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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• Invocation of Alien Enemies Act raises due process, democracy, and foreign relations concerns: The Trump administration has employed a 227-year-old law to expel hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s feared prison system without due process and in likely defiance of a judicial order to divert the aircraft carrying them. As officials resist supplying a federal court with basic information about the incident, legal analysts warn of a constitutional crisis.
• U.S. military presence at the border continues to expand: The administration may be planning to declare a 60-foot buffer zone along much of the border to be a “military installation,” allowing soldiers to “hold” migrants there. A Navy destroyer is to carry out a mission where the border meets the Gulf of Mexico.
• Travel ban appears imminent: In a much larger version of a “travel ban” implemented during Donald Trump’s first term, his administration may soon ban the arrival of 43 countries’ citizens to the United States, dividing them into three tiers of prohibition.
• Border wall construction resuming: The administration is using funds appropriated in 2021 to build seven miles of border wall in south Texas, potentially including a segment running through a private butterfly reserve. “Gap-filling” projects are getting underway near Nogales, Arizona, and San Diego, California.
• Notes on Congress: Congressional Democrats issued letters protesting the administration’s renewed use of family detention and termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. ICE is warning Congress of a $2 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2025.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Invocation of Alien Enemies Act raises due process, democracy, and foreign relations concerns

On March 15 the Trump administration employed the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a rarely used statute, to expel 137 Venezuelan men from the United States on suspicion of membership in a criminal group labeled “terrorist.”

Even as a federal judge ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor planes to return, the administration flew them to El Salvador, along with 101 Venezuelan men reportedly deported under regular immigration proceedings and 23 alleged Salvadoran gang members. There, the Trump-allied regime of President Nayib Bukele is holding the men in a notorious mega-prison built to confine gang members.

The episode, one of the principal U.S. news stories of the past week, raises concerns about due process and the presumption of innocence, the judiciary’s existence as a coequal branch in the U.S. constitutional system, and the wisdom and legality of endorsing the Salvadoran government’s mass incarceration tactics.

The Alien Enemies Act

• A presidential proclamation, apparently signed by Donald Trump on Friday March 14, then posted to the White House website on the afternoon of Saturday March 15, invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as an authority to detain and swiftly expel suspected members of the Tren de Aragua.
• Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan organized crime group that the Trump administration added to the U.S. government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations on February 19.
• This is only the fourth time in U.S. history that a U.S. president has invoked the Alien Enemies Act. The previous occasions were the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.
• While its sweeping scope and lack of due process protections have permitted historic human rights abuses, especially during World War II, the Alien Enemies Act has not been used before to transfer individuals to prisons in foreign countries.
• The Act is meant to be a wartime authority, allowing the president to detain and deport people without due process when the United States is at war with a “hostile nation or government” or when a foreign state has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” an invasion or “predatory incursion” in U.S. territory.
• The U.S. Constitution uses the term “invasion” four times, but does not define it. And in fact, when announcing a decline in migration, a March 1 “Truth Social” post by Donald Trump had declared, “The Invasion of our Country is OVER.”
• The White House proclamation argues that Tren de Aragua colludes with the dictatorship of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. As a result, it further contends that the presence of some of its members among the Venezuelan migrant population constitutes a “predatory incursion” enabling the Act’s invocation to deport people without hearings.
• Five legal experts interviewed in a PolitiFact analysis agreed that the Tren de Aragua presence in the United States does not meet the definition of an “invasion” or a “predatory incursion.” Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice said, “In the context of the Alien Enemies Act [when it was drafted], invasion and predatory incursion referred to civil war or armed attacks by organized militaries or paramilitaries.”

The Tren de Aragua

• Tren de Aragua originated and consolidated in the Tocorón prison in Venezuela’s state of Aragua in the mid-2010s. An InSight Crime overview noted that it “has established permanent cells in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, with reports of its activities in Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia.”
• The White House’s proclamation stated that Tren de Aragua is “a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.” While nearly all agree that its presence is growing as the Venezuelan migrant community has increased since 2021, security analysts differ about the extent and severity of the organization’s footprint in the United States.
• The group’s relationship with the Venezuelan government “has been complex,” InSight Crime noted. Though it has corrupted local and regional officials, the Venezuelan security forces dealt it a critical blow when 11,000 troops and police raided the Tocorón prison in September 2023.
• The loosely organized group does not appear to be a first-tier source of illegal drugs in the United States, a market dominated by Mexican and other suppliers. Its principal income streams are human trafficking and forced prostitution, ATM theft and shoplifting, contract killing, and low-level arms dealing, according to an NBC News analysis.
• That analysis, by David Noriega and Sarah Ford, notes: “It’s often unclear how law enforcement identifies gang members, and evidence of their involvement is tenuous in some of the most violent and high-profile cases that Trump and his supporters attribute to the gang.”
• “The size of the gang is unclear as is the extent to which its actions are coordinated across state lines and national borders,” noted an Associated Press analysis.
• While the group grew and consolidated with government officials’ knowledge, Venezuelan journalist Ronna Risquez, author of a 2023 book about the Tren de Aragua, told PolitiFact that “she has not seen evidence that the gang responds to or is run by the Venezuelan government or that it has sent Tren de Aragua members to the US.” She told NBC News that some Venezuelan migrants engaging in criminal activity may be emulating Tren de Aragua’s methods without being members of the group itself.
• The New York Times reported on the existence of a February 26 intelligence assessment summarizing “the shared judgment of the nation’s spy agencies that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government,” contradicting the White House’s claim.

Due process and presumption of innocence

Trump administration “officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador,” the New York Times reported. The administration has not even identified the 238 Venezuelan men whom it put on the planes.

On March 20 CBS News obtained and published a full list of all 238. For many of their loved ones, it was the first confirmation of their whereabouts after losing contact with them.

“Family members of the men say they’ve had no way to communicate with their loved ones,” noted Jonathan Lemire and Nick Miroff at the Atlantic, “So they study the [Salvadoran government’s] propaganda videos for glimpses of sons and spouses among the deportees.”

Here are profiles of 15 of them, compiled from news reports and court documents linked from each. None shows evidence of criminal ties, and ICE seems to have detained many of them based on tattoos, which do not even appear to be a consistent signifier of Tren de Aragua membership.

• Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Agüero, 27, had lived in Dallas with his wife since December 2023, when they entered the United States with a port-of-entry appointment made using the CBP One app. In early February 2025, Aguilera was arrested while taking out the trash outside their home, his wife told the Miami Herald. He has a nine-month-old U.S. citizen son. His tattoos include his older, Venezuelan-born son’s name, his name and his mother’s name, and a reggaeton lyric. His mother says he has no criminal record.
• “JABV,” a 24-year-old who left Venezuela after state agents abducted and beat him for carrying out campaign work on behalf of opposition leader María Corina Machado in 2024. His attorney stated that he has no criminal record in the United States or Venezuela, no removal order, and “his tattoos are a Rose, a Clock, and a Crown with his son’s name on it.”
• Franco Caraballo, a 26-year-old barber detained in Dallas on February 3 when he reported to a regular check-in with ICE. His wife, Johanny Sánchez, insists he has no gang ties. “She struggles even to find logic in the accusation,” the Associated Press reported. Caraballo has several tattoos, including an image of a clock commemorating his daughter’s birthday. He had called Ms. Sánchez on the evening of March 14, Reuters reported, to tell her that he was probably being deported to Venezuela even though he had a pending asylum claim.
• “L.G.,” who has no removal order and a pending asylum claim. His attorney stated, “L.G. has three tattoos: one is a rosary, the other is his partner’s name, and the third is a rose and a clock.”
• Edwuar Hernández, a 23-year-old man from Maracaibo, was arrested along with three friends at the Dallas townhouse they shared on March 13. Relatives tell the Washington Post that he had no gang ties and no criminal record in Venezuela. (See the narrative for Mervyn Yamarte below.)
• Francisco Javier García Casique, a 24-year-old barber from Maracay, Venezuela, had a clean criminal record. He tried to make a living in Peru for four years before migrating to the United States. “He doesn’t belong to any criminal gang, either in the US or Venezuela… he’s not a criminal,” his mother told the BBC. “My brother doesn’t belong to any criminal group, has no criminal history or record in any country and they have unjustly sent him to El Salvador simply because of his tattoos,” the Guardian reported that his brother wrote on Instagram.
• Ali David Navas Vizcaya, who was detained in early 2024 when appearing for an appointment with ICE. His mother told AP, “he has no criminal record and suspects he may have been mistakenly identified as a Tren de Aragua member because of several tattoos.”
• Andy Javier Perozo, a 30-year-old father of five from Maracaibo who was doing food delivery gig work, was arrested along with three friends at the Dallas townhouse they shared on March 13. Relatives tell the Washington Post that he had no gang ties and no criminal record in Venezuela. (See the narrative for Mervyn Yamarte below.)
• Jerce Reyes Barrios, a 36-year-old former professional soccer player who was imprisoned and tortured after marching in two early 2024 demonstrations against the Maduro regime. Reyes has a tattoo of the Real Madrid soccer team’s logo and had a picture of himself in his social media feed making a rock-and-roll hand gesture that DHS officials decided was a gang sign. He had already submitted a document showing he had no criminal record and a declaration from the tattoo artist, to no avail. He has two daughters, aged two and six.
• Ringo Rincón, a 39-year-old man from Maracaibo, was arrested along with three friends at the Dallas townhouse they shared on March 13. Relatives tell the Washington Post that he had no gang ties and no criminal record in Venezuela. (See the narrative for Mervyn Yamarte below.)
• Anyelo Jose Sarabia, age 19, is an asylum seeker detained during a scheduled January 31, 2025 check-in with ICE in Dallas. His brother’s statement reads, “The tattoo on his left hand is of a rose with money as petals. A picture of the tattoo is below. He had that tattoo done in August 2024 in Arlington, Texas, because he thought it looked cool.” (His sister said something similar to Reuters.) Another tattoo is the words “strength and courage,” and another is a bible verse; both were applied by Anyelo’s brother, who has no criminal record in the United States or Venezuela.
• “E.V.,” who fled Venezuela after being imprisoned and tortured for participating in a 2022 protest. His attorney said he “has only one arrest in the U.S., which resolved with a non-criminal disposition under New York state law and for which he received a sentence of a one-year conditional discharge.” He has “tattoos of anime, flowers, and animals.”
• Henry Javier Vargas Lugo, a 32-year-old, had been living and working odd jobs in Aurora, Colorado, after trying to make a living as a mechanic in Colombia for seven years. He entered the United States with his mother and daughter. “He has several tattoos, including crowns with his niece and mother’s name, a clock on his arm, and a rosary,” the Miami Herald reported.
• Mervyn Yamarte, a 29-year-old who entered the United States in 2023 after passing through the Darién Gap and lived in Dallas, is “‘a good, hardworking boy’ who had never been involved in crime,” his mother told the Guardian and the BBC. His wife said the same to the Washington Post, which reported that armed ICE officers showed up on March 13 at the townhouse where he and three friends from Maracaibo (Edwuar Hernández, Andy Javier Perozo, and Ringo Rincón) had been living, and hauled them away. Yamarte’s younger brother witnessed the arrest; he said that the agents asked whether he had tattoos. One of Mervyn Yamarte’s tattoos is his daughter’s name. Another reads, “Strong like Mom.” Yamarte appears—shaved, wincing, but recognizable—in the video shared by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on March 16.
• An unnamed client of Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney at the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), is an LGBTQ+ artist and asylum seeker whose tattoos included a verse from the Book of Isaiah. “They’re fairly benign. Clearly not gang tattoos,” Toczylowski told Mother Jones. “In my 15 years of representing people in removal proceedings in the United States, this is the most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen happen to one of our clients,” she told the Guardian.

The administration has recognized that some of those sent to El Salvador are accused of no specific crimes.

• “The lack of criminal records does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with Tren de Aragua, the lack of specific information about each specific individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” read a statement submitted to the court reviewing the case by Robert Cerna, the acting director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office in Harlingen, Texas, where the flights originated.
• “That we lack information about someone makes them more suspect” is a remarkable claim, numerous legal analysts have noted.
• Cerna’s statement insisted that his agency “did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone,” but specified very few other criteria used for those without prior court or criminal records.
• Asked by Fox News whether some of those deported might not be Tren de Aragua members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio replied, “If one of them turns out not to be, then they’re just illegally in our country, and the Salvadorans can then deport them from—to Venezuela, but they weren’t supposed to be in our country to begin with.” This was the first mention of any possible arrangement with the Salvadoran government to release any of those transferred.

“Constitutional crisis” and defying judiciary

Early on Saturday March 15, as it appeared that the Trump administration was about to employ the Alien Enemies Act, two legal groups, the ACLU and Democracy Forward, filed suit on behalf of five Venezuelans in Washington DC federal court, seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent their expulsion.

This case ( J.G.G. v. Trump), expanded to include the entire class of migrants to whom the Alien Enemies Act might be applied, is being heard by James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Washington DC District Court.

Here is a timeline of events in the case, constructed from social media coverage of hearings, use of the FlightAware app, and reconstructions by the Washington Post and Associated Press.

• Friday, March 14, time unknown: President Trump signs the proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
• Saturday, March 15 at 2:16am: The ACLU and Democracy Forward file suit on behalf of five Venezuelans to prevent their expulsion using the Alien Enemies Act.
• Saturday at 9:40am: Judge Boasberg grants a temporary restraining order preventing the five Venezuelans’ expulsion and schedules a 5:00 hearing to consider a request to expand it. The Trump administration appeals the order.
• Saturday at 3:51pm, according to the page’s timestamp: The proclamation is posted to the White House website.
• Saturday 5:00pm: The hearing convenes, then pauses at 5:22pm as Justice Department lawyers ask for time to find out whether the government plans to expel anyone soon under the new proclamation.
• Saturday 5:26pm: A plane (tail number N278GX) departs Harlingen, Texas.
• Saturday 5:45pm: A second plane (tail number N837VA) departs Harlingen, Texas.
• Saturday 5:55pm: The hearing reconvenes; Justice Department lawyers say they have no new information.
• Saturday, around 6:45pm: Judge Boasberg orally tells administration lawyers to halt any planes: “You shall inform your clients of this immediately. However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
• Saturday 7:26pm: Boasberg’s order appears in writing.
• Saturday, 7:36pm —51 minutes after oral order, 10 minutes after written order: A third plane (tail number N630VA) departs Harlingen. A March 18 statement submitted to the court by ICE official Robert Cerna claims that this third flight did not have people aboard being expelled under the Alien Enemies Act.
• Saturday 7:37pm—52 minutes after oral order, 11 minutes after written order: The first plane (tail number N278GX) lands in Comayagua, Honduras.
• Saturday, 8:07pm—1 hour, 22 minutes after oral order, 41 minutes after written order: The second plane (tail number N837VA) lands in Comayagua. (Probably; a second flight plan indicated that it landed in San Salvador at 8:02pm, but that seems less likely.)
• Saturday, 9:46pm—3 hours, 1 minute after oral order, 2 hours, 20 minutes after written order: The third plane (tail number N630VA) lands in Comayagua.
• Saturday, 11:39pm—4 hours, 54 minutes after oral order, 4 hours, 13 minutes after written order: The first plane (tail number N278GX) departs Comayagua.
• Saturday, 11:43pm—4 hours, 58 minutes after oral order, 4 hours, 17 minutes after written order: The second plane (tail number N837VA) departs Comayagua.
• Sunday, March 16, 12:05am—5 hours, 20 minutes after oral order, 4 hours, 39 minutes after written order: The first plane (tail number N278GX) arrives in San Salvador.
• Sunday, 12:18am—5 hours, 33 minutes after oral order, 4 hours, 52 minutes after written order: The second plane (tail number N837VA) arrives in San Salvador.
• Sunday, 12:41am—5 hours, 56 minutes after oral order, 5 hours, 15 minutes after written order: The third plane (tail number N630VA) departs Comayagua.
• Sunday, 1:03am—6 hours, 18 minutes after oral order, 5 hours, 47 minutes after written order: The third plane (tail number N630VA) arrives in San Salvador.
• Sunday, 7:46am: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele takes to Twitter to gloat, “Oopsie… too late <laughing/crying emoji>,” over a headline relaying federal Judge James Boasberg’s March 15 order to return the planes to the United States.
• Sunday, 8:13am: Bukele announces the expelled detainees’ arrival on Twitter, with a video displaying very rough treatment upon arrival at his government’s “Terrorist Containment Center” (CECOT) prison.
• Sunday evening: Marc Caputo of Axios reported that the White House chose to ignore Judge Boasberg’s order: “Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ‘orchestrated’ the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Few outside their teams knew what was happening. They didn’t actually set out to defy a court order. ‘We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,’ said the [unnamed senior White House] official.”

As Judge Boasberg has sought to determine whether the Trump administration ignored his order on March 15, administration officials have been refusing to answer questions about the timeline of events that evening, including questions easily answerable with public information as above.

• On March 18, Justice Department lawyers would not even say how many Venezuelans the administration deported under the Alien Enemies Act—a number that the Washington Post reported as 137.
• Justice Department attorneys said that Boasberg was seeking “sensitive information bearing on national security and foreign relations” that they would not divulge. A March 19 Justice Department filing noted that the administration is “currently evaluating whether to invoke the state secrets privilege” to withhold information from the court.

In March 17 arguments and a March 19 statement, Attorney-General Pam Bondi, other Justice Department officials, and attorneys in the case insisted that the Trump administration could ignore Judge Boasberg’s order because the ICE contractor flights had already departed U.S. airspace when he issued it in writing.

• Judge Boasberg’s call to divert the aircraft, the March 19 document reads, “betrayed a complete misunderstanding of the serious national security, safety, regulatory, and logistical problems presented by a fiat from the Court directed at pilots operating outside the United States and was made without regard to whether any such aircraft could feasibly be diverted or even had enough fuel to safely do so.”
• This roughly echoes White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s March 17 comment to Fox News: “It wasn’t until this flight was already [in] international waters heading down to El Salvador that the judge made some comment about returning the flights. We are already in international waters. We are outside the borders of the United States. I’m the border czar. Once you are outside the border, you know, it is what it is.”
• Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck, whose work has been cited in the court proceedings, posted an objection to the administration’s “international waters” defense: “A federal court’s jurisdiction does not stop at the water’s edge. The question is whether the defendants are subject to the court order, not where the conduct being challenged takes place. Were it otherwise, the government could act lawlessly overseas and courts would be powerless to stop it.”

A still-unclear issue is why the flights spent hours on the ground in Honduras before passing to El Salvador—a period well after Judge Boasberg issued his temporary restraining order—and whether the planes were still subject to the judge’s order during that time.

• Wilson Paz Reyes, director of the Honduran government’s National Migration Institute (INM), confirmed to the news site Criterio that no Honduran nationals were aboard, or discharged from, the planes that landed at the Enrique Soto Cano air base in Comayagua. There, the U.S. military since 1983 has headquartered a unit, Joint Task Force Bravo, that shares the runway with a commercial airport and the Honduran military aviation academy.

Top officials have directed their ire at Judge Boasberg and the judicial branch.

• “We are not stopping,” Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” told a Fox News interviewer on March 17. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”
• On March 18, President Trump took to his “Truth Social” network to call Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” and demand he be impeached. The judge was appointed by George W. Bush to the DC Superior Court, and by Barack Obama to the federal court, when he received unanimous Senate confirmation. Boasberg presided over the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2020 and 2021.
• Trump’s remark drew a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Legal analysts are viewing this as the most severe crisis involving potential abuse of presidential power so far in the Trump administration.

• “Over the weekend, the Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, violating an instruction that could not have been plainer or more direct,” read a legal analysis by the New York Times’s Adam Liptak. “Justice Department lawyers later justified the administration’s actions with contentions that many legal experts said bordered on frivolous.”
• Legal scholars interviewed by Liptak believe that the separation of powers at the heart of the U.S. Constitution has already been breached—a situation often referred to as a “constitutional crisis”—“and the right question now is how it will transform the nation.”
• Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, penned an essay for his newsletter viewing this episode as a serious setback for U.S. democracy. “‘Foreign’ means that they are not us. ‘Alien’ means that we should hate them. ‘Terrorist’ means that we should hate them enough to allow a state of exception, a suspension of normal practices, a change of regime. There is a long history of this, all around the world, including Hitler in 1933 and Stalin in 1934.”

El Salvador’s prisons

As noted in WOLA’s February 7 Border Update, during Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s February 3 visit to Central America, President Nayib Bukele offered to imprison other countries’ citizens sent from the United States for a “relatively low” fee.

• The Associated Press and other sources reported that the Trump administration is paying the Salvadoran government $6 million to imprison what may be 300 people.
• Given the patterns of gross human rights violations committed within El Salvador’s prison system mentioned below, this funding almost certainly violates the Leahy Law. This quarter-century-year-old statute prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign security force units credibly alleged to have grossly violated human rights with impunity.

While few, if any, of the expelled Venezuelans were convicted in the U.S. criminal justice system, indicating a severe due process failure, there is zero indication that a single one of them, including any who may indeed be Tren de Aragua members, violated Salvadoran law, or what charges they might face if ever brought before a Salvadoran judge.

• This raises the prospect of indefinite detention in El Salvador without trial, a clear and elementary human rights violation.
• This detention, it appears, comes without access to attorneys or even contact with family members, much less appearance before an impartial and independent judge.

The men are now confined in the Bukele government’s Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a sprawling facility in the municipality of Tecoluca built in 2023. The Associated Press described the CECOT as “a mega-prison where visitation, recreation, and education are not allowed.”

• Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tweeted that while a prison system that holds nearly 3 percent of El Salvador’s adult male population costs $200 million per year to maintain, he hopes to make it “self-sustainable” through forced labor, citing “production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program.”
• At his newsletter, migration expert Austin Kocher cited alarming excerpts from the State Department’s most recent available annual country report about human rights conditions in El Salvador.
• The Americas director of Human Rights Watch, Juanita Goebertus, submitted a declaration to the court recalling that her organization “is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison [the CECOT],” and that since a state of emergency began three years ago, over 350 people have died in El Salvador’s prisons nationwide.
• Media reports, many from independent Salvadoran outlets like El Faro, have documented widespread torture, malnourishment, and medical neglect of people confined in El Salvador’s jails, many or most of whom have yet to see a courtroom.

Next steps

As of late on March 20, the New York Times put it, Judge Boasberg has “edged closer…to holding the Trump administration in contempt for possibly having violated his ruling” seeking to pause or turn back the March 15 flights.

• The Judge has given the administration five days either to release information about the flights or to invoke the state secrets privilege. “the Government again evaded its obligations” to respond to information requests, his order noted.
• Oral arguments in the administration’s appeal, seeking an emergency stay of Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order, are scheduled for Monday, March 24.

Venezuela’s regime has spoken out about the transfer of Venezuelan citizens to El Salvador’s jails, even as the Trump administration pushes Caracas to accept more deported migrants.

• “They were not brought to trial, they were not given the right to a defense, the right to due process, they were deceived, handcuffed, put on a plane, kidnapped, and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador,” said Venezuela’s de facto president, Nicolás Maduro, who said he would issue an official request to return them to Caracas.
• Semafor reported that the White House has asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take control of ongoing discussions with Venezuela’s regime, with which the U.S. government maintains no formal diplomatic relations, about the tempo of flights returning migrants there. Rubio took to Twitter to threaten “new, severe, and escalating sanctions” if the Maduro regime does not accept “a consistent flow of deportation flights, without further excuses or delays.”
• On March 13, the Trump administration’s envoy for special missions, Ric Grenell, tweeted that Venezuela agreed to resume flights. No flights occurred following Grenell’s tweet. The Venezuelan government claimed bad weather on the 14th. (Grenell is the official who visited Venezuela and met with Maduro on January 31.)
• Venezuela’s government did retrieve about 306 of its citizens on a repatriation flight sent from Caracas to Mexico on March 20.

U.S. military presence at the border continues to expand

The “Roosevelt Reservation”

• On March 19 the Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration is considering declaring that a 60-foot buffer zone along much of the border is a “military installation.” This would empower U.S. soldiers to hold migrants in the “Roosevelt Reservation,” the narrow strip of territory along a large segment of the border that is federal, not privately held, land.
• “By militarizing the buffer zone, the theory goes, any migrant apprehensions made by service members would be tantamount to catching trespassers on a military base: The troops involved would simply hold them until law enforcement arrives,” the Post explained. An official emphasized that it would be “holding” and not “detention.”
• Having soldiers hold migrants would require a major and open-ended exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. This 1878 law prohibits soldiers from carrying out civilian law enforcement duties on U.S. soil under non-emergency circumstances.
• WOLA’s March 14 Border Update noted that the Trump administration has already ordered about 9,600 active-duty military personnel sent to the border.

A Navy destroyer on a border security mission

• At the Trump administration’s orders, the U.S. Navy sent a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Gravely, to waters off the part of the coast where the Rio Grande—the international border—empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
• The Gravely can hold up to 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles and recently returned from a mission involving strikes against Houthi rebel targets in Yemen.
• The vessel has a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment (LEDET) aboard, which enables it to carry out maritime law enforcement missions like drug seizures.
• A post to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico’s Twitter account celebrated the destroyer’s arrival in the “Gulf of America,” linking to a U.S. Northern Command announcement that did not refer to the body of water known as the Gulf of Mexico.
• “The Pentagon hasn’t detailed how the USS Gravely will be used, other than to say it will support the U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Coast Guard in both U.S. and international waters,” the Houston Chronicle reported.
• “The Gravely’s exact tasking, Caudle said, might be intelligence gathering initially but could expand,” reported Stars and Stripes, citing Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces.
• An unnamed defense official “ suggested” to Military.com “that the move was far more about the dramatic visual of a warship operating off the Mexican coast than the need for any of its more advanced weapons and capabilities.”
• “They are monitoring international waters in case drugs or some other situation arrives in the United States,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said of the Gravely deployment.
• The administration may soon dispatch a second destroyer, Military.com reported, probably to the other end of the border in San Diego.

Spy planes and radars

• In a tweet, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin stated that high-altitude U-2 spy planes, RC-135 signals intelligence planes, and drones have been “tirelessly” flying over the border region “to restore sovereignty and protect American communities.” The U-2 has been in operation since 1955, though current models date to the 1980s, according to Air and Space Forces.
• The U.S. Northern Command’s Joint Task Force – Southern Border is incorporating AN/TPQ-53 radar equipment, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, along the border, reported Defense Mirror. Units like the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division are using the radars to detect drones used by organized crime, reported The War Zone.

Travel ban appears imminent

• The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering a list of 43 countries whose citizens would be subject to a sweeping ban on travel to the United States. While similar to the “travel ban” that Donald Trump decreed during his first term, this would encompass much more of the world, including several countries in the Americas.
• Reports from the Times and elsewhere indicate a three-tier system:                                
  • A “red list” of 11 countries from which travel would be prohibited and visas not issued: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
  • An “orange list” of 10 countries that would face severe, but not total, restrictions on entry and visa availability: Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
  • A “yellow list” of 22 countries given 60 days to reform their passport security, naturalization, or similar systems in order to avoid a complete ban. This list includes Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe.
• Reporting separately on an apparently different version of this draft travel ban memo, Reuters noted a total of 41 countries: 10 “red,” five “orange,” and 26 “yellow.”
• Citing unnamed officials, the Times reported that the State Department drew up the list, which could change before it gets to the White House.
• “The proposed restrictions could target more than one in five legal immigrants traveling to the United States from abroad and could separate over 150,000 spouses and minor children of US citizens and legal permanent residents from their families in the United States,” wrote the Cato Institute’s David Bier.
• “More work [on the proposed ban] is necessary, assuming the leaks reflect reality,” wrote the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow at the reliably pro-Trump American Conservative. “Ban travel from Bhutan? How would this protect America?”

Border wall construction resuming

• Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has awarded Granite Construction Inc. a $70.3 million contract to build a seven-mile border wall segment in Hidalgo County, near McAllen, in south Texas. The funding comes from CBP’s fiscal year 2021 budget.
• The Houston Chronicle recalled that this Hidalgo County segment could run through the National Butterfly Center. This privately run preserve bitterly fought this construction plan during the first Trump administration.
• “Similar work on the border wall is being done in Arizona. including in Nogales,” NewsNation reported, adding that construction has not yet resumed in Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector in mid-Texas.
• The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the Trump administration may soon launch projects to close gaps in the border wall, mainly due to rough terrain, near San Diego. These include “a 2.1-mile section near Jacumba Hot Springs, 350 feet in Smuggler’s Gulch near Imperial Beach, and two sections of 600 feet and 1,500 feet east of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.”
• The article notes that Mexico’s National Guard is now camped in the eastern Tijuana neighborhood of Nido de las Águilas. At this longtime crossing point, rough topography causes a gap in the fence near Otay Mountain.

Notes on Congress

• Twenty-two Democratic or Democratic-caucusing senators signed a letter to President Trump objecting to his administration’s renewed use of family detention centers. “Detaining a mother and her children in an ICE facility costs an astonishing $319 per day. In contrast, Alternatives to Detention (ATD) programs —such as community-based case management—cost as little as $5 per person per day and have ensured high compliance rates with immigration proceedings,” the letter noted, citing Human Rights Watch and the Women’s Refugee Commission.
• Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (R-Florida) and Gregory Meeks (D-New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee) led 39 House Democratic signers of a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio voicing dismay over the Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 348,000 Venezuelans in the United States as of April 7, 2025. [1] 
• ICE leadership has communicated to Congress that, to maintain the agency’s present operational tempo for deportation operations, it will need an additional $2 billion by the September 30 end of fiscal year 2025, sources told Axios. That money may come from a massive spending bill that the Republican majority leaders of the House and Senate expect to pass without needing any Democratic votes, under a special rule called “reconciliation.” This will likely pass by mid-year, after both houses’ Republican leaderships iron out differences.
• Arizona Public Media covered the recent introduction by Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R), who represents a southeast Arizona border district, of the “ FLASH Act,” which stands for “Federal Lands Amplified Security for the Homeland.” The bill would expand CBP access to federal lands and allow states to place temporary border barriers on federal land. Ciscomani says the bill will reduce environmental harm caused by migrants who litter trash in ecologically sensitive areas. Environmental advocates meanwhile worry about the impact of border barriers and overstretched Park Service resources.
• On March 25 the House Homeland Security subcommittee will hold one of the first border-related hearings of the year. It will not be forward-looking: the Republican majority has entitled it “Part 1: Consequences of Failure: How Biden’s Policies Fueled the Border Crisis.”

Other news

• A ProPublica investigation found that private ICE detention contractor GEO Group, with a market value of $4 billion, “continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live.”
• The Washington Post shared video of the March 10 arrest, by plainclothes, sweatshirt-and-t-shirt-wearing Border Patrol agents, of a Venezuelan mother and father in Washington DC. The parents’ offense was having crossed the border improperly two and a half years ago, when they and their children turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents to seek asylum in October 2022. The arrest—very unusual because it involved Border Patrol in Washington, an offense committed a long time ago, and parents who were Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients—was first reported, minus the video, by the Los Angeles Times on March 12. The parents have since been released but face criminal charges in El Paso.
• In a March 17 tweet, the rock band Semisonic objected to the White House’s use of its 1998 song “Closing Time” as background to a tweet celebrating migrant deportations. “The song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely.” A Washington Post piece covered the “dehumanizing” tone of the Trump administration’s social media messages about migrants and deportations.
• The Trump administration’s Justice Department has dropped a Biden-era challenge to S.B. 4, the Texas law—approved in late 2023—making it a state crime to cross the border without authorization. Two other challenges to the law remain active. Rights defenders worry that the law may empower police throughout the state to profile people and demand that they prove they arrived legally.
• Mexico’s government reported detaining 1,560 people since the February 5 launch of a big deployment of National Guard troops to its side of the U.S.-Mexico border, begun in an effort to stave off Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods. The so-called “Operación Frontera Norte” has also netted 1,456 smuggled firearms and 22,753 kilograms of drugs, including 129 kilograms of fentanyl.
• Migration was a frequent topic for the foreign minister of Guatemala, Carlos Ramiro Martínez, during an eight-day visit to the United States. Topics included his government’s “Return Home Plan, which seeks to attend to, protect, and guarantee the integration and settlement of the Guatemalan migrant population that has been returned” from the United States or other nations, the daily La Hora reported.
• The Kino Border Initiative, which operates a shelter in Nogales, Sonora, reported an increase in the number of arriving migrants after a post-January 20 lull, the National Catholic Reporter reported. Most are recent deportees; 80 percent said they had lived in the United States for an average of 11 years.
• The Democratic-majority New Mexico state House of Representatives voted 35-25 on March 7 for a bill that would require state and local governments to cut ties with companies that detain migrants and ban the use of state-owned land for migrant detention. The “Immigrant Safety Act” now passes to the state Senate.
• Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of California filed over 100 border-related cases during the second week of March. The Western District of Texas has reported filing 250 immigration-related cases during March 3-9.
• Amid smaller border-crossing numbers, the Texas state government is closing a jail booking facility in Jim Hogg County, a non-border county near the Rio Grande Valley, that it had used since 2022 to process migrants arrested for trespassing.
• The Associated Press reported on how migrant smugglers are drumming up business, even during the Trump administration’s crackdown, by using TikTok to share testimonials from customers who reached their U.S. destinations.
• A report from the “Center for Renewing America,” an organization founded by Russ Vought—who is now the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget director—lists non-governmental charities that, in its view, “enabled” or “are complicit” with migrant smuggling. In fact, these charities performed a service that communities requested: offering short-term shelter for migrants released from CBP custody prevented disruptive and dangerous “street releases” in U.S. border cities.
• At the Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire and Nick Miroff explored the leading role that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has played in guiding the rapid-fire onslaught of new anti-immigration initiatives that have marked the Trump administration’s first two months in office. “Miller’s plan has been to fire off so many different proposals that some inevitably find a friendly court ruling, three administration officials told us.”
• The University of Texas Strauss Center’s latest quarterly report about Asylum Processing at the U.S.-Mexico border finds that the border’s ports of entry have entered a seventh phase of asylum processing in six and a half years. The new phase is one in which “there is no longer any asylum processing at the border.” Authors Stephanie Leutert and Caitlyn Yates estimate that approximately 13,000 individuals remain in Mexican border cities, especially in Reynosa, Ciudad Juárez, and Tijuana.
• Mobile Pathways, a group that promotes technological solutions to help people navigate immigration law, has launched a series of visualizations of immigration court data, like asylum outcomes, judge profiles, and removal orders.