Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Southbound migration, Guantánamo, “mass deportations”, tariffs, drug seizures

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:

• Reports of southbound migration as people abandon hope of seeking protection in the United States: As Trump administration measures shut off the possibility of seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, some people who had migrated to Mexico to do that are turning around. Several dozen per day have been boarding boats through dangerous currents to avoid traveling southbound through the Darién Gap.
• Another Guantánamo flight arrives, as released detainees reveal horrific conditions: The Trump administration sent 17 more undocumented migrants to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, just 3 days after removing to Venezuela all who had been at the base for up to 16 days. Those released from the facility told of horrific and abusive conditions.
• “Mass deportation” updates: The House passed a budget resolution that, like a Senate measure passed a week earlier, could provide a gigantic amount of funding for the administration’s mass deportation plans. These plans appear to include widespread use of military bases and invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
• “Bridge deportations” continue: The Trump administration sent to Costa Rica a second plane with migrants aboard from Asia, eastern Europe, and Africa. In Panama, 112 of 299 migrants whom the administration flew there are in a jungle camp, cut off from access to attorneys, as they voice fear of return to their countries of origin.
• The impact on Mexico: President Trump appears determined to levy tariffs on Mexican goods on March 4, citing continued flows of fentanyl. U.S. deportation flights to Mexico are now taking people as far south as possible, near the Guatemala border.
• Update on CBP’s border drug seizures: Despite Donald Trump’s tariff threats, CBP is finding less fentanyl at the border. Seizures dropped 21 percent from 2023 to 2024, and another 22 percent in the first four months of fiscal 2025, compared to the same period a year earlier. All drugs except marijuana—which continues a sharp decline in seizures—continue to be overwhelmingly encountered at ports of entry.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Reports of southbound migration as people abandon hope of seeking protection in the United States

Several media reports documented a small but steady southbound flow of migrants who have given up on trying to apply for asylum in the United States, as the Trump administration has placed the U.S. asylum system out of reach at the U.S.-Mexico border.

• Costa Rica’s vice-minister of the interior said that 50 to 75 people have been traveling south each day, the AP reported.
• Colombia’s migration agency counted an average of 79 people per day arriving from the north on its side of the Darién Gap migration route between February 10 and 15, compared to an average of just 11 people going northbound into the Darién.
• In most cases, people arriving in Colombia paid to travel by boat along Panama’s Caribbean coast, rather than attempting a southbound journey through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle trail. Boat operators are charging $200 to $250 per person to take people along the Caribbean to the Colombian side of the border.
• The Washington Post reported that, in what migrants called an “experiment,” the government of Panama arranged to have about 50 people take a $175 route “by bus and then, by boat” into Colombia from the Lajas Blancas reception camp at the Panamanian end of the Darién Gap trail. One of the three boats capsized, killing an eight-year-old Venezuelan girl aboard.
• Still, Panama is “working to formalize” this southbound boat route, the Associated Press reported. EFE reported that the remote region’s Indigenous authorities are voicing alarm because their seaside populations “lack sufficient equipment, infrastructure and means of transport to deal with this problem.”
• “Each day, hundreds of migrants line up outside an immigration office in southern Mexico,” ABC News reported, to sign up for possible repatriation flights, mainly to Colombia and Venezuela.

Another Guantánamo flight arrives, as released detainees reveal horrific conditions

On February 23, just 3 days after a deportation of 177 people to Venezuela via Honduras left the U.S. base empty of detained migrants, a new military aircraft brought 17 more people from the United States to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba.

• Unlike the initial 177, who were all Venezuelan, this group included 7 Hondurans, 4 Colombians, 3 Salvadorans, 2 Guatemalans, and a man from Ecuador. They were all men ranging in age from 23 to 62, the New York Times reported. Eight had entered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since Inauguration Day.
• On February 26, the Trump administration adopted a more aggressive stance toward Venezuela, revoking a license allowing the U.S. oil company Chevron to operate in the country despite sanctions. This move will deal a sharp blow to the country’s economy. Among reasons for the revocation, President Trump complained that Venezuela was not accepting enough deportation flights. With the removal of the license—probably its strongest incentive to cooperate—the regime in Caracas will be far less likely to allow future flights.
• Of the 177 Venezuelan citizens who spent up to 16 days at the base, “126 people had criminal charges or convictions, while 51 had no criminal record,” CNN reported.
• A Miami Herald investigation into 18 of them found that even many who had records were not hardened criminals or, in Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s words, “the worst of the worst.” Six of the eighteen had no criminal record at all, five were only charged with illegal entry at the border. Many arrest records show they committed crimes like “Biking on the wrong side of the road. Crossing the Rio Grande on foot. Shoplifting at Target.” Only two had been convicted of felonies.
• Their relatives, meanwhile, suffered anxiety because the U.S. government would not share information about their whereabouts and well-being, much less the names of those held at the base in Cuba.
• Detainee Yoiner Purroy Roldan told the Herald that he lost 20 pounds during his time in Guantánamo: “He said the lights were on 24 hours a day, cameras watched their every move, and the guards hit one of his friends. The detainees couldn’t use the restroom in privacy, he said. Soldiers who watched over them would swear at them when they spoke.”
• Detainee Diuvar Uzcátegui told the Washington Post that, alone in a cell, he could only keep track of days by putting a small tear in the last page of a Bible after every three meals. Military guards gave him a 3/4 inch foam pad to sleep on, and a bucket for bathroom needs. He was allowed outdoors twice, but only within a cage. He heard screams and suicide threats from other inmates.
• A former detainee told the Post that he attempted to kill himself, and they heard of at least two others who tried.
• Twenty-two-year-old Kevin Rodríguez told Noticias Telemundo that his six-by-nine-foot cell was full of cobwebs and ants, indicating that it had been neither used nor cleaned.
• These accounts confirm that U.S. military personnel are serving as guards at Guantánamo, even though many of the detainees there committed only immigration offenses and, again, many do not have serious criminal records. Carrying out immigration detention is a very unusual role for U.S. military personnel.
• Several detainees’ often harrowing testimonies are included in court documents accompanying litigation demanding that detainees have access to attorneys.
• CNN reported that the administration has halted a plan to house migrants in dozens of tents that soldiers have put up at the Guantánamo site, as “the emerging facilities don’t meet detention standards because they lack air conditioning or electricity.” The network added that “roughly 1,000 U.S. service members” are currently assigned to the detention mission.
• The Guardian revealed that Akima, the contractor hired to manage the Guantánamo base’s more than 30-year-old detention facility for so-called “low-risk” migrants and migrants apprehended on the high seas (the Migrant Operations Center), “has been the subject of critical audits and a civil rights complaint over conditions” at three other detention facilities that it manages. These include a case of an Akima guard pepper-spraying a detainee through a solitary-confinement cell door slot. In August 2024, the Biden administration granted Akima a $163.4 million, 5-year contract to run the Migrant Operations Center, which is separate from “Camp 6,” the war-on-terror era military prison where the Trump administration has been placing migrants whom it considers to be “high-risk.”
• “The episode featured all the elements of the new political order,” wrote Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker. “Migrants were villainized and treated like an existential threat to the country. There was not even a semblance of transparency or accountability. Amid the chaos, it was easy to overlook the fact that the Venezuelans were being returned to a brutal dictatorship; in 2022, Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, said that deporting people there was ‘a very real death sentence.’”

“Mass deportation” updates

• The House of Representatives narrowly (a 217-215 vote) passed a budget resolution that could pave the way for a large outlay to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to fund, among other priorities, a truly massive “mass deportation” campaign. This resolution, like a bill that passed the Senate on February 21, contains little detail. The House bill would increase DHS spending by $90 billion, while the Senate bill would increase DHS spending by $175 billion.
• Both houses must pass identical bills for the process to move forward, at which point their Republican majorities will draft bills revealing more detail about what the money would pay for. Under Senate rules, this bill could pass with a simple, filibuster-proof majority. At the moment, the timetable is unclear, as Republicans in the House and Senate seem to disagree sharply about how to move forward with their dissimilar bills. (Unlike the House, the Senate does not include an extension of Trump’s tax cuts, which Senate leaders had expected to postpone for a separate bill.)
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a requirement that undocumented immigrants in the United States aged 14 and over register with the government, providing home addresses and fingerprints. Those who don’t register could be fined up to $5,000 or imprisoned for up to 6 months. The requirement exists in the Alien Registration Act of 1940, a law making it a crime to be unregistered and undocumented “that has essentially been dormant for decades,” according to an explainer from the American Immigration Council (AIC). Even people with documented status in the United States “will face a risk of prosecution if they fail to carry registration papers with them at all times,” the AIC noted.
• Use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed deportations “is being widely discussed at several agencies,” CNN reported. The sweeping law gives the President the authority to detain and remove entire classes of non-citizens without due process or involvement of immigration courts. It could even apply to non-citizens with documented status in the United States. Donald Trump has proposed using it against suspected members of organized crime groups like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua. As an October analysis from the Brennan Center’s Katherine Yon Ebright pointed out, the Alien Enemies Act may only be invoked “during times of ‘declared war’ or when a foreign government threatens or undertakes an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion.’” While only Congress can declare war, courts may have to rule on whether the President alone may determine whether the other two conditions exist.
• ICE recorded more than 20,000 “at large” immigration arrests between January 21 and February 21; CBS News reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez noted that the Biden administration recorded 33,000 such arrests in all of fiscal 2024. ICE reported deporting 37,660 migrants, according to Reuters, during the Trump administration’s first month, a number that appears to include recent border crossers.
• Those numbers have not been high enough for the White House: Caleb Vitello, the acting director of ICE, was reassigned on February 21.
• The New York Times and NPR reported on a draft DHS memo that would ask the Department of Defense for help detaining apprehended migrants on military bases. The memo envisions Fort Bliss, near El Paso, holding up to 1,000 detained people during a 60-day “evaluation period,” after which its capacity would increase to 10,000 and holding facilities would open at about 10 other bases around the country. Doing so would deal a serious setback to military readiness, warned Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), whose El Paso district includes Fort Bliss.
• NBC News, ABC News, Reuters, and Rolling Stone reported that the administration is planning a “nationwide operation” to find and, where possible, to deport children who arrived unaccompanied at the U.S.-Mexico border. ICE is calling it the “Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation.” When they arrive at the border, unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries automatically get placed in asylum proceedings and, after a stay in the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) shelter network, placed with relatives or sponsors in the United States. ICE seeks to locate children who have not been reporting to their immigration court hearings, or whose sponsors have not been responding to telephone check-ins, in an operation that could start “as soon as this week.” NBC saw ORR data indicating that the largest concentrations of unaccompanied children are living with sponsors in Maricopa County, Arizona; Los Angeles County, California; Miami-Dade County, Florida; and Prince George’s County, Maryland.
• Politico revealed that “a group of prominent military contractors” and former officials, including Erik Prince, former CEO of the highly controversial private security company Blackwater, has sent the White House a proposed $25 billion mass deportation plan involving “processing camps” on military bases, “mass deportation hearings,” and a private contractor militia empowered to detain people around the country. Prince and colleagues set a goal of deporting 12 million people before the November 2026 midterm elections. “There has been zero show of interest or engagement from the government,” said one of the proposal’s authors.
• El Paso Times reporter Jeff Abbott was in Guatemala City for the arrival of a U.S. deportation flight on February 19. Migrants he spoke with did not seem to have criminal records, and many had lived in the United States for years. They “recounted being detained while pumping gas into their cars or leaving work—with some migrants still wearing their work uniforms upon arrival in Guatemala.”
• ICE arrested 118 people in a single operation in Colony Ridge, a majority-Latino housing development outside of Houston.
• Border Patrol boarded a bus between Las Cruces and Albuquerque, New Mexico carrying high school students participating in a swim meet, requiring all to affirm their documented status. The February 21 incident, which alarmed southern New Mexico Rep. Gabe Vásquez (D), happened two weeks after Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks derided as “absurd” a Texas school district’s warning about agents boarding school buses. The New Mexico bus was chartered by a Las Cruces school and was not marked as a school bus.
• The ACLU and United Farm Workers filed suit in federal court alleging that agents from Border Patrol’s El Centro sector carried out illegal racial profiling during “Operation Return to Sender,” an operation that arrested undocumented farmworkers near Bakersfield, about 300 miles north of the border—but less than 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean, so still within Border Patrol’s area of jurisdiction. The Bakersfield operation, which continues to sow fear in the region, happened in mid-January, before Donald Trump’s inauguration; former Biden administration officials told the Los Angeles Times that the Border Patrol sector chief “went rogue” with the raids. “While driving home after a day of working in the fields, a man who had lived in Kern County for 20 years was stopped and arrested. Agents called him and his passenger ‘Mexican b—ches,’” CalMatters reported.
• State and local police forces in Texas have been deputizing personnel to help ICE enforce immigration law, the Texas Observer reported in a piece that includes a clear explanation of the 287(g) immigration “task force” program allowing local law enforcement personnel, with federal training, to “perform certain functions of an immigration officer.”

“Bridge deportations” continue

“In its first month, the Trump administration has reached deals with Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama to act as stopovers or destinations for migrants expelled from the U.S.,” explained an Associated Press overview of the new administration’s practice of sending third countries’ citizens to those nations. The U.S. government is funding those deported migrants’ subsequent flights to their home countries, if they are willing to be returned.

• A second U.S. flight, a civilian ICE charter from Yuma, landed in Costa Rica on February 25 carrying 65 people, including 16 minors, from China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Georgia, India, Nepal, Russia, Vietnam, Yemen, and other nations. That makes a total of 200 non-Western Hemisphere citizens taken to Costa Rica, after a February 20 plane brought 135 people. According to local media, 200 was the number agreed between the U.S. and Costa Rican governments.
• Costa Rican authorities took all 200 to a “Temporary Migrant Care Center (CATEM)” several hours’ drive from San José, near Costa Rica’s border with Panama. The rustic site was a short-term holding area for migrants heading northbound after crossing through the Darién Gap. All are being interviewed, Costa Rican government migration director Omer Badilla said, adding that so far “there have been no requests for asylum.” The first departures to migrants’ home countries may begin this week.
• “A significant number of deportees were observed, babies in arms, children, women, elderly people, all of them issuing calls for help, especially to be able to inform their families of their whereabouts, and were showing and expressing their distress,” read a statement about the first flight from the Costa Rican government’s independent human rights ombudsman.
• The Associated Press recalled that about a third of the 299 citizens of Asian countries whom the Trump administration flew to Panama have expressed fear of return to their countries of origin. Panamanian Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Ruiz-Hernandez told PBS NewsHour that 200 of the 299 have been willing to be repatriated voluntarily (most remain in a Panama City hotel), and the others “have to go through our due process” if they “want refuge or asylum in our country.”
• The New York Times profiled Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a convert to Christianity who remains in Panama, at San Vicente, a primitive encampment at the northern end of the Darién Gap jungle route, as she fears return to her native Iran. The Associated Press interviewed a Chinese citizen who said that Panamanian authorities had seized deported people’s phones, were restricting their movements, and were cutting off access to legal counsel.
• Reuters confirmed that Panama is preventing asylum seekers from talking to their attorneys. The agency reported that the number of people moved to San Vicente is 112, not 99 as Ruiz-Hernández, the vice minister, implied.
• “They are disappearing into a black box without access to counsel,” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU told Reuters of the people stranded in San Vicente. Attorney Keren Zwick of the National Immigrant Justice Center voiced “grave” concern about a Turkish woman and her daughter who had tried to seek asylum on February 3, only to be rebuffed by U.S. officials and sent to Panama, which then sent her to Turkey.
• “I am extremely concerned about the uncertainty of due process and procedural safeguards,” said Gehad Madi, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, who was visiting Panama when the U.S. removal flights began arriving. Madi highlighted “concerns about the legal and migration status of these individuals, the legal basis for their detention in Panama, their access to a lawyer and information about their rights, their right to communicate with their family, safeguards to challenge the lawfulness of their detention, access to asylum procedures, and guarantees of the principle of non-refoulement.”
• U.S. law requires that a non-citizen on U.S. soil be permitted to apply for asylum if they express fear of return. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the New York Times that “not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody,” a statement that is surprising given what so many have said in Panama.

The impact on Mexico

• In an episode of WOLA’s podcast, staff from the Kino Border Initiative, a shelter and advocacy organization at the border in Nogales, discuss the impact of the Trump administration crackdown on the population they serve. As Mexico’s government braces to receive deportees in border cities, including through construction of their own shelters with military involvement, they note a lack of transparency and coordination. That is echoed by Judith Cabrera de la Rocha, co-director of the Border Line Crisis Center in Tijuana, in an interview with the Border Chronicle.
• In Tijuana, the coordinator of the shelter that Mexico’s government recently assembled to receive deported Mexican migrants said that the facility had received 754 people as of February 22, 90 percent of them men; a daily average of 55 deportees for a facility with a capacity of 2,600. This and other government shelters remain mostly empty, as the Trump administration’s promised deportations have not yet reached “mass” proportions.
• Donald Trump said on February 27 that he intends to place a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada on March 4, citing “unacceptable levels” of fentanyl smuggling. A day earlier, the President had said that additional, “reciprocal” tariffs on many countries’ goods would go into effect on April 2. Trump relented on a similar tariff threat at the beginning of February, pushing it back for a month after U.S. market indices tumbled and Mexico promised to deploy National Guard troops to its northern border zone.
• Trump’s demand for more action to curb fentanyl by Mexico and Canada (which is not a significant source or transit country for the drug) comes at a time when fentanyl seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border have been plummeting (see below), and just as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that drug overdose deaths in the United States fell nearly 24 percent from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024.
• The Mexican government sent a high-level delegation to Washington on February 27 to discuss a bilateral security agreement that would be a framework for more U.S. security cooperation with Mexico. The New York Times reported that officials within the Trump administration are divided about whether to carry out military operations against organized crime inside Mexico’s territory without Mexico’s consent. On the more moderate side, the Times noted, is White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hardliner concerned about taking actions that might provoke Mexico into easing its efforts to block U.S.-bound migrants.
• U.S. officials, including Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks, announced that flights removing Mexican citizens into Mexico’s interior will now deport people into the southernmost part of the country, near the Guatemalan border. Since January 20, Banks tweeted on February 26, DHS had operated 14 repatriation flights into Mexico with “1,650 subjects.” Most removals into Mexico continue to occur over the land border.
• Between February 2024 and January 2025, Witness at the Border reported, DHS sent 167 deportation flights to Mexico City, 8 to Guadalajara, and 8 to Morelia, but none to Mexico’s far south.
• On February 24 a Venezuelan government aircraft retrieved 242 citizens of Venezuela from Mexico City, Mexico, bringing them back to Caracas where top officials awaited them. It is unclear whether those aboard had been in the United States before ending up in Mexico, though it appears likely.
• “Venezuelan police sources” told the Miami Herald, “Of the total of 609 Venezuelan migrants who have arrived in in the South American country since the deportation flights began two weeks ago, only 56 had at some point been investigated by police in Venezuela—although not necessarily charged—under suspicion of having committed some sort of crime.”
• Border Report provided an update on Team Brownsville, which ran a shelter for migrants released from CBP custody since 2019, until the Trump administration’s curbs on asylum and CBP One appointments drastically reduced the population it served. The charity is now working with shelters across the border in Reynosa and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, where many asylum seekers who had planned to cross with CBP One appointments remain stranded. About 250 people are still living in a Matamoros shelter.
• Mexico’s government reported on February 21 that its “Northern Border Operation”—a big deployment of Mexican National Guard personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border in response to President Trump’s late January tariff threat—has so far led to 622 arrests since February 5, the seizure of 616 firearms, and the seizures of nearly half a ton of cocaine, 10.3 tons of methamphetamine, and about 120 pounds of fentanyl pills.
• In Tijuana, most of the over 500 National Guard troops whom the Mexican government sent to the city “have been placed at points where migrants and smugglers are known to cross the border, especially in the mountains east of the city,” Border Report reported.
• Milenio reported that, amid the border crackdown, smugglers in Tijuana are using drones to guide migrants who seek to avoid apprehension after climbing over the border wall. Reporting from Tijuana, the Guatemala-based Agencia Ocote explored migrants’ frequent use of homemade ladders to scale the border wall, which results in numerous injuries. (Ocote also published a long report about the treacherous “panga boat” route that some migrants attempt along the Pacific from Baja California to California.)
• The Mexican National Guard director in Sonora, the state bordering Arizona and a sliver of New Mexico, told local media that troops deployed there are seizing significant quantities of northbound methamphetamine and southbound weapons, but “we have hardly found any migrants.”
• In Mexico’s far south near the Guatemalan border, EFE reported that the population of stranded migrants appears to have reduced as migrants give up on arriving or obtaining protection in the United States.

Update on CBP’s border drug seizures

CBP’s monthly releases of border enforcement data, which last occurred on February 18, include information about drugs that the agency’s personnel seize at the border. A dashboard and dataset break down seizures by drug, geographic area, and whether they occurred at ports of entry (where CBP Field Operations officers operate) or between them (where Border Patrol agents operate).

Drug seizure data through January 2025 show continuations of some notable trends, few of which have received much attention.

Fentanyl seizures have been declining

Fentanyl, the highly addictive synthetic opioid, began appearing in significant quantities in the mid to late 2010s. As its use, and related overdose deaths, grew at a very sharp rate, so did CBP’s seizures of the drug at the border.

• Starting in fiscal year 2024, though, fentanyl seizures at the border began to fall. Last year’s seizures (21,148 pounds) were 21 percent fewer than in 2023 (26,719 pounds).

Data table

• The trend continues in fiscal 2025, which began in October: the 5,409 pounds seized between October and January are 22 percent fewer than the 6,932 pounds seized between October 2023 and January 2024, and 38 percent fewer than the 8,673 pounds seized during the same period two years earlier.
• Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention support this finding at the border. In a welcome development, drug overdose deaths in the United States appear to have declined nearly 24 percent in a single year, from fiscal 2023 to 2024.
• The reasons for the drop in fentanyl seizures and overdoses are not certain, though likely hypotheses are turmoil within the Sinaloa cartel including a reported criminal ban on producing fentanyl in that Mexican state (see analyses from InSight Crime); more access to naloxone and other methods of forestalling overdose deaths; and a possible decline in demand for fentanyl in U.S. drug markets, as occurred with demand for crack cocaine throughout the 1990s.
• While seizures are dropping, fentanyl remains a drug that U.S. authorities overwhelmingly find at ports of entry (official border crossings), not in the areas between the ports where Border Patrol operates. Border Patrol accounted for 13 percent of fentanyl seizures in 2024 and 10 percent so far in 2025, and in both years, 4 percent of that occurred at the agency’s internal vehicle checkpoints.
• Arizona and California account for 96 percent of all border-wide fentanyl seizures since 2020. However, Arizona’s share has increased in recent years, to 61 percent of all seizures in the 16 months since fiscal 2024 compared to 36 percent for California (the two states are nearly equal—48 percent of the total—since 2020).

Cocaine seizures continue to rise

CBP seized 30,383 pounds of cocaine at the border in fiscal 2024, up 10 percent from 27,569 pounds in 2023 and up 23 percent from 2018-19. The first four months of fiscal 2025 are nearly identical to a year earlier, about 1 percent behind October 2023-January 2024.

Data table

• This seems to track with an increase in cocaine production in the Andean region, though it appears that cocaine demand and seizures are growing more rapidly in Europe and other non-U.S. markets.
• 81 percent of border cocaine seizures in fiscal 2024 occurred at ports of entry, and 77 percent so far in fiscal 2025.
• Since 2020, 82 percent of cocaine seizures have occurred in the westernmost and easternmost parts of the border (the San Diego CBP field office and Border Patrol sector in California; the Laredo CBP field office and Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol sector in Texas). San Diego has seen 48 percent of all cocaine seizures (53% since fiscal 2024), south Texas has seen 34 percent (25% since fiscal 2024).

Methamphetamine seizures are volatile but generally steady throughout the 2020s.

CBP seized 157,559 pounds of methamphetamine at the border in fiscal 2024, up 30 percent from 121,184 pounds in 2023 but down 8 percent from 170,999 pounds in 2022. This suggests some volatility, though seizures have remained in a range between 121,000 and 182,000 pounds since 2019. The first four months of fiscal 2025 are running about 26 percent lower than October 2023-January 2024.

Data table

• 94 percent of methamphetamine seizures in fiscal 2024 occurred at border ports of entry, and 93 percent so far in fiscal 2025. Nearly half of what Border Patrol seizes gets encountered at vehicle checkpoints.
• Since 2020, like cocaine, 84 percent of methamphetamine seizures have occurred in the westernmost and easternmost parts of the border (the San Diego CBP field office and Border Patrol sector in California; the Laredo CBP field office and Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol sector in Texas). San Diego has seen 61 percent of all meth seizures (60% since fiscal 2024), south Texas has seen 23 percent (25% since fiscal 2024).

Marijuana and heroin seizures remain historically low

• As recently as the late 2010s, CBP’s seizures of marijuana were in the high hundreds of thousands of pounds per year. By fiscal 2024, they had dropped to 56,390 pounds. The main reason is the regulation and legalization of cannabis markets in many U.S. states, which has rendered importation from Mexico largely unnecessary, though it still happens.

Data table

• Unlike other, more compact drugs, marijuana gets seized primarily between the ports of entry, by Border Patrol: 80 percent of fiscal 2024 seizures and 71 percent of 2025’s seizures so far.
• Heroin seizures, too, continue to drop as opioid suppliers turn to synthetics like fentanyl, cutting opium poppy suppliers out of the picture. As late as 2021, CBP was seizing about 5,000 or more pounds of heroin each year at the border, usually more than 85 percent of it at ports of entry. That fell by 2024 to just 961 pounds. However, heroin seizures during the first four months of fiscal 2025 already total 502 pounds, 89 percent ahead of where they were during the first four months of fiscal 2024.

Data table

Other news

• Reporting from the Arizona-Sonora border near Sásabe, Emily Bregel of the Arizona Daily Star found a very quiet border, with “no sign of human activity” at a desert site where migrants had been coming often to turn themselves in to seek asylum. On the Mexican side, the increased Mexican National Guard presence has meant that motorists are spending much more time at checkpoints.
• DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tweeted that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “encountered just 200” migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border on February 22, “the lowest single apprehension day in over 15 years.”
• CBS News, citing internal documents and echoing an earlier CNN report, revealed that the Trump administration is planning to revive the pandemic-era Title 42 policy, which the Trump and Biden administrations used, citing public health concerns, to expel migrants from the border nearly 3 million times without a chance to ask for asylum. As there is currently no pandemic, this likely order would be more general: it “would label unauthorized migrants trying to enter the U.S. as public health risks, citing concerns that they could spread communicable diseases like tuberculosis,” reported Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS.
• Now that six Mexican organized crime groups are on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations, migrants apprehended at the border could be prosecuted for aiding terrorist groups, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official told reporters. Daniel Comeaux, the special agent in charge of DEA’s Houston Division, cited a 2023 report from the House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee Republicans in which Border Patrol sector chiefs stated that all migrants who cross the border between ports of entry pay cartel-tied smugglers.
• After a few days, the Trump administration rescinded its “stop-work” order barring funding for organizations providing legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court hearings.
• A federal judge in Seattle granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, recalling that the program was established and funded by an act of Congress. The Justice Department will appeal.
• President Trump proposed to sell residency permits (green cards) “with a path to citizenship” to all who pay a $5 million registration fee. He called it a “Trump Gold Card.” However, David Bier of the Cato Institute explained that Congress would have to pass a law to undo existing caps on immigrant investors. Bier observed, “There are only about 2.3 million people in the world with net assets excluding their primary residence of $5 million or more—and a third of these individuals are already in the United States.”
• Four Florida members of Congress, including one Republican, reintroduced the “ Venezuela Adjustment Act,” which would allow some Venezuelan migrants in the United States to adjust their immigration status and obtain permanent residency. About 600,000 Venezuelan citizens in the United States are close to losing their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) this year—some as early as April 7—as the Trump administration refuses to extend it.
• As they draw up their next two-year budget, Texas’s majority-Republican state legislators plan to spend about $6.5 billion on border security, down from about $8 billion allocated in 2023, the Houston Chronicle reported. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) intends to continue the state’s “Operation Lone Star” border security crackdown, begun in 2021, despite Donald Trump’s election and the past year’s sharp drop in migration. Despite Abbott’s lobbying in Washington, Donald Trump “so far has not endorsed the idea that the federal government should give Texas money” to reimburse for past “Lone Star” expenses.
• The Democratic governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, signed an executive order, “Operation Desert Guardian,” requiring state and local law enforcement to cooperate with CBP on efforts at the border to counter organized crime. Some border-county sheriffs told local news that they had not been informed of any new duties resulting from the executive order. Newsweek noted that Arizona’s Republican-majority legislature is “reviewing the Arizona ICE Act,” which “would mandate deputizing 10 percent of local and state law enforcement officers to ICE.”
• Reporter Sandra Sánchez of Border Report accompanied Border Patrol agents in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley sector, where migrant apprehensions are down to 100-150 per day, but “hundreds, if not thousands, of wristbands that are given to smuggled migrants” littered on the ground appear to show that migrant smuggling continues. “The average price to cross the Rio Grande has typically been about $8,000 per person. But officials say that has gone up as the new Trump administration is cracking down.”
• Journalist Kate Morrissey interviewed an immigration judge who, after two months on the job, became one of twenty-two fired by the incoming Trump administration. The firings promise to worsen backlogs and, ironically, slow removals of migrants, which are a top Trump administration priority.
• The U.S. Department of Justice indicted 14 citizens of the United States and Mexico involved in a migrant smuggling ring that operated in the desert area west of El Paso.
• The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, visited this area during a February 21 trip to El Paso, to oversee the Trump administration’s ongoing deployment of U.S. military personnel to the border. It turned out to be Gen. Brown’s last day on the job, as the administration abruptly dismissed him that evening.
• “I went through the whole summer [of 2024] filing open records requests, and I was told, ‘We don’t count migrants,’” said University of Colorado PhD student Chilton Tippin, who has been trying to get an accurate count of migrant deaths in the deserts west of El Paso. “Then when I tried to get autopsy reports, they said that if I wanted to see the records of drowning victims, it would cost over $4,000. And if I wanted a broader dataset—covering deaths in the desert as well—I got a bill for over $100,000.”