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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:
Even before Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, the new Republican majority in the U.S. Congress is moving to implement hard-line border and migration measures. The “Laken Riley Act,” which mandates detentions for minor crimes and gives superpowers to state attorneys-general, is nearing passage. Next week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee will hold hearings on the Homeland Security secretary nominee and the Remain in Mexico program. A big “reconciliation” package of spending for border hardening and deportations awaits, though it may be later than initially expected.
Donald Trump expects to issue a large number of executive orders regarding the border and migration on January 20, possibly including a revival of Title 42. Officials have been discussing, without very much detail, plans for a mass deportation campaign that could cost dozens of billions of dollars per year. Governments in Mexico and Central America are concerned about the economic impact and about the likelihood that the Trump administration may push them to accept deportations of other countries’ citizens. The President of Honduras threatened to close a 42-year-old U.S. military base.
Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions at the border have fallen to levels not seen since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Darién Gap, too, migration has plummeted. Anticipation of the new Trump administration may be a reason. Large numbers of people continue to be stranded in Mexico, often hoping to get appointments using the CBP One app—a migration pathway that the new Trump administration appears determined to abolish.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Republican-led Congress Accelerating Border and Migration Agenda
The 119th Congress, with Republican majorities in the House of Representatives (220-215) and the Senate (53-47), began work on January 3, 17 days before Donald Trump’s coming inauguration. Congressional leadership is already moving on plans to implement Trump’s hard-line border and migration agenda.
They include the confirmation of a Homeland Security secretary; a gigantic budget package to enable a mass deportation campaign and other measures; a further codification of the “Remain in Mexico” program; and a bill mandating detentions of migrants accused of minor crimes and empowering state attorneys-general to overrule federal immigration policy.
“We will be addressing border. We have got a number of bills just over the next two weeks that we’re going to address the low-hanging fruit, so to speak,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told Fox News on January 5. Among these smaller measures are a requirement that voters prove citizenship at the polls, a provision for swift deportations of migrants determined to have committed sexual violence, a mandate for more border wall construction, and cuts to federal funds to jurisdictions that do not fully cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One bill less likely to come to a vote would move Customs and Border Protection (CBP) headquarters from Washington to Texas.
“Laken Riley Act”
One bill passed the House already, on January 7. The Laken Riley Act ( H.R. 29, named for a Georgia woman killed by a man from Venezuela in February 2024) cleared the House by a 264-159 vote, with 48 Democrats joining all Republicans. (That is up from 37 Democrats when the bill passed the House in 2024; the Democratic-majority Senate at the time did not take it up). As of January 9, the bill is before the Senate, where it appears to have the support of enough Democratic senators to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to avoid a filibuster. On the afternoon of the 9th, 33 out of 42 Democratic-caucusing senators who were present voted, along with all Republicans present, to allow the bill’s consideration.
The man convicted of murder in Riley’s case, José Antonio Ibarra, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022; months before the homicide, he was arrested for shoplifting but later released. (The case is tragic, but studies show that migrants, especially undocumented migrants, tend to commit violent crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens.)
The Laken Riley Act would require that any “inadmissible” migrants arrested—not found guilty, merely arrested—for even minor theft be detained until their cases are resolved. The “inadmissible” category includes people with asylum cases before U.S. immigration courts and recipients of other temporary statuses like humanitarian parole, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
“Unfortunately, there are countless real-life examples of people getting wrongfully arrested for crimes they didn’t commit,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington). “People deserve to have their day in court and are innocent until proven guilty. That seems to be something that the majority has forgotten or doesn’t seem to care about.”
The bill would also empower U.S. states’ attorneys-general to sue the federal government if a released immigrant commits crimes, and petition federal judges to place injunctions freezing aspects of federal immigration policy, including banning visas to entire nationalities, like China and India, whose governments rarely allow U.S. deportation flights to land in their territory.
This could give ultra-conservative “state attorneys general, like Ken Paxton in Texas, veto power over large swaths of federal immigration policy,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council warned in a column at MSNBC. At Reason, Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School called the bill “a Trojan horse intended to make it easier for state governments to pursue lawsuits to block various types of legal migration.”
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso, argued in a video that the bill “eliminates a cornerstone of the American judicial system.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told reporter Pablo Manríquez, “I fear that it’s only going to be when it comes to people’s doorsteps that they’re going to realize fully what people have consented to.”
In the Senate, some Democrats, especially from swing states, have signaled their intention to vote for the Laken Riley Act, an apparent indicator of the national mood’s rightward shift on migration. An NBC News analysis contended that “momentum is gaining among immigration rights groups and some Democrats for policies that would move the party to the right on immigration.” These may include some hardening of the border along with opening other legal immigration pathways.
Only seven Democratic senators’ votes are needed to override a filibuster, along with 53 Republican votes. Democrats favoring the Laken Riley Act so far include Rubén Gallego (D-Arizona) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan), newly elected senators who voted for the bill in the House last year; Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona); Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania); Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia); and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan).
Gallego, the son of immigrants from Colombia and Mexico, said, “We’re not going to automatically just knee-jerk reject anything that comes from the White House. We’re not going to run to the barricades when they use words like ‘mass deportation,’ because even now, to this day, they have not really qualified what their plans are.” Gallego, Slotkin, and Fetterman are members of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where Peters is the ranking Democrat.
DHS Secretary nomination
Now chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), that committee will meet on January 15 to question Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As governor of South Dakota, Noem sent National Guard troops from her state to Texas to support Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown; her deployment counted with about $1 million in funding from a Tennessee-based billionaire.
Noem’s nomination is likely to win quick approval. She will probably play a larger day-to-day role in aspects of DHS that have less to do with the border and migration (agencies like TSA, FEMA, Secret Service, Coast Guard, CISA, and others). Border and migration policy may be more directly managed by two White House officials whose positions don’t need Senate confirmation: “Border Czar” Tom Homan and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Both are outspoken hardliners.
“Remain in Mexico”
The following day (Thursday, January 16), the Senate Homeland Security Committee is to hold a hearing on the “Remain in Mexico” policy, also known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” a Trump-era initiative that forced over 70,000 non-Mexican asylum seekers to await their U.S. immigration court hearings inside Mexico. Human rights monitors documented over 1,500 cases of violence perpetrated against these asylum seekers while they waited in Mexico.
Joe Biden shut down “Remain in Mexico” upon taking office. At the time, the pandemic-era Title 42 policy, which Biden kept in place, had shut down asylum access anyway and was expelling hundreds of thousands into Mexico.
Trump and the Republican congressional majority are seeking to reinstate Remain in Mexico, and a bill introduced in the House by a newly elected representative from Texas, Brandon Gill (R), would enact that. Any reinstatement, though, would require the Mexican government’s assent.
The Reconciliation package
Sometime after Inauguration Day, Congress is to pursue a giant package of spending on measures to tighten the border and support the new administration’s plans to carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented migrants living in the United States (see below).
Republican leadership would design the package to pass the Senate with a 50-vote majority, avoiding the 60-vote requirement that Senate rules usually require to halt debate and move to approve legislation (the filibuster). This is only possible if the bill’s authors can show that each of its provisions has a significant impact on the federal budget. This exception to the filibuster, which can be invoked once or twice a year, is called “reconciliation.”
At a 50-vote threshold, the Senate’s Republicans can pass a reconciliation bill without a single Democratic vote; no bipartisan negotiation would be necessary. (For more on the reconciliation package’s process and likely contents, see WOLA’s December 13, 2024 Border Update.)
At year’s end, it appeared that the incoming administration and congressional leadership had agreed to pursue two reconciliation bills: one later in the spring to lock in tax cuts, and one slated for passage by mid-February to fund border, deportation, and other migration policy changes. That timetable is shifting, though, as President-Elect Trump has been waffling (the word the New York Times used) on how to proceed.
Trump and House Republicans are now leaning toward moving the tax and border-migration measures in a single, enormous reconciliation bill. House Republican leaders fear their razor-thin majority may not be enough to get two bills passed; Senate leaders have said they prefer two bills. A one-bill approach could push the reconciliation bill’s timetable for passage into the spring, perhaps March or April.
As of now, it appears that the reconciliation process will be less rushed than anticipated, and it may be a few weeks before the bill’s border and migration provisions become public.
Bracing for Executive Orders and “Mass Deportation”
President-Elect Trump and aligned legislators and officials responded to the tragic truck attack on New Year’s celebrants in New Orleans by blaming what Trump called “open border” policies—even though the attack’s perpetrator was a radicalized U.S.-born military veteran.
The invective sets the stage for a raft of executive actions that the new president plans to issue upon his January 20 inauguration, including the launch of a promised “mass deportation” effort to remove as many as possible of the estimated 11 million to 13 million people living undocumented in the United States, plus others whose temporary statuses the new administration may revoke.
In a January 8 meeting with Senate Republicans, senior officials of the incoming administration revealed that Trump plans to issue 100 executive orders upon taking office, many of them dealing with the border and migration.
Axios reported that, according to incoming Deputy White House Chief Of Staff Stephen Miller, these would include a reinstatement of Title 42, the pandemic-era public health policy that expelled people from the U.S.-Mexico border nearly 3 million times without a chance to request asylum. It is not clear what illness Miller would utilize to justify a new pandemic restriction, whether the White House can compel the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to approve it, or whether Mexico would again agree to receive expulsions of non-Mexican migrants, as it did nearly a million times between 2020 and 2023.
Other orders, though, are likely to enable the mass deportation plan, including some probably enlisting the help of different government agencies, including state and local jurisdictions.
Details about mass deportation remain sketchy, with incoming “Border Czar” Tom Homan dropping the most hints in rounds of media appearances full of tough talk that appears intended to sow fear among immigrant communities.
Homan continues to pledge to begin the campaign by focusing on undocumented people who have committed criminal offenses in the past, including those in state and local prisons. “We would love to work in local jails, but sanctuary cities won’t allow us into those jails,” Homan has reiterated, specifying that broader ICE raids are more likely in the neighborhoods of cities and states that do not cooperate in handing over undocumented people in police custody. Those raids, he has acknowledged, would involve many “collateral arrests” of undocumented migrants without criminal records. (Many police jurisdictions worry that cooperation with ICE complicates their job by making undocumented victims and witnesses less likely to come forward.)
“Tom Homan, along with Stephen Miller and President Trump himself, are seeking ‘shock and awe’ and to instill panic in immigrant communities,” Vanessa Cárdenas of America’s Voice, an immigrant rights defense organization, told the Boston Herald. “The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders,” said Cardinal Robert McElroy, the newly named archbishop of Washington, DC. “At the same time, we are called always to have a sense of the dignity of every human person. And thus, plans which have been talked about at some levels of having a wider indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine. So we’ll have to see what emerges in the administration.”
In addition to raids, ICE appears to be laying out plans to increase its detention capacity from its current level of 41,500 beds to at least 100,000, according to Eunice Cho of the ACLU.
A mass deportation campaign’s cost is the main reason the “reconciliation” bill headed for the U.S. Congress (see above) could carry a price tag of $80 to $100 billion or more. Homan acknowledged a possible initial cost of $86 billion in remarks in Texas on January 6. (The entire DHS budget, by contrast, is about $100 billion this year.) Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told CBS News’s Face the Nation that the deportation plan’s cost remains unclear: “What we’re trying to do is get an assessment from the people who are going to be in place.”
A mass deportation campaign, of course, requires that foreign governments be willing to accept repatriations of large numbers of their citizens. If a nation refuses to accept U.S. deportation flights, Homan and others have said, the new administration will dialogue with other governments about accepting third countries’ citizens. Speaking to Face the Nation, Homan said he is open to holding talks even with Venezuela.
We already have countries talking about taking back people from other countries if – if, for instance, Venezuela don’t want to take their people back, there’s others ways we can do it. There’s other countries that will be willing to accept them. We’re hoping that President Trump will work with Venezuela, like he did with Mexico and El Salvador and get these countries to take them back. If they don’t, they’re still going to be deported, they’re just going to be deported to a different country.
Among foreign leaders with whom Homan has conversed recently is Consuelo Porras, the controversial attorney-general of Guatemala, whose U.S. visa has been revoked for “significant corruption” while she continues to persecute anti-corruption judges, prosecutors, and journalists. It is not clear whether Porras, who is a political adversary of elected president Bernardo Arévalo, discussed cooperation with mass deportation or whether the conversation with Homan focused on countering migrant smuggling networks.
In El Salvador, the government of President Nayib Bukele, a Trump admirer, “has not spoken publicly about mass deportations,” the New York Times noted. Reporting for Capital and Main, Kate Morrissey raised the alarming possibility that deportees to El Salvador could end up suffering torture if, upon arrival, they get jailed as part of the Bukele government’s anti-gang mass-incarceration scheme. Morrissey pointed out this would violate U.S. commitments under the Convention Against Torture.
Another Central American leader does not intend to enable mass deportation. Ximena Castro, the president of Honduras, said on January 1 that if the Trump administration massively seeks to deport Hondurans from the U.S. interior, she will demand closure of a 42-year-old U.S. military presence at the Soto Cano military base near the city of Comayagua. “Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military arena,” said Castro, whose decision on a base closure would not need legislative approval.
The U.S. base in Honduras, established during the Reagan administration’s cold-war campaign against leftist insurgencies and governments in Central America, currently hosts about 500 U.S. military personnel, primarily reservists, who carry out exercises, engagements, humanitarian missions, and some counter-drug efforts.
On Twitter, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) caused a stir in Guatemala by proposing that the base relocate there. Guatemalan officials said that no discussions about a U.S. base have taken place.
According to a November 2024 ICE response to a Fox News information request, Mexico and Central America account for more than a million (70%) of the 1.45 million people on ICE’s non-detained docket with final removal orders, the category of migrants most likely to be caught up in a first wave of mass deportations.
Sending a large number of deportees to those countries could have severe economic effects, likely driving them into recession by increasing their unemployed populations and eradicating the remittances that those migrants had been sending home. Officials in Mexican border states, like Tamaulipas Governor Américo Villareal, worry about large numbers of deported people concentrated in their jurisdictions after being repatriated there.
As it shares a long land border and is the largest nationality of undocumented migrants in the United States, Mexico would be at the center of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. Administration officials are likely to ask—or demand, perhaps by threatening tariffs—that the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum take back not just deportations of Mexicans arrested at the border and in the U.S. interior, but also deportations and expulsions of other countries’ citizens upon their arrest at the border.
Since 2019, Mexico has agreed to accept deportations or expulsions under the Remain in Mexico program, the Title 42 pandemic order (for seven countries), and the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions (for four countries). On January 3, Sheinbaum said, “We can collaborate through different mechanisms” when migrants come from countries that do not accept deportations.
Still, there is no clarity yet about the circumstances under which the incoming administration would call on Mexico to accept other nationalities’ deportees. It is especially unclear whether the new administration would ask Mexico to accept non-Mexican nationals arrested by ICE in the U.S. interior after living in the United States for months or years.
“It does appear they [Mexican government officials] take the incoming Trump administration seriously enough to anticipate that they’ll have to take a lot of Mexican nationals back,” Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council told New York Magazine. “How much capacity they feel they have for everybody else is an open question.”
Sheinbaum’s focus for now has been on Mexicans in the United States. Her government has increased staff at Mexican consulates and is rolling out a “panic button” app that Mexican migrants may be able to use to alert consular officials about ongoing enforcement actions, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Mexico’s Foreign Ministry announced it will host a January 15-16 summit of chief diplomats of Latin American nations along the migratory route to discuss and anticipate migration challenges posed by the new U.S. administration. The initiative originated from a December 30 conversation between Sheinbaum and Castro, the Honduran president. The summit’s agenda points haven’t been announced.
Migration Appears to be Declining Ahead of Inauguration
Border Patrol apprehended about 44,000 people during the first 29 days of December, the Associated Press reported on December 30. That means the agency was on track to record a number similar to November (46,612 apprehensions), the lowest monthly migration total since July 2020, when Donald Trump was president. Reuters reported an estimate of about 47,000 apprehensions in December, indicating a very steady per-day average.
An expected rush of migrants to the border ahead of Inauguration Day has not materialized. In fact, USA Today reported that Border Patrol averaged barely 1,000 migrant apprehensions per day—levels last seen during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic—during the holiday week ending January 5. Factors probably include fear of the coming Trump crackdown, Biden policies that place asylum out of reach between ports of entry, and the existence, for now, of the CBP One app as an alternative for making appointments at ports of entry. (The incoming Trump administration is all but certain to cancel the app’s appointments feature.)
Two of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors made up a majority of that week’s crossings: the westernmost and easternmost sectors of San Diego, California and Rio Grande Valley, Texas. San Diego has been declining steadily, but Rio Grande Valley has seen some increases in recent weeks. The El Paso Times reported that Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector is at low levels not seen for years.
Speaking to Reuters, Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute credited the Biden administration’s combination of asylum restrictions and alternative pathways like CBP One and humanitarian parole for some nationalities. “If they [Trump officials] simply shut down all of those policies and don’t have some other regime to put in place, it could backfire and numbers could go up, because there are a lot of people that are waiting in Mexico,” Meissner added.
Migration levels will likely remain low or decline further during the Trump administration’s first months. The period that followed the last time Donald Trump took office (February-July 2017) saw the smallest monthly migrant apprehension totals of the entire 21st century, smaller even than the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Trump’s first administration had not even implemented a border crackdown yet: migrants and smugglers opted to delay their plans in anticipation of policy changes. Migration levels recovered soon afterward.
Migration levels are down sharply, too, in the Darién Gap, the treacherous jungle region straddling Colombia and Panama that more than 1.2 million migrants have crossed since 2021. Panama reported 4,849 people migrating through the Darién Gap in December, the fewest since March 2022.
Though the number of people transiting dropped 42 percent from 2023’s record levels (from 520,085 to 302,203), 2024 was the second heaviest year ever for Darién Gap migration.
There are no solid estimates of the size of the migrant population—both foreign nationals and would-be Mexican migrants—who are currently stranded in Mexico. The Mexican Interior Ministry’s Migration Policy Unit, meanwhile, has not reported authorities’ migrant encounters since August as it claims to be “restructuring” its data.
Anecdotal evidence, though, points to a large number of people waiting inside the country for a chance to migrate to the United States, mainly using the CBP One app’s port-of-entry appointments feature. The UN Refugee Agency published the results of a September 2024 survey of 1,078 migrants in Mexico, including some Mexican citizens: 64 percent reported obtaining a CBP One appointment in less than 3 months, while 20 percent reported waiting 6 months or more.
Because of the CBP One option, migrants are opting not to await appointments in Mexico’s often dangerous northern border cities, where shelters are generally below capacity. That may be shifting a bit as Trump’s term nears. Julián Resendiz of Border Report visited the Good Samaritan shelter in Ciudad Juárez, which “already is filling up with those who couldn’t get across and others rushing past a gantlet of Mexican checkpoints to get into the U.S. before Inauguration Day.”
Border cities are also emptier because Mexico’s government continues to systematically bus migrants from those cities to the country’s south. The Associated Press reported on recent busing to the violence-plagued Pacific Coast resort city of Acapulco.
Some of Mexico’s larger concentrations of non-Mexican migrants are in Mexico City and the southern border zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas. Mexico continues to disperse “caravans” of migrants leaving Tapachula—at least 10 since October—before they get very far.
Other news
- The immigration advocacy group FWD.us published a white paper by former Biden White House official Andrea Flores proposing a new framework for regional migration and border security, from “root causes” to legal pathways to overhauling the asylum system.
- Charity-run shelters that receive migrants released from Border Patrol custody, preventing “street releases” in U.S. border cities, could be targeted by the new Trump administration, the Associated Press reported. “Border Czar” Tom Homan has “vowed to review the role of nongovernmental organizations and whether they helped open ‘the doors to this humanitarian crisis.’”
- In the Tucson area, meanwhile, groups that do humanitarian work in the desert borderlands have been receiving intimidating mailings calling on them to report undocumented migrants to ICE, reported the Arizona Daily Star. Some have been posted to aid workers’ home addresses.
- The latest report on ICE migrant removal flights from Witness at the Border’s Tom Cartwright counted 127 deportation flights in December, the most since August. The top destinations were Guatemala (33 flights), Mexico (24), Honduras (20), and Colombia (10).
- At The Baffler, Jared Olson published an investigation of forced displacement in Mexico, especially the turbulent state of Michoacán. Causes include organized crime violence and threats, government officials’ neglect and collusion with criminals, and big economic projects like mining. Some who flee attempt to reach the United States.
- In a New Yorker article focused on Indigenous Ecuadorians, Jordan Salama found that migrants often use TikTok to curate misleadingly sunny, prosperous portrayals of their new lives in the United States, enticing more people to make the journey even as they are, in fact, suffering off camera.
- NewsNation reported that CBP and Border Patrol will have 140 officers and agents, a record number, marching in Donald Trump’s inaugural parade in Washington.
- Responding to a viral video filmed on January 1 at the Falfurrias Border Patrol checkpoint in south Texas, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) objected to a Border Patrol dog handler’s apparent disciplining of a working dog by swinging her knee at the animal. The local Border Patrol union responded that the maneuver was a correct “corrective action” in line with agents’ training.
- Authorities in Chihuahua, Mexico arrested and charged two Venezuelan migrants—allegedly linked to the Tren de Aragua organized crime group— accused of killing a Mexican migration agent using stones on December 30 south of Ciudad Juárez.
- A Ciudad Juárez police officer has been charged with shooting two U.S. citizen brothers from El Paso who were paying a visit to their mother on the Mexican side. One was killed.
- Two Ecuadorian men who had journeyed overland, all the way through the Darién Gap, died on January 3 as they sought to leap from a moving train to avoid Mexican immigration agents near Torreón, Coahuila, the Guayaquil daily El Universo reported.
- Unidentified gunmen wounded a Venezuelan migrant near the border fence in Ciudad Juárez on January 3; Breitbart reported that it was an apparent kidnapping attempt.
- Border Report, citing a Tijuana shelter operator, reported that corrupt Mexican migration agents in the city have been taking $500 bribes from migrants to let them cross into the United States. The money is shared with taxi drivers who bring the smuggled individuals to the borderline.