CBP One appointments canceled. Shutdown of processing migrants and asylum seekers. “Remain in Mexico” restarts. Humanitarian parole programs end. Declaring that the United States is under “invasion”. Domestic use of the U.S. armed forces. Placing criminal groups on the “terrorist list”. Foreign relations. Other provisions. Reactions in Mexico and elsewhere. Initial analyses.

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.

This Update is the product of interviews and the review of over 210,000 words of source documents since January 18. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to keeping these paywall-free and ad-free Updates going. Please contribute now and support our work.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

The many actions and changes following Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration force a change in the format of this week’s Border Update. Instead of narratives organized under three or four topics, this Update organizes brief points under the following headings:

THE FULL UPDATE:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, the architect of many of the first Trump administration’s border and migration policies, had been signaling an intention to keep advocates and opponents off balance by “flooding the zone” with a large number of initiatives. In the hours after Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, the flood began with 10 executive orders and other declarations announcing the reversal of Biden-era policies and the launch of numerous hard-line actions.

They come at a time when the border is relatively quiet: crackdowns carried out by the Biden administration and the government of Mexico led Border Patrol migrant apprehensions (a number that doesn’t count people arriving legally with CBP One appointments) to drop to levels lower than they were during the Trump administration’s final months.

Analyses at El Paso Matters, the Guardian, and elsewhere detailed how local and national migrant rights’ defense and assistance organizations were scrambling to prepare. “It’s breathtaking, both in terms of substance and just how many actions they’re taking right out of the gate,” Heidi Altman of the National Immigration Law Center told the New York Times. “How far-reaching the impact and harm will be, but also just in terms of the sheer willingness to break the law and attempt to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution.”

CBP One appointments canceled

  • An executive order abruptly halted asylum seekers’ use of the CBP One smartphone app that, over two years, allowed over 936,500 people in Mexican territory to schedule appointments at U.S.-Mexico border ports of entry. Since July 2023, appointments averaged about 1,450 per day.
  • Late on January 23, the New York Times revealed that, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo, the new administration is granting agents the discretion to revoke the humanitarian parole status given to those who arrived with CBP One appointments, essentially leaving them undocumented unless they have applied for another status. The discretion to strip parole status could affect up to 1,468,190 people in the United States ( as of December 31), combining parole granted to CBP One arrivals and that given to participants in a program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (see below). Many have probably sought other statuses like asylum applications or, if eligible, Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
  • About 270,000 people inside Mexico have been using the app to try to secure appointments, sharing biometric and other personal data with CBP.
  • Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had been scheduling appointments at ports of entry for a few weeks after January 20. The new administration’s order canceled all of those appointments, stranding about 30,000 people inside Mexico.
  • The Washington Post, New York Times, El Paso Times, Associated Press, Texas Tribune, BBC, CNN, La Verdad de Juárez, Milenio, Norte, Houston Landing, and iNewSource covered the anguished, despairing reactions of people from several nations, many of whom had undergone arduous overland journeys to Mexico, upon learning that the new administration canceled their long-awaited appointments.
  • Between the Biden administration’s June 2024 ban on asylum access between ports of entry and the new cancellation of CBP One appointments at ports of entry, there is currently no practical pathway to protection for migrants arriving at the border. This is despite the guarantee, in Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, that people physically present in the United States may seek asylum if they fear harm upon return.
  • The disappearance of CBP One as an alternative asylum pathway led the ACLU to file a motion in an ongoing case against the Biden administration’s June rule restricting asylum access.
  • The app’s closure may lead some of the most desperate to attempt to enter the United States while evading Border Patrol. This dangerous option usually involves making a big payment to organized crime-tied smugglers. “I saw the posts that went viral with migrants crying at the border. It was exactly the same here: people are desperate,” Josué Leal, from a shelter in Mexico’s southern state of Tabasco, told the Guardian. “The great majority here now have the idea to get moving, to start going north.” Pedro Ríos of AFSC San Diego told Border Report, “CBP One was the only legal pathway to seek asylum. Now that it’s gone, migrants will be forced to cross the border illegally to seek asylum.”

Shutdown of processing migrants and asylum seekers

  • An executive order has suspended the entry of undocumented migrants to the United States under any circumstances. Border Patrol agents are now summarily turning people away regardless of protection needs. The order claims that all who make it to U.S. soil “are restricted from invoking” provisions like asylum. It further restricts undocumented people who cannot prove satisfactory medical and criminal histories.
  • CBS News reported that Border Patrol agents “have been instructed to summarily deport migrants crossing into the country illegally without allowing them to request legal protection.” Two CBP sources told CBS that “migrants will not be allowed to see an immigration judge or asylum officer.” Personnel are rapidly deporting adults and families after taking their biometric data and fingerprints. Non-Mexican migrants “are to be detained pending their deportation.”
  • It claims its legal basis in section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the President to ban entry of entire classes of migrants but may not ban asylum access to people on U.S. soil who have already entered the United States. It appears to seek to override that with a novel claim that the United States is facing an “invasion” (see below).
  • A CBP order obtained by the Washington Post “directs border agents to block entry to migrants on the grounds that they have passed through countries where communicable diseases are present,” without specifying any disease.
  • “The fundamental promise of asylum—that someone fleeing danger can present themselves to U.S. officials to seek safety—remained intact in one form or another. With these executive actions, asylum, in that form, is dead,” reads an analysis from the American Immigration Council.
  • Under extraordinary cases where asylum seekers actually get processed, the administration intends to detain them as their cases proceed. Any releases into the U.S. interior must have the approval of the chief or deputy chief of Border Patrol in Washington.

“Remain in Mexico” restarts

  • The same executive order that halts CBP One restarts the “Remain in Mexico” program, which requires non-Mexican asylum seekers to await their U.S. hearing dates inside Mexican territory.
  • In January 21 comments, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum did not say that her government would block the U.S. government from returning non-Mexican migrants with appointments in U.S. immigration courts. “It’s nothing new,” she said of the program. “This is something we don’t agree with. We have a different focus. We want to adjust it,” said Foreign Minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente.
  • During the first Trump administration, more than 71,000 asylum seekers had to “remain in Mexico.” Human rights monitors compiled over 1,500 examples of violent crimes these people suffered during their wait at the hands of Mexican organized crime and corrupt officials.
  • With asylum effectively blocked and the border putatively sealed to undocumented people, it is not clear against whom the new administration plans to apply a revived “Remain in Mexico.”
  • At least two moderate Democrats from districts that went for Donald Trump in November (Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Glueskamp Perez of Washington) have co-sponsored a Republican-led House bill that would compel the U.S. government to carry out “Remain in Mexico” rather than make it optional.

Humanitarian parole programs end

  • The new administration has shut down the Biden administration’s use of a presidential humanitarian parole authority to allow up to a combined 30,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, with passports and U.S.-based sponsors, to enter the United States without having to cross a land border. The program provided a two-year parole status inside the United States to over 531,690 citizens of those countries since late 2022, relieving pressure from the border.

“Mass deportation”

  • An executive order mandated the creation of “Homeland Security Task Forces” to manage interior deportation operations in all 50 states.
  • It calls for a dramatic expansion of detention facilities and the enlistment of state and local law enforcement to assist in the administration’s promised “ mass deportation” effort. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening four new 10,000-bed facilities and 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people,” the Washington Post reported.
  • It calls for cutting federal funds to states and municipalities that do not fully cooperate with ICE, including those who fear that such cooperation would hobble policing in communities with significant undocumented populations. The administration has directed federal prosecutors to investigate and potentially prosecute state and local officials who do not cooperate with “mass deportation,” the Washington Post and Bloomberg revealed.
  • It requires all noncitizens to register with the U.S. government, presenting their fingerprints. Failure to do so will trigger criminal penalties.
  • The administration has eliminated a guidance, which goes back to 2011, preventing ICE personnel from entering “sensitive” facilities like churches, schools, and hospitals. “Rolling back sensitive-location protections risks undermining community trust and, ultimately, ICE’s ability to effectively protect our communities in the long term,” Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff during much of the Biden administration, told the New York Times.
  • The new administration would further speed deportations by applying “expedited removal” in the U.S. interior to all who cannot prove that they have lived in the United States for at least two years. Usually used only at the U.S.-Mexico border, this procedure can deport someone quickly without involving an immigration judge. “The overwhelming majority of people in expedited removal are unable to secure legal representation or even consult with a legal representative while detained before being summarily deported,” Human Rights First observed. The ACLU and Make the Road New York have filed suit against this provision.
  • White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan said that ICE would not be carrying out raids in Chicago in the first days after inauguration, after news of the plan leaked to the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. Still, the Chicago Tribune reported, people across the city opted to stay home from work.
  • A November ICE response to a Fox News inquiry indicated that 1,445,549 people in the United States were on the agency’s “non-detained docket” with final orders of removal, placing them among the most susceptible to rapid deportation. The top ten nationalities listed were as follows. The numbers are not the totality of people facing removal; they are just those who have little or no remaining recourse in the immigration court system:
    • Honduras 261,651
    • Guatemala 253,413
    • Mexico 252,044
    • El Salvador 203,822
    • Nicaragua 45,995
    • Cuba 42,084
    • Brazil 38,677
    • China 37,908
    • Haiti 32,363
    • Ecuador 31,252
  • Citing data from Syracuse University’s currently defunct Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the Central American news site Expediente Público reported that 488,397 Hondurans are currently on deportation order lists—equal to nearly 5 percent of the country’s population.
  • The administration fired the acting head of the Justice Department’s immigration court system and three other senior officials.
  • Arizona Luminaria covered how community groups in southern Arizona “have been brainstorming, emotionally preparing, conducting know-your-rights trainings, getting documents in order, and more, in readiness for the possible crackdown.”
  • The administration announced the deportation of 308 people on January 21, which is not a departure from Biden-era levels. It deported about 176 into Mexico’s organized crime-plagued border state of Tamaulipas. In what may be the first of a daily series of updates, ICE tweeted on January 23 that it carried out 538 arrests that day.
  • The Justice Department halted programs, carried out through non-governmental organizations, that funded legal guidance to immigrants facing deportation and legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children.
  • Asked on an Italian talk show on January 19 about Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” pledge, Pope Francis replied, “If true, this will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill… This won’t do! This is not the way to solve things. That’s not how things are resolved.”

Declaring that the United States is under “invasion”

  • Some executive orders adopt a radical legal theory that asylum seekers and economic migrants meet the definition of an “invasion” under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Measures like the ban on all entries of undocumented people rest on the existence of an “invasion” and won’t get lifted until President Trump decides that the “invasion” has concluded. The orders’ “invasion” language is vaguely worded.
  • The idea that unarmed, non-state, leaderless individuals with humanitarian needs constitute an “invasion” first emerged in Republican circles during the Biden administration. When state governments—especially that of Texas—have sought to use the Constitution’s “invasion” clause to justify hardline anti-immigration policies, “courts have uniformly rejected” them, George Mason University Law School’s Ilya Somin explained in March 2024.
  • “The president’s claim that he can simply declare an invasion and thereby eliminate asylum on his own constitutional authority puts us in dangerous and uncharted territory,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has litigated past high-profile asylum cases, told columnist Greg Sargent at the New Republic.
  • “James Madison stated that an ‘[I]nvasion is an operation of war’ in response to claims that the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were authorized by Article IV,” read an analysis at Just Security by Mark P. Nevitt of Emory University School of Law.
  • “Of course, unlawful migration is not an ‘invasion’ in any legal sense,” wrote Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. “The use of commander-in-chief powers to conduct military operations against migrants would be a stunning abuse of power, even by Trump’s standards.”

Domestic use of the U.S. armed forces

  • The Defense Department announced that it has formed “a Task Force to oversee expedited implementation of the Executive Orders,” along with a deployment of 1,500 active-duty military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • The contingent, reportedly about 1,000 Army soldiers and 500 Marines, is meant to be the initial segment of a larger deployment of about 10,000 troops, even though Border Patrol’s migrant apprehensions are currently near their lowest levels since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is the initial effort that we can do right away. And then we anticipate many additional missions after this. This is just the start,” said a Defense Department official, according to Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour.
  • The Marines had been in California helping put out wildfires.
  • “We’ve been told to treat this like a national emergency because it’s been declared a national emergency,” said a Defense Department official cited by CNN. “Don’t be surprised if you see Marines being dropped off by helicopters.”
  • About 2,200 troops, nearly all of them National Guard personnel, are already serving at the border under federal command. Those troops have primarily played a behind-the-scenes role in support of CBP. They are distinct from the roughly 4,500 troops deployed in a more aggressive role by the state of Texas under the direct command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
  • The Biden administration had sent 1,500 active-duty troops to the border in May 2023, for 90 days, to provide additional staffing after that month’s suspension of the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy.
  • None of the new military personnel “at the moment are intended to perform any law enforcement actions, and they have not received law enforcement training,” reported Schifrin. However, many of the Army personnel will be military police, according to CNN. “The decision to arm them would be left up to the commander for U.S. Northern Command,” reported USA Today, citing a Defense Department official. A “senior Marine official” told Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, “Our response will be immediate. We are going in ready to respond. If the cartels shoot at us we will not stand by… We will be taking whatever equipment we would send if a Marine Expeditionary Unit or MEU were deploying overseas.”
  • Among new military missions, according to a Defense Department memo, will be the operation of military aircraft—two C-17 and two C-130 cargo planes—to deport people. Among those likely facing quick deportation are about 5,500 people currently in CBP custody, mainly in the El Paso and San Diego areas, after recent crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • Troops will also assist with border barrier construction.
  • The CBP memo “also says the Defense Department ‘may’ convert its bases into ‘holding facilities’” to stage deportations, CBS News reported. So far, according to Schifrin, “There has been no request to use U.S. military bases for detentions.”
  • An executive order would involve the armed forces directly in migration control and mass deportation. It charges U.S. Northern Command, the body responsible for military activities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas, with “the mission to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”
  • Federal National Guard and small active-duty military deployments have operated at the border since the George W. Bush administration. Those have been explicitly “in support of” civilian law enforcement agencies at the border, with little likelihood of confrontation, or usually even contact, between combat-trained soldiers and migrants—or other civilians—on U.S. soil. Past border missions have been legal exceptions to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the use of soldiers in law enforcement—a phenomenon that WOLA has noted with concern in Latin America’s precarious democracies. Still, past administrations have sought to minimize these exceptions’ footprint and scope.
  • The mission foreseen in the new executive order appears more aggressive, likely encouraging Northern Command to emulate the model that the state of Texas has adopted for National Guard personnel at the command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R). At the borderline since 2021, Texas troops have sustained many confrontations with migrants, including the discharge of weapons against civilians and allegations of human rights abuse.
  • Beyond the current deployment, an executive order declaring a “ national emergency” at the border enables the use of the National Guard and reserves, and calls for a review of military use of force policies.
  • Most notably, it sets a 90-day countdown for the Homeland Security and Defense secretaries to determine whether President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. That rarely used statute, an expansive exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, could allow Trump to deploy soldiers not just against migrants, but against U.S. citizens participating in political protests.
  • Adm. Kevin Lunday, the Coast Guard’s new acting commandant following the firing of his predecessor, who was the first-ever female commandant, said on January 21 that he had ordered an “immediate surge” of boats to the United States’ maritime borders. Lunday took care to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America.”
  • “I don’t think we need troops in El Paso,” said El Paso’s mayor, Renard Johnson, according to Border Report. “I go back and say we are a very safe community. We are one of the safest cities in the United States and we don’t need troops along our border here because it’s very safe.”
  • The executive orders related to the military “reveal the range of legal theories we should expect to play out over the months to come,” read a Lawfare analysis by Chris Mirasola of the University of Houston Law Center. “Some of these legal theories are recycled from Trump’s first term. Others are far more extreme (and dubious) interpretations of statutory authorities and the president’s constitutional powers.”
  • “Anglo-American law has a long tradition of military noninterference in civilian affairs, for the simple reason that an army turned inward can quickly become an instrument of tyranny,” recalled the Brennan Center’s Goitien in a clear-eyed analysis of available military force authorities at the Atlantic. Goitien added that emergency powers “are designed to address sudden, unexpected crises that can’t be handled by Congress through ordinary legislation. There is nothing sudden or unexpected about the problems at the southern border, and Congress can—and should—address those problems.”

Placing criminal groups on the “terrorist list”

  • An executive order calls for adding Mexican “cartels” (to be specified later) and two Latin American gangs—the El Salvador-originated MS-13 and the Venezuela-originated Tren de Aragua—to the State Department’s listing of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). This would be the first time that purely criminal groups—generating profits for their own enrichment instead of using them for a claimed religious or political objective—would appear on the FTO list.
  • The same executive order sets in motion the eventual use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily remove from the United States all noncitizens suspected of ties to these groups. This ancient law contains few due process protections.
  • Placing criminal groups on the FTO list would not enable U.S. military strikes inside Mexico without Mexico’s consent. It could pose other challenges, though. The very definition of “cartel”—many of which change names and fragment often—is blurry. A large number of people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border who have had financial dealings with cartels could suddenly be facing up to 20 years in U.S. prison for being “material supporters” of terrorism. Asylum seekers fleeing threats from organizations now considered FTOs could see their cases strengthened, while those who had to pay ransoms or extortions could face bars to asylum.

Foreign relations

  • President Trump said he plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on all products from Mexico and Canada as of February 1. He insisted that both countries are allowing “mass numbers of people and fentanyl” to enter the United States. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated that Mexico would respond with retaliatory tariffs.
  • “The Mexican and US economies are tightly intertwined,” wrote Luis Gomez Romero of the University of Wollongong at the Conversation. “If Trump imposes tariffs on Mexican beer, for example, he will also be imposing them on barley from Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota that’s used to make the beer.”
  • In a cable to State Department employees, the new secretary, former Florida senator Marco Rubio (R), wrote, “Mass migration is among the most consequential issues of our time. The era of mass migration must end. This Department will no longer undertake any activities that facilitate or encourage it. Any diplomacy with other nations, especially in the Western Hemisphere, will prioritize securing America’s borders, stopping illegal and destabilization migration, and negotiating the repatriation of illegal immigrants.”
  • An executive order requires U.S. diplomats to negotiate new “safe third country” agreements. These would obligate other governments to accept U.S. removals of third countries’ citizens, who would then have to seek asylum in the receiving country’s system. The first Trump administration had signed so-called “Asylum Cooperation Agreements” with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The agreement with Guatemala was the only one to begin operating before the COVID pandemic suspended them. According to a 2021 U.S. Senate report, it flew 945 non-Guatemalan asylum seekers to Guatemala City, zero of whom received asylum.
  • An executive order indefinitely suspends the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program pending reports, submitted every 90 days, to determine “whether resumption of entry of refugees into the United States under the USRAP would be in the interests of the United States.” Parallel to this, the administration is closing the “Safe Mobility Offices” that the Biden administration had helped establish in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala, where people could be considered for admission through the refugee program or other legal pathways, including the now-canceled humanitarian parole programs. Citing internal State Department documents, CBS News reported on January 23 that these offices will close.
  • “I’ve spoken to multiple officials in Venezuela today and will begin meetings early tomorrow morning,” tweeted Ric Grenell, the administration’s “envoy for special missions.” The U.S. government has no diplomatic relations with the regime in Venezuela, which does not allow U.S. deportation flights to land there.

Other provisions

  • When CBP releases asylum seekers and other migrants from custody in border cities, the agency usually hands them off to charity-run short-term shelters instead of simply dropping them off on cities’ streets. Those shelters provide a place to stay and help migrants contact those in their interior U.S. destinations who will help them make travel arrangements. The Biden administration helped some of these shelters cover costs through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Now, an executive order demands that the Justice and Homeland Security departments investigate these assistance contracts for “waste, fraud, and abuse” and, if necessary, compel those charities to give back funds.
  • An executive order already facing multiple challenges in federal courts seeks to undo the centuries-old conferral of U.S. citizenship on all people born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ status. The figure of birthright citizenship has been enshrined in the first sentence of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment since 1868. A statement from the chairs of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus noted that the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in 1898. A Seattle-based federal judge, stating that the executive order “boggles the mind,” has already issued a two-week restraining order blocking its implementation. At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern fully expects the Supreme Court to overturn the executive order eventually.
  • An executive order suspended the DHS task force that the Biden administration set up to reunify some of the thousands of migrant families separated by the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.
  • Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, discussed with congressional Republicans “how to bring back Title 42,” the pandemic-era mass expulsions policy, according to Daniella Díaz of Politico. That would require a determination from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an outcome that NOTUS considered possible given the views of Dave Weldon, Trump’s nominee to head the agency.
  • Trump’s pick to head Border Patrol is Mike Banks, who had been serving as the Texas state government’s “border czar,” helping to direct Gov. Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown. Banks, a retired Border Patrol agent who once headed the agency’s station in Weslaco, in south Texas, is a rare political appointee in the Border Patrol chief’s position, someone who did not rise all the way through the agency’s ranks. “I don’t think that politics should get into the law enforcement arena, because we have to be impartial and focused on the mission no matter who is in charge,” the outgoing Border Patrol chief, Jason Owens, told the Washington Post.

Reactions in Mexico and elsewhere

  • Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said she has no current plans to meet Donald Trump in person. She added that Foreign Minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente had a “cordial” phone conversation covering migration and security with the new U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
  • She touted her government’s initiative, “Mexico Embraces You,” which intends to receive deported Mexican citizens at border crossings with reception center tents, mobile kitchens staffed by soldiers, debit cards, and other services.
  • Charity-run migrant shelters in Mexican border cities are also preparing, as much as they can, to receive a sharply increased number of people returned by a “mass deportation” campaign. With northbound migration down in Mexico’s northern border region, most shelters have been far from capacity in recent months.
  • The Mexican government is also rolling out a smartphone app, ConsulApp Contigo, to provide information and facilitate consular services to Mexican citizens in the United States. It features a red “Attention Button” for urgent situations that citizens facing U.S. detention can activate by holding it down for five seconds. As of January 23, it was the number five app in the “Education” section of the iPhone App Store.
  • In Mexico City, operators of charity-run migrant shelters told the New York Times that they have not received offers of support from Mexico’s government.
  • Mexico’s ambassador to the United States said that White House executive orders that affect Mexico are “subject to negotiation.”
  • “Mexico’s president has shown a certain frustration of not being able to connect with Trump’s officials,” reported the Puente News Collaborative. “She said they were unable to have any meetings until their confirmations in the U.S Congress.”
  • Sheinbaum told reporters that if the U.S. government returns people from third countries to Mexico, her government is prepared to deport them further: “We would seek mechanisms through migration policy and foreign policy to return them to their countries of origin, for example, there is an agreement with Guatemala, with practically all Central American countries… There is an agreement with Cuba.”
  • In Mexico’s central state of Guanajuato, migrants riding atop the “La Bestia” cargo trains told La Jornada that they remain determined to come to the United States despite the Trump administration’s measures.
  • Guatemala’s foreign minister told the country’s 25 consuls in the United States, “Today more than ever, each of the consular missions must seek closer ties with the community, providing them with support, assistance services, consular care and protection, and timely information to remind them that they are not alone.”
  • A group of Guatemalan legislators introduced a bill that would, among other provisions, ban the entry of more than 10 unrelated people at a time, excluding tourist packages.
  • Chile, the only Latin American nation whose citizens may visit the United States without first obtaining a visa, is anticipating the possible loss of that status during the Trump administration.

Initial analyses

  • Human Rights First analyzed the initial orders’ use of presidential war powers and emergency declarations, use of the military, suspension of asylum protections, and their impact on vulnerable people.
  • The American Immigration Council examined the administration’s expanded border and migration enforcement priorities, increased militarization at the border, curtailment of due process, the impact on asylum seekers, and the constitutional challenges posed by the overreach of executive authority.
  • A Migration Policy Institute explainer counted more than 21 specific immigration measures as of the morning of January 23.
  • An overview from the American Immigration Lawyers Association provides highlights of 13 executive orders.

Other news

  • The Senate (on January 20, 64-35) and House Of Representatives (on January 22, 263-156) passed the “Laken Riley Act,” which mandates detention for migrants—including those protected from deportation by programs like DACA or TPS—arrested or charged (not necessarily convicted) for petty crimes. The bill also empowers state attorneys-general to sue the federal government to block aspects of immigration law, including demands to ban entries of citizens of countries that do not accept U.S. deportation flights. The Republican-initiated bill got 46 Democratic votes in the House and 12 in the Senate. Politico drew attention to the leading role played by a new Democratic senator, Rubén Gallego of Arizona. President Trump is certain to sign the bill into law.
  • Sen. Bernie Moreno, the Ohio Republican who defeated Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) in November’s elections, will introduce legislation banning the release of asylum seekers into the United States while their cases are adjudicated, Axios reported.
  • “While deportation is a vital tool in upholding the rule of law, it must be wielded with a proper proportion of compassion. Mass deportation may not uphold either, in the end,” reads a column at The Hill by Sen. John Curtis, a recently elected Republican from Utah.
  • “On Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, about 800 migrants were taken into custody along the U.S.-Mexico border, down from a daily average of 1,300 during the week before Trump’s inauguration,” the Washington Post reported.
  • In an apparent exercise, CBP officers in full riot gear shut a border bridge on January 21 in Brownsville as they cleared the nearby area and marched in formation, Border Report reported.
  • An AP-NORC poll found 50 percent of U.S. respondents, including 28 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of independents, agreeing that border security “should be a high priority.” 82 percent favor deporting undocumented migrants who have been convicted of violent crimes, but just 37 percent (though 61 percent of Republicans) favor deporting those who have not been convicted of a crime. Sixty-four percent oppose arresting migrants in schools and churches. Forty-two percent agree that local police “should always cooperate” with ICE.
  • A New York Times poll similarly found 87 percent of respondents favoring deporting undocumented migrants with criminal records, 55 percent favoring deporting all migrants “who are here illegally,” and 63 percent favoring deporting those here illegally who arrived during the past 4 years. Forty-one percent favored ending birthright citizenship for the children of “immigrants who are here illegally.”
  • At InkStick, Tyler Hicks investigated the complicated relationship that armed citizen militia groups have with Border Patrol agents, and how that relationship could grow warmer during the current presidential administration. “For militias,” Hicks wrote, “the ultimate ‘green light’ (a term used by multiple people interviewed for this story) would be a pardon of the Jan. 6 protestors, many of whom are militia members.”
  • A report from the Guardian looked at the environmental harm that would likely result from resuming border wall construction.
  • Mexican migration authorities detained 39 people in an October 18 nighttime raid that dismantled a migrant encampment in the capital of Chihuahua state. Authorities bused most of them to the country’s south. Agents took 17 minors into custody, turning just 4 of them over to the Mexican government’s child welfare agency.
  • Perhaps 2,000 people formed a new migrant “caravan” in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula. This is the 13th such gathering since October. As Mexico’s government prohibits their participants from boarding vehicles, none has made it intact beyond the country’s southernmost states. “[S]ince we arrived [in power] in October, no caravan has arrived” at the northern border, President Sheinbaum boasted.
  • In a Washington Post column, John Spencer of the Modern War Institute predicted that more border wall building would result in an increase in criminal groups digging sophisticated tunnels between the United States and Mexico, like one discovered last week in El Paso.