With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• The Alien Enemies Act invocation and El Salvador renditions have days in court: The Trump administration sent 17 more detained people—10 Salvadorans and 7 Venezuelans—from Guantánamo to El Salvador’s Center for Containment of Terrorism (CECOT) prison. Federal courts are probing violations of a restraining order against the use of the Alien Enemies Act, as we continue to learn about people removed to the Salvadoran prison despite a lack of criminal background. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recognized that at least one man, Kilmar Ábrego García, was removed in error, but the administration is not asking El Salvador to release him.
• Notes about deportation flights: A Boston federal judge barred the Trump administration from deporting migrants to third countries without allowing them to argue that they might be harmed. Deportation flights to Venezuela have resumed. Reports highlight unsafe conditions and abuse aboard ICE’s deportation flights with little accountability or transparency.
• Budget resolution to move in Senate: The Senate is preparing to vote on a budget resolution that sets the stage for a larger spending bill advancing President Trump’s “mass deportation” and border-hardening agenda. The forthcoming “reconciliation” bill could allocate $90–175 billion over 10 years for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Passed by a simple majority, it would bypass the filibuster and exclude Democrats.
• Notes on the U.S. military’s border and migration role: The U.S. military presence at the border has grown to over 6,700 active-duty troops, expected to grow to 10,000. Roles and equipment are expanding, and the price tag since January 20 is now $376 million since January 20. The Guantánamo base now holds about 85 migrants at a very high cost. Senators visiting the base criticized it as a wasteful, likely illegal attempt to bypass due process.
• Low border numbers in March: Border Patrol recorded 7,180 migrant apprehensions in March, the lowest monthly total in decades, amid a near-total shutdown of asylum access. Shelters are empty, aid groups are scaling back, and migrant injuries from wall falls have declined. In Panama, migration through the Darién Gap plummeted to less than 200 in March.
• Noem’s travel to Latin America: Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem visited El Salvador, Colombia, and Mexico. Her appearance at El Salvador’s CECOT, shooting a video using jailed people as a backdrop,  drew criticism. In Colombia, Noem signed a biometric data-sharing agreement. In Mexico, she claimed some progress toward a similar deal.

THE FULL UPDATE:

The Alien Enemies Act invocation and El Salvador renditions have days in court

17 more people

• The Trump administration removed 17 more people—10 Salvadorans and 7 Venezuelans—to El Salvador’s CECOT, Latin America’s largest prison, on the evening of March 30. The 17 were transported on a military aircraft from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, where the Trump administration has been detaining some migrants whom it regards as having criminal ties.
• “All individuals are confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders, including six child rapists,” tweeted El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. Donald Trump thanked Bukele on his “Truth Social” network.
• The White House shared a list of their names with Fox News.
• The administration stated that these individuals were not removed under the Alien Enemies Act, which would have violated a temporary restraining order in place since March 15. Instead, these individuals appear to have had final orders of removal in U.S. immigration court.

The temporary restraining order

• On March 28, James Boasberg, the Washington, DC district court judge who issued a March 15 temporary restraining order to stop the flights that ultimately arrived in El Salvador, extended that order for another two weeks. For now, the Trump administration may not invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority, to deport people without due process on suspicion of membership in the Tren de Aragua, as it did on the evening of March 15. Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan criminal group that the administration has added to the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations.
• Two days earlier, on March 26th, a three-judge circuit court panel upheld the restraining order, rejecting the Trump administration’s effort to undo it.
• After losing in the Circuit Court of Appeals, the administration made an emergency request to the Supreme Court to review that ruling. “Any time in the next few weeks,” the Supreme Court could decide, using its “shadow docket,” whether to allow or prohibit the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act while justices deliberate on its legality, Ian Milhiser explained at Vox. The Supreme Court’s choice of whether or not to suspend the “Alien Enemies” removals while it decides, the New York Times recalled, happens without hearings or oral arguments.
• On April 3, Judge Boasberg held a new hearing to determine whether Trump administration officials violated his order to turn around the El Salvador-bound flights on March 15. When Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said the administration had complied with the order, Boasberg replied, “There is a fair likelihood that that is not correct.” The judge pressed Ensign for information about individuals in the administration responsible for sending the flights despite his order, raising the possibility of finding them in contempt of court. Ensign continued to claim ignorance of “operational details” and high-level government decision-making. “The hearing itself is several steps short of any real consequence that Boasberg might impose on the Trump administration for potentially flouting his order,” Talking Points Memo explained.
• On March 24th, administration lawyers had invoked the “state secrets privilege,” which usually implies national security or foreign policy sensitivity, to avoid sharing further information about what happened on the 15th.
• At the Atlantic, Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School observed that in its dealings with the judicial system on immigration and other cases, the Trump administration is drawing lessons from its mostly successful first-term effort to have courts go along with its 2017 ban on travel to the United States by nationals of several countries. “The administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the [Supreme] Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation.”
• In the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on March 26, top national security agency chiefs presented their “Annual Worldwide Threats Assessment.” Notably, the U.S. intelligence community’s 31-page document made zero mention of any “predatory incursion” from Venezuela’s government or any “invasion” of migrants. Those alleged threats were the pretexts that the White House used to invoke the wartime Alien Enemies Act and to shut the U.S.-Mexico border to asylum seekers. In fact, the Threats Assessment’s only mention of Venezuela at all—and there are none about the Tren de Aragua—noted a sharp reduction in arrivals of Venezuelan migrants.

Venezuelan women on a plane to El Salvador

• Filings in the Alien Enemies Act litigation revealed that eight Venezuelan women were among the people placed aboard the removal flights to El Salvador on March 15. Salvadoran authorities refused to take them, as well as a man from Nicaragua who was also aboard, and all returned to detention in the United States.
• “The incident is the latest example of the haphazard nature of the flights to El Salvador,” concluded NBC News, which spoke to two of the women. Both said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or contractor personnel falsely told those aboard the planes that they were going to Venezuela, even claiming that they were in Venezuela after they landed in El Salvador.

Ábrego García Case

• ICE had placed 23 citizens of El Salvador aboard the three planes that took detained migrants to San Salvador on March 15. They were not returned under the Alien Enemies Act: the agency claimed they already had final removal orders from U.S. immigration court.
• That has turned out not to be true in at least one case: that of Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old father living and working in Maryland after being granted withholding of removal in 2019. Under that status, Ábrego García was not deportable.
• In a March 31 court filing quickly covered by Nick Miroff at the Atlantic, ICE official Robert Cerna recognized that the agency had removed Ábrego García to El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” an “oversight…carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Ábrego-García’s purported membership in MS-13,” the Salvadoran gang.
• Ábrego-García’s order of removal has been withheld since 2019, and Cerna’s allegation of gang membership is unproven and based on the claim of one confidential source. Ábrego García has no criminal record and had been in the United States since 2011.
• (Cerna is the same official—the acting director of ICE’s Harlingen, Texas field office—who had claimed in a March 17 filing that “the lack of a criminal record” about a deported individual “does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact…the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.”)
• Despite recognizing its error in court, the Trump administration has not asked the Salvadoran government to release Ábrego García from its CECOT mega-prison or return him to his home in the United States. Justice Department lawyers are opposing Ábrego García’s lawyers’ demand that the administration do so, claiming that there is nothing they can do. Mr. Ábrego García’s lawyers call that “outrageous.”
• In a Fox News appearance on April 3, Vice President JD Vance said that Ábrego was not the “father of the year” because he had “traffic violations,” adding, “we do not ask permission from far left Democrats before we deport illegal immigrants.” (Arguing about the case with commentators on Twitter earlier in the week, Vance made false claims that Ábrego García had been “convicted” of gang membership.)
• These cases, and the Trump administration’s refusal to ask the Salvadoran government to revert imprisonments, are leading analysts, like Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern and Amanda Tyler of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, to voice concerns about the potential use of the CECOT as a “legal black hole” (Tyler) or “black site” (Stern) where it is impossible to file writs of habeas corpus to challenge unlawful detentions. (The term “black site” emerged during the George W. Bush administration, which held some foreign terrorism suspects beyond the reach of U.S. criminal law in secret foreign detention facilities.)
• “Although the Alien Enemies Act does not apply to American citizens, without due process, a citizen could be mistakenly deported to El Salvador, held indefinitely, and reliant on the same administration that deported them to realize the error and decide to retrieve them,” wrote Adam Serwer at the Atlantic. Greg Sargent echoed that at the New Republic, quoting Ábrego García’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg: “if the government can remove people in ‘error’ without recourse, then that logic could ‘apply with equal force to U.S. citizens.’”
• “The over-broad and ill-defined evidence immigration agencies employ to allege gang affiliation has led to the worst harms of detention or deportation,” recalled Nayna Gupta of the American Immigration Council at Just Security.
• Meanwhile, as José Olivares and Ryan Grim reported at Drop Site News, another of the Salvadorans sent to the CECOT on March 15 was Cesar Humberto López-Larios, alias “Greñas,” an MS-13 gang leader who was arrested in Mexico last year and quickly extradited to the United States. López-Larios “was involved in secret negotiations between the gang and Bukele’s government,” which may have included electoral support to Bukele’s political party, before Bukele abandoned secret talks in 2022. His removal from the United States prevents “the sordid links between Bukele and the gang he is famous for warring against” from being “aired publicly.”

El Salvador claims that people can file complaints

• CNN reported that, according to a Salvadoran official, “families of the imprisoned Venezuelans can petition the Salvadoran government for their release—but the fruitfulness of that process is an open question in a country accused of arbitrary detention by rights groups and even the US State Department.”
• A lawyer representing 30 of the imprisoned Venezuelans has filed a habeas corpus petition with the Salvadoran Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber.
• The Salvadoran NGO Cristosal is compiling information from the families of the Venezuelan detainees.

ICE’s gang membership criteria

• An ACLU filing included a copy of a rubric of criteria that ICE agents have used to determine whether they suspect that a migrant may be a member of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization. The agency’s “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” sets up a scoring system that would identify someone as a member of the group based on tattoos and “insignia, logos, notations, drawings, or dress.” Scores on both of those counts would be enough to qualify as a Tren de Aragua member, even though experts state that the criminal group does not use tattoos and rarely uses common iconography.
• Reuters reporters reviewed 50 cases of Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador on March 15. They found that 27 of them had pending immigration court dates to consider their requests for asylum in the United States. Of the 50, 10 were arrested upon reporting to ICE offices for regularly scheduled check-ins. Three-quarters had tattoos.
• In New York, Daniel Delgado, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man who arrived with a grant of humanitarian parole that the Trump administration is now cancelling, told Efecto Cocuyo that he is scared of being sent to El Salvador: “I have quite a few tattoos and it’s terrifying to think that they could use that as an excuse to label me as a criminal. It was already difficult to be seen as a thug in Venezuela, and now here they want to sell us as terrorists.”
• The steady stream of accounts of people who appear to have been wrongfully sent to the CECOT prison is starting to generate an outcry among some conservatives, the New York Times noted. They include the popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024 but has called the possible imprisonment of innocent people in El Salvador “horrific.”

Some Venezuelan prisoners profiled in media over the past week

• New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer profiled Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela whose tattoos commemorate the renowned Epiphany (Three Kings) festival in his hometown, Capacho. At the Guardian, Tom Phillips and Clavel Rangel spoke to people who knew Hernández in Capacho.
• Jefferson Jose Laya Freites, a 33-year-old asylum-seeker with no criminal record and legal work authorization, was profiled in USA Today. His wife is left behind to care for five children in Aurora, Colorado.
• Frengel Reyes Mota, profiled in the Miami Herald, is a 24-year-old asylum seeker with no criminal record in Venezuela, no tattoos, and U.S. immigration detention records that “are riddled with mistakes.” He has a 9-year-old son and a dog named Sacha.
• The mother of Francisco García Casique, a barber, told Efecto Cocuyo, “I don’t know what condition he’s in. Nobody has given us legal assistance yet.”
• Carlos Alexis Uzcátegui, profiled in Venezuela’s Tal Cual, is 32 and arrived in the United States with a CBP One appointment. He worked in a seafood restaurant in Mexico City while he awaited that appointment. He has 13 tattoos, most of them commemorating family members.
• Carlos Daniel Terán Aguilar, age 18, profiled in Texas Monthly, was arrested by ICE at his home in Austin, Texas, where he was living with his father and stepmother. “They were all from Venezuela, and all were in the country legally.” Terán’s criminal record in Chile, where he had lived before emigrating to join his father, consists of a charge of marijuana possession when he was 16.
• At Beyond the Border, Kate Morrissey profiled Alirio Guillermo Belloso Fuenmayor, whose wife said he was a family man with an eight-year-old daughter who never committed a crime. His immigration case appeared to have fallen victim to a filing error.
• The Miami Herald profiled “E.M.,” who applied for and eventually received refugee status, along with his girlfriend, in January. That did not prevent him from being detained and sent to El Salvador. He has tattoos: “a crown, a soccer ball, and a palm tree.”
• Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo, age 26, who was profiled in Mother Jones and Tal Cual, arrived with a CBP One appointment in mid-2024. He has no criminal record, but about 20 tattoos.

Notes about deportation flights

• On March 28, a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting migrants to third countries without giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to argue that doing so might endanger them. This ruling does not place limits, however, on removals under the Alien Enemies Act.
• Deportation flights to Venezuela have resumed in earnest. Venezuelan planes have flown to Honduras to retrieve deported individuals from the United States at least four times: 199 people on March 24, 178 people on March 28, 229 people on March 30, and an unknown number on April 3. A Venezuelan plane also retrieved 313 Venezuelan citizens from Mexico on April 3, taking 151 children, 60 adult men, and 102 adult women back to Caracas.
• ProPublica published a grim exposé of conditions aboard the deportation flights run by Global Crossing (GlobalX), an ICE contractor, based on interviews with seven of the company’s current or former flight attendants. They did not receive instructions, for instance, about evacuating shackled individuals from the aircraft in the event of an accident. “‘Just get up and leave,’ one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. ‘That’s it. … Save your life first.’”
• The Project on Government Oversight documented the case of Colombian citizen Camilo Alexis Rincon, who was allegedly shoved and hit by guards while he was shackled aboard a December 2022 ICE deportation flight. Neither ICE nor its contractor, Akima, reported the incident through official channels.
• Much of what we know about ICE’s deportation flights owes to the diligent volunteer monitoring work of Tom Cartwright with Witness at the Border. The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff published a profile of Cartwright, a former executive at J.P. Morgan based in Ohio who has been tracking flights since 2020. Under Trump, what had been a retirement project has become an “everyday job” requiring 30 to 40 hours per week of work.
• “To date no daily figures appear to have ever been released of the actual number of removals carried out by this administration,” noted a data analysis from TRAC Immigration.

Budget resolution to move in Senate

• In coming days, the U.S. Senate will vote on a budget resolution that will serve as a framework for a subsequent, more detailed bill. That later bill could increase the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” and border spending by more than $100 billion.
• The resolution about to move through the Senate lays out a plan, NBC News explained, “to instruct committees to begin work a massive bill to pass Trump’s agenda on taxes, immigration funding and other priorities.”
• This so-called “reconciliation” process was originally expected earlier in the year, but the Republican majorities of the House and Senate have disagreed about how to move forward. Once both houses approve an identical budget resolution, Republicans would then be able to pass their later spending bill by a simple majority, using a special procedure to avoid the Senate’s filibuster rule. That rule usually requires 60 percent of the chamber to agree to take a bill to a vote, but reconciliation would cut Democrats out of the process.
• In addition to likely tax cuts and cuts to domestic social programs, the “reconciliation bill” might include an additional $90 billion (House version) to $175 billion (Senate version) for DHS to spend over the next 10 years. The yearly addition is roughly equivalent to the current combined annual budget of ICE and Border Patrol.
• The bill would include similarly large outlays for the Defense and Justice departments, which may play central roles in a “mass deportation” effort that is barely underway with current resource levels.
• In an April 2 White House meeting, President Trump approved the Senate Republican leadership’s approach, and senators may vote on the budget resolution as early as this weekend. That could involve a chaotic all-night process of party-line votes on largely symbolic amendments, known as a “vote-a-rama.”
• When it comes, perhaps in April, more likely in May or even later, the actual “reconciliation” bill will involve much higher budgetary stakes.

Notes on the U.S. military’s border and migration role

The price tag at the border

• At an April 1 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Defense Department officials revealed that about 6,700 active-duty military personnel are currently deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border and “up to 10,000 have been ordered.” They will remain there “for an extended period.” This is in addition to about 2,200 to 2,500 National Guard personnel already stationed at the border on a federal support mission.
• Since January 20, the border mission has cost the Defense Department $376 million, or about $5.3 million per day, civilian Pentagon officials told the Committee.
• “About 90% of what the active forces are doing down there is in what we call detection and monitoring,” said Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command. Border Patrol or other civilian law enforcement personnel, not soldiers, apprehend detected migrants.
• If “operating in close proximity to the border,” however, troops are armed with rifles or pistols.
• Gen. Guillot said that the only change to the rules of engagement that he has proposed is the ability to shoot down drones that might be surveilling troops stationed at the border.

New missions

• The Defense Department is empowering active-duty soldiers to play less of a behind-the-scenes role. A March 20 directive enables soldiers to conduct patrols near the border to monitor suspected illegal activity, and to transport Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, including Border Patrol agents, in military vehicles. Except for Texas National Guard personnel under the command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R), previous military deployments at the border have not involved conspicuous foot patrols. Soldiers are still not empowered to detain or apprehend migrants or other civilians.
• Reuters revealed that two Defense Department intelligence agencies, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), will be increasing their use of satellites to surveil the U.S.-Mexico border zone. “The government could use AI to identify objects or persons of interest by sifting through satellite images and other data feeds, much like the Defense Department can do on the battlefield,” two sources told the news agency.
• The U.S. Army’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team is sending 105 Strykers, a 20-ton combat vehicle, to the border from Fort Carson, Colorado, the Denver Gazette reported. Personnel from this unit will be stationed between Yuma and El Paso, centered on Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
• “The 19-ton, eight-wheeled vehicle also looks imposing when seen from Mexico, and that’s on purpose,” Border Report’s Julian Resendiz reported from Sunland Park, New Mexico, west of El Paso.
• The U.S. Navy has now stationed destroyers in the ocean at both ends of the U.S.-Mexico border. WOLA’s March 21 Border Update noted the deployment of the USS Gravely to the Gulf of Mexico. The USS Spruance is now off the coast of San Diego and Tijuana. An April 1 Northern Command press release indicated that the Spruance provided “vectoring assistance” to a recent Coast Guard operation that led to 13 arrests.
• “We’ve essentially tripled the amount of Coast Guard assets on the southern border” since January 20, Peter Nelson, Officer in Charge of Coast Guard Station San Diego, told Border Report. The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but becomes a military branch during wartime.
• Marines have installed concertina wire along the border wall in “Friendship Park,” a site near where the border meets the Pacific south of San Diego that, in the early 1970s, was inaugurated as a binational park but has been closed to the public on the U.S. side since the COVID pandemic.

Guantánamo

• Five Democratic or Democratic-caucusing senators paid a March 28 visit to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, where the Trump administration is currently detaining approximately 85 migrants. They included the ranking Democrats on the Senate’s committees on Armed Services (Jack Reed of Rhode Island), Homeland Security (Gary Peters of Michigan), Foreign Relations (Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire), and Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration (Alex Padilla of California).
• Their statement read: “After examining the migrant relocation activities at Guantanamo Bay, we are outraged by the scale and wastefulness of the Trump Administration’s misuse of our military. It is obvious that Guantanamo Bay is a likely illegal and certainly illogical location to detain immigrants. Its use is seemingly designed to undermine due process and evade legal scrutiny.”
• According to the New York Times, the senators said that Defense Department officials told them the first month of detention operations at the base had cost $40 million to hold 395 men. That is $100,000 per person over 1 month.
• Much of the cost is the stationing of 1,000 troops to support detention operations at the base. Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 1 that if the base were to expand to meet President Trump’s stated goal of detaining 30,000 people there, he would need 9,000 troops to carry out that mission.

Low border numbers in March

Migration

• CBP reported on April 1 that Border Patrol apprehended 7,180 migrants during the month of March. The agency’s release billed that as “the lowest southwest border crossings in history.” That is not quite accurate, though it appears to be the fewest in a month since the 1950s and 1960s, when yearly totals divided by 12 were less than 7,180.

• CBP will probably release more details about March migration in mid-April.
• If we assume that there are about 32,800 Border Patrol agents and military personnel currently or about to be stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border, that yields a ratio of 4.6 uniformed personnel for each migrant apprehended in March. Dividing further reveals that in an average day, each uniformed agent or soldier apprehends 0.007 migrants. (The numbers in the chart below come from the DHS Inspector-General, Stars and Stripes, CNN, and CBP’s latest release.

• The historic drop in migration owes to the effective shutdown of all asylum access at the border, as directed by a January 20 White House executive order claiming an “emergency” caused by an “invasion” of migrants—a judgment on which courts have yet to rule.
• The number of non-asylum-seeking migrants also seems to be down right now. As happened during the first months of Donald Trump’s first term, and during the initial periods of several other border crackdowns, migrants and smugglers have entered a sort of “wait and see” stance.
• In 2017, during Trump’s first months in office, migrant apprehensions similarly dropped to what were then 21st-century lows by April of that year, only to begin increasing again in May. It is hard to predict if that pattern will repeat in 2025, as the total shutdown of asylum is a new variable, as is the deployment of nearly 10,000 military personnel.
• As asylum seekers have all but stopped reporting there for now, aid groups like American Friends Service Committee are reducing their operations at “ Whiskey 8,” a site south of San Diego where people had been waiting between the border wall’s two layers to turn themselves in to Border Patrol.
• Along with reduced migration has come a drop in what had been a very high number of injuries from people falling off the 30-foot border wall between San Diego and Tijuana, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Nonetheless, the Times of San Diego reported that a migrant died and another was injured by a border wall fall on the evening of March 31.
• In Arizona, Brad Jones, a volunteer with the humanitarian group Humane Borders, told Newsweek that he fears that the border crackdown will cause more people to risk their lives trying to migrate through more remote and dangerous parts of the border.
• At the House Armed Services Committee hearing discussed above, Gen. Guillot of Northcom said that because the increased security force presence has reduced opportunities to bring illicit drugs and migrants across the border, Mexico’s border zones are experiencing increased violence as criminal groups “incur into other cartels’ territories.”

Further south

• The President of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, said on March 28 that only 194 people had migrated north through the Darién Gap since March 1. That points to the lowest monthly total since the early pandemic period for a treacherous jungle route through which over 1 million people passed between 2022 and 2024.
• Colombia’s migration authority reported an “inverse flow” of 3,485 people migrating southbound from Panama—nearly always by sea—between January 1 and March 15, compared to 2,813 people detected going northward into the Darién Gap.
• In a report from a February field visit to the Darién region, the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission found that most abuses that criminal groups perpetrate on migrants along the dangerous jungle route go unreported. When victims do report suffering violence, few of those reports lead to convictions, even after prolonged efforts in Panama’s judicial system.
• The New Humanitarian covered the situation of tens of thousands of U.S.-bound citizens of other countries who, after being stranded by the Trump administration’s suspension of asylum access, are trying to adjust to life in Mexico. “Many of those now stranded have been in Mexico for months in ‘deplorable conditions, lacking water and sanitation, with no access to basic services or healthcare,’” Reinaldo Ortuño of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) told reporter Daniela Díaz.
• “So far, the Mexican government hasn’t laid out a clear strategy or designated officials to manage the situation,” an article in the New Humanitarian series observed. It noted the struggles of the Mexican government’s overwhelmed refugee agency, COMAR, and of the UN Refugee Agency, whose operations in Mexico have been hit hard by the Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts.
• On March 28, COMAR and UNCHR announced the opening of a “Multi-Service Center” to assist asylum seekers and refugees in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas.
• Cuba is by far the number-one nationality of migrants passing through Honduras so far this year, displacing Venezuela since January. Agénce France-Presse reported that with the likelihood of applying for protection in the United States nearly zero, many Cuban migrants, who are arriving at the North American mainland via Nicaragua, are seeking to settle in Mexico.
• At Mexico’s northern border, migrant shelters are mostly empty. “Trump’s rules are severe, and migrant (arrivals) are rare,” Ismael Martinez of the Pan de Vida shelter in western Ciudad Juárez told Border Report. Shelters in Baja California are at 30 percent capacity, La Jornada reported.

Noem’s travel to Latin America

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem visited three nations in Latin America last week. What received the most attention was her visit to El Salvador’s CECOT on March 26, from where she recorded a video touting Trump administration policies while wearing a Rolex on her wrist and using a crowded cell of tattooed prisoners as a jarring, dehumanizing backdrop.
• On March 27, Noem was in Colombia, where the tone of her visit appeared to have been more cordial than might have been expected after a public fight between Donald Trump and President Gustavo Petro over military deportation flights at the end of January. Noem and Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia signed an agreement to expand biometric data-sharing about migrants and law enforcement.
• On April 1, Noem said that during her “ fruitful” March 28 stop in Mexico, she and President Claudia Sheinbaum had agreed to discuss the possibility of sharing biometric data about migrants and travelers in Mexico. Sheinbaum said that was not entirely correct: Mexico would only consider sharing biometrics about migrants. R3D, a Mexican digital rights group, recalled that Mexico already has an agreement with the U.S. government, signed in 2017, to share biometric data about migrants. “There is no reason to believe that the data transfer agreement is not currently in force or that the collection of data on migrants in migrant detention centers has stopped.”
• The Mexican government reported on April 1 that its “Northern Border Plan,” a deployment of Mexican National Guard troops to the border zone begun on February 5 in response to a tariff threat from Donald Trump, “has resulted in 1,998 people being detained and 1,862 firearms seized,” local media reported.

Other news

• Mexico’s government expressed relief that President Trump did not include new levies on Mexican goods in his April 2 announcement of worldwide tariffs. Even as financial markets reeled from the news, “President Sheinbaum’s strategy has worked,” said Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard. “We have a preferential treatment.” In early March, Trump had placed a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods, but then rescinded it for products covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) free trade agreement.
• A federal judge in California postponed the Trump administration’s early cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 citizens of Venezuela in the United States, which was to deprive them of status on April 7. District Court Judge Edward Chen said it was “unprecedented” for TPS to be ended so abruptly, and cited “negative stereotypes” about Venezuelans. For now, Andrew Kreighbaum explained at Bloomberg Law, the work permits of people affected by the cancellation and postponement are still valid. Administration attorneys are seeking to appeal the ruling to the federal judiciary’s 9th Circuit on an accelerated basis so that they may quickly bring the TPS cancellation to the Supreme Court, the Miami Herald reported.
• Another federal judge in California overturned, for now, the Trump administration’s cancellation of a contract to provide legal services to children who arrived at the border unaccompanied, so that the kids do not have to defend themselves in immigration court. The Associated Press pointed out that legal service providers, which had already begun laying off employees, are still awaiting word from the Office of Refugee Resettlement about how it may comply with District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín’s April 1 decision.
• Immigrant rights defense groups filed suit on March 31 to block DHS from reactivating a long-dormant 1940s requirement that undocumented migrants register with the government.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is cancelling the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which reimbursed local governments and charities that provide emergency shelter to recently arrived migrants. Now, CNN reported that DHS officials are discussing how to divert remaining SSP funds into immigration enforcement, perhaps including ICE detention.
• The Trump administration’s plan to impose a ban on travel from citizens of dozens of countries, discussed in WOLA’s March 21 Border Update, has been delayed with no clear implementation date, USA Today reported. A January 20 White House executive order had given the State Department 60 days to develop a list of banned countries, but “the State Department’s top spokesperson declared the deadline no longer in effect.” The delay’s cause is not clear.
• The Trump administration has revoked the U.S. visa of Oscar Arias, a two-time president of Costa Rica and winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for advocating a negotiated end to Central America’s civil wars. Arias, 84, has criticized Donald Trump in the past, and repeated some of those criticisms in an April 1 news conference he convened to discuss the visa revocation.
• The Intercept reported that Google is now providing cloud data support for upgraded, machine learning-capable CBP surveillance towers along the border. “It appears every camera in CBP’s Tucson Sector will pipe data into Google servers,” noted reporter Sam Biddle.
• At the Texas Observer, an investigation by Francesca D’Annunzio found that the Texas state Department of Public Safety (DPS) has sharply expanded its use of AI for surveillance, raising privacy and civil liberties concerns. DPS is using Tangles, an AI platform that gathers information from various web sources, with an add-on feature, WebLoc, which allows geofencing to track mobile device movements without a warrant.
• The Texas Observer also published a chapter of an upcoming edited volume about border walls. Scott Nicol, a Rio Grande Valley-area advocate and artist, recounted the 30-year history of wall construction relying on sweeping waivers of environmental and cultural laws.
• “Half a year’s rainfall” in less than two days caused significant flooding in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and across the border in Tamaulipas, Mexico.
• A high-speed Border Patrol vehicle pursuit near Elsa, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, ended with two migrants dead—a woman and a 14-year-old boy from Guatemala—when their vehicle plunged into an irrigation canal on March 28. Another high-speed Border Patrol pursuit, near Sonoita, Arizona, ended with a crash that left a U.S. citizen suspected of smuggling migrants in critical condition.
• At Vox, Christian Paz reviewed recent polling showing immigration to be the only issue for which more voters approve than disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance, though margins are narrow.
• However, Aaron Blake recalled at the Washington Post, “Polling has shown that Americans, by huge margins, oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who a) have no criminal records, b) arrived as children, c) have children who are U.S. citizens and/or d) have been here at least 10 years. Those categories account for a large majority of migrants.”