Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: low migration, Guantánamo buildup, Congress spending bill, Venezuela deportation

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 plummeting along the U.S.-bound route as the new U.S. administration leads people to pause: In part because of the Trump administration’s near-complete ban on asylum access, in part because of Mexico’s crackdown, migration levels are low from South America to the U.S.-Mexico border. Large numbers of people are coming to terms with extended stays in Mexico.
• Guantánamo: as planes keep bringing migrants, some are not “the worst of the worst”: The Trump administration has taken about 100 people, likely all of them Venezuelan, to detention at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Some do not appear to have criminal backgrounds. Groups are suing to allow attorneys to gain access.
• “Mass deportations”: as Trump blasts their pace, Congress begins work on a giant spending measure: President Trump is reportedly angry that arrests and deportations from the U.S. interior are not increasing faster. Agencies lack capacity, but that could be vastly increased by a spending package, now underway in Congress, that could add $175 billion for border and migration crackdowns.
• Venezuela sends two planes to pick up deportees: Following a friendly meeting between a Trump administration representative and Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan regime sent two planes to Texas to retrieve deported Venezuelan citizens.
• Updates about the U.S. military border deployment: The number of active-duty troops and National Guard (state and federal) deployed to the border may now exceed 10,000. Air Force personnel running deportation flights are removing name tape and unit insignias from their uniforms. Those flights cost about three times as much as civilian deportation flights.
• Eight Latin American criminal groups to be added to the U.S. terrorist list: The Trump administration is adding eight criminal groups from four countries to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. This will affect the asylum cases of people threatened by these groups, strengthening some cases and devastating others.
• U.S. aid freeze affects programs designed to integrate migrants and receive deported people: The administration’s 90-day freeze in most forms of foreign assistance has dealt a blow to Mexican shelters. It also weakens programs that aim to integrate migrants into countries like Colombia so they might not continue their journeys northward.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Migration plummeting along the U.S.-bound route as the new U.S. administration leads people to pause

Banning asylum means almost no asylum seekers

As occurred during the first months of Donald Trump’s first term in 2017, Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border are plummeting to some of the lowest levels measured during the 21st century. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not yet reported January apprehensions. Still, unofficial data shared with CBS News at the beginning of February pointed to less than 30,000, which would be the smallest monthly total since May 2020.

Migrant apprehensions could fall further, to a 15,000 per month pace: 500 per day or below, according to White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan. That happened three times during the first months of the first Trump administration, in March-May 2017. Numbers steadily increased, however, over the subsequent two years.

Citing leaked CBP data, the New York Post reported an average of 359 apprehensions per day so far in February, which would be a monthly rate of just over 10,000. If sustained, that would be the fewest monthly apprehensions since at least October 1999, the earliest month for which WOLA has seen monthly reporting.

On February 8, Texas authorities reported only 331 migrant apprehensions in the entire state that day. In Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which comprises most of Arizona, “apprehensions and other encounters with immigrants have fallen to about 450 per week from 1,200 per week in late January,” the New York Times reported. In south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, the busiest of Border Patrol’s nine sectors in December, Border Patrol agents are now apprehending “between 100 to 150” per day, the Washington Examiner reported.

Much of the drop owes to the impossibility of accessing the U.S. asylum system due to the Trump administration’s January 20 executive order prohibiting such access. Almost no apprehended migrants are people seeking to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities to plea for protection.

Mexico’s crackdown

Migrants’ passage is also blocked by Mexico’s deployment of an additional 10,000 National Guard personnel to the U.S. border region in response to President Trump’s temporarily withdrawn threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods. (In a February 9 interview with Fox News, Donald Trump said that Mexico’s efforts so far are “not good enough.”)

“What the Mexico troops will do on the border is unclear,” a New York Times analysis noted. Other than listings of drug and weapons seizures that don’t appear to be unprecedentedly high, there has been little official reporting of activities and results so far. Mexican National Guard personnel are now inspecting vehicles heading north from Reynosa, Tamaulipas into Hidalgo and McAllen, Texas, the magazine Proceso reported. Milenio documented increased urban checkpoints and highway patrols in and around Matamoros.

The number of migrants is not shrinking on the Mexican side of the border, though, as the newly deported join would-be migrants stranded by the administration’s border closure. The Casa del Migrante migrant shelter in Reynosa, with a capacity of 150, is currently housing 250 people, including 80 children, Latin Times reported.

In Tijuana, Julie Watson of the Associated Press spoke with migrants from Venezuela and elsewhere who are among the 280,000 people who tried to get CBP One appointments during the Biden administration, did not succeed, and are now coming to terms with spending a long period in Mexico. The “prevailing mood,” Watson put it, is “stay put and see how Trump’s policies unfold over the next few months.”

The AP’s Megan Janetsky spoke to stranded migrants in Mexico City who are now filing applications in Mexico’s overwhelmed asylum system after having their CBP One appointments canceled by the Trump administration.

The Mexican government’s refugee agency (COMAR) is usually quick to publish the number of asylum applications it receives each month, but it has not yet revealed January data. Janetsky reported, though, that COMAR’s January 2025 asylum applications were about triple the agency’s monthly average in 2024.

Many Mexican citizens fleeing organized crime violence are now also unable to seek protection in the United States. They are stranded in the same country where they are threatened. Animal Político spoke to displaced Mexicans who are now out of options in Tijuana shelters. “Inside the makeshift church where the mass is being held, no one is praying out loud for Trump to ‘have a change of heart’ anymore,” wrote reporter Manu Ureste.

Darién Gap

In the region straddling Colombia and Panama, northbound overland migration through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route has fallen to levels not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic. Colombia’s migration agency measured an average of 93 people per day departing the towns of Necoclí and Turbo, in the country’s northwest, to embark on the Darién route. In January 2024, Colombia detected 1,072 departures per day. In Necoclí, Voice of America reported, a beach where hundreds of migrants had been sleeping in tents as they awaited a chance to board boats is now “practically empty.”

On the border between Colombia and Venezuela, local border analyst William Gómez reported an 82 percent drop so far this year in the flow of people departing Venezuela at one of the principal border crossings, the Simón Bolívar Bridge between San Cristóbal, Venezuela and Cúcuta, Colombia. “Gómez specified that the main reason for the decrease in migration through this area is due to the drastic immigration measures that Donald Trump’s government has been implementing,” noted Venezuela’s La Nación.

Reverse flow

Faced with the impossibility of accessing asylum or other pathways in the United States, a small number of migrants appear to be giving up and going south. “Dozens” have been reported crossing south from Honduras into Nicaragua, in some cases following U.S. detention and deportation, EFE reported. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks posted photos in a tweet mentioning two groups at Honduras’s borders, totaling 49 people: “These individuals cited the heavy security posture along the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexico’s containment efforts as key reasons for reversing course.”

Panamanian and Costa Rican authorities reportedly intercepted a group of mostly Venezuelan migrants along the two countries’ border. The Security Minister of Panama, where Venezuelan citizens have been the vast majority of people migrating through the Darién Gap, indicated that his government is studying the possibility of carrying out removal flights directly to Venezuela, which does not have diplomatic relations with Panama.

Guantánamo: as planes keep bringing migrants, some are not “the worst of the worst”

About 100 detainees

As of February 12, at least seven military aircraft had brought roughly 100 detained migrants from Fort Bliss, a sprawling military base in El Paso, Texas, to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in southeastern Cuba.

The Guantánamo flights are the fast operationalization of a plan that Donald Trump announced on January 29, when he called for detaining “the worst criminal illegal aliens” at the base. “Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst,” tweeted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on February 4. The administration’s declared goal is to hold at the base 30,000 people who cannot easily be deported.

Some detainees— about 53 so far, according to a list of names obtained by the New York Times—are being held not in the base’s migrant detention facility but in “Camp 6,” the medium-security military prison once used to hold so-called “enemy combatants” during the “war on terror” of the 2000s and 2010s. The U.S. military has also set up more than 60 tents to hold detainees, according to USA Today; a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery cited “more than 185 tents and temporary structures.”

They are at least nominally in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), not the Department of Defense. However, the New York Times revealed on February 12 that “military guards and medics,” not civilian ICE employees, are guarding at least the detainees in Camp 6. A source told the Times that “only two ICE officials were working inside Camp 6,” a facility suffering from a lack of maintenance.

CNN reported that there is a great deal of confusion on the base as agencies try to figure out how to work together. “Nobody really knows what’s going on, between DOD, ICE, and CBP. We’ve got everybody pointing fingers, saying, ‘They’re in charge,’ ‘They’re paying for this,’ ‘They’re providing security.’ No one actually knows,” one source with knowledge of the planning said.” At a February 13 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the commander of the Defense Department’s U.S. Southern Command, which manages the Guantánamo facility, was unable to offer an estimate of the detention operation’s expected cost.

All of the people brought to Guantánamo so far are adults, probably all men, from Venezuela, a country to which deportation flights are infrequent but happening (see below). The Trump administration often refers to the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan organized crime group, as a security threat, but has not explicitly claimed that all of those sent to the Cuba base are members of Tren de Aragua.

That criminal group formed in a Venezuelan prison and appears to have a small presence within the Venezuelan diaspora. Venezuelan experts who study the group, like journalist Ronna Risquez and scholar Ronal Rodríguez, find that Tren de Aragua’s real influence often gets “ overstated” or “ exaggerated to justify actions against Venezuelan migrants.”

“Low-risk” detainees

Evidence is emerging that some of the detainees have no relation whatsoever to organized crime and no criminal records. In the days after February 4, when the first plane arrived, relatives of some of the detained men began learning that their loved ones are being held in Guantánamo. They are telling the media and attorneys that the men are law-abiding.

• “My brother is not a criminal,” the sister of 25-year-old Luis Alberto Castillo, who appeared in Secretary Noem’s February 4 tweet showing photos of camouflage-clad agents loading bound men onto a military plane, told the New York Times. “This is all discrimination and xenophobia, just because he’s Venezuelan.” Journalist Pablo Manríquez, whose Migrant Insider newsletter was the first to reveal Castillo’s case, reported that he had not even violated U.S. laws banning illegal entry, as he arrived at a port of entry during the Biden administration using the CBP One app. For EFE, Castillo’s wife played an audio message that he sent from custody: “They say I’m from the Tren de Aragua… all the Venezuelans here are in the same situation.”
• “To me, and I’m speaking sincerely, I believe my son was kidnapped by U.S. authorities,” Angela Sequera, the mother of 25-year-old Yoiker David Sequera, told USA Today. Mr. Sequera is an aspiring barber who was seeking asylum while in ICE detention in El Paso.
• “Why don’t they investigate him? So they can see that he has nothing to do with any Tren de Aragua,” the father of 21-year-old Mayfreed Durán asked EFE.
• “Yesika Palma sobbed as she spoke about her brother Jose Daniel Simancas, a 30-year-old construction worker, and how it felt to think of him being treated like a terrorist when all he’d done was attempt to come to the United States in pursuit of a decent job,” reported ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune have identified 12 people being detained at Guantánamo. Reporters Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg spoke to relatives of three of them, who “said that their relatives were not criminals, and two provided records from the Venezuelan Interior Ministry and other documents to support their statements.”

The “worst of the worst” label has also been undercut by “government documents,” obtained by CBS News, recognizing that some of those being taken to Guantánamo are, in fact, “low-risk” migrants with no criminal records or suspected gang ties. Some, it appears, are being singled out just because they have tattoos. Those deemed “low risk” are apparently not being held in Camp 6 but in the base’s Migrant Operations Center (MOC), which the Department of State has used to hold migrants interdicted at sea. (An analysis by Nicole Narea at Vox recalled some of the abuses that took place at that facility in the 1990s.) Guards at the MOC are members of the Coast Guard, the Times reported.

The New York Times has reported that Luis Alberto Castillo, the detainee featured in Secretary Noem’s February 4 tweet who arrived with a CBP One appointment, is on a list of 53 detainees being held at Camp 6. However, the Times has also reported that Castillo is in the Migrant Operations Center.

Groups file suit

The ACLU, on behalf of four immigration attorneys’ organizations and relatives of some of the people held in Guantánamo, filed suit in Washington, DC federal district court on February 12. They request that a judge issue a temporary restraining order guaranteeing detainees access to attorneys.

Their legal action noted that “For the first time in U.S. history, the federal government has moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to the Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (“Guantánamo”). And it is holding them incommunicado, without access to attorneys, family, or the outside world.” It demands that the Trump administration allow attorneys to meet and communicate with detainees at Guantánamo via in-person visits, phone, and video calls, and make available information about their status and rights.

As this tightly guarded military facility has sat since 1903 in a 45-square-mile piece of Cuba, a dictatorship and U.S. adversary, the Guantánamo base often gets called a “ legal black hole” for people detained there. “The government requires attorneys to pass security clearances to visit the base,” USA Today noted. “They have to travel to a mainland military base and take a military flight; there are no commercial flights to Guantanamo. Detainees’ phone access is so severely limited, it has to be reserved 15 days in advance, according to court filings.”

“It is essential to know who is there, what legal claims they have, and whether they want attorneys,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has litigated many migrants’ rights cases in recent years, told the Washington Post. “This is the normal ICE lack of transparency on steroids.”

“If the AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union cares more about highly dangerous criminal aliens including murderers & vicious gang members than they do about American citizens—they should change their name,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in an email to CBS News. The Assistant Secretary had already made that quip in a February 7 tweet, responding to an ACLU request for information, that the ACLU-led plaintiffs cited in their complaint.

In New Mexico on February 9, attorneys convinced a federal judge to grant a restraining order prohibiting the transfer to Guantánamo of three men who “fit the profile of those the administration has prioritized for detention in Guantánamo, i.e. Venezuelan men detained in the El Paso area with (false) charges of connections with the Tren de Aragua gang.”

“Mass deportations”: as Trump blasts their pace, Congress begins work on a giant spending measure

The President is unhappy

Reports indicate that President Donald Trump, who made a “mass deportation” campaign one of his principal campaign themes last year, is angry about what he regards to be the slow pace of ICE arrests and deportations from the U.S. interior so far. “The numbers are too f—— low,” Trump is telling his aides, a source told NewsNation.

As of February 7, ICE arrests in the U.S. interior since Inauguration Day (January 20) stood at over 8,000, CNN reported. White House “Border Czar” Homan said on February 11 that ICE arrests stood at 14,000. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on February 13 that the 10 migrant reception centers her government has established along the border to attend to deportees had received 2,016 people so far.

While Homan has said that the agency will focus on detaining undocumented migrants with criminal records, he has also said that he shares Trump’s dissatisfaction with the pace of ICE arrests. “Three times higher [than arrests during Joe Biden’s tenure] is good, but I’m not satisfied. There are more criminal aliens that need to be arrested, hundreds of thousands,” Homan told NewsNation. An administration official told CNN, “They’re treading water. They’re way behind.”

The Los Angeles Times and others have reported that ICE is sweeping up many with no criminal records as the agency seeks to ramp up its numbers. Among them may be people whose documentation is being revoked, like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients.

“Over the past week,” the Washington Post reported, “ICE has stopped issuing daily arrest figures, and the agency has struggled to keep pace with White House demands, even though officers are working six or even seven days a week at some locations.” At his newsletter, Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher noted, “ICE did give up their brief practice of posting these data points, and they did so just as the data on arrests and detainers began to decline.” On February 11 the administration reassigned two top officials in ICE’s Enforcement and Removals Office whom it apparently regarded as underperforming, the Post revealed.

As ICE detention facilities remain at capacity, the administration has begun using federal prisons to hold some people detained by “mass deportation” efforts, the Associated Press reported. The AP lists “federal jails in Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia and federal prisons in Atlanta, Leavenworth, Kansas, and Berlin, New Hampshire.”

The “Reconciliation” spending package

The administration is pushing the Republican-majority Congress to approve new resources to fund mass deportation and detention, along with other border security and immigration-restriction efforts. “I am begging you for money,” Homan reportedly told senators.

Those resources will be a central element of a big spending package that the House and Senate expect to pass in coming weeks. Under a rule called “ Reconciliation,” this spending package will be able to pass the Senate with a simple majority, avoiding the filibuster and permitting passage without a single Democratic vote.

This process is now underway. On February 12 the Senate Budget Committee approved, on an 11-10 party-line vote, a budget resolution that instructs the Committee on Homeland Security to prepare $175 billion in new spending, mainly on as-yet unspecified border and migration measures. The resolution includes $175 billion more for the Department of Justice and $150 billion more for the Department of Defense, parts of which could also support mass deportation and similar measures.

During the Senate Budget Committee proceedings, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) proposed amendments to prevent spending to allow ICE raids in places of worship and to prohibit detention and deportation of migrants, including DACA recipients, who are not a threat to public safety. Both failed on party-line votes.

The House Budget Committee considered its own budget resolution on February 13. In the House, where Republicans have a microscopic 218-215 majority, Speaker Mike Johnson wants to combine tax measures with border and migration measures in a single Reconciliation package, in order to avoid holding two votes. Senate leaders are resisting that and prefer two bills.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott (R), a supporter of Trump’s hardline border policies, is reportedly traveling to Washington for the second straight week. Abbott is asking Congress to include, in its Reconciliation package, a reimbursement of the more than $11 billion in state funds that he spent on a border crackdown, “Operation Lone Star,” during the Biden administration.

A removal flight goes to Panama

The list of nations to which the Trump administration has been deporting third countries’ citizens has so far included Cuba (Guantánamo) and Mexico (over the land border). Guatemala and El Salvador both agreed to take back some third countries’ citizens when Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited during the first week of February, though as of February 13, no such removals had occurred.

The list now includes Panama. On the evening of February 12, a military plane departing from California sent 119 people to an airport near Panama City. Panama’s Foreign Ministry reported that they were citizens of India (35), China (33), Uzbekistan (19), Iran (12), Vietnam (9), Nepal (3), Turkey (3),  Afghanistan (2), Pakistan (2), and Sri Lanka (1). Some were minors traveling with parents. 82 of the deported were male, and 37 female.

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said that two more U.S. Air Force flights will be coming, adding up to 360 deported migrants flown to Panama. One was due to land on Feburary 13 but was postponed by weather.

It is unclear whether those aboard the flights had an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States before being removed.

Panama’s government plans to bring these people to its rustic reception centers at the end of the Darién Gap route, which are currently below capacity, and then fly them to their home countries. The U.S. government is paying for all stages of their travel, and the International Organization for Migration is lending support inside Panama.

Other mass deportation developments

In a letter to U.S. bishops, Pope Francis criticized the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy: “I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” Homan, the “border czar,” responded, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope… He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”

Detention of migrant families, a practice that the Biden administration had halted, is set to restart. NBC News revealed that ICE is preparing to publish a “Request for Proposals” seeking bids from private prison companies to manage detention facilities designed to hold parents and children. The 1997 Flores court settlement agreement prohibits detaining children for more than 20 days unless they are in a licensed childcare facility, which costs more to operate than a standard detention center.

DHS has requested that the Department of the Treasury allow Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents to help with the mass deportation effort instead of performing their tax-collection duties.

Sheriffs around the United States “are thrilled to work with the Trump administration” on immigration enforcement, including by lending jail space and holding undocumented inmates beyond their release dates, the New York Times reported. However, they say they will need funding from the federal government to cover the cost.

A CBS News / YouGov poll found 59 percent of U.S. respondents approving of “the Trump administration’s program to deport immigrants illegally in the United States,” 64 percent in favor of “sending U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border,” and 48 percent even in favor of “large detention centers while determining who should be deported.” Fifty-three percent of respondents in the February 5-7 survey said they approved of Donald Trump’s overall performance, one of the highest measures Trump has ever received.

A February 4 military flight deporting 104 people to India continues to be a big news story there, as outrage swirls about those aboard the flight being shackled and complaining of rough treatment. The episode “hangs over” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February 13 visit to Washington, the Washington Post reported.

Venezuela sends two planes to pick up deportees

Following Trump administration envoy Richard Grenell’s January 31 visit with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, aerial deportations of Venezuelans have resumed for the first time since January 2024, when the Venezuelan regime halted them after allowing 15 in the previous 3 months.

While the Maduro regime remains unwilling to receive U.S. planes, it has agreed to send an unspecified number of flights to the United States to retrieve Venezuelan citizens. Though “Border Czar” Tom Homan had said that Venezuela would commence these retrieval flights in about 30 days, the first planes came more quickly.

On February 10, two planes from the Venezuelan state airline Conviasa flew to Fort Bliss, Texas, where they loaded 190 people and returned them to Caracas’s Maiquetia airport. (For reasons that remain unclear, Conviasa was able to land planes in the United States even though the airline is subject to U.S. Treasury sanctions.) There, high regime officials, including feared Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, were awaiting them. One reportedly asked Cabello if the arriving migrants might be getting any food to eat.

The president of Venezuela’s ruling party-dominated National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, said that none of the 190 deportees who arrived on February 10 had any ties to the Tren de Aragua organized crime group. Cabello said 17 of the 190 had other, unrelated past criminal activity on their records. Still, human rights advocates worried about their safety as they returned to a government that is holding about 1,200 political prisoners. “I don’t expect them to have any guarantee of due process upon return,” Laura Dib of WOLA’s Venezuela Program told the New York Times. “If anything, I think there could be retaliations against people that had fled to the U.S.”

“In its statement Monday, the Venezuelan government didn’t comment on any future flights,” the Associated Press noted.

A Venezuelan pollster, Poder y Estrategia, reported the results of a late January survey of 1,040 people in Venezuela. It found 18 percent of respondents, and 40 percent of respondents below 30 years old, wanting to migrate. However, the preferred destination country changed dramatically: in September and November, 27 percent of Venezuelans who wished to migrate said they wanted to go to the United States, but in January that fell to 11 percent, behind Spain, Brazil, and Colombia.

Updates about the U.S. military border deployment

The Associated Press reported on February 7 that the Defense Department will deploy another 1,500 active duty military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border. That would bring the active-duty presence to 3,600 troops. Adding that to about 2,200 from an existing federal National Guard deployment and about 4,500 Texas National Guard commanded by Gov. Abbott yields a rough total of over 10,000 military personnel stationed along the border.

Add them to about 16,500 Border Patrol agents along the border, and the rough number of agents and soldiers (26,800) is almost equal to the rough number of Border Patrol migrant apprehensions unofficially reported for January ( less than 30,000).

On February 13 the commander of U.S. Northern Command, Gen. Gregory Guillot, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We have 5,000 Title 10 forces on the southern border right now, and I do expect that number to grow.” The term “Title 10 forces” combines the roughly 2,200 existing federal National Guard with perhaps 2,800 active-duty troops that have arrived at the border so far.

As the Trump administration increases military deployments to the border, the pace of crewed military surveillance and reconnaissance flights has increased dramatically, CNN reported, from about one mission per month to eighteen missions over the past two weeks. Aircraft used include Navy P-8s, Air Force RC-135s, and high-altitude U-2 spy planes. “Despite flying over US airspace along the border, these aircraft are capable of collecting intelligence deep within Mexico,” including a possible hunt for targets that U.S. forces might strike, CNN noted.

U.S. Air Force personnel running military deportation flights are removing their names and unit insignias from their uniforms, “contributing to a lack of transparency as the service obscures details of its involvement in the border mission from the public,” Military.com reported.

“It costs three times more to deport migrants on military aircraft than civilian planes that ICE often uses, and has cost ICE at least five times more per detention bed to hold migrants at Guantanamo Naval Base than at facilities in the United States,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) asserted in the Senate Armed Services’ February 13 hearing.

Indeed, a Wall Street Journal video about the cost of military deportation flights found that the February 4 C-17 flight taking 104 people to India, referenced above in the “mass deportations” discussion, probably cost $2.8 million, or $27,000 per deported person. The flight required two in-air refuelings.

Eight Latin American criminal groups to be added to the U.S. terrorist list

A January 20 White House executive order had charged the State Department with recommending organized crime groups to be added to its lists of Foreign Terrorist Organizations or Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The February 12 New York Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is to recommend that eight groups be added to the U.S. terrorist list:

• Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua.
• El Salvador’s MS-13 gang.
• Five Mexican cartels: the Sinaloa cartel, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, the Northeast cartel, the Michoacán family, and the United cartels.
• Colombia’s Gulf Clan, which exercises tight control over the Colombian entrance to the Darién Gap, through which hundreds of thousands of migrants have been passing each year. (Three other Colombian groups are already on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list: the National Liberation Army, or ELN, guerrilla group and two networks led by former members of the disbanded FARC guerrilla group who rejected a 2016 peace accord.)

There is still some confusion about whether the group to be added is Colombia’s Gulf Clan or Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, which operates in the country’s northeast, near south Texas. The New York Times updated its reporting on February 13 with a paragraph reading, “But on Thursday, after this story was posted online, one of those officials and a State Department official said the C.D.G. on the list stands for Cartel del Golfo, a Mexican crime organization.”

This is the first time that purely criminal groups—generating profits for their own enrichment instead of using them for a claimed religious or political objective—would be listed as terrorists, implying that the Trump administration believes that the two types of groups should be fought with similar tactics.

Listing as terrorists could free up some defense and intelligence resources to pursue these groups, but does not significantly change the penalties their members would face if captured. As WOLA noted in a January 24 analysis, though, it might stiffen penalties for outside actors, from corrupt officials to business people, who carry out financial transactions or otherwise support these groups. Those actors become “material supporters of terrorism.”

Asylum seekers fleeing these rechristened “terrorist” groups could have their cases strengthened, especially people fleeing the Mexican organizations that, according to a February 1 White House fact sheet, “have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico,” implying that the Mexican government cannot or will not protect people from them.

However, asylum seekers who face credible allegations of having given these groups money or services, even under extreme duress, could face bars to U.S. asylum. An analysis from journalist Kate Morrissey warned that adding criminal groups to the U.S. terrorist list could gravely harm the asylum cases of victims whom those groups forced to pay ransoms or extortion, or even to provide coerced services like forced labor to those groups.

U.S. aid freeze affects programs designed to integrate migrants and receive deported people

As the Trump administration moves aggressively to paralyze and shrink the U.S. Agency For International Development (USAID), officials from CBP, which occupies a separate wing of the same office building in downtown Washington, took a “walkthrough” tour of USAID’s office space on February 10, the Guardian reported.

As most U.S. foreign assistance remains frozen by a January 20 executive order requiring a 90-day freeze in expenditures, migrant shelters in Tijuana that had been receiving direct or indirect U.S. government support are enduring painful cutbacks even as they brace for mass deportations, reported Border Report and inewsource. “We are left alone,” a shelter and soup kitchen operator told Sofía Mejías-Pascoe of inewsource.

In Ciudad Juárez, Bloomberg’s Maya Averbuch reported, charity-run shelters that would help receive deported people “don’t have a fallback beyond the local community.” Spokespeople for the UN Refugee Agency and the UN International Organization for Migration would not comment to inewsource or Bloomberg about the assistance cutoff’s impact on services.

Similarly, Voice of America reported that the cutoff in U.S. support has shuttered Colombian government facilities that help Venezuelan people regularize their migration status. This increases the risk that Venezuelans unable to firmly settle in Colombia may attempt to migrate north. A freeze in USAID development programming could have a similar effect: “Colombian officials say closing USAID will push even more people to migrate as their country was one of the largest recipients of US aid funds in the world,” CNN reported.

Other news

• ProPublica and the Texas Tribune published a guide highlighting 34 policy changes emanating from the 10 White House executive orders since January 20 related to the border and migration. For each policy change, it shows what has been attempted before and what is new this time.
• Four federal judges have now issued rulings blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to undo the constitutional right to birthright citizenship.
• About 1,000 children remain separated from their families seven years after the first Trump administration carried out a “zero tolerance” policy against migrants who crossed between border ports of entry. Advocates seeking to reunite the remaining families told the Wall Street Journal that they are losing hope now that Donald Trump is back in office.
• Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), a legal services organization based in Los Angeles, joined other organizations in filing a motion in federal court requesting an emergency stay to prevent the Trump administration from restarting the “Remain in Mexico” program. That program, also called “Migrant Protection Protocols,” forced more than 81,000 asylum seekers to await their U.S. hearings inside Mexican territory, where thousands suffered abuse. The Biden administration ended the program in 2021 and again in 2022 after the Supreme Court overruled a Texas federal judge who had forced the program to restart.
• A CBP officer has been arrested on charges of enriching himself by permitting human smugglers and drug smugglers to pass through his lane at El Paso ports of entry, the Justice Department reported.
• A February 12 tweet from the chief of Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, in south Texas, reported that an agent fired their weapon while “responding to suspected smuggling activity” near Boca Chica, Texas. “One individual sustained a gunshot wound and immediately received medical attention.”
• DHS fired four Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials for approving transfers to New York City’s municipal government, during the Biden administration, to fund hotel stays for recently arrived asylum seekers. The transfers were part of FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which aided charities and local governments providing essential services to recently arrived asylum seekers so they might not be unsheltered in their communities. New York City’s comptroller is accusing Elon Musk—who tweeted angrily about the expenditure and whose “Department of Government Efficiency” appears to have control of government payment systems—of removing $80 million from city bank accounts.
• The full House of Representatives considered and approved legislation, sponsored by border-district Republican Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, that would increase penalties for anyone who leads Border Patrol or other law enforcement agencies on high-speed vehicle chases near the border. Faced with growing safety concerns about Border Patrol pursuits in populated areas, CBP had updated its Emergency Driving and Vehicular Pursuits directive in 2022. On February 13 Human Rights Watch reported that, under the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown that began in 2021, “vehicle pursuits by Texas state troopers and local law enforcement have killed at least 106 people and injured 301.”
• A Bloomberg Law analysis pointed out that the Trump administration used a new argument when, on February 1, it employed a “national security” or “contrary to the national interest” justification to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 350,000 Venezuelan citizens in the United States. Legal challenges to the TPS revocation may focus on whether the Trump administration truly considered the evidence about conditions in Venezuela and the threat that Venezuelan migrants allegedly pose to the national interest.
• The Washington Post spoke to Venezuelan TPS recipients in Doral, Florida, where about 40 percent of residents “have Venezuelan roots.” Many there supported Donald Trump in 2024 but now fear deportation: “Everyone is in shock.” The Miami Herald reported that political leaders in Doral “are treading lightly to avoid a direct confrontation with President Donald Trump—whose candidacy many of them supported.”
• According to an internal Border Patrol memo obtained by NewsNation in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, “an organized group operating out of Matamoros, Mexico, is allegedly planning to use a shooter who targets U.S. law enforcement or military from the other side of the U.S. border.”
• Longtime Trump advisor and ideologist Steve Bannon pleaded guilty to felony fraud in a New York court for his role in a private border wall-building organization, “We Build the Wall,” which misused donors’ money for personal enrichment. Bannon will not get jail time.