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:

• Accumulating accounts of cruel and possibly unlawful removals and detentions: Several troubling cases emerged in the past week of ICE separating parents from children, people fearing rendition to El Salvador, and a death in custody. The administration has begun prosecuting undocumented migrants who fail to register, while issuing an executive order about so-called “sanctuary cities” and advancing plans to send third-country migrants to Libya and Rwanda.
• “Reconciliation” mega-spending bill sails through House committees: Committees in the House of Representatives began work in earnest on a massive spending bill. More than $150 billion in new spending would go to border walls, detention, deportations, building up border security forces, and technology. Bills would also charge fees to migrants applying for statuses, including protection from harm. Congress hopes to approve the legislation by July 4th, although it is unclear whether both houses’ Republican majorities can iron out disagreements that quickly.
• Renditions to El Salvador blocked, for now, amid new revelations: The New York Times and CNN found that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was reluctant to accept renditions of Venezuelan migrants who had not been convicted. The Trump administration made some approaches to the Bukele government about releasing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but Donald Trump told an interviewer that he will not ask Bukele directly for the wrongly deported man’s return despite judicial requirements that he facilitate that outcome. A Justice Department guidance instructs officials to dispense with the Fourth Amendment and enter homes without warrants when enforcing the Alien Enemies Act against migrants.
• First migrants arrested for trespassing in “defense area”: Now that the first 60 feet of New Mexico’s border is considered Defense Department property, the federal government is prosecuting 28 people for trespassing on a military installation. Penalties could reach a $100,000 fine or one year in prison.
• Scrutinizing the administration’s first-100-day deportation claims: The Trump administration claims to have deported 142,000 people during its first 100 days, but experts find the number confusing. Perhaps 50,000 people have been deported aboard about 400 ICE aircraft, and Mexico’s President said that nearly 39,000 more have been returned to her country. Those numbers fall far short of 142,000.
• CBP nominee hearing refocuses attention on 2010 migrant killing: The Senate Finance Committee considered the nomination of Rodney Scott, a former Border Patrol chief, to lead Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. The hearing raised past concerns about Scott, including controversial statements and his alleged role in what amounted to a cover-up of the 2010 killing, in San Diego, of Mexican citizen Anastasio Hernández.
• Judicial updates: In Washington, D.C., a federal judge sounded skeptical about the Trump administration’s claims that a migrant “invasion” warrants a shutdown of access to asylum at the border. Another judge ordered funding restored for attorneys representing unaccompanied children, while another prohibited Border Patrol from carrying out warrantless immigration stops in Central California.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Accumulating accounts of cruel and possibly unlawful removals and detentions

Recent cases

• ICE deported a Honduran mother with her 2-year-old U.S. citizen son on April 25, shortly after officials told her to bring her children with her to a scheduled check-in in New Orleans. The agency took the mother into custody and moved to deport her, giving her just two minutes to talk with the child’s father about his future. “At every single point ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]  denied anybody the ability to know where this family was, denied everybody the ability to contact with them and communicate with them,” National Immigration Project attorney Gracie Willis told NBC News.
• The father filed an emergency petition in the federal judiciary’s Western District of Louisiana on April 24. “The child was put on a plane to Honduras the next morning before the court opened,” the Washington Post reported. This raised strong concerns—including from the judge assigned to the case, a Trump appointee—that the Trump administration removed a U.S. citizen child from the country against one parent’s wishes.
• Also on April 25, ICE deported another Honduran mother from New Orleans with her two U.S. citizen children, aged 4 and 7. The agency, which also apprehended the mother at a scheduled check-in, was fully aware that the 4-year-old has metastatic cancer and was receiving treatment in the United States. “Not only did they deport this family against the mother’s wishes; they were deported without the child’s medication,” said attorney Mich González.
• On Twitter, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contended that “the mother made the determination to take her children with her back to Honduras.” As proof in the case of the Honduran mother with the 2-year-old child, ICE provided a redacted photo of a handwritten, one-sentence note written by the mother.
• Attorneys for the parents, including the ACLU of Louisiana, are “pushing back” against the Department’s statements, NBC News reported. They say that ICE gave the mothers no time or opportunity to make arrangements for their U.S. citizen children’s care in the United States. They point out that the mother’s handwritten note did not indicate freely given consent.
• “These actions stand in direct violation of ICE’s own written and informal directives, which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers—regardless of immigration status—when deportations are being carried out,” read a statement from the ACLU of Louisiana.
• DHS deported a Cuban mother without her 1-year-old, still-breastfeeding daughter, Reuters, the Huffington Post, the Associated Press, El Toque, and other media reported. The agency claims that Heidy Sánchez, taken into custody in Tampa at a routine April 24 ICE check-in, chose to leave her daughter with a relative. Sánchez, who is married to a U.S. citizen, vehemently and tearfully denied that. “They told me to call my husband, that our daughter had to stay and that I would go.”
• The separation was so traumatic for the baby that she had to be taken to the hospital, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Florida) wrote in a letter to President Trump demanding a grant of humanitarian parole for the mother.
• “If you choose to have a U.S.-citizen child, knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position,” White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan told reporters on April 28.
• DHS has kept the 2-year-old daughter of Venezuelan parents in the United States after transferring her father to El Salvador’s Center for Containment of Terrorism (CECOT) prison in March and deporting her mother to Venezuela.
• DHS is claiming without evidence that Maiker Espinoza-Escalona, the father, and Yorely Escarleth Bernal Inciarte, the mother, are tied to the Tren de Aragua criminal group. “Record searches indicate that neither parent has a criminal record in Venezuela or Peru, where they lived for several years, or in the United States, beyond their immigration offenses,” the New York Times reported.
• U.S. authorities had taken the toddler from the parents months ago—according to relatives, because “their tattoos looked suspicious”—and she has been in foster care assigned by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
• Ms. Bernal was led to believe that her daughter would return with her to Caracas, but U.S. authorities refused to hand her over upon deportation. “I started yelling at the officers asking where my baby was,” she told ABC News. “[ICE] officers ignored me.”
• Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry has referred to the case as a “kidnapping.”
• Javier Salazar, a 19-year-old from Venezuela, was one of the ICE detainees nearly taken to a prison in El Salvador on April 18, under the Alien Enemies Act, as a suspected member of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua criminal group. (See the discussion on El Salvador renditions below.) Interviewed at the Bluebonnet ICE detention facility in Anson, Texas, Salazar told the Guardian’s Tanvi Misra, “I thank God that we weren’t sent to El Salvador, but I am still sad knowing that I am in this detention facility when I do not [even] have any tattoos [and have committed] no crimes.” It appears that ICE claimed to have a photo of Salazar carrying a gun, but it was a blue and white water pistol.
• A 44-year-old woman from Haiti died in ICE custody in Florida, after more than 10 weeks at detention centers, including the infamous Krome North Processing Center in Miami. Marie Ange Blaise had been among a group of women whom ICE allegedly kept handcuffed on a bus for numerous hours without access to a bathroom in March. ICE stated that the cause of death is “under investigation”; the Miami Herald reported that she had been complaining of chest pains and had measured very high blood pressure.
• On April 24, “about 20 men, armed with guns, busted through the door” of a U.S. citizen woman who had just moved to Oklahoma City two weeks earlier, local news reported. They said they were U.S. Marshals, ICE, and FBI agents who may have been looking for prior residents. (U.S. Marshals later denied involvement.) They made the mother and her daughters wait outside in the rain semi-clothed, while agents trashed the house and seized cash, cellphones, and other belongings. “The warrant targeted the property itself, not specific individuals, and its execution was not contingent on the presence of any person… and we have not ruled out current occupants involvement in the smuggling ring,” reads a DHS tweet.
• The recent disappearances of migrants from ICE’s public locator, with no government acknowledgement of their transfer to a Salvadoran prison without trial, “might have played out in any number of Latin American dictatorships during the 20th century, from Gen Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Gen Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina,” observed the Guardian.
• On April 30, WOLA and the National Security Archive hosted an online discussion of what is happening in the United States from the perspective of three Latin American human rights defenders with long histories of fighting enforced disappearances. Video of the event is here.
• “The constant pain of not knowing a loved one’s whereabouts, amid an endless search for any clue that might lead to finding them, is a feeling many in Latin America know too well,” wrote WOLA’s president, Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, in a column at El Faro.
• At its Twitter account, DHS posted a thread seeking to debunk these and other alarming accounts, often by portraying the parents and detained people as criminals or suspects, in most cases offering no evidence.

Notes on the deportation offensive

• In west Texas, the Justice Department charged Hugo Moreno-Mendez, an undocumented migrant, with failure to register with the federal government. It is the first publicly reported case we have seen of a prosecution for failing to register since the Trump administration announced, basing its demand on a 1940s law, that undocumented people would face penalties if they did not do so by April 11.
• President Trump signed an executive order on April 28 calling for the publication of a list of “sanctuary cities” that refuse to turn arrested people over to federal immigration agents. Officials from these jurisdictions, it reads, engage in “a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” Probably unlawful funding freezes, lawsuits, or even Justice Department criminal prosecutions could result. The administration has already sued the city government of Rochester, New York, and arrested a county judge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
• The Trump administration has discussed the possibility of sending third-country migrants with criminal records to Libya and Rwanda, two countries that have endured devastating civil wars in the past 30 years, CNN reported. The administration sent an Iraqi citizen to the central African country earlier this month, and a Rwandan official told the Washington Post that “we’re open to others.”
• At the New Yorker, Laila Hlass and Mary Yanik note that “it is no coincidence” that so many detained high-profile migrants get taken to ICE detention centers in Louisiana. The state “is notorious for a trifecta of compounding barriers to effectuate the rights of immigrants: conservative courts, scarce access to legal support, and horrific detention conditions.” More than half of detained immigrants are in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
• The Guardian reported on ORR’s growing tempo of “welfare checks” on the households of children who arrived unaccompanied, in nearly all cases at the U.S.-Mexico border. As the refugee resettlement agency coordinates more closely with ICE, “It’s in the name of saying that they’re pursuing children’s welfare. They seem to be actually trying to conduct an enforcement operation,” Shaina Aber of the Acacia Center for Justice said. “It seems very clear that what they are actually doing is gathering intelligence on the family.”
• Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manriquez reported on “ImmigrationOS,” an ICE data-consolidation program managed by the controversial data-mining company Palantir, calling it “a $30 million digital predator purpose-made for hunting migrants.” 404 Media revealed the contents of an internal wiki page “in which Palantir discusses the project and the ethics around it.” It notes “an increased (and bipartisan) public desire for more focused effort on border security and the enforcement of existing immigration law” and that “Palantir is cognizant of the risks to privacy and civil liberties.”
• This is part of a larger Trump administration effort to break barriers between government datasets, posing significant privacy risks for U.S. citizens, Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost reported at the Atlantic.
• Manriquez noted that, as the Trump administration combines many agencies’ resources into the migrant detention and deportation effort, even U.S. postal inspectors participated in an April 27 DEA-led raid on a Colorado Springs, Colorado nightclub that arrested 114 undocumented migrants.
• The Immigration Hub published “ Disappeared in America,” an online compendium of short visual profiles of people victimized by the mass deportation campaign so far.

”Reconciliation” mega-spending bill sails through House committees

Homeland Security, Judiciary, Armed Services

• The House of Representatives has begun work on a massive spending bill that could add well over $150 billion to the Trump administration’s border-hardening and “mass deportation” efforts. This bill would advance under an infrequently invoked legislative rule called “reconciliation,” allowing it to pass the Senate on a simple majority vote without the filibuster rule, which usually requires 60 of 100 votes to end debate and vote. Both chambers’ Republican majorities seek to pass this bill even if it lacks a single Democratic vote.
• The House passed a budget resolution on April 10 laying out a bare framework apportioning this new spending across committees overseeing different government functions. Three committees met this week to draw up relevant parts of the bill, revealing their legislative language beforehand. This language still lacks detail—the House’s Republican majority is showing great deference to the Trump administration, allowing it to spend the money flexibly—but we now at least have a better sense of dollar amounts for key border and migration-related priorities.                          
  • The House Homeland Security Committee met on April 29 and approved its legislative language, which mainly covered Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) role.
  • The House Armed Services Committee also met on April 29 and approved its legislative language, with an outlay for the Defense Department’s border role.
  • The House Judiciary Committee met on April 30 and approved its legislative language, with resources primarily for ICE and immigration adjudication.
• At each of these “markups” (hearings at which legislation is amended and approved), Democratic members voiced strong objections. They pursued numerous amendments seeking to undo some of the bill’s harsher provisions, or to prevent the Trump administration from pursuing policies like removing U.S. citizens from the United States. “If Donald Trump can sweep noncitizens off the street and fly them to a torturer’s prison in El Salvador with no due process, he can do it to citizens too,” warned Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
• These amendments failed along party lines. Republican members, in fact, said little. Politico noted that Democrats were rather “muted” in their opposition to the bill’s border wall-building provisions.

Key provisions

• In addition to the massive appropriations listed below, the Judiciary Committee’s bill seeks to impose a long list of application fees charged to migrants. Asylum seekers would have to pay $1,000 to enter the system. Those receiving humanitarian parole would similarly have to pay $1,000. Recipients of Temporary Protected Status would be charged $500. Applicants for work authorization would need $550. Sponsors of unaccompanied children would have to pay $3,500.
• Tucked at the end of the Judiciary bill is a provision limiting courts’ ability to enforce contempt orders issued against the Trump administration. Judges in cases involving renditions to El Salvador have mentioned the possibility of contempt of court proceedings against administration officials who appear to be ignoring orders and failing to provide requested information. The provision in this bill would weaken judges’ ability to make the executive branch comply with their orders.
• It is unclear whether this change to basic law would meet the standards necessary for a “reconciliation” bill, which requires that all items have a budgetary impact. It is impossible to state with certainty that Republicans won’t seek a way to keep it in the bill. Migrant Insider reported that Senate Republican leadership is considering taking the drastic step of ignoring the recommendations of the body’s parliamentarian, which could undo the foundations of the filibuster rule, the origins of which go back to the 19th century.

Border and migration-related items in the bill (over $100 million)

• $46.5 billion for border barrier construction. “Planned investments,” the Homeland Security Committee reported, “include: completion of 701 miles of primary wall, construction of 900 miles of river barriers, 629 miles of secondary barriers, and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers.” (HS)
• $45 billion for adult and family detention, enough to detain 100,000 people at a time. The New York Times reported in early April that ICE had already requested proposals from contractors who run detention facilities. (J)
• $14.40 billion for transportation and removal of deportees. (J)
• $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE personnel. (J)
• $5 billion for CBP facilities construction. (HS)
• $5 billion for military role in border security. (AS)
• $4.1 billion to hire 3,000 new Border Patrol agents, 5,000 CBP Office of Field Operations Officers, 200 new Air and Marine Operations agents, and 290 support staff. (HS)
• $3 billion to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for unaccompanied children. (J)
• $2.77 billion for CBP surveillance technology, “such as ground detection sensors, integrated surveillance towers, tunnel detection capability, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and enhanced communications equipment.” (HS)
• $2.05 billion for CBP retention bonuses and signing incentives. (HS)
• $1.63 billion to protect the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics. (HS)
• $1.32 billion for ICE legal advisor (immigration prosecutors). (J)
• $1.25 billion for the immigration court system (EOIR). (J)
• $1.23 billion for CBP Air and Marine Operations procurement. (HS)
• $1.08 billion for non-intrusive inspection scanners. (HS)
• $0.95 billion to incarcerate criminal aliens. (J)
• $0.86 billion for bonuses to recruit and retain ICE officers. (J)
• $0.81 billion for CBP vehicles. (HS)
• $0.79 billion for state and local participation in homeland security efforts. (J)
• $0.75 billion for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. (HS)
• $0.70 billion for new ICE information technology. (J)
• $0.67 billion for CBP “biometric entry and exit system.” (HS)
• $0.65 billion for 287(g) agreements. (J)
• $0.60 billion for ICE hiring capacity. (J)
• $0.60 billion for DOJ immigration-related investigations and prosecutions. (J)
• $0.60 billion for CBP recruitment and vetting. (HS)
• $0.55 billion for ICE facilities upgrades. (J)
• $0.50 billion for DHS to combat drug trafficking. (HS)
• $0.50 billion for grants to local law enforcement for counter-drone systems. (HS)
• $0.50 billion for removals to contiguous countries. (J)
• $0.45 billion for Operation Stonegarden grants to local law enforcement. (HS)
• $0.30 billion for FEMA to reimburse law enforcement for protecting presidential residences. (HS)
• $0.25 billion for ICE vehicles. (J)
• $0.10 billion to repatriate unaccompanied children. (J)
• The above list, which leaves out some smaller items, totals $153.46 billion.

Likely next steps and timetable

• House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) agreed that the House of Representatives might pass the bill by Memorial Day. Thune said the process may take longer in the Senate, which has more complex procedural rules. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he hopes the two houses will pass the bill by July 4.
• The Senate sections of the budget resolution foresee larger overall amounts of money going to each function, while in the House, where Republicans hold a narrow majority, some members of the Republican caucus oppose big spending that might add to the national debt. The two houses’ Republican majorities may have deep differences to iron out.

Renditons to El Salvador blocked, for now, amid new revelations

A first ruling against use of the Alien Enemies Act

• On May 1, U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. became the first federal judge to strike down the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to remove non-citizens from the United States without due process.
• In a ruling that applies only to south Texas, Rodriguez, a 2018 Trump appointee in Brownsville, rejected the administration’s view that activities of the Tren de Aragua criminal group constitute a “predatory incursion” from Venezuela requiring use of the 1798 wartime law.
• The Judge found that the March 15 White House proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act against suspected Tren de Aragua members is “contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
• “The importance of this ruling cannot be overstated,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told CNN.

The administration’s negotiations with El Salvador

• A New York Times investigation included several notable revelations about the Trump administration’s renditions of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. So did CNN, which saw email exchanges between Nayib Bukele’s brother Ibrajim, who holds no formal government position, and Michael Needham, the counselor and chief of staff to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
• After the first planes landed and security forces brought 238 Venezuelan and 23 Salvadoran people to the CECOT mega-prison in the pre-dawn hours of March 16, President Bukele “quietly expressed concerns,” the Times reported. Bukele had agreed only to accept transfers of convicted criminals into the prison. But it turned out that most, if not all, of the Venezuelans and some of the Salvadorans had never been sentenced by a U.S. court. This triggered a “scramble” inside the U.S. government “to get the Salvadorans whatever evidence they could” that the Venezuelan men were members of the Tren de Aragua criminal group.
• Bukele, the Times reported, “did not want to bring in noncriminal migrants; he could not convince Salvadorans he was prioritizing their national interests if he turned their country into a dumping ground for U.S. deportees from other countries, he explained to Mr. Trump’s aides.”
• CNN reported that the Trump administration had proposed to El Salvador’s government that it take 500 Venezuelan migrants with alleged Tren de Aragua ties, but that El Salvador eventually agreed to a ceiling of 300 people.
• As a condition for accepting the Venezuelan men, the Times and CNN both reported, President Bukele demanded that the Trump administration also expel to El Salvador a list of top MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody, against whom the Justice Department had been building cases. Some of these gang leaders appear very likely to have had incriminating information about Bukele’s past negotiations with MS-13 leaders; that information is now far less likely to come to light. One of those gang leaders is the subject of an April 18th profile in the New Yorker.
• “Upon all nine [gang leaders] being returned, (El Salvador) will provide (US government) a 50% discount for Year 2, if necessary, of the original TdAs,” read an email between Ibrajim Bukele and Needham reported by CNN.
• In an internal briefing, the Times found, State Department employees learned that according to the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment, the Venezuelan government does not control Tren de Aragua, even though that collusion was the White House’s justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act in mid-March.
• CNN reported that migrants in the CECOT “are considered to be in Salvadoran custody, according to US officials, and therefore no longer in the control of the US despite payments from the United States.”
• The Trump administration has approved a $15 million grant to El Salvador to cover the imprisonment costs, coming from “foreign affairs funding,” CNN reported, and as of late April, $4.76 million has been transferred.
• A U.S. official whom CNN interviewed characterized the arrangement with El Salvador as “a ‘cooperation agreement but in a friendly non-binding fashion’ that still stands.”
• The ranking Democratic members of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security, and Oversight Committees sent a letter to the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security demanding to see the agreement signed with El Salvador to hold expelled migrants in the CECOT prison.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia

• In an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, President Trump said he could ask for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but he would not.

TERRY MORAN: You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could.
TERRY MORAN: You could pick it up, and with all the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, “Send him back,” right now.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.
TERRY MORAN: But the court has ordered you —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But he’s not.
TERRY MORAN: — to facilitate that — his release–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want —
TERRY MORAN: You’re the president.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — to do this, Terry —
TERRY MORAN: Yeah, but the — but the buck stops in this office —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I — no, no, no, no. I follow the law. You want me to follow the law. If I were the president that just wanted to do anything, I’d probably keep him right where he is —

• Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran migrant, a Maryland-based 29-year-old father, sent to the CECOT on March 15 despite a lack of a serious criminal record and a “withholding of removal” status directing that he not be sent to El Salvador.
• Trump’s refusal appears to conflict with a 9-0 Supreme Court decision requiring his administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.
• Trump insisted to ABC’s Moran that tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s knuckles are symbols denoting membership in MS-13. Gang experts dispute this. The President argued that Abrego Garcia has the letters and numbers “M S 1 3” tattooed above the symbols on his knuckles, citing a photo he displayed on social media. Those letters, though, were rather obviously superimposed on the image in a sans-serif font. Trump refused to believe that it was “Photoshop,” and did not let the topic drop for a remarkable amount of time during the interview.

Diplomatic contacts

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in direct touch with President Bukele about Abrego Garcia’s case, according to multiple sources interviewed by CNN. “A US official also told CNN the Trump administration has been working closely with El Salvador and asked for Abrego Garcia’s return but insisted that Bukele has made clear that he’s not returning him to the U.S.,” the network reported.
• The New York Times reported that the Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to the Salvadoran government to inquire about releasing Abrego Garcia. Sources told the Times that President Bukele said no.
• “It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House,” or “an attempt at window dressing by officials seeking to give the appearance of being in compliance” with the courts’ “facilitation” requirement, the story by five Times reporters affirmed.
• The President’s declaration that he would not help, voiced in the ABC interview, weakens the administration’s ability to prove in court that the diplomatic contacts show officials “facilitating” Abrego Garcia’s release, as the Supreme Court dictated.
• The possibility of a diplomatic resolution is why the federal court hearing Abrego Garcia’s case granted a one-week delay of its inquiry into the government’s role, during which it sealed proceedings. That pause in the case expired late on April 30, after Judge Paula Xinis refused a Justice Department request for an additional delay. Attorneys will soon take depositions from four Trump administration officials.
• At the Atlantic, Nick Miroff revealed that in the initial days after his unlawful rendition in mid-March, Trump administration officials sought to undo their error by bringing Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador. “Officials looked for ways to bring him home. They puzzled over the fragmentary evidence tying him to gang membership. And they worried about his safety in a prison where he could be targeted for attack.” However, once the case’s profile increased (a development for which Miroff gets some credit), “White House officials took over the response and began striking a far more strident tone in their public statements.” Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “took charge of the White House’s messaging, castigating reporters who asked about the case.”
• The U.S. government, in fact, has a long history of undoing mistaken deportations “quickly and quietly,” recalled an analysis from Andrew Kreighbaum and Ellen Gilmer of Bloomberg Government.

Notes on El Salvador renditions

• USA Today revealed a March 14 Justice Department directive governing the implementation of the Alien Enemies Act. Casting aside basic Fourth Amendment protections, it instructs ICE and other personnel that they may forcibly enter the residences of suspected “alien enemies” without a warrant.
• At the Bluebonnet ICE detention center in Anson, Texas, 31 men in the facility’s yard formed the letters “SOS” as Reuters reporters flew a drone nearby. It was from this facility, in the U.S. judiciary’s Northern District of Texas on April 18, that ICE came very close to loading 28 Venezuelan men on an aircraft and sending them to El Salvador. (ICE had given about 60 Venezuelan men in the Bluebonnet facility an English document to sign, telling them that they were about to be removed under the Alien Enemies Act.) A late-night Supreme Court action halted the rendition. Detainees whom Reuters interviewed by telephone voiced great fear for their lives.
• Mother Jones reporters Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias spoke to six of the men detained at Bluebonnet for a set of profiles entitled “ The Men Who Could Be Sent to El Salvador Next.” They described the April 18 process of being compelled to sign English forms and loaded onto buses with a heavy police escort. The buses went to the Abilene, Texas airport but then returned to the detention center.
• All the men have pending immigration cases, and “vigorously denied having ties to Tren de Aragua. Many of them believe they have been targeted because of tattoos that they said have nothing to do with the gang,” Mother Jones reported. One had tattoos of characters from Pokémon, Mario Brothers, and SpongeBob SquarePants.
• One detainee told Mother Jones he had only two or three hours between when he received the official notice from ICE and when he was loaded onto a bus. If accurate, this wildly violated the Supreme Court’s requirement that those subject to the Alien Enemies Act get a “reasonable” amount of time to contest their rendition.
• An analysis by Maureen Tkacik at the American Prospect argued that claims of a 2024 Tren de Aragua takeover of an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado—a case that Donald Trump has mentioned innumerable times—are less evidence of a Venezuelan government plot than the result of political mismanagement, real estate speculation collapse, and media-driven hysteria. Tkacik found that while criminal activity indeed occurs within the Venezuelan migrant community, it is far less organized than accounts of Tren de Aragua’s apparent rise would indicate.
• The Bulwark reported that congressional Democratic leadership, particularly Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), is discouraging the party’s legislators from further trips to El Salvador. In a response, Jeffries’s office called the article “thinly sourced.”
• A statement from a group of UN human rights experts voiced “deep concern” at the manner in which the Trump administration has employed the Alien Enemies Act and denied due process. It calls for the Salvadoran government “to allow independent monitoring bodies immediate and unfettered access to prisons holding the deportees.” They further find, “There has plainly been no ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion’ of the U.S. by any foreign State, as required by the Act. Even if some individuals were gang members, gang activity is a crime, not an act of war.”

First migrants arrested for trespassing in “defense area”

• On April 11, the Trump administration declared the “Roosevelt Reservation,” a 60-foot-wide strip of land along the border west of Texas, to be a “National Defense Area”—basically a long, thin extension of nearby military bases—for at least three years. Now, some apprehended migrants who crossed into New Mexico, where the administration is first rolling out this new measure, are facing criminal charges for unauthorized entry on military property.
• The first detentions leading to these charges occurred in New Mexico, probably around April 24. U.S. military personnel did not make the arrests, though the Defense Department has permitted troops to “temporarily detain trespassers.” Border Patrol agents most likely carried out the apprehensions.
• As of April 28, the federal government had charged about 28 people with the misdemeanor crime of “violations of security regulations,” which can carry penalties of fines up to $100,000 or a year in prison. The charges were issued at the U.S. District Court in Las Cruces.
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the New Mexico zone on April 25. He showed reporters new signs in English and Spanish indicating that the land is now under U.S. military jurisdiction and that trespassers will be detained.
• The “National Defense Area” does not include the 62-mile stretch of border that passes through the lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Cronkite News reported on concerns that the militarization of the rest of the border may drive more migrants through the Indigenous group’s land, much of which is remote desert where large numbers of migrants already perish of heat exposure and dehydration.
• On May 1, Northern Command issued a release announcing a second National Defense Area in west Texas, to be considered part of Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army base near El Paso. The release contains no maps or details; much of west Texas’s borderland is private and not federal property.
• “The establishment of a National Defense Area increases the military’s role at the southern border, effectively bypassing longstanding legal restrictions put in place by the Posse Comitatus Act,” blurring longtime bans on involving the armed forces in domestic law enforcement, explained an analysis by Emory University law professor Mark Nevitt at Just Security. Congress, Nevitt pointed out, could easily halt this escalation if it chose to do so.
• Elizabeth Goitein and Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice agreed that “this action seems designed to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act… This move could have alarming implications for democratic freedoms.”
• “The buffer zone allowed the Trump administration to use troops to arrest migrants without invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act that empowers a president to deploy the US military to suppress events like civil disorder,” the Guardian observed. A January 20th White House executive order had called on the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense to recommend, after 90 days, whether to invoke the Insurrection Act at the border; for now, they have not made that recommendation.
• “As of Tuesday [April 22], there were 10,281 troops assigned to the Southwest border–up from 2,500 before Trump’s order, according to U.S. Northern Command,” Cronkite News found. The number combines active-duty military and National Guard personnel on federal missions.
• The U.S.S. Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer assigned to the border mission in the Gulf of Mexico, anchored this week off the coast of Veracruz, several hundred miles south of the border.

Scrutinizing the administration’s first-100-day deportation claims

• Upon President Trump’s 100th day in office, officials released some statistical data, for the first time in months, about removals of undocumented migrants. How the administration derived its number is unclear, as analysts agree that it seems dubiously high.
• “Deportations have already exceeded 142,000—this is just the beginning,” read an April 29 DHS release, up from the 139,000 that “Border Czar” Tom Homan had claimed during a press conference a day before.
• A DHS breakdown of those deportations, according to CNN, reported 66,939 by CBP, 65,682 by ICE, 9,136 “known self-departures,” and 371 carried out by the U.S. Coast Guard.
• While the ICE number is high, given that about 400 deportation flights have taken place since January 20 and planes rarely hold more than 125 people, the number that stands out most is the CBP figure. Near all borders and ports of entry (including airports), CBP has been encountering a bit fewer than 1,000 undocumented migrants per day nationwide, judging from the agency’s reporting on the first two full months of the Trump administration, February and March. CBP’s apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border have been about 300 per day.
• Assuming that CBP did expel 66,939 of those people, it is not clear where they went. CBP does not operate deportation flights. The answer is not “Mexico”: In response to an April 29 question from Los Angeles Times reporter Kate Linthicum, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that in the 100 days since January 20, Mexico has received 38,757 people deported from the United States.
• (5,446 of them have been citizens of countries other than Mexico. Sheinbaum did not specify which ones, but told Linthicum that “Mexico has not signed a formal agreement with the U.S. to take any so-called ‘third-party’ migrants.”)

CBP nominee hearing refocuses attention on 2010 migrant killing

• The Senate Finance Committee met on April 30th to evaluate Rodney Scott, the Trump administration’s nominee to be the next commissioner of CBP. Scott is a former chief of Border Patrol, one of CBP’s main components.
• Scott’s tenure at Border Patrol ended a few months into the Biden administration. Upon leaving, he became a vocal opponent of the administration’s border and migration policies.
• Scott has faced criticism for past statements and actions representing a point of view that, if implemented, would diminish respect for human rights and effective oversight in CBP’s organizational culture.
• Some of these statements and actions came up in Democrats’ questioning of Scott in the Senate hearing. The most prominent of these are allegations that Scott interfered with investigations into the 2010 killing of Mexican citizen Anastasio Hernández Rojas near San Diego’s main border crossing, when Scott was Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector acting deputy chief patrol agent.
• On April 28th, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the OAS (IACHR) released a report on the case of Hernández, who died after CBP and Border Patrol agents beat him and administered taser shocks while he was handcuffed. The IACHR concluded that Hernández Rojas was tortured before his death, and called for reforms to U.S. law enforcement’s broad discretion in use-of-force situations. It recalled that the U.S. Department of Justice closed the Hernández case without charges.
• This is the first time that the IACHR—of which the United States is a member but not bound by its decisions—has ruled about a law enforcement killing on U.S. soil, noted an overview of the report, with much additional context about the case and remarks from Hernández’s widow, from Kate Morrissey at Capital and Main.
• In another analysis, Morrissey looked into Rodney Scott’s management of the investigative team “that attorneys for the family say helped the officials involved in the 2010 incident escape prosecution.”
• In a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the Finance Committee’s ranking Democrat, demanded more information about “Mr. Scott’s role in a death-in-custody investigation marred by process failures and potential obstruction, as well as his decision to issue a potentially unlawful and obstructive subpoena during his tenure as Deputy Chief Patrol Agent.”
• “This was not an investigation, it was a cover-up—one Mr Scott supervised,” read a letter to Sen. Wyden from James Wong, a former deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s office of internal affairs. “This abuse of power disqualifies him from leading one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country.”

Judicial updates

• In Washington, DC on April 29, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss presided over a hearing in an ongoing challenge to the January 20th White House executive order that suspends asylum access at the U.S.-Mexico border, citing an emergency triggered by a putative “invasion” by migrants. Government attorneys argued that the courts have no right to review President Trump’s determination that the United States is being “invaded.” Judge Moss appeared skeptical.
• In San Francisco, federal district Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted a nationwide preliminary injunction ordering the restoration of funding for attorneys representing unaccompanied children in asylum cases. This stops, for now, the practice of forcing toddlers and young children to face immigration judges on their own.
• The ACLU filed a motion in the federal judiciary’s Southern District of California to stop the Department of Justice from cutting off legal aid to families that the first Trump administration forcibly separated. This assistance was part of a judicial settlement agreement between the Biden administration and many families.
• A federal judge in Fresno, California issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting Border Patrol from carrying out warrantless immigration stops throughout much of central California unless they reasonably suspect that a person is violating U.S. immigration law. “You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers,’” said U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston. The ACLU brought the case on behalf of the United Farm Workers after Border Patrol carried out mid-January raids in Kern County, California, arresting dozens of undocumented farmworkers hundreds of miles from the border.
• On May 1, the Justice Department made an emergency request to the Supreme Court seeking to lift a California federal court’s ruling, while appeals proceed, preventing the administration from canceling Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelan citizens.

Other news

• CBS News reported that Border Patrol apprehended approximately 8,400 migrants at the border in April. That would be a 21 percent increase from March, from 232 to 280 apprehensions per day. During Donald Trump’s first term, in 2017, migrant apprehensions plummeted sharply at the outset, reaching a low point in April before climbing steadily for the next two years. Though much could happen to alter the trend, we could now be seeing apprehensions “bottoming out” in March, a month earlier than eight years ago.

• Authorities in Kinney County, which lies along the mid-Texas border between Del Rio and Eagle Pass, participated heavily in “Operation Lone Star,” the Texas state government’s migrant crackdown that included thousands of trespassing arrests of migrants in Kinney. An investigation by Jack Herrera at the New York Times found that county authorities collected $1.7 million in bail money from migrants arrested under the operation, only to hand those migrants over to ICE upon their release. ICE then deported them, and the county did not return their money.
• A CNN/SSRS poll found 52 percent of U.S. respondents agreeing that “Trump has gone too far in deporting undocumented immigrants, up from 45% in February.” By a margin of 56 percent (including 58 percent of independents) to 20 percent, those polled agreed that “the Trump administration should work to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia.” It was one of several recent polls showing respondents’ disapproval of Trump’s handling of immigration now exceeding approval.
• The Abrego Garcia case is a big reason for the public opinion shift, the Washington Post observed. “The issue has also broken through at GOP lawmaker town halls, on Trump-friendly podcasts and in other spaces where the president has generally enjoyed support.”
• Palabra reported that in Texas border counties, where Latino voters swung heavily toward Trump in 2024, many are having second thoughts.
• At an April 30 cabinet meeting, Homeland Security Secretary Noem told President Trump, “The President of Mexico told me, sir, she turned around over a half a million people in Mexico before they ever reached our border. We should be counting those as deportations because they never even made it to the border because she turned them around because you forced her to. So those are all people that never even came here because they got the message because you were so aggressive.” (There is zero evidence that Mexico’s government turned back half a million migrants since January 20.)
• Kathleen Bush-Joseph and Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute published a data-heavy overview of the Trump administration’s first-100-day migration policies. They find that despite a surge in detentions and great fear instilled in migrant communities, current removal rates fall short of the administration’s informally held 1 million per year deportation target.
• Chiapas state authorities rescued seven Cuban migrants kidnapped for $10,000 ransoms in Mexico’s southern border zone city of Tapachula. Police reported finding no captors on the scene to arrest.
• A group in Tapachula calling itself “Resistencia Civil Pacífica (RCP)” is demanding that the Mexican government stop supporting migrants in the country; now that the U.S. government has shut off access to protection in the United States, they are calling on stranded migrants to leave Mexico.
• Mexico’s National Guard reported that 89 percent of 426 U.S. citizens the force has arrested in Mexico since 2021 faced charges of trafficking either weapons or drugs.
• Dozens of Venezuelan migrants who have given up on accessing the U.S. asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border are stranded at Honduras’s border with Nicaragua, where they are petitioning the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for assistance returning to Venezuela, Reuters reported.
• Near Colombia’s border with Venezuela, the Trump administration’s cuts in U.S. humanitarian aid have dealt a severe blow to La Pista, “the largest informal migrant settlement in the Americas” and home to many Venezuelan migrants seeking to settle in Colombia without moving further north, Spain’s El País reported. With aid agencies pulling out, “I have information that more women are turning to prostitution to feed their families,” a community leader said.
• A UNHCR official said that U.S. cuts have forced the closure of programs needed to guarantee the integration and regularization of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in Colombia. “Years of progress in protecting and integrating displaced populations could be lost, and the most vulnerable—children, women, and families—will pay the highest price,” William Spindler warned.