelli, “This is going to be a total train wreck.”
• The Trump administration is moving to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for citizens of Haiti by August, well ahead of when it was set to expire, the Wall Street Journal reported on the afternoon of February 20. This would leave up to 500,000 people with their work permits revoked and vulnerable to “mass deportation.” It is not clear how the administration can argue that conditions have improved in the island nation of about 12 million people, where gangs set fire to the capital’s main hospital on February 12.
• An analysis from Dara Lind at the American Immigration Council explained the likely effect of the administration’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelan citizens: “Up to 350,000 will lose protections in April, and 243,000 more may lose them in September.” A possible cancellation of the Biden administration’s two-year parole status for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela leaves hundreds of thousands more “in limbo.” CBS News reported that the administration has suspended applications submitted by parole recipients seeking to adjust their status in the United States.
• In a Denver Post column, Juan Peña, a pastor in Denver, vividly described an ICE raid at an apartment complex, with agents using military-style uniforms and weapons: “One family from our church said ICE pounded on their door so hard they thought it would break down. Ten people lived in that small unit, including several children. They asked to see a warrant. The officers ignored them and continued yelling in English, refusing to answer.”
• “Border Czar” Homan said he has asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has broken any laws by holding events to educate people about their rights when facing ICE operations. “I’m working with the Department of Justice and finding out. Where is that line that they cross? So, maybe AOC’s gonna be in trouble now,” he told Fox News.
• Apparently seeking to plug leaks about upcoming ICE raids, an internal directive from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem mandates subjecting some Department personnel to polygraph examinations with a question about unauthorized communications with the media or nonprofits.
• A DHS memo deputized up to 600 members of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service “to perform the functions of an immigration officer” including apprehending undocumented people in the United States, the Washington Examiner reported.
• People showing up to regular ICE check-ins or immigration court appearances are being detained “after the Trump administration allegedly tricked, lied to or otherwise deceived them as part of its mass deportation campaign,” the Guardian reported. “There’s no lower-hanging fruit than immigrants following the rules,” observed reporter Alexandra Villareal.
• DHS plans to spend as much as $200 million on an advertising campaign warning undocumented migrants, “We will find you and deport you,” Semafor reported. Two vendors that produced ads for the 2024 Trump campaign have received contracts.

Notes on the impact in Mexico

• Reporting from Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, Reynosa, and Tijuana, Puente News Collaborative found that deportations into Mexico have not yet been “massive”: large short-term shelters that Mexico’s government quickly built in its northern border cities sit largely empty.
• Border Report noted that charity-run shelters in Ciudad Juárez are also emptying, as migrants either give up on plans to enter the United States legally or seek to build new lives in Mexico. Those shelters may fill again if the tempo of “mass deportation” increases. Mexico’s Pie de Página found similarly empty shelters in Tijuana.
• Aid workers in Mexico City interviewed by Prism described “Ulysses Syndrome,” a form of extreme anxiety that migrants, many of whom fled violence, are suffering acutely as the Trump administration’s policies have blocked their hopes of reaching the United States. It is “extreme migratory grief—not a mental disorder—that is aggravated by chronic and multiple stresses. It appears in migrants who deal with loneliness, fear, and helplessness daily.”
• Between January 20 and February 13, U.S. authorities deported into Mexico 2,970 non-Mexican citizens, out of a total of 13,455 deportees, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters. (That is 538 deported people per day.) Mexico has been systematically busing non-Mexican deportees from the U.S. border to the southern part of the country.
• The director of Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) said that between January 20 and February 5, Mexico received 8,119 deported Mexicans and 2,521 deported citizens of third countries. Combining that with Sheinbaum’s numbers above, we can deduce that 2,366 Mexicans and 449 non-Mexicans were deported into Mexico between February 6 and 13. (That would be 626 people per day between January 20 and February 5, and 352 people per day between February 6 and 13.)
• The U.S. government sent the first deportation flight since March 2024 to a Mexican city other than Mexico City. 130 Mexican citizens were aboard a flight that landed in Villahermosa, in the southern state of Tabasco, on February 18.
• “In Tijuana, the prices coyotes charge to smuggle migrants into the U.S. have doubled, according to some of them,” Puente News Collaborative reported. “The cost of these crossings ranges from $6,000 to $10,000, double what they used to cost.”
• As Mexico’s security forces increase their presence and step up inspections at the border—a measure taken in early February in response to Donald Trump’s threats to place tariffs on Mexican goods—travelers entering and leaving Mexico from Arizona are experiencing increased delays, Arizona’s Family reported. Mexican National Guard checkpoints have also slowed traffic between Tijuana and San Diego, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
• In San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, the municipality that receives the most financial remittances wired from people in the United States, transfers have fallen 40 percent so far in February, EFE reported.
• EFE also noted, though, that remittances from the United States have increased in communities along Mexico’s northern border: people in the United States are rushing to transfer money to relatives there, so that they might still have access to their savings if they get deported.
• Guatemala’s foreign minister, Carlos Ramiro Martínez, told an interviewer that he did not expect a big increase in U.S. deportations of Guatemalans this year. Between January 1 and February 10, the United States deported 4,183 people to Guatemala; 2024 deportations totaled nearly 62,000.
• Because of its increased efforts to block and integrate migrants, Mexico’s government “has new leverage compared to 2019” in its dealings with the Trump administration, noted an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute’s Andrew Selee and Ariel Ruiz.

Other news

• Border Patrol Chief Banks deputized 300 soldiers from the Texas National Guard, who will now have the authority to carry out immigration enforcement, including arresting migrants. It is very rare in the United States for soldiers to be empowered to arrest and confront civilians on U.S. soil.
• The Trump administration has fired 20 recently hired immigration judges from a struggling system in which about 735 judges must hear a backlog of about 3.7 million cases. “You could be talking in some jurisdictions upwards of six, seven plus years for a case to be adjudicated,” a Houston-based immigration attorney told Border Report.
• The administration fired 400 employees at DHS, including 50 from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—but none from CBP or ICE, CBS News reported.
• The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) has ceased payments and issued “stop work” orders to all legal aid organizations advising and representing about 26,000 unaccompanied children in U.S. immigration courts. The order to stop payments comes from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.” The result could be a return to absurd situations like toddlers made to defend their asylum claims before immigration judges without attorneys present. One organization, Estrella del Paso, is suing.
• Bloomberg and the New York Times reported that ORR is once again sharing with ICE sensitive information about people who come forward to sponsor unaccompanied migrant children in the agency’s shelter system, and requiring sponsors to be fingerprinted. These sponsors are often relatives and sometimes undocumented. This data-sharing arrangement purports to improve vetting and prevent children from being exploited, but it is likely to make many would-be sponsors unwilling to come forward, which in turn could mean forcing children to endure longer stays in ORR’s shelters.
• Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed a February 12 CBP memo mandating that personnel start collecting biometric data on all migrant children encountered between ports of entry, regardless of age, “including fingerprints, facial images, and other available modalities, as appropriate.”
• The Elon Musk-headed “Department of Government Efficiency” has eliminated most staff at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Unaccompanied Children Office of the Ombuds, which hears complaints about treatment of unaccompanied migrant children, Bloomberg reported.
• The White House posted an “ASMR” video—a genre of online video featuring sounds that give some people a physical reaction—showing migrants being shackled and boarded onto a deportation flight. “It is like a snuff film for the American idea,” tweeted New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen.
• The commander of the U.S. military’s Northern Command met with Mexico’s secretary of defense on February 19 to discuss “coordinated patrols on their respective side of the border,” information sharing, and immediate communications.
• The Mexican daily Milenio reported the case of Héctor Hernández, a Border Patrol agent in San Diego who allegedly gave Tijuana migrant smugglers “tours” of the border showing them the best sites for crossing migrants, charging them “$5,000 per tour and entry.” That ended in 2023 when Hernández gave a “tour” to an undercover Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent.
• Citing potential security risks raised in a thread on Reddit, CBP issued a memo suspending Border Patrol agents’ use of body-worn cameras, NewsNation reported. While the announcement alarmed accountability proponents, CBP lifted the order days later, and agents are presumably wearing cameras again.