Controversies continue over renditions to El Salvador; Notes on “mass deportation”; The U.S. military role; Notes from the migration route

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

  • Controversies continue over renditions to El Salvador: Courts, including the Supreme Court, continue to block the Trump administration’s invocations of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel Venezuelan migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The amount of advance notification individuals must receive has been an area of sharp contention. A Maryland federal court continues to pursue “intense discovery” in the case of erroneously expelled Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. A senator who visited Abrego Garcia in El Salvador provided new details about his confinement.
  • Notes on “mass deportation”: Congress is about to consider a historically massive spending package to fund border hardening and the Trump administration’s planned mass deportation campaign. A U.S. citizen whom Border Patrol arrested in Arizona ended up in immigration detention for 10 days. Unaccompanied children as young as four years old are now defending themselves in immigration court asylum cases as the Trump administration has canceled legal aid funding. Family detention centers are now confining not just people detained at the border, but families who have been in the United States for years.
  • The U.S. military role: The Trump administration appears not to be invoking, for now, the Insurrection Act of 1807 to expand the active-duty military’s role at the border. The Defense Department announced new authorities for soldiers operating along New Mexico’s border, a fringe of territory now considered a “military installation.” In a most unusual expansion of domestic military roles, soldiers in this zone will now be able to detain and search migrants and conduct crowd control measures.
  • Notes from the migration route: As migration levels remain very low amid the impossibility of obtaining U.S. asylum, shelters on Mexico’s side of the border are empty and reeling from U.S. aid cuts; they may fill again once the Trump administration’s mass deportations get truly underway. Migration through the Darién Gap remains very low as well. Costa Rica and Panama have offered short-term migratory status to asylum seekers from other continents whom the Trump administration expelled to those countries in February. A new report from Human Rights Watch found fault with the U.S., Panamanian, and UN responses.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Controversies continue over renditions to El Salvador

The numbers, as far as we can tell

  • As far as we can tell, since March 15 the Trump administration has sent 252 Venezuelan and 36 Salvadoran migrants from U.S. immigration authorities’ custody to El Salvador. We do not know the names of all of these individuals, and their loved ones have received no official word from the U.S. or Salvadoran governments.
Country Known Names Unknown Names Total
Venezuela 245 7 252
El Salvador 13 23 36
Total 258 30 288

(For links to sources used to derive this table, see this blog post from WOLA’s Adam Isacson.)

  • All but one (Kilmar Abrego Garcia, discussed below) appear to be in the Salvadoran government’s massive Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) prison facility, held incommunicado without a judicial process.
  • Of the Venezuelans, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority used only three times before in U.S. history, to remove 137 of them on the merest suspicion of ties to the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal group.
  • A vast majority, we now know, were not accused of committing crimes in the United States, and only a small handful faced allegations of committing violent crimes (see CBS News, Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Cristosal).

Alien Enemies Act

  • In the early pre-dawn hours of April 19, the Supreme Court issued an unusual 7-2 ruling temporarily stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove Venezuelan migrants from northern Texas.
  • The ruling appears to have halted a rendition to El Salvador that was already in progress, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Bluebonnett detention facility in Anson, Texas. “Video from Friday night [late April 18] shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement buses full of Venezuelan migrants headed toward an airport in North Texas before abruptly turning around before the Supreme Court ruled,” NBC News reported. At least 28 detained migrants were aboard the buses.
  • News of the buses’ movements, conveyed by the ACLU, led to an emergency hearing on the evening of the 18th in the courtroom of Chief District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, DC. At that hearing, Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said no flights were scheduled to depart on the 18th, but he could offer no assurances about the 19th.
  • Defense attorneys allege that the administration had been congregating Venezuelan men detained around the country into the Bluebonnet facility, which sits within the U.S. judiciary’s Northern District of Texas, a conservative-leaning venue that the administration believes is more favorable to Alien Enemies Act removals. Judges in other jurisdictions have been blocking removals pending more clarity about the government’s plans for providing due process.
  • Reuters revealed that ICE moved a detained Venezuelan man from Philadelphia to the Bluebonnet facility in Texas on April 15, half an hour after a federal judge had ordered that he remain in Pennsylvania. The man is believed to have been among those aboard the buses that turned around late on April 18.

“Reasonable time”

  • In an April 7 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court had overturned Boasberg’s March 15 restraining order halting such flights. At the same time, though, the high court justices required that future Alien Enemies Act removals take place only after individuals are notified and given “reasonable time” to decide whether to challenge them through habeas corpus claims, and then to pursue those claims.
  • The Supreme Court did not define “reasonable time,” which provided a big opening for an administration determined to exploit vague language. The ACLU has requested that it be defined as 30 days’ notice. The Department of Justice’s attorney stated in Boasberg’s Washington courtroom on April 18 that it seeks to define “reasonable time” as just 24 hours.
  • In an ICE court filing unsealed on April 24 in Texas, that was further defined as only 12 hours to decide whether to challenge, followed by 24 hours to file a habeas corpus claim, the New York Times, Associated Press, and others reported.
  • An unsealed ICE form, in English, showed that the agency did not make clear to individuals that they could challenge their removal. Many of the men at Bluebonnet refused to sign this form; all got loaded onto buses anyway.
  • A district judge in Colorado settled on 21 days with specific notice instructions for Venezuelan migrants detained in the state, including that all forms be in their language and that they know they have a right to an attorney. A judge in Manhattan “appeared inclined to require the administration to notify Venezuelans at least 10 days in advance,” Reuters reported.

Legal battles intensifying

  • Steve Vladeck of the Georgetown University Law Center saw the Supreme Court’s late-night ruling as evidence that justices are losing patience with the Trump administration’s maneuvering. “The Court appears to be finally getting the message—and, in turn, handing down rulings with none of the wiggle room we saw in the J.G.G. and Abrego Garcia decisions last week. That’s a massively significant development unto itself.”
  • On April 20, Justice Samuel Alito penned a dissent to the 7-2 ruling that halted the Texas renditions, calling the migrants’ relief “hastily and prematurely granted.” Justice Clarence Thomas joined Alito.
  • “The question at the core of this—are these detainees in the custody of the United States, or El Salvador?—now features in at least two habeas corpus lawsuits filed on behalf of those removed,” and now in El Salvador, noted Talking Points Memo.
  • An April 23 administration response to a district court in Massachusetts claimed that a March 31 rendition of three Venezuelans aboard a military flight to El Salvador did not violate a judge’s restraining order, because the Defense Department carried it out with no Homeland Security Department personnel aboard the flights. (We know of no March 31 rendition to El Salvador; the document may refer erroneously to a March 30 transfer of seven Venezuelan and 10 Salvadoran citizens.)
  • On April 24, a Maryland federal judge ordered the return to the United States of a Venezuelan man rendered to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act invocation on March 15. “Cristian” had come to the United States as an unaccompanied minor and was part of a class-action lawsuit settlement giving him and other plaintiffs the right to remain while their asylum claims were processed.

Two new disappearances

  • News reporting revealed the identities of two more people whose renditions to El Salvador were not previously known. After ending up in ICE detention, they disappeared from the agency’s locator tool, but were neither deported to Venezuela nor included on any of the incomplete, leaked lists of names of those sent to El Salvador.
  • Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan man working in a delivery job in Detroit, entered ICE custody after making a wrong turn that led him onto a bridge bound for Canada. He never reappeared. “Mr. Prada’s disappearance has created concerns that more immigrants have been deported to El Salvador than previously known,” the New York Times reported. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), calling the Times story “FALSE” in a tweet that did not contradict the newspaper’s account, confirmed that Prada is now in El Salvador.
  • “I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law,” Stephen Yale-Loehr of Cornell University Law School told the Times of Prada’s case.
  • The Detroit Free Press reported that hundreds of migrants end up in custody after making wrong turns at Detroit’s Canada border bridge and tunnel, adding that one Venezuelan man tried to take his own life inside a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility at the Detroit border in March. The man was later turned over to ICE, and “it’s unclear where he is currently and his name was not provided,” the Free Press added.
  • Neiyerver Adrian Leon Rengel, a 27-year-old Venezuelan barber, entered the United States via a CBP One appointment in June 2023. “He was arrested by ICE in March 2025, and since then, his family hasn’t heard from him,” the Miami Herald and NBC News reported. He had tattoos of his mother’s and daughter’s names, a barbershop, a tiger, and a lion.
  • DHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, told NBC that Rengel is a Tren de Aragua member, but refused to provide evidence: “We aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one. That would be insane.”
  • The practice of a government transferring a person to a prison where they are held indefinitely and extrajudicially, while refusing to confirm that person’s whereabouts, meets the definition of enforced disappearance, an internationally recognized human rights violation. Join WOLA and the National Security Archive at 2:00 PM on Wednesday, April 30, for an online discussion with Latin American human rights defenders known worldwide for confronting enforced disappearance.

Sen. Van Hollen’s revelations in the Abrego Garcia Case

  • As noted in WOLA’s April 18 Border Update, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) was able to meet briefly with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man sent in error to the country’s CECOT mega-prison, on April 17 during a visit to San Salvador. Upon his return, Sen. Van Hollen related some of what he learned from Abrego Garcia, who had been held incommunicado even as his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court.                                 
    • The Salvadoran government had transferred Abrego Garcia out of the CECOT nine days earlier to the lower-level “Centro Industrial” prison in Santa Ana, where he is “in the administrative building…in a room of his own with a bed and furniture, and… not in a cell,” according to a State Department court filing citing Sen. Van Hollen.
    • He has had “No news from the outside world. Can’t speak to anybody at all.”
    • During his time in the CECOT, he was “fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways.”
    • The U.S. government is giving the Salvadoran government $15 million to detain people without trial, not $6 million as had previously been reported.
    • While the Senator and the detained man spoke in San Salvador’s Sheraton hotel, Salvadoran government operatives placed drinks that looked like cocktails on the table in front of them, then photographed them. This gave Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, an ardent Trump ally, the opportunity to tweet that they were “sipping margaritas,” a lie since repeated by Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), who plans to visit Bukele.

Other developments in Abrego Garcia’s case

  • In the Maryland district court of Judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over Abrego Garcia’s case, the Judge’s order for an “intense” two-week investigation (“discovery process”) appears to be moving slowly.
  • Plaintiffs stated on April 21 that the documents provided by the Trump administration have included “nothing of substance,” and its responses to inquiries have been “non-responsive.” Judge Xinis ordered the administration to respond more fully by April 23: “Defendants have failed to respond in good faith, and their refusal to do so can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance.”
  • On April 23, administration attorneys, who Judge Xinis has been requiring to provide daily updates, which rarely contain new information, submitted a sealed update. Soon afterward, Xinis, for unclear reasons, agreed to pause the “discovery” process and daily updates for a week, with both the plaintiffs and the government agreeing to the delay.
  • Immigration experts interviewed by Bloomberg Government recalled that past U.S. administrations from both parties have, on several occasions, taken “lengthy steps to correct previous mistaken deportations.” The Trump administration refuses to do that despite instructions from the Supreme Court that it “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
  • A team of Washington Post reporters highlighted flaws in the immigration and criminal justice systems’ treatment of Abrego García’s case. A new element was the Prince George’s County, Maryland Police Department’s reliance on a database (“GangNET”) and field sheet system that have since been discontinued after lawsuits and criticisms pointing out its history of racial profiling and lack of vetting. These since-discredited methods led to the Department’s 2019 suspicions that Abrego Garcia may have had ties to the MS-13 gang.
  • Also at the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler produced a detailed timeline and fact-check, going back to a 16-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s arrival in the United States in 2011, debunking the Trump administration’s many false claims about him and revealing serious procedural errors, misrepresentations, and legal violations in his case.
  • The Washington Post’s María Luisa Paul profiled Abrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen and mother of three in Washington DC’s Maryland suburbs. She has become a vocal advocate for her husband’s return, speaking at rallies and interfacing with political leaders despite the Trump administration’s hostility.
  • She said she fears for her safety. In efforts to smear Abrego Garcia, DHS had posted a request for a restraining order that Vásquez Sura had filed in 2021 because of an abuse incident that she says was not repeated and she did not follow up. In so doing, DHS published Vásquez Sura’s unredacted home address, which forced her to go into hiding.
  • U.S. respondents to an Economist/YouGov poll agreed, by a 50-to-28 percent margin, that Abrego Garcia should be allowed to return to the United States. Only 27 percent believe the Trump administration’s claim that he is a member of MS-13 (43 percent are “not sure”).

The Salvadoran government’s role

  • Four House Democrats visited El Salvador on April 20-22. The Salvadoran government did not permit them to meet Abrego Garcia or other people rendered to El Salvador. Their visit was unofficial and self-funded, as the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee, on which three of the four Democrats are members, refused the permission necessary to make their visit “official” travel. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California) said that the U.S. embassy would check on the welfare of Andry Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan makeup artist sent to El Salvador despite zero evidence of Tren de Aragua ties.
  • Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a vocal opponent of Donald Trump, announced that his state government would take economic measures against the government of El Salvador “for aiding the Trump Administration’s unlawful and unconstitutional actions.”
  • At the New Yorker, Danielle Mackey recalled that in addition to Abrego Garcia, one of the 23 Salvadoran citizens sent to the CECOT on March 15 was an indicted MS-13 leader who knew about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s past negotiations with gang leaders. This may have included evidence of gang support for the President’s political party. With the return of César Humberto López Larios, alias Greñas de Stoners, to Salvadoran custody, his inconvenient information about Bukele’s past dealings is much less likely to come to light. “The Trump Administration now appears to be helping Bukele sweep away the case.”
  • Boston Globe columnist Marcela García found that Bukele’s decisions to lend the CECOT to Trump and to deny due process to Abrego Garcia are costing him much support among the Salvadoran diaspora, with whom he has been overwhelmingly popular. “I have felt worse than when my partner betrayed me,” a Salvadoran in Massachusetts told García.
  • On April 20, Bukele floated an offer via Twitter to the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela: accept an exchange of the 252 Venezuelan men in the CECOT, released to Venezuela, for 252 Venezuelan political prisoners, released to El Salvador. Venezuela’s chief prosecutor rebuffed the offer as “cynical” and accused Bukele of having “kidnapped” the Venezuelans.
  • Trump’s treatment of Venezuelan migrants whom it suspects of Tren de Aragua ties has caused a split within Venezuela’s beleaguered political opposition, Spain’s El País reported. Some insist on advocating for the imprisoned men’s rights, while others worry that openly opposing Trump could weaken their leverage in the United States.

Possible application to U.S. citizens

  • Axios speculated that the Trump administration might seek to banish U.S. citizens to Salvadoran prisons via three possible routes, all of them almost certainly illegal. The routes are sending U.S. citizens already convicted of crimes, charging Trump’s political opponents with crimes, or resisting court orders, as is happening now with administration foot-dragging on the Supreme Court’s requirement that it “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
  • Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, led a letter from 26 Senate Democrats calling on President Trump to rescind his claims and statements advocating possible transfers of U.S. citizens to El Salvador’s jails. “Congress has passed no provision into law that would permit exiling United States citizens to a foreign country for any reason.” The letter also calls for Abrego Garcia’s immediate return.

Essays and analyses

  • “To my knowledge almost no one seems to have made a seemingly obvious legal (and moral) point,” wrote Ahilan Arulanantham of the UCLA School of Law at Just Security. “Sending alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang to CECOT…constitutes punishment, and therefore cannot be imposed without trial under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.”
  • “Trump has done more than resurrect a constitutionally dubious and disreputable law,” wrote Katherine Yon Ebright and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at the Atlantic. “By invoking a wartime authority in service of a peacetime deportation agenda, he has gone beyond what even this draconian power permits.”
  • “The Trump administration is trapped in a corrupt cycle, trying to suppress the public’s outrage at its lies with yet more lies,” wrote Melissa Gira Grant at the New Republic about officials’ escalating untruths in Abrego Garcia’s case. “But the opposition has taken notice: The lies aren’t working, and that could be turned to their advantage.”
  • “The f— -you impunity on display during Bukele’s recent visit to the Oval Office—‘Of course I’m not going to do it,’ Bukele said, when asked if he would return Ábrego García—is a higher order of terror, one meant not to generate doubt but to instill helplessness,” wrote Yale University historian Greg Grandin at the Intercept. That essay seeks to place these latest human rights crimes in the context of the United States’ history of supporting abusive regimes in the Americas.
  • “It has been startling to listen to President Donald Trump and his team suggest there’s nothing they can do to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” Nahal Toosi wrote at Politico. “Much of the Trump administration’s image is built around the idea of strength, especially on the global front, so this display of impotence is off message.”
  • “The premise appears to be that only the President can decide whether someone’s legal rights are legitimate,” wrote Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker.

Links to litigation mentioned in this section

Notes on “mass deportation”

“Reconciliation” spending bill

  • When the U.S. Congress returns from a two-week recess next week, its two-house Republican majority will begin work on an enormous spending package that could devote $175 to $345 billion to funding the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” plans. Using the budget reconciliation process, an infrequently invoked rule that allows bills to pass with a simple majority–no Democratic votes needed—this yet-to-be-introduced legislation could provide up to $175 billion in new funding to DHS and similar amounts to the Departments of Defense and Justice, which would play some role in border-hardening and vastly stepped-up deportations.
  • A budget resolution that passed in late March and early April, which includes no detail on how money would be spent, would provide DHS with $90 billion (House of Representatives version) or $175 billion (Senate version) over the next 10 years, much of which would get front-loaded into the next few years.
  • The House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee is scheduled to mark up (consider, amend, and approve) its $90 billion-or-more DHS section of the “reconciliation” package on Tuesday, April 29. As that meeting approaches, the Committee will reveal more details about what the funding might support.
  • The House Armed Services Committee is also to meet on the 29th to consider $100 billion in new defense spending, which appears likely to increase closer to the Senate’s $150 billion target. “The Pentagon portion of the GOP reconciliation effort would likely include money for the Trump administration’s expanded military mission at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Politico noted.
  • Politico further reported, “The Judiciary Committee will meet April 30 to debate its part of the GOP package, which is set to include $110 billion in spending on immigration enforcement.”
  • Funds alone will not be enough to enable a truly massive deportation campaign. ICE, which has fewer than 6,000 Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) agents, will need people to carry it out. Some may come from military personnel in support roles. Francesca D’Annunzio of the Texas Observer reported that local police forces, deputized under what are known as 287(g) task force model agreements, have been signing up to assist ICE in 23 states, particularly Florida and Texas. The Obama administration had terminated the 287(g) model “amid controversies over racial profiling,” D’Annunzio noted.

U.S. citizen detained in Arizona

  • A 19-year-old U.S. citizen, Jose Hermosillo, spent ten days in ICE custody after Border Patrol arrested him in Arizona. In tweets, DHS officials promoted a story that Hermosillo “approached Border Patrol in Tucson Arizona,” saying that he was a citizen of Mexico who had entered the United States illegally, and that his “arrest and detention were a direct result of his own actions and statements.”
  • The Arizona Daily Star noted, “Some of the claims in DHS’s statement conflict with the sworn statement from a Tucson Border Patrol agent in an April 9 complaint.” Hermosillo told Judd Legum of Popular Information that, while visiting Tucson from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he suffered a seizure and was taken to a hospital without his identification. After his release, disoriented, he saw a Border Patrol agent and asked for help—then ended up spending 10 days in ICE’s Florence Detention Center. He said he never stated that he was from Mexico, and signed the documents Border Patrol agents gave him, even though he is unable to read due to a learning disability.
  • “Hermosillo said he was detained with about 15 other men in a cell at the Florence Correctional Center,” Legum reported. “He was served only cold food. He said he contracted the flu because ‘they have it cold in there and everybody’s getting sick.’ Hermosillo said he requested medicine but was not provided with any. Hermosillo said he tried to tell people at Florence Correctional Center that he was a U.S. citizen, but was dismissed. ‘They say, tell your lawyer,’ he recalled.”

Children and families

  • Now that the Trump administration has pulled funding from attorneys representing 26,000 unaccompanied children in asylum proceedings, very young children are being made to defend themselves in immigration courts, leading to absurd situations like this virtual hearing described in Gothamist:

“The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States,” Judge Ubaid ul-Haq, presiding from a courtroom on Varick Street, told a group of about a dozen children on a recent morning on Webex.

“It’s my job to figure out if you have to leave,” ul-Haq continued. “It’s also my job to figure out if you should stay.”

The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.

  • At the New Yorker, Jack Herrera reported on family detention centers in Dilley and Karnes, Texas, that the Trump administration recently reopened. During the Obama and first Trump administrations, this facility held parents and children apprehended at the border days or weeks before. Now, Herrera found, many of the families there were people who had been living in the U.S. interior for years. Future family detention plans may include “a tent village in Fort Bliss,” a sprawling army base near El Paso, Herrera reported (though WOLA has also heard from a knowledgeable source that the base may be used for single adults). The article includes a historical overview of the Flores court settlement that has governed the treatment of migrant children in custody since the 1990s.

Other “mass deportation” items

  • Donald Trump asserted that his administration should be able to deport undocumented migrants without bringing them to immigration court. “We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial.’ The trial is going to take two years.” On his social network, the President added, “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
  • The administration meanwhile fired more immigration judges, this time in Massachusetts, California, and Louisiana, NPR reported. The Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) had 735 judges at the end of fiscal 2024 to hear a backlog of 3.9 million cases, including nearly 1.5 million asylum cases. The firings just increase the number of cases per judge.
  • People all over the United States continue to receive emails from DHS informing them that their documented status is revoked and they must leave the country immediately. Most are people who received a parole status when they entered at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry with CBP One appointments during the Biden administration. However, due to what appears to be sloppy data management, the recipients include many U.S. citizens, often immigration attorneys.
  • In 2025 through April 14, the Trump administration had deported 1,694 Venezuelans back to Caracas, including 94 women and 2 children. Mexico has deported another 866 Venezuelans, the Miami Herald reported, citing the Venezuelan NGO Votoscopio. A new U.S. flight to Venezuela, via Honduras, on April 23 increased the U.S. total to 1,868, including 123 women and 2 children. A new flight from Mexico to Venezuela on April 24 raised Mexico’s total to 1,184.
  • A WIRED investigation revealed that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is building a centralized, cross-agency data system within DHS to surveil and potentially target undocumented immigrants. Experts with whom the publication spoke fear that building this augmented “data lake” may cause “disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants.”
  • 404 Media reported that ICE is pursuing another big data fusion effort, bringing together information from the Departments of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), plus the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), into a centralized database. A document calls it “ATrac” and “Alien Tracker.”
  • “The public may ‘broadly agree with the sentiment that people here illegally should be returned to their country of origin,’ but we shouldn’t assume they agree that people here legally should be incarcerated in their country of origin,” wrote Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly. “And we shouldn’t assume that just because the public doesn’t like illegal immigration in general that they won’t be repulsed when immigrants have their basic human rights violated.”
  • “Several recent polls find Trump’s approval on the issue slipping below the level of disapproval. More pertinent, that support collapses when it meets almost any specific application of his agenda,” Jonathan Chait observed at the Atlantic.
  • “As soon as Trump takes power and makes actual decisions rather than just spreading misinformation, the public gets a whiff of what Republican anti-immigrant policy looks like in practice, and they don’t like it,” wrote Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect. “It turns out that few people thought they were voting for the president to kidnap a legal resident by mistake, deport him to a torture prison in a foreign country, and openly defy a Supreme Court order to bring him back.”

The U.S. military role

Insurrection Act

  • Citing multiple sources, CNN reported that the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security are to recommend that the White House abstain, for now, from invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to expand the active-duty military’s role at the border. They may hold off because migration levels are currently low.
  • A January 20 White House executive order had given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem 90 days (April 20) to recommend whether to invoke the very old, broadly worded law at the border. The Insurrection Act is one of a few emergency exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, the law normally prohibiting the use of U.S. soldiers as domestic police. It has been invoked, usually on a very small scale, just six times in the past sixty years.
  • Invoking the Insurrection Act “could mean soldiers rolling into cities in armored vehicles, stopping people on the streets while demanding identification, and going door to door to search houses,” wrote USA Today columnist Chris Brennan.

Joint Chiefs chairman visits

  • Gen. Dan Caine, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid a visit to the border, his first, at Fort Huachuca in southeast Arizona. There, he reportedly received a briefing on military border security operations.
  • New York Times coverage of the visit reported that “the Pentagon has dispatched nearly 7,000 active-duty troops along the border.” That would mean the troop presence has not yet reached the previously announced goal of 9,600.

Roosevelt Reservation

  • In New Mexico, the Trump administration has begun implementing an April 11 White House memorandum placing under U.S. military control a 20-yard fringe of territory along much of the border west of Texas. This may mean that people who set foot in, or pass through, this strip of land, mainly migrants, could be charged with the crime of trespassing on a military installation. It could also involve soldiers holding migrants inside the fringe of land until Border Patrol or other authorities can apprehend them. This land is now designated as an extension of Fort Huachuca.
  • A Bureau of Land Management map shown in the Arizona Daily Star depicts an “‘emergency withdrawal area’ to be transferred to military control, which extends 2 to 3.5 miles from New Mexico’s international border, except in designated wilderness study areas.” That is far larger than 20 yards.
  • Environmentalists cited by the Daily Star worry that “parts of Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Coronado National Forest, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument could become a staging area” for military units’ operations.
  • Soldiers in the “Roosevelt Reservation” fringe in New Mexico are now authorized to detain and search undocumented migrants, to conduct crowd control measures, provide medical support, and construct barriers. Several of these roles, which involve direct and potentially adversarial contact between active-duty soldiers and civilians, are highly unusual for the U.S. military on U.S. soil.
  • “Through these enhanced authorities, U.S. Northern Command will ensure those who illegally trespass in the New Mexico National Defense Area are handed over to Customs and Border Protection or our other law enforcement partners,” said Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command, cited in Stars and Stripes.
  • This “represents a dangerous erosion of the constitutional principle that the military should not be policing civilians,” warned a statement from ACLU New Mexico.

Other military items

  • The Marine Corps identified the two members who died in an April 15 vehicle crash in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Lance Corporals Albert Aguilera and Marcelino Gamino “were assigned on a reconnaissance mission, as the Defense Department seeks to improve its understanding of the region,” the Washington Post reported. They were aboard a civilian vehicle.
  • Reporting from the borderline west of El Paso, Johannes Streeck at Inkstick Media twice found soldiers parked in Border Patrol vehicles. “Again, it is not Border Patrol agents manning the vehicle but two soldiers, who initially refuse to admit that they are regular Army until asked about the visible insignia on their uniforms,” Streeck wrote of his second encounter.
  • The Border Chronicle interviewed Eagle Pass, Texas activist Amerika García Grewal, co-founder of Frontera Federation, a new organization. She discussed harms to her community resulting from Texas’s construction of a state military (National Guard) base outside of town.

Notes from the migration route

Mexico

  • An essay from New York Times opinion writer Lydia Polgreen noted that Mexico City has become a “beacon” attracting migrants from poorer or more violent places, but also affluent people from the United States and other wealthier nations, whose increased presence has been driving up rents.
  • In Tijuana, Kate Morrissey spoke with Father Pat Murphy, who has run the city’s 38-year-old Casa del Migrante migrant shelter since 2013. He said that the Trump administration’s cancellations of U.S. assistance have forced the shelter to slash its budget by 40 percent.
  • In Ciudad Juárez, where migrants’ numbers have plummeted since 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that the shelter that the Mexican government had built in anticipation of Donald Trump’s policies, a complex of large tents, is sitting empty. That is in large part because there are few migrants to deport from the border right now, and because the administration’s “mass deportation” offensive is barely underway.
  • In Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, migrants from several countries held a protest outside of Siglo XXI, which is Latin America’s largest migrant detention center. “After being stranded on the southern border of the country due to Donald Trump’s new policies, all they are looking for is economic stability to survive and a secure job to support their families,” a Venezuelan man told Milenio.
  • Some Venezuelans in Tapachula who have given up on northbound migration are protesting to demand that the Mexican and Venezuelan governments facilitate humanitarian flights back to Caracas.
  • DHS is funding radio, broadcast, and digital ads, being aired in several countries, in which Secretary Kristi Noem tells people not to migrate improperly to the United States because they will be “hunted down and deported.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government called the spots “discriminatory” and sent a letter to broadcasters asking them not to run them. “Another ad slated to broadcast in the United States and internationally shows Ms. Noem calling undocumented immigrants rapists, murderers and child molesters, and telling them to self-deport,” the New York Times reported.

Central America

  • EFE visited the once-bustling Las Manos border crossing between Nicaragua and Honduras and found it “desolate, with hardly any migrants for at least two months.”
  • Reporting for the Atlantic at Costa Rica’s border with Nicaragua, Justin Gest found evidence of growing southbound migration. “The migrants I spoke with were broadly aware of the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants, including its highly publicized deportations. Most had reversed their course simply because they didn’t think they could get into the United States.” The danger of spending long periods in Mexico, where organized crime preys on migrants with corrupt officials’ acquiescence, is another reason that migrants cited for turning around.
  • Many of the 200 African, Asian, and Eastern European migrants whom the Trump administration flew to Costa Rica in February remain in the Central American nation. Those who fear return to their home countries have been confined to a camp near the Panamanian border, but the government in San José will now be offering a three-month status to many of them; at least some are seeking asylum in Costa Rica.
  • The decision comes days after a group of human rights lawyers sued Costa Rica’s government before a UN human rights committee. Panama, which received 299 citizens from other continents on U.S. planes in February, had already granted a similar temporary status to more than 110 but appeared less willing to entertain asylum claims.
  • Human Rights Watch published a report based on private, in-person interviews with 48 of the 299 people the U.S. government expelled to Panama. It found that the Trump administration completely disregarded these individuals’ protection needs, endangering them and abandoning many to a limbo in Panama, where the government has made asylum or refugee status exceedingly hard to obtain. The report is critical of the role played by the UN’s International Organization of Migration (IOM), alleging that IOM failed to present asylum options to the expelled migrants, citing several who stated that the agency presented them with just two options, both leading only to their return to their countries of origin. IOM denies these allegations.

The Darién Gap

  • Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, said on April 24 that only 73 migrants had passed through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle route from Colombia since April 1. That is down from 194 in March, 29,259 in April 2024, and 40,297 in April 2023.
  • Between January 1 and April 15, at its border with Panama—the beginning of the Darién Gap route—Colombia’s government reported detecting 6,501 southbound migrants entering the country, usually via maritime routes, and 2,888 people departing northbound into the Darién: a net negative flow.

Other news

  • The Senate Finance Committee will meet on April 30 to consider the nomination of former Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott as the Trump administration’s commissioner for CBP, which is Border Patrol’s parent agency. A vocal Trump supporter after his mid-2021 retirement, Scott has voiced hardline views and faces questions about possible improper intervention in the criminal investigation of Border Patrol and CBP agents’ 2010 beating death of Mexican citizen Anastasio Hernández in San Diego. That allegation is the subject of a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) reported in the Washington Post. “Many worry that Scott’s likely ascension to the top job at CBP will further erode oversight at the agency,” the Post noted.
  • Parties will meet in a Washington DC federal courtroom at 2:00 on April 29 for a “hearing on the cross-motions for summary judgment” in the RAICES v. Noem litigation challenging the Trump administration’s January 20 executive order shutting the border to undocumented entry, and stopping border asylum claims, by claiming that an “invasion” is underway. This case has seen little movement in weeks.
  • The Project on Government Oversight restored to the internet over 160 memos and documents that the Trump administration had removed from the website of DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). That office, which received complaints of human rights abuse and other misconduct, has had nearly all of its staff fired by the incoming administration.
  • Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Southern Border Communities Coalition, and Urban Justice Center, represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group and Democracy Forward, filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decimation of CRCL, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Ombudsman Office, and DHS’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO).
  • A Venezuelan couple with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who had twice been detained by CBP and ICE in the Washington DC area were detained yet again, at the El Paso airport, on April 16. (Their earlier arrests were the subject of articles in the March 12 Los Angeles Times and the March 21 Washington Post.) A federal judge in El Paso angrily ordered ICE to free them again. They face charges of misdemeanor improper entry at the border in late 2022 when they, like hundreds of thousands of others, turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents to seek asylum. They were in El Paso to face those misdemeanor charges. Now, the Department of Justice is claiming that one is “a senior member” of Tren de Aragua, based on weak evidence that a judge already harshly rejected, and is seeking to expel them under the Alien Enemies Act.
  • Mexico’s government stated that its “Operation Frontera Norte” military deployment, begun on February 5 in response to President Trump’s initial tariff threat, has resulted in the arrest of 2,631 individuals and the seizure of 2,292 firearms and various drugs, including 163 kilograms of fentanyl pills.
  • A report from the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram finds that Arizona’s border “remains strikingly quiet, a counterpoint to the Trump administration’s declarations of a ‘national emergency’ requiring an expanded role for the military and the turnover of thousands of acres of public land.” A Border Patrol agent said, “When agents are told people are crossing the border, four or five agents rush to the spot, hoping for something to do.”
  • Even though the border is quiet, Texas’s state legislature appears poised to approve $6.5 billion in border security spending over the next two years, the Texas Tribune reported.
  • An Arizona Republic investigation looked at the environmental damage, biodiversity threats, and harm to Indigenous culture posed by the resumed border wall construction in parts of the state, like the San Rafael Valley, where fencing gaps remain.