Trump renews calls for mass deportations, likely using the military, and for hiring 10,000 Border Patrol agents. Venezuelan migration through the Darién Gap rose 69% in a month.

Get daily links in your email

Developments

Republican candidate Donald Trump visited Aurora, Colorado on October 11, where he called for a campaign of mass deportations of migrants that, if elected, he would call “Operation Aurora.” The deportation blitz would rely on the Alien Enemies Act, part of the rarely used Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

The Denver suburb has received much attention in conservative media and Republican politicians’ statements because of the alleged presence of members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization, in an apartment block.

The city’s mayor and other Republican officials have said that the presence of Tren de Aragua is minimal, and mayor Mike Coffman (R, a former congressman) criticized Trump for exaggerating it. “The mayor said they were exaggerated. That means there’s gotta be some element of truth here,” Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), said on ABC’s This Week.

Civilian U.S. agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), lack the capacity to carry out Trump’s proposed mass deportation plan on their own. The candidate would use rarely invoked emergency authorities to have members of the U.S. military carry out deportation and border security duties.

It is very unusual to have soldiers carrying out non-defense duties on U.S. soil that put them in regular contact with civilians. But as an Associated Press analysis pointed out, “He [Trump] has pledged to recall thousands of American troops from overseas and station them at the U.S. border with Mexico. He has explored using troops for domestic policy priorities such as deportations and confronting civil unrest. He has talked of weeding out military officers who are ideologically opposed to him.”

Trump’s proposed use of the Alien Enemies Act is highly controversial. Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck pointed out that “Courts have historically taken a remarkably narrow view of the statute’s scope” and would face similar challenges even in today’s more conservative federal courts.

At an October 13 rally in Arizona, Trump brought up leaders of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing most Border Patrol agents. The union’s new president, Paul Pérez, endorsed Trump, telling the crowd, “If we allow Border Czar [Kamala] Harris to win this election, every city, every community in this great country, is going to go to hell.”

The candidate proposed a 10 percent pay raise for Border Patrol agents and a $10,000 signing bonus for recruits, in order to add 10,000 new agents to a force that currently has just under 20,000.

Border Patrol already had enough funds appropriated in 2024 to maintain a workforce of 22,000, but has barely been able to hire more agents than it loses to retirements and other attrition. CBP continues to struggle to find recruits who can pass background checks, including a polygraph exam with a high failure rate. Already, the Washington Post pointed out, “new Border Patrol agents could be eligible for as much as $30,000 in incentives.”

Several news reports noted that in February, Trump urged Republican legislators to kill a compromise Senate bill that, among other provisions, would have hired about 1,500 new Border Patrol agents and CBP officers.

The New York Times noted that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, has been playing up her past performance as a prosecutor and attorney-general in a border state, California, which included many prosecutions of transnational organized crime groups. Her efforts to collaborate with other states and other nations “led to the arrests of larger players in the drug trade and seizures of greater quantities of drugs and other illicit goods,” the Times reported. “Ms. Harris is leaning into that experience as she runs on the most conservative border and immigration platform of any Democrat in decades.”

Panama’s migration authority released data about September migration through the treacherous Darién Gap region. It showed a 51 percent increase in the number of people transiting the Darién Gap last month compared to August, which was one of the lightest months in the past two years.

Of 25,111 migrants registered at the route’s end in September, 79 percent were citizens of Venezuela. Migration from Venezuela leaped 69 percent (19,800, up from 11,733 in August). This is a likely consequence of the Nicolás Maduro regime’s refusal to recognize a probable landslide defeat in July 28 elections, which it followed with a wave of political repression.

Refugees International published an in-depth report about the current experience of migrants transiting the Panama segment of the Darién Gap route, the rest of Panama, and Costa Rica. Researchers Caitlyn Yates and Rachel Schmidtke warned that Panama’s and Costa Rica’s restrictive policies are exacerbating humanitarian crises without curbing migration, and they expect high levels of migration to persist.

The report finds that both countries’ busing system, which intends to reduce smuggling, leaves vulnerable migrants stranded due to high fees and inadequate financial support. Humanitarian needs are particularly acute in Costa Rica’s border regions.

A report from the Venezuela Observatory at Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario highlighted some of the dangers that migrants face during the Darién journey in Colombia and Panama, especially predation by organized crime.

Darién Gap migrants, along with Central Americans and people who take aerial routes into countries like Nicaragua, continue to arrive in large numbers at Mexico’s southern border. Spain’s El País reported from Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, where people trying to use the CBP One app to obtain appointments at the U.S. border are subject to “heightened violence” while they struggle to earn money to survive. Many arrive already traumatized by the journey through the Darién and Central America.

The number of in-transit migrants passing from Nicaragua into Honduras so far this year stood at 318,771 in 2024 as of October 7, about 12 percent less than at the same point in 2023, reported the independent Nicaraguan media outlet Confidencial, citing Honduran government data. Venezuelan citizens make up 49.6 percent of this year’s registered migrants.

About 1,000 migrants formed a “caravan” in Tapachula. Citing an inability to get CBP One appointments, participants said their destination is Mexico City. This is the second large group of migrants in Tapachula this month. According to Milenio, among the nationalities of those participating are “Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Central America, Haiti, Argentina, Panama, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Nepal, and others.”

These “caravans” no longer reach the U.S.-Mexico border as they may have in 2018-2019; migrants tend to organize them now to protest delays in their migratory documentation efforts, or to achieve “safety in numbers” while traveling through segments of southern Mexico.

The Mexican daily Milenio, citing information from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), reported that the Venezuelan-origin Tren de Aragua criminal group “has joined Mexican gangs that operate a network of safe houses in US territory used for human smuggling, particularly in the El Paso region of Texas.” CBP public affairs official Landon Hutchens said, “Most of our criminal smuggling activity is from Mexican cartels, in our region (El Paso) we have three main cartels: La Empresa, La Linea and the Sinaloa Cartel. El Tren de Aragua (from Venezuela) is a new group.”

The Ciudad Juárez daily Norte reported, citing Chihuahua state authorities, that fentanyl labs have begun appearing in the border state, including one in the Ciudad Juárez neighborhood of Anapra across from El Paso’s western suburbs in New Mexico. Nearly all fentanyl has been entering Arizona and California, not Texas and New Mexico.

A federal judge has at least temporarily halted the legal offensive that Texas’s state attorney general, Ken Paxton (R), has been carrying out against organizations that assist migrants. In an unrelated case, magistrate Judge Mark Lane of the Western District of Texas granted an injunction stopping Paxton from using a “request to examine” statute in Texas law, determining that it is unconstitutional. The statute empowers Texas prosecutors to require companies and organizations (like legal aid groups or shelters) to “immediately permit” the attorney general to inspect their records.

Analyses and Feature Stories

At USA Today, Lauren Villagrán examined Mexico’s crackdown on in-transit migration, which began at the beginning of the year. “Mexico is holding the line, analysts say, thanks to a carefully negotiated—but unwritten—agreement” with the U.S. government.

The Huffington Post published a thorough review of human rights abuse allegations associated with Texas’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown. It focuses on Texas forces’ excessive use of force against non-threatening asylum seekers, many of them families, at the borderline. The alleged perpetrators are often National Guard military personnel.

Jeremy Slack, the sociology and anthropology department chair at the University of Texas at El Paso, noted that Texas state forces’ alleged abuses have increased sharply at a time when reports of abuse by Border Patrol agents have been dropping. “Border Patrol is a known quantity, and people have been working on the issue of Border Patrol accountability for decades… When you start a new agency doing this, especially in that shoot-from-the-hip, haphazard manner, with no clear mandate about what they’re actually trying to do, that’s a recipe for disaster.”

The Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli interviewed Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), the lead Senate Republican negotiator of the compromise border bill that failed in February, following the Senator’s recent visit to the Arizona border. Lankford called for an end to the use of the CBP One app to admit migrants at ports of entry; for increased use of expedited removal proceedings without asking migrants if they fear return; for use of a “non-detained docket” to hand down rapid asylum decisions as soon as possible for recent arrivals; and for building up infrastructure and staffing at CBP’s border ports of entry.

On the Right