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Due to the U.S. holiday, there will be no Weekly Border Update on November 29, 2024. Updates will resume on December 6.
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:
Two and a half weeks after Election Day, little has emerged about the scope or process of the incoming Trump administration’s plans for “mass deportation.” Plans remain vague, while many immigrant rights defenders fear the worst. This narrative includes a discussion of a possible domestic military deployment to support deportation and three laws that might authorize it.
Mexico may find tens of thousands of in-transit migrants stranded in its territory when a U.S. administration takes office with plans to deport many more, including some from other countries. Migrants, some participating in short-lived “caravans,” worry about what might happen to them after January 20, while Mexican government officials say that they are not concerned about relations with the United States.
Border Patrol apprehended 56,530 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2024, a number very similar to July through September and one of the lowest since the last months of the previous Trump administration. Arrivals of Central American families are increasing. Weekly data show a decrease in migrant arrivals following Election Day in the United States: while a pre-inauguration rush to U.S. soil is likely, it has not begun yet. Migration through the Darién Gap is reduced, at least partially because of weather conditions.
THE FULL UPDATE:
Incoming Trump administration hints at coming crackdown
Two and a half weeks after Election Day, President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated a White House “border czar” (Thomas Homan), a White House deputy chief of staff with border and immigration policy responsibilities (Stephen Miller), and a Homeland Security secretary (Kristi Noem). All are known for hardline views on the border and migration (as discussed in WOLA’s November 15, 2024 Border Update).
The transitioning administration has yet to announce border and migration-related appointments further down the organizational chart. According to the Washington Examiner and Fox News, possible nominees for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner may include a former and current Border Patrol chief (Rodney Scott and Jason Owens, respectively) and a former deputy CBP commissioner (Robert Perez). Fox named one of its frequent guests—longtime, recently resigned Border Patrol union president Brandon Judd—as a possible Border Patrol chief. Possible Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directors could be the current Enforcement and Removal Operations director in Boston, Todd Lyons, or former ICE agent Victor Ávila, who challenged border-district Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) in the 2024 Republican primary, arguing that Gonzales was too moderate.
The Texas Tribune, citing CNN, added that the “czar” overseeing the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown, former Border Patrol agent Michael Banks, “has been a part of behind-the-scenes discussions with Trump’s team about immigration initiatives.”
Mass deportation
The incoming administration’s plans to carry out a “mass deportation” campaign, possibly removing millions of people from the United States during the coming presidential term, are receiving heavy attention. However, incoming officials have revealed few specifics about the promised campaign’s scope, targets, or process.
For one thing, Trump and other officials appear to lack even a consistent ballpark estimate of the number of undocumented people residing in the United States. Philip Bump recalled in a Washington Post analysis that Trump, Vice President-Elect JD Vance, and others in their circle often cite a figure of 20 million, 25 million, or more undocumented and presumably removable people. “[T]here are almost certainly not 15 million people living in the country without authorization, unless you include those awaiting court hearings for their asylum claims,” Bump concluded. (The Pew Research Center estimated an undocumented population of 11 million in 2022; the American Immigration Council estimated 13.3 million as of 2024.)
Another unclear question is who would be most vulnerable to deportation. Homan, the “border czar,” has told a few interviewers that the initial approach would be “targeted” toward people with criminal histories, those believed to be national security threats, and those already ordered removed by an immigration court. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told CNN that those populations could be “as many as 3 or 4 million people.”
An analysis at the conservative, UK-based Daily Mail posited that incoming officials foresee three steps: a focus on migrants with ties to criminal gangs, a focus on about a million people who have been ordered removed, and then a broader set of sweeps and raids to locate and remove the broader undocumented population. The accuracy of this “three steps” analysis, or its expected timeframes, is far from clear.
In interviews with the BBC, undocumented migrants said they found the apparent initial focus on people with criminal records reassuring. Still, personnel choices cast doubt on how “targeted” the deportation effort would be over four years. “Naming Stephen Miller as his Deputy Chief of Staff of Policy, these are very real signals that they intend on pursuing as broad and aggressive a deportation campaign as possible,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told reporter Pablo Manríquez.
The picture is further muddled by pledges, by Trump and close allies, to revoke statuses currently protecting approximately 2 million people from removal, especially Temporary Protected Status ( TPS), Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and humanitarian parole. Trump, for instance, repeatedly promised to remove Haitians from the city of Springfield, Ohio, nearly all of whom have TPS or humanitarian parole, but few of whom have criminal records or adverse immigration court judgments.
The breadth of “mass deportation” would expand radically, too, if Trump were to make good on pledges to employ the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the detention and removal of people according to their nationality when the United States is in a declared war or facing a “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” invasion. Because those conditions hardly exist, this law’s application would face very stiff legal challenges, with the Trump administration likely forced to rely on the Republican talking point that migrants—whose numbers have already been dropping for over 10 months—constitute an “invasion.”
Many immigrant rights defenders are preparing for the worst. “We take president-elect Trump at his word that efforts to actualize mass deportations are coming—and that they will be sweeping and indiscriminate,” said Shayna Kessler of the Vera Institute. Neha Desai of the Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law told USA Today that “the administration’s plan for mass deportation will result in an untold number of devastating family separations.” Robyn Barnard of Human Rights First told the New York Times, “Families will be torn apart, businesses left without vital employees, and our country will be left to pick up the pieces for years to come.”
Some of the vagueness about upcoming plans is a factor of the recency of the election and numerous still-unknown variables like legal authorities, logistical capabilities, and budgets. However, incoming officials may also be avoiding specifics because a vague approach creates more fear among the migrant population. “For those who believe the United States will be better off if every unauthorized immigrant leaves the country… making people afraid enough to deport themselves is a convenient and low-cost way to do it,” the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind wrote at the New York Times.
The ACLU Foundation of Southern California filed suit to get a response to an August Freedom of Information Act Request of ICE, seeking information about the agency’s capacity to deport an expanded number of people using its system of chartered flights operated by contractors. This is one of several open questions about the agency’s capacity to remove large numbers of people.
ICE currently maintains 41,500 detention bed spaces, a number that would have to increase if deportations surge. “What people don’t understand is we can’t just put [them on] a plane,” Homan said, according to ABC News. “There’s a process we have to go through. You have to contact the country, they have to agree to accept them, then they got to send you travel documents. And that takes several days to several weeks. So we need detention assets.”
The agency also has about 6,000 agents available to remove and detain people. “To boost ICE’s ranks,” ABC added, “Homan has suggested the administration could move officers from other agencies to assist.”
Use of the military
Most controversially, the U.S. military is high on the list of agencies whose personnel would be called to assist with mass deportations. In a brief post to his “Truth Social” network, Trump confirmed his intention to deploy armed forces personnel but offered no details. “It’s not immediately clear what he means by that: whether he intends for the military to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, for military funds to be redirected toward supporting mass deportations, or something else,” noted Vox reporter Nicole Narea.
Currently, about 4,000 members of the U.S. armed forces, the vast majority National Guard personnel, are stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border in support of CBP. (This does not count the unknown number of Texas National Guard personnel deployed at the border at the orders of Gov. Greg Abbott (R).) The federal military mission, which President Joe Biden augmented in 2023 when the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy came to an end, places soldiers in back-end support, analysis, and surveillance roles that seldom put them in contact with migrants or other civilians. These more limited deployments have operated under emergency declarations.
It is not clear whether military personnel assigned to a mass deportation campaign would find themselves in a more “kinetic” role, which would be a mission with few modern precedents on U.S. soil. Homan has stated that armed forces personnel would play more of a logistical role, like transporting people to be deported and building facilities, rather than kicking in doors and rounding people up. However, CBS News recalled, “Stephen Miller, the incoming White House deputy chief of staff, has gone further than Homan, suggesting the National Guard could be deputized to arrest undocumented immigrants.”
At Lawfare, Chris Mirasola of the University of Houston Law Center cast doubt on whether Trump would seek to employ the armed forces by declaring a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, as has happened with current federal border deployments. Instead, Mirasola and others foresee three legal authorities offering Trump opportunities to deploy soldiers. All permit military personnel to play domestic roles despite the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that usually prevents federal troops from carrying out law enforcement duties on U.S. soil.
First, the Insurrection Act of 1807, which no president has used since 1992 (a brief mission during the Los Angeles riots), gives the president broad power to deploy the military domestically. The president need only find that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion… make it impracticable” to keep order “by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
An 1827 Supreme Court decision gave the president “sole discretion, in most instances,” to decide when those conditions are met. “For all practical purposes, courts have been cut out of the process,” wrote Elizabeth Goitein and Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice, cited by Narea. Trump can argue that organized crime groups smuggling migrants are “obstructing” enforcement of U.S. immigration law. However, he might be unable to argue that “ordinary” judicial proceedings are not up to the task.
Second, Section 2808 of Title 10, U.S. Code empowers the president to move funds to carry out construction projects on military facilities. During his first term, Trump used this authority to move money out of the defense budget to build hundreds of miles of border wall, even though Congress had expressly refused to fund wall-building. If the incoming administration wishes to build camps or staging areas on military facilities to assist with the detention and deportation process, Section 2808 might be construed as allowing that.
“I expect to see the Trump administration use Section 2808 to authorize the construction of migrant detention camps on military installations,” Mirasola wrote. Still, the law is unclear about whether construction for an immigration mission truly constitutes “military construction.”
In 2023, Stephen Miller referred to the building of “camps” on military bases to hold arrested migrants while they awaited removal. Homan has referred to “soft-sided” facilities with large, carnival-style tents, similar to what CBP uses to process asylum seekers at the border during busy periods. Rolling Stone reported that the incoming administration’s members have received “some guidance” to stop using the word “camps” because of World War II connotations.
On November 14, the Texas state government’s land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham (R), wrote to the President-elect offering the federal government use of a 1,400-acre property along the border in Starr County, in south Texas. The letter observed that “the plot could be used to build facilities for ‘processing, detention, and co-ordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history,’” the BBC reported. Texas just purchased the ranch land in October and is starting construction of a segment of state-funded border wall there.
A third non-emergency power, Section 502(f) of Title 32, U.S. Code, allows the president to request that state governors lend National Guard support for vaguely defined federal military missions. If a “red state” governor agrees to such a request for assistance, National Guard personnel—who are soldiers with standard U.S. military training—could be funded by the federal government but nominally be at the governor’s command, even if operating in another state.
Section 502(f) could give National Guard personnel an expansive ability to operate during a Trump administration, whether in support of “mass deportation” or as part of a show of force along the U.S.-Mexico border.
While Homan has used the term “shock and awe” to describe how the incoming administration plans to rapidly ramp up operations, Mirasola observed that none of these military authorities and missions can be rolled out quickly. The Defense Department would need to consult with governors about National Guard availability. The Homeland Security Department (DHS) would need to formally request Defense Department support. “The military construction process is notoriously slow and cumbersome.” Most measures may face quick judicial challenges. And for undocumented immigrants detained in the U.S. interior, not at the border, “deportation isn’t a quick process,” Lind explained.
Misgivings
Discomfort with a military role in mass deportation extends to at least one key Republican legislator. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is to become the chairperson of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs when the Republican Party assumes the Senate’s majority in January. The Senator pledged a quick committee confirmation vote for Homeland Security Secretary-Designate Kristi Noem, and said that his first hearing will examine reinstating the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, a step that would require Mexico’s assent.
However, Sen. Paul—a conservative with libertarian inclinations—also voiced disagreement with involving the military in a deportation campaign. While he supports deporting undocumented migrants with criminal records, Newsweek reported, the incoming committee chairperson said he is “not in favor of sending the army in uniforms into our cities to collect people. I think it’s a terrible image. While I am all for ‘Remain in Mexico,’ I will not support an emergency to put the army into our cities. I think that is a huge mistake.” Paul added that such steps “smack of martial rule. They smack of no Congressional approval.”
The governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, a moderate Democrat who criticized the Biden administration’s border and migration policies as too lenient, told reporters that she looked forward to working with the incoming Trump administration on border security. The Governor highlighted an ongoing state deployment of 40 Arizona National Guard personnel embedded at the border alongside CBP on a counter-drug mission. However, Hobbs said, her cooperation would not extend to assisting mass deportations: “I will not tolerate terrorizing communities or threatening Arizonans.”
Civilian assistance and militias
Wired noted that during a Fox News appearance, incoming “border czar” Tom Homan said that his team is open to working with civilian collaborators: “There’s a lot of good patriots. Thousands of retired agents, Border Patrol agents, retired military who have volunteered to help secure the border.” Tim Foley, the head of a “civilian patrol” or militia group called Arizona Border Recon, told Wired that “he has been in contact with the incoming Trump administration and that he expects to be a valuable resource to them.”
Other measures
Anticipating an end to Justice Department legal challenges after Trump takes office, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said that his state government was preparing to add to a controversial 1,000-foot barrier of buoys floating in the middle of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. The plastic spheres, interspersed with discs of serrated metal, intend to stop migrants from crossing the river. The Biden administration has sued to stop the project, contending that the “buoy wall” violates longstanding agreements with Mexico about the river’s management.
Abbott and Lieutenant-Governor Dan Patrick (R) have indicated that they may scale back the Texas state government’s “Operation Lone Star” border security crackdown, which has cost more than $11 billion in state funds since 2021, after Trump takes office.
Regarding foreign policy and migration, the Washington Post revealed that “people close to” Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime in Venezuela “have had conversations with members of the Trump team in the days since the election,” including the Caracas government’s “willingness to work with Trump immediately on an agreement focused on migration issues, including allowing deportation flights of Venezuelans.” It remains to be seen how such an arrangement might go down with Secretary of State-Designate Marco Rubio, who as a Florida senator (R) has been a forceful opponent of the Maduro regime and other dictatorships considered to be leftist.
The view from Mexico
For Mexico, the second Trump administration’s arrival will probably mean more pressure to continue blocking in-transit migrants, and to accept more removals to Mexican territory—both Mexican citizens and probably citizens of other countries, whether deported or in a renewed “Remain in Mexico” asylum arrangement. Tens of thousands of migrants transiting Mexico may also be stranded there if the new U.S. administration, as expected, halts use of the CBP One smartphone app to schedule appointments at land-border ports of entry.
“There is going to be a massive return of people if the CBP One system disappears. To this we must add other deportations, plus the migrants who are still in Mexico and who continue to arrive to request asylum in the United States,” María Magdalena Silva Rentería, director of the Cafemín migrant shelter in Mexico City, told La Jornada. She and other shelter leaders appealed to the Mexican government for more assistance: while few of their facilities are at capacity right now, the demand for their services could soon surge as migrants are stranded in Mexico and deported there.
About 1,500 migrants formed the latest of several “caravans” in Mexico’s southern border-zone city of Tapachula, Chiapas, over 1,100 miles from the U.S. border, on November 20. Some participants told the Associated Press and Agénce France Presse that after already undergoing long journeys through Central America and, in many cases, through the jungles of the Darién Gap, they hope to reach the United States before Trump’s inauguration. Caravans have long since ceased to make it to the U.S. border intact, as Mexican forces in the country’s southern states prohibit motorists from transporting their participants. Some migrants currently in southern Mexico called on the Mexican government “to talk to President Trump so that they accept us as migrants,” as a Colombian man told EFE.
“According to activists and human rights defenders, there are at least 45,000 stranded migrants on Mexico’s southern border,” the Mexican daily Milenio estimated. On November 13 in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, authorities forcibly cleared about 250 Venezuelan migrants from a park where they had been encamped. “They were removed, one by one, and scattered throughout the streets of the Chiapas capital,” Milenio reported.
In Oaxaca, the next state through which most migrants pass after departing Chiapas, the co-director of the “Collins” migrant shelter, Drew Johnson, told the Times of London, “Most of the people we see on the road now are panicking because of Trump’s election… I worry that Mexico will become a massive refugee country.” Co-Director Mayra Hernández saw “little chance of migrants being persuaded to return to their homes.”
Top Mexican government officials say they are not concerned about relations with the incoming Trump administration, the New York Times reported, noting that in his earlier term, Trump avoided what they perceived as meddling in Mexico’s internal affairs as long as they cooperated in deterring migration. “[S]ome top [Mexican] officials say a crackdown by Mr. Trump would further deter migrants from making the journey to the U.S. border, at least in the short term, lessening the pressure on Mexico,” the Times observed.
In a speech commemorating the anniversary of Mexico’s 1910 revolution, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that she and counterparts in the Canadian government are preparing a joint document to submit to Trump, highlighting the contributions that Mexican workers make in the United States.
CBP’s October border data shows little change in migration flows
Border Patrol apprehended 56,530 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2024, according to data that CBP published on November 19. That is a 5 percent increase over September—but since October has more days than September, the per-day average increased just 2 percent, from 1,795 apprehensions per day to 1,824 per day.
CBP encountered another 49,814 people at land-border ports of entry, over 44,900 of them with CBP One appointments. That is nearly identical, in per-day terms, to September’s 47,932 port-of-entry encounters. CBP limits daily CBP One appointments to 1,450 per day. This program’s future is uncertain after Donald Trump takes office.
October’s migration numbers are very similar to every month’s since July: over the past four full months, Border Patrol apprehensions have ranged between 53,858 (September) and 58,009 (August). These are the four lowest totals of the entire Biden administration, and fewer than the last three full months of the Trump administration.
The drop owes to two ongoing crackdowns. In January, Mexico stepped up operations to block in-transit migrants, sending tens of thousands of them to the southern part of the country. In June, the Biden administration put the asylum system almost completely out of reach for people crossing the border between ports of entry, making tightly capped CBP One appointments by far the most viable pathway to access protection at the border.
No post-election “rush,” yet
Donald Trump’s election may create an incentive for an increase in the number of migrants trying to reach U.S. soil before Inauguration Day, January 20, when pathways might close further. Smugglers “are urging people through online platforms to head north as soon as they can,” the Times of London reported from Mexico.
A “rush to the border” has yet to materialize in the two weeks since Election Day, however. In Border Patrol’s San Diego and Tucson sectors, where sector chiefs informally post weekly numbers to Twitter, migrant apprehensions have actually dropped during the first two weeks of November.
Nationalities
Combining Border Patrol apprehensions and port-of-entry encounters, the nationalities that increased the most in October, compared to the July-September average, were Turkey (+50%), “Other Countries” (+20%), Nicaragua (+15%), and Venezuela (+14%), with Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras all increasing 11 percent. Nationalities that decreased the most were Russia (-40%), Brazil (-26%), Ecuador (-24%), and Haiti (-22%).
Again comparing October to the July-September average, last month saw notable increases in Central American people arriving at the border as families. CBP encounters with family-unit members increased the most among citizens of Nicaragua (39%), “Other Countries” (26%), Honduras (26%), El Salvador (24%), and Venezuela (16%), with Colombia and Guatemala increasing 15 percent.
Arrivals of Mexican family-unit members increased only 0.5 percent from the July-September average to October; this is notable because family-unit migration from Mexico had increased by a remarkable 78 percent from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024 (from 157,603 to 280,477 people).
The Darién Gap
With U.S. financial support, on November 18 Panama’s government deported migrants detained in the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling its border with Colombia, aboard a chartered flight to India and Vietnam. It was the second flight to India since Panama’s U.S.-backed aerial deportation program accelerated in August. The plane left 85 people in Delhi and 48 in Ho Chi Minh City.
“This is the 28th Panama deportation since 7 August, deporting 1,204 people (only 1.5% of Darién entries in that period), with a reported 26 funded by the U.S. deporting 1,148,” noted Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border, who closely tracks these deportation flights. “It is reasonable to assume this flight will cost $700,000+ bringing the US funding to about $2 million, about 1/3 of the total allocated [$6 million].”
Most of Panama’s removal flights have gone to Colombia and Ecuador. The U.S. government “is proud that Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador are helping us in this very difficult cause,” DHS official Marlen Piñero told a press conference organized by the U.S. Embassy in Panama.
The Colombian government released data showing that the number of people departing the ports of Necoclí and Turbo, crossing the Gulf of Urabá to begin the Darién Gap journey, has decreased in recent weeks. Departures averaged 382 people per day during the first 15 days of November, down from an average of 771 per day between September 1 and October 15. Part of the reason for the decline is bad weather: storms forced the ports’ closure between November 2 and 4.
Darién Gap migration “is the worst thing that can happen to a migrant child and their family in their experience in search of a better future,” Luis Pedernera, vice-president of the UN Commission on the Rights of the Child, told Agénce France Presse during a visit to Panama. Between January and October, 61,154 minors made the dangerous journey through the jungle region, 21 percent of all 286,210 Darién Gap migrants, according to Panamanian government data.
Other news
- Searchers found the remains of 21-year-old Colombian migrant Karen Sofia Siguecia Arroyo near the border in Tecate, Mexico, east of Tijuana. She had arrived in Mexico on a tourist visa on October 20 and was reported missing three days later.
- At the New York Review of Books, S.C. Cornell recounted the case of the January 30, 2023 killing of 48-year-old Mexican migrant Gabriel Cuen by an AK-47-wielding Arizona rancher. Cornell’s discussion of Cuen’s case recalled a long history of civilian involvement in border law enforcement and the scarcity of convictions of those who kill migrants.
- An analysis by the New York Times’s Hamed Aleaziz pointed out that the outgoing Biden administration’s tight restrictions on asylum access between the border’s ports of entry “may make it easier for Mr. Trump to fulfill his promise to shut down the border and turn back migrants as quickly as possible.”
- Now that Arizona voters have approved a measure empowering law enforcement to arrest people on suspicion of having crossed the border illegally, “My biggest fear is that I’m gonna get rounded up, and put in a detention center myself,” Reyna Montoya of the Phoenix-based non-profit Aliento told the Guardian. Montoya is documented, but “she fears the Trump administration will revoke” her temporary status.
- “One of the first actions that President-elect Donald Trump could take come Jan. 20, 2025, is rescinding the Biden administration’s ban on the term ‘illegal alien,’” the Washington Times reported.
- Citing data compiled by the Immigration Hub and the ad tracking firm AdImpact, the New York Times reported that while Democratic candidates and affiliated groups spent $107 million on immigration-themed campaign ads between January and October 2024, Republicans and affiliates “spent $573 million on negative messaging about immigrants.”
- Border Report cited a University of Michigan study finding that 48 percent of people surveyed who migrated to the United States experienced gun-related threats and violence in their countries of origin.
- A report from House Judiciary Committee Republicans cited examples of alleged improprieties in the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Of over 531,000 beneficiaries with U.S.-based sponsors, the Committee cited over 300 cases of sponsors who were receiving government economic assistance though self-sufficiency was a requirement; 80,000 sponsors who were not U.S. citizens; and double-digit numbers of sponsorship applications from the same internet IP addresses.