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:

• Congressional Republicans’ hardline early-2025 border agenda coming into focus

Following likely confirmation of the incoming Trump administration’s choice for Homeland Security secretary, the 119th Congress will move by late January on a package of hardline border and immigration measures whose total cost could be more than $100 billion. As it will move under a special Senate rule called “reconciliation,” it could pass the chamber, where Republicans lead by a 53-47 margin, by a simple majority.

• Setting the stage for mass deportation

Without offering much detail, President-Elect Trump and other White House officials have been previewing plans to carry out a promised campaign of mass deportations of undocumented migrants in the United States. They are exhibiting a willingness to deport U.S. citizen children together with their undocumented parents, and are preparing aggressive tactics against Democratic state and local officials who do not cooperate.

• The impact in Mexico and elsewhere along the migration route

Many migrants cannot be deported quickly or inexpensively because they come from distant countries, or countries whose governments do not allow deportation flights. The incoming Trump administration is seeking third countries to accept some deportees, including a reluctant Mexico that may already find itself receiving large numbers of its own citizens across the land border. Impacts of imminent policy changes are evident all along the U.S.-bound migration route, including the Darién Gap which saw, in November, the lightest migration flow since April 2022.

• Personnel changes at border and migration agencies

The incoming administration announced nominees to head CBP and ICE, along with White House and ambassadorial choices. CBP nominee Rodney Scott, a former Border Patrol chief, is an outspoken critic of the Biden administration whose past activities raise concerns among rights defenders. A former Border Patrol union chief is the nominee to head the U.S. embassy in Chile.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Congressional Republicans’ hardline early 2025 border agenda coming into focus

Upon his January 20 inauguration as president, Donald Trump will sign numerous executive orders, some reversing Biden administration policies. One proposes to effectively “seal the border,” according to longtime Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who is to be the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

Trump’s promised measures to shut the border to migrants and asylum seekers, combined with a “mass deportation” campaign, will get an assist from the U.S. Congress, where the President-Elect’s Republican Party will hold majorities in the Senate (53-47) and House of Representatives (220-215). The 119th Congress will convene on Friday, January 3.

DHS Secretary

The Senate may quickly confirm Trump’s choice to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R). DHS includes Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Noem’s confirmation hearing is likely to take place before Inauguration Day.

The Washington Examiner noted that as secretary, Noem, “who has limited experience with immigration policy,” would focus more on aspects of DHS that have less to do with the border and migration—transportation security, emergency management, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and other agencies. Miller and Trump’s White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, would likely play a more direct role in immigration and border security.

That could be complicated, Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute—a top Clinton-era migration policy official— told NPR, since White House officials, who do not require Senate confirmation, don’t have the same statutory authority to carry out policies that the DHS Secretary does.

Reconciliation package

A larger part of the Republicans’ congressional agenda will be the quick passage of legislation. Under the Senate’s filibuster rule, most bills need to get 60 out of 100 votes to end debate and proceed to passage, and the Republicans have just 53 senators. An exception to the filibuster, though, is a process called “ reconciliation,” which allows some budget-related bills to pass with 50 of 100 votes.

Under the Senate’s Byrd Rule, a bill can pass with a simple majority if it has “a nontangential impact on spending, revenues, and the deficit,” as The Hill explained. Whether legislation meets that definition is up to a ruling by the Senate Parliamentarian, an official who “serves at the pleasure of the majority leader” of the chamber. In 2021, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who has held the post since 2012, ruled against the Biden administration and Senate Democrats when they sought to pass a package of immigration reform measures via reconciliation.

A source told The Hill that “Senate Republicans will test the limits of the budget reconciliation rules” next month when they seek to pass a large package of border and immigration measures via reconciliation, perhaps with defense and energy measures also included. (A likely second reconciliation bill, which would come later, would aim to preserve tax cuts passed during Trump’s last administration.)

Miller told Fox News that using reconciliation, Congress could get a border and immigration bill to Trump’s desk for signature as soon as the end of January or early February. To do this, incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said that in its first months, the body will move very fast, with no Fridays off and reduced time for holding votes. The House and Senate might pass a budget resolution before January 20, which would allow the reconciliation package to move ahead.

“While I support spending restrictions and tax cuts, my top priority—and the first order of business in the Senate Budget Committee—is to secure a broken border,” tweeted the incoming Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). “The bill will be transformational, it will be paid for, and it will go first.”

Nothing is clear yet, but estimates of the Republicans’ border and migration measures’ total cost range from $85 billion to $120 billion. (Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council pointed out that $120 billion is about equal to Border Patrol’s cumulative budget since 1990.) To pay for that, sources told Axios, Republicans might overturn President Biden’s student loan program, “which could free up to $200 billion.”

Such numbers imply a wide variety of hardline border and migration restriction initiatives, not all of which may meet the definition of “reconciliation,” but most of which would have a decent probability of passing without a single Democratic senator’s vote.

• Miller said to expect “a massive increase in [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers working on the deportation operation” along with “a historic increase in border agents, a pay raise for both, full funding for military operations, full funding for ICE beds, full funding for air and marine operations, full funding for all of the barriers and technology you need to ensure there’s never another ‘gotaway’ entering this country.” (As Border Patrol estimated 588,215 “gotaways,” or migrants who evaded capture, in 2023, that goal is unlikely to be met.)
• In addition to the above, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) specified more border wall and related infrastructure construction, more deportation flights, and more budget for CBP’s National Vetting Center, which screens migrants’ eligibility to enter or remain in the United States.
• One of the House Republicans’ leading border hawks, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), mentioned other budget measures like taxing immigrants’ remittances of funds to relatives in their home countries and charging fees to recipients of humanitarian parole status.

Roy said he would reintroduce H.R. 2, a package of hardline measures that, among other changes, would all but eliminate asylum access at the U.S.-Mexico border. H.R. 2 passed the House without a single Democratic vote in May 2023 but did not come up in the Democratic-majority Senate. Many of its provisions would fail to get a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the 2025 Republican-majority Senate, but some might slip through under reconciliation.

Setting the stage for mass deportation

In interviews with primarily conservative news outlets, Tom Homan, the incoming White House “border czar,” and Stephen Miller, the incoming White House deputy chief of staff, have been previewing one of the new administration’s principal initiatives: a promised “mass deportation” campaign to remove millions of undocumented people from the United States. Miller calls it “the largest deportation operation in American history.” President-Elect Trump, too, discussed the deportation plan in a December 8 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press program. (See the New York Times’s fact-check of several claims that Trump made during that interview.)

The undocumented population

“Today, there are at least 13 million undocumented people living in the United States,” the American Immigration Council’s (AIC) Reichlin-Melnick reported in testimony before a contentious December 10 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the mass deportation proposal. Reichlin-Melnick cited DHS data and his organization’s research. “Nearly five million have been here for a minimum of 25 years, and nearly 1.5 million have been here for a minimum of 35 years.”

The price tag

Deporting this many people would be a massive and disruptive undertaking. Reichlin-Melnick’s testimony and AIC’s earlier research cited a cost of $315 billion to deport all 13 million people “in a single mass deportation operation” and $968 billion if, as would be more likely, the operation stretched out over 10 years. The estimated blow to the U.S. workforce would reduce U.S. Gross Domestic Product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent, a sharper drop than the Great Recession of the late 2000s (4.3%).

Asked on Fox News about the cost, Homan said, “Well, $86 billion is the minimum,” referring back to the reconciliation package that will go before Congress as early as January.

People who might be targeted first

A “mass deportation” campaign would probably begin with people who have final removal orders from immigration courts, or those who have some sort of criminal record in the United States. According to ICE data obtained by Fox, as of November 24, 1,445,549 non-citizens had final orders of removal from immigration courts but not in ICE custody, known as the “non-detained docket.” The top nationalities are citizens of Honduras (261,651), Guatemala (253,413), Mexico (252,044), and El Salvador (203,822), well ahead of fifth-place Nicaragua (45,995).

Only about 55 percent of those final removal orders are “executable”: the others cannot be sent back to their home countries because they have pending petitions for asylum or other protection. In other cases (discussed below), ICE cannot remove people because their countries are not accepting deportees from the United States.

Trump and other incoming officials say that they plan to begin by deporting those with criminal records. “We’re starting with the criminals, and we gotta do it,” Trump told Meet the Press, “and then we’re starting with others, and we’ll see how it goes.” More than 90 percent of undocumented migrants in the United States have no criminal record. In a September response to an information request from border-district Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), ICE reported that 662,566 people on its docket have a criminal history. The largest category was traffic offenses.

Separating families, or deporting U.S. citizens with their parents

Among the many concerns that “mass deportation” raises, one of the most immediate is the likelihood that the Trump administration’s arrests and removals will separate undocumented parents from their U.S.-born, U.S. citizen children. More than 4 million minor children live with undocumented parents in the United States.

Asked on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in October whether there is a way to carry out such deportations without separating families, Homan shrugged it off: “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.” Trump echoed that on Meet the Press: “Well, I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

While the law would not allow the U.S. government to force U.S. citizens out of the country, the incoming administration appears willing to force parents to make the terrible choice of leaving their children in the United States or taking their children with them to countries where the children do not have citizenship.

Trump went further, reiterating his intention to do away with the U.S. constitutional provision, birthright citizenship, that confers U.S. citizenship on all individuals born on U.S. soil.

Other possible moves

Several other controversial aspects of “mass deportation” emerged, or received further media attention, during the past week.

• NBC News revealed that the incoming administration intends to rescind a policy largely preventing ICE from arresting undocumented people in “sensitive locations” like houses of worship, schools, hospitals, funerals, weddings, or public demonstrations. An outcome could be undocumented people with infectious diseases refusing to seek medical care, or children receiving no education.
• Homan said that ICE will set up a phone line that people can use to alert agents about undocumented people in their communities.
• ICE has a workforce of about 20,000, about 41,000 detention beds, and about a dozen charter planes with which to deport people. The administration has plans to augment that with resources from other agencies. Those include:                     
  • State and local law enforcement and prisons. “Since 2015, 82% of ICE arrests occurred inside of a local, state, or federal jail,” according to the AIC’s Adriel Orozco. The incoming administration is likely to engage in aggressive conflict with states and cities, considered “sanctuary jurisdictions,” that do not give ICE access to people detained by their criminal justice systems.
  • The U.S. military and state National Guard forces. Homan has said that he expects armed service members not to be “kicking in doors” but supporting mass deportation in a logistical capacity: roles like transportation, managing staging facilities, and perhaps providing deportation aircraft. (See WOLA’s November 22 Border Update.)
  • The private sector. “I’ve been meeting with these tech companies the last couple weeks to find out what’s the latest and brightest technology available, so we’re already working on that plan,” Homan told television personality “Dr. Phil” McGraw, NBC News reported.
  • Armed militias. On Fox News, Homan mentioned “thousands of retired border patrol agents, retired military, that want to come in and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do this deportation operation.” Armed citizen groups along the border with names like the “Texas Three Percenters” and “Arizona Border Recon” say that they stand ready to help.

State and local response

Twenty-six Republican state governors issued a December 11 statement supporting the incoming administration’s deportation plan: “We stand ready to utilize every tool at our disposal—whether through state law enforcement or the National Guard—to support President Trump in this vital mission.” Several Republican-governed states—and Arizona, through a ballot measure—are passing laws making unauthorized border crossing a state crime. Homan appears to have accepted Texas’s offer to lease a recently purchased 1,400-acre ranch along the border, in Starr County, perhaps to stage people about to be deported.

Democratic governors’ message is less unified. The New York Times interviewed 11 of them at a meeting of the Democratic Governors’ Association and found many “now charting a more careful course.” While they “often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown,” they “were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation,” especially in the deportation of undocumented people with criminal records.

The mayor of New York, Eric Adams—who has vocally complained about the number of migrants arriving in his city— said that he looks forward to meeting with Homan to discuss areas of common work. Roll Call noted the emergence of a contingent of Democratic House members, calling them “border hawks,” who appear willing to work with the Trump administration on parts of its agenda even if they are not on board with the entire mass deportation plan. The article cited Rep. Mike Levin (D-California), Rep. Don Davis (D-North Carolina), Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York), and two freshman Democratic members from New York, Laura Gillen and Josh Riley.

Democratic governors do appear willing to resist Trump administration requests to use state jails or National Guard personnel for the deportation effort. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “emotional, tears welling and his face turning scarlet,” told the New York Times that he is “going to have the back of those folks every g—d—n second of the day.” Newsom visited California’s border this week to announce an increasing deployment of National Guard personnel for a drug interdiction mission, along with plans to build a third San Diego-area land-border port of entry at Otay Mesa East.

“I’ve seen some of these Democratic governors say they’re going to stand in the way,” Homan said. “They’re going to make it hard for us. A suggestion: If you’re not going to help us, get the hell out of the way because we’re going to do it.” He singled out Chicago: “Chicago is in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks.” The incoming “czar” threatened to prosecute Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democratic politicians for “harboring and concealing” undocumented aliens if they impede the mass deportation effort.

Stripping documentation

The population of migrants subject to deportation could grow if Trump uses presidential power to cancel, or declines to renew, migratory statuses currently protecting about 2 million undocumented people from being removed. These include:

• Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from countries deemed too unsafe for return. TPS currently protects about 1,095,115 people from 17 countries, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, but the President must renew it regularly, and 13 countries’ designations expire in 2025.
• Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a status that the Obama administration created in 2012 to protect “DREAMers,” undocumented people brought to the United States as children. Of about 3 million people who fit that description, about 535,000 have DACA status. “I want to be able to work something out” for DACA recipients, Trump told Meet the Press, though Vox recalled that, during his last term, he tried to terminate the program only to be blocked by the Supreme Court over procedural objections.
• The Biden administration allowed over 531,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States with a two-year humanitarian parole status that Trump could decide to cancel, or decline to renew. That could leave “many vulnerable to deportation and unable to find alternative legal protections,” Jonathan Blitzer wrote in the New Yorker.

Seven Democratic senators sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to act before he leaves office to extend TPS for current recipients, to expedite DACA renewal applications, and to “prioritize adjudication of pending asylum claims.” Whether the outgoing administration will do so is unclear: “They’re afraid of their own shadow on this issue,” a Democratic congressional aide told CNN. A column at USA Today by Yael Schacher and Ari Sawyer of Refugees International implored Biden and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to work together to increase the number of asylum seekers who can access U.S. ports of entry using the CBP One smartphone application, while that option continues to exist.

The climate facing migrant defenders

The United States’ community of immigrant rights defenders are “bracing for the worst” after Inauguration Day, Jonah Valdez wrote at the Intercept. They face challenges that were not as acute in 2017, like a less favorable public opinion climate, fatigue and burnout, reduced philanthropic funding, and the likelihood of more repressive policies targeting their organizations.

Public opinion, though, is inconstant. “Right now, polling shows that while most Americans support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, support could change as mass deportations become real, especially if it affects the labor market, prices of goods, or separates families,” read an analysis from the polling firm Ipsos.

The impact in Mexico, and elsewhere along the migration route

If it must happen by air, deporting people is costly, and it may be impossible if the migrant’s home country does not accept removal flights. The above-cited ICE response to a Fox News information request cited 15 countries as “uncooperative,” meaning they refuse most U.S. deportation planes: Bhutan, Burma, China, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Laos, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, and Venezuela. Another 11 countries are “at risk of non-compliance” because they receive few flights: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Gabon, Gambia, Iraq, Jamaica, Nicaragua, South Sudan, St. Lucia, and Vietnam.

Removals to third countries

As a result, the incoming Trump administration is seeking third countries that may be willing to accept some deportees. NBC News, citing three unnamed sources, reported that “countries on the list have included but may not be limited to Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Panama, and Grenada.”

These four states’ combined population is just over 5 million people, so their capacity to receive deportees would be small. Grenada and Panama stated that they had not received any such request. The Bahamas Foreign Ministry, while not consulted, quickly refused: “The Bahamas simply does not have the resources to accommodate such a request,” a statement read.

Deportation across the land border into Mexico is far less costly, and the sources told NBC News that the incoming administration “also wants Mexico to accept non-Mexicans who are deported from the United States”: not just people detained at the border, but third-country nationals already living in the U.S. interior. WOLA’s December 6 Border Update listed occasions since 2019 when Mexico’s government permitted the return from the border of non-Mexican citizens.

The sources told NBC “that Trump will use the threat of tariffs in an effort to compel Mexico to comply.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on December 5 that she will ask Trump to deport non-Mexican citizens directly to their home countries, not at the land border. “We are supportive, but our main function is to receive Mexicans,” Sheinbaum said. Business leaders in Ciudad Juárez noted that Mexican government bureaucracy makes it difficult for them to hire foreign nationals, which drives non-Mexican migrants back into the informal economy.

Removals of Mexican citizens

There is less that Mexico can do to forestall the Trump administration vastly increasing the number of Mexican citizens deported into Mexico over the land border. Approximately 5.1 million Mexican citizens live irregularly in the United States, according to a December 5 letter to Sheinbaum from dozens of migrant rights defense organizations, including WOLA. The letter called on the Mexican government to improve consular services for Mexicans in the United States, to vastly expand assistance for those being deported, and to push the U.S. government to honor and process asylum requests at the border.

Whether just Mexican citizens or incorporating other nationalities, the next administration’s likely escalation of deportations into Mexico comes at an especially challenging time, as Mexico’s government, facing its largest deficit since the 1980s, is slashing agencies’ budgets. That includes those of its two key migration management agencies: the National Migration Institute (INM) and the far smaller Mexican Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR). Both are “already being pushed to their breaking points,” read a Washington Post column by León Krauze.

Migration through Mexico

Meanwhile, many migrants continue to enter Mexico through the country’s southern border. Though the past week has not seen reports of new attempts to form “caravans,” América Pérez, the Jesuit Refugee Services coordinator in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, told EFE that “despite the rhetoric, people are still arriving.” Near Mexico City, the daily La Jornada visited an encampment where 1,500 non-Mexican migrants, many of them families, are living in cardboard and wooden shacks while seeking CBP One appointments at U.S. border ports of entry.

In some cities along Mexico’s northern border, where CBP One applicants need only be present for their appointments and can spend the months-long wait elsewhere, migrant shelters are emptying. In Ciudad Juárez, the municipal government last week closed its five-year-old Kiki Romero shelter, which will revert to being a gymnasium.

Mexican asylum seekers

Citizens of Mexico, however, continue to come to the U.S. border zone after fleeing violence elsewhere in the country. The Mexican magazine Proceso, citing the main migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, across from Eagle Pass, Texas, reported that arrivals there have been increasing from organized crime-hit states along Mexico’s Pacific, like Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas.

In a new report, Human Rights Watch found that on the U.S. side of the border, Border Patrol agents “systematically deny Mexican asylum seekers access to asylum processes, mistreat them in custody, and forcibly return them to Mexico, often in violation of U.S. and international human rights law.” Verbal and sometimes physical abuse is common, as is the non-return or destruction of asylum seekers’ belongings. A woman fleeing Michoacán said that while in custody, Border Patrol agents “would call us ‘dogs,’ and they would say ‘f— you’ all the time.”

The Darién Gap

Further south, migration has plummeted in the Darién Gap jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama. Panama’s government published data on December 6 showing that November 2024 saw the fewest Darién Gap migrants (11,144) of any month since April 2022. During the first 11 months of 2024, 277,354 people, 70 percent of them citizens of Venezuela, traversed this dangerous route. That is down 44 percent from the 495,459 people who crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, the record year.

Data table

A key reason for November’s drop may be stepped-up efforts by Panama’s government to block and deport some migrants. Even more likely is the weather. November is the height of the rainy season in southern Central America: the Darién paths are especially miserable with muddy trails and flooded rivers, while maritime routes can be dangerous. A December 6 report from Colombia’s migration agency showed that on at least three days in November, the boats leading to the Darién route’s starting point from the ports of Necoclí and Turbo, Colombia, were shut down completely by climate conditions.

There could also be a “Trump effect.” The election of an anti-immigrant president in the United States may be causing would-be migrants to change their plans, for now, until they have better information about what may await them. This is despite the disastrous outcome and repressive aftermath of the disputed July 28 elections in Venezuela.

Elsewhere along the U.S.-bound migration route

Elsewhere, although China is on the above-cited ICE list of “uncooperative” countries refusing to receive deportees, the Beijing government has increased its reception of U.S. removal flights. On December 9 Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border, who closely tracks deportation flights, reported a new flight to Shenyang, in northern China, the fourth large jet since June. A Chinese government spokesperson told Newsweek that it “is working with relevant departments in the U.S. and other countries to firmly crack down on such crimes and hold migrant smuggling plotters and organizers accountable.”

Deportations to authoritarian countries like China, however, raise urgent concerns for the rights of those who get returned. In El Salvador, El Faro talked to relatives of “José Roger,” a deported migrant who has no criminal record but was arrested at the airport upon arrival from the United States. Apparently swept up in President Nayib Bukele’s mass incarceration crackdown on suspected gang members, José Roger has been imprisoned since August 2023.

Personnel changes at border and migration agencies

The incoming Trump administration named several officials with border and migration responsibilities over the past week. At the beginning of December, the only known appointments were Homeland Security secretary nominee Kristi Noem, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and White House “border czar” Tom Homan. The transition team has since named several more.

Rodney Scott is Trump’s nominee to be the next commissioner of CBP. This agency includes Border Patrol, the Office of Field Operations manning ports of entry, and an Air and Marine branch, for a total of about 60,000 law enforcement officers. Scott served as Border Patrol chief in 2020 and stayed on for the first six months of the Biden administration until being forced out, after which he was an outspoken administration critic. His appointment was very popular with unnamed Border Patrol agents contacted by the Washington Examiner, one of whom called Scott a “savior.”

Human rights advocates have noted concerns about Scott’s record, among them involvement in the widely criticized investigation of the 2010 beating death of Mexican citizen Anastasio Hernandez in San Diego; membership in a Border Patrol Facebook group with racist, violent, and lewd content; and statements dismissing concerns about family separation. Scott will replace CBP “Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner” Troy Miller, who has managed the agency since late 2021.

Caleb Vitello, a career ICE official with a lower profile, is Trump’s pick to lead ICE in an acting capacity. (His surname is spelled differently than Ronald Vitiello, the acting ICE director in 2018-19.) ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since Sarah Saldaña during the last two years of Barack Obama’s administration.

Anthony “Tony” Salisbury, special agent in charge of the ICE Homeland Security Investigations office in Miami, will come to the White House as a deputy homeland security advisor reporting to Stephen Miller.

The incoming administration has yet to name a new Border Patrol chief. Jason Owens, who has led the agency since mid-2023, may stay on.

The longtime, recently retired head of the Border Patrol agents’ union, the National Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, is the Trump administration’s pick to serve as ambassador to Chile. Judd is a very outspoken critic of the Biden administration who, in many appearances on conservative media, repeated the conspiracy theory that Democrats encourage migration to “replace” White Americans. It is unclear why Judd, with no diplomatic background, would be sent to faraway Chile; without drawing a connection, the Tucson Sentinel recalled that Judd supported compromise Senate border legislation that failed in February after Trump urged Republicans to oppose it. Since 2014, Chileans have been the only Latin American nation whose citizens can enter the United States without first obtaining a visa; it is possible that Judd could lead a Trump administration move to rescind Chile’s participation in the Visa Waiver program.

The ambassador to Mexico will play a key role in the incoming administration’s efforts to pressure the Mexican government to block migrants and accept deportees. For that role, Trump has chosen Ron Johnson (not the senator from Wisconsin), a former Special Forces officer and CIA operative who was the last Trump administration’s ambassador in El Salvador.

Other news

• A meticulous year-long investigation by the Washington Post, Lighthouse Reports, and Mexico’s El Universal revealed a dramatic official underreporting of migrant drowning deaths in the Rio Grande, particularly near Eagle Pass, Texas. It linked a sharp rise in fatalities to intensified border enforcement, including Texas’s state Operation Lone Star security crackdown, which operates heavily in Eagle Pass. Between 2017 and 2023, at least 1,107 migrants drowned in the Rio Grande, with deaths peaking in 2022. Children accounted for over 10 percent of fatalities in 2023.
• NBC News profiled Operation ID, a Texas State University program that employs students and volunteers to help border counties identify the remains of migrants. The report noted that only two Texas border counties have medical examiners able to carry out death investigations.
• A woman was injured after falling from the border wall near San Diego on the evening of December 6, according to local news, while her 13-year-old daughter had to be rescued from atop the barrier.
• A report from the Migration Policy Institute reviewed the Biden administration’s mixed legacy on immigration policy. It found that while the outgoing administration restored legal pathways closed by the Trump administration and introduced new ones, it also introduced strict new limits on access to asylum. The administration was often hindered by political opposition, insufficient resources, and systemic challenges, was unable to shake public perceptions of a “border crisis,” and ended up satisfying neither rights advocates nor conservative critics.
• The annual National Defense Authorization Act, currently heading to a vote in Congress, would add $100 million in new funding and construction for the Defense Department’s decades-old counter-drug support mission at the border.
• Writing in the New York Review of Books, Piper French examined the long-term fallout of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, including its ongoing impact on separated families and their renewed vulnerability after Trump reassumes power. French critiqued the Biden administration’s slow response to reunification and the potential for further harm if protections are dismantled—especially since public outrage has diminished since 2018.
• At InSight Crime, Steven Dudley explained why Trump’s crackdown on migration could bring new profits to criminal groups specializing in migrant smuggling, “who stand to profit from higher prices and fresh opportunities if the chaos and confusion expected from his second administration transpire.” Similarly, a column at the Conversation from Tufts University Professor Katrina Burgess drew on past research to explain “that Trump’s approach is unlikely to stop migrants from trying to enter the U.S. but very likely to enrich criminals.”
• A feature at NPR’s Latino USA program, by producer Reynaldo Leaños Jr., examined the surveillance technology deployed along the border, including about 500 towers built in recent decades, and what they mean “for the future of those crossing, and living, on the border.”
• Texas Public Radio’s “American Homefront Project” and the Times of London covered the deaths of at least 17 Texas National Guard personnel participating in the state government’s Operation Lone Star since 2021. According to the radio network, “The deaths include at least seven suicides, two accidental shootings, and two motor vehicle accidents. One guardsman drowned while attempting to save migrants who were crossing the Rio Grande.”
• A brief report at Arizona’s Family noted that “a U.S. Customs agent and his spouse” were arrested in the border town of Douglas for charges including drug possession, domestic violence, and child abuse.
• The Department of Justice announced the arrest in Guatemala, and imminent extradition, of five smugglers, part of a local network called “Los Quinos,” who arranged the travel of some of the more than 50 migrants who died when the trailer truck smuggling them crashed near Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico on December 9, 2021.