Adam Isacson
Adam Isacson
Director for Defense Oversight
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With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
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The many actions and changes following Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration force a change in this week’s Border Update format. Instead of narratives organized under three or four topics, this Update organizes brief points under the following headings:
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported a sharp drop in the number of migrants that its agents and officers encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2025, a month during which the Biden administration managed the border for the first 19 1/2 days, and the Trump administration took over for the final 11 1/2 days.
CBP, which incorporates Border Patrol agents operating between ports of entry (official border crossings) and Field Operations officers operating at the ports of entry, took 61,465 people into custody last month. That was 36 percent fewer than in December 2024, 65 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since September 2020.
Data table
Thirty-two percent of migrants encountered in January were citizens of Mexico, which is not unusual: since October 2023, Mexican people have made up 31 percent of all encountered migrants. Of the 16 nationalities that CBP reports that had more than 100 encounters, all decreased from December to January; the nationalities that dropped most steeply were Guatemala (-51%), Brazil (-51%), Honduras (-46%), Colombia (-45%), Nicaragua (-44%), and Haiti (-44%).
Migration had been falling steadily at the border for 13 months, since Mexico’s government launched a crackdown on northbound migration in January 2024, and since the Biden administration implemented a rule in June 2024 that ended asylum access between ports of entry in most cases. The further December-to-January drop is a result of the Trump administration acting on January 20 to close the border to all undocumented people and shut down asylum access.
Between the ports of entry in January, CBP’s Border Patrol component apprehended 29,116 people. That was 38 percent fewer than in December 2024, 77 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since May 2020.
Data table
Border Patrol agents released 2,572 migrants from custody in January (9 percent of apprehensions). That was 63 percent fewer than in December 2024, 96 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest interior releases since January 2021. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks told CBS News on February 20 that the agency has released only two migrants from custody since January 20, and those individuals “were released to assist with criminal prosecutions as witnesses.”
At the ports of entry, the Trump administration abruptly stopped honoring appointments that the Biden administration had been allowing asylum seekers to arrange using the CBP One smartphone app. As the new administration canceled CBP One’s use for appointments, CBP’s encounters at ports of entry between January 20-31 were 93 percent fewer than the preceding 11 days’ average. As a result, the number of migrants encountered for the entire month of January 2025 dropped sharply after holding steady since July 2023, when the CBP One program had begun functioning at 1,450 daily appointments.
Data Table
At the ports of entry in January, CBP’s Field Operations component encountered 32,349 people. Port-of-entry encounters exceeded Border Patrol apprehensions during the third straight month, and almost certainly for the third time ever. January’s port-of-entry encounters were 34 percent fewer than in December 2024, 38 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since April 2023.
Sixty-one percent of migrants encountered in January were single adults, 34 percent were family unit members (parents and children), and 5 percent were unaccompanied children. That is similar to proportions measured overall since October 2023 (57 percent single adults, 37 percent family unit members, 5 percent unaccompanied children.)
Data table
Of the nine geographic sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, San Diego, the westernmost sector in California, was the number one sector for migrant apprehensions with 6,397, or 22 percent of the total. San Diego has been the number-one sector for migrant apprehensions since June 2024, with the exception of December 2024, when agents apprehended more migrants in the easternmost sector, the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas.
Data table
While data since Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration are not yet fully available, we do know the following:
The drop in migration is a direct result of the impossibility of seeking asylum at the border under the Trump administration’s border policies, like summarily deporting all undocumented people and ending CBP One appointments, which several organizations are currently challenging in federal court.
“The right to seek asylum in the United States is non-existent at the U.S.-Mexico border,” read a February 20 Amnesty International brief based on fieldwork in Tijuana, which found that thousands are stranded and vulnerable in Mexico as a result.
Banks, the Border Patrol chief, agreed in a CBS News interview that asylum is no longer an option for those who cross between ports of entry. “You do not cross the border illegally and then make an asylum claim,” he told CBS reporter Camilo Montoya-Gálvez. “You can go to the port of entry, or you can go to one of the embassies in your country and make your claim for asylum.” Those options are nearly impossible to pursue, however, as ports of entry and embassy entrances are tightly guarded.
The new administration is adopting a layered approach, stacking overlapping bans on asylum access on top of each other.
First, and most indiscriminately, a January 20 executive order suspended the entry of undocumented migrants to the United States under any circumstances, using the presidential power to block the entry of classes of people granted by Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This order restricts people from invoking the right to asylum at the border, citing the existence of an “invasion” under Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Border Patrol agents and CBP officers are essentially authorized to ignore asylum claims.
A Just Security analysis from Elizabeth Goitein and Katherine Yon Ebright of the Brennan Center for Justice warned that Trump is using his invocation of an “invasion” as a way “to lay claim to vast presidential powers that don’t exist in peacetime or wartime, launching a direct assault on the constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law.”
Second, CNN reporter Priscilla Álvarez revealed that the administration is about to unveil a new block: a public health order banning asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants “as risks for spreading diseases.” Although there is no pandemic threat, sources told Álvarez that internal discussions have cited measles and tuberculosis. (Scholars have pointed out that the racist notion that migrants spread disease has a long history in the United States.)
Meanwhile, even as it professes concern for cross-border spread of disease, the new administration has fired hundreds of federal health inspectors who had been posted at ports of entry to detect communicable diseases in arriving cargo and people, the New York Times revealed.
Third, one of the January 20 executive orders would revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which sends asylum seekers into Mexico to await their U.S. immigration court hearing dates. While the administration refuses to hear asylum claims, it is not clear who would be sent to Mexico to await asylum proceedings.
The government of Panama published data about migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling its border with Colombia, in January. It reported that just 2,229 people—72 per day—migrated through the Gap last month. That was 54 percent fewer than in December 2024, 94 percent fewer than in January 2024, and the fewest in any month since February 2021.
Data table
As in every month since February 2023, Venezuela was the number-one nationality of people who migrated through the Darién route. However, Venezuelan citizens made up just 50 percent of the migration flow, the smallest share since December 2023. Venezuela (1,114 people) was followed on the list of nationalities by Colombia (136), Nepal (122), and Iran (100). Minors were 17 percent of the total. Women and girls were 34 percent.
The number of people traveling through the 70-mile Darién Gap route has declined sharply despite the January inauguration of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who—as a February 17 Carter Center final report makes clear—declared himself re-elected after a fraudulent July 2024 vote. There has not been a new wave of migration away from the entrenched dictatorship in part because it is known that the United States has inaugurated a president promising a historic crackdown on migrants.
The Trump administration has begun to implement so-called “bridge deportations”: compelling nations to accept deported migrants who are citizens of third countries, whom those nations would then have to repatriate, apparently at U.S. expense. These deportations appear to be taking place without taking into account the deported migrants’ fear of returning to their home countries.
Between February 12 and 15, the U.S. government sent three military planes to Panama carrying migrants from several Asian nations. In response to a direct request from the Trump administration, Panama’s government agreed to receive 299 individuals from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and likely elsewhere.
Panamanian officials could produce no document or agreement explaining the legal basis for this transfer of people from third countries.
Upon arrival, the deported people were confined to a hotel in Panama City and barred from leaving for several days, their passports and most mobile phones taken away from them. “Lawyers have said it is illegal to detain people in Panama for more than 24 hours without a court order,” the Times noted. Several migrants told the New York Times reporters that at least one person in the hotel attempted suicide and another broke his leg trying to escape.
At the hotel, a vivid New York Times report documented, many communicated to reporters by cellphone or by writing on windows and holding up signs. An Afghan woman, using hand gestures through the hotel window, communicated that she could be killed if returned to Kabul. Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year-old citizen of Iran, fled her country because, as a convert to Christianity, she could be executed in her home country. “I would rather jump off a plane than go back to China,” a Chinese Christian man told the Times.
Though Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that “not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody,” it is not clear whether they had the opportunity to do so, or whether they were listened to. Panamanian officials said that more than 40 percent of the deported people (128 of 299) have indicated that they fear return to their home countries, and will not go back voluntarily.
On February 19 the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) assisted the voluntary repatriations of 12 people from Uzbekistan and India, the Times reported.
Those who refuse repatriation are now being taken to the San Vicente reception center on the edge of Panama’s Darién Gap wilderness, about a five or six-hour drive from the capital, where they will be confined for an unclear amount of time.
The San Vicente center was built as temporary dormitory housing for processing northbound migrants emerging from the Darién Gap route. Now that migration through that route has declined sharply (see above), it stands largely empty. Conditions at San Vicente, which has a capacity of about 500 beds, were always primitive, as documented in a March 2024 Human Rights Watch report. When the deported migrants were confined to the Panama City hotel, Panamanian authorities were reportedly preparing the San Vicente facility.
On the night of February 18, Panamanian authorities transferred 97 people to San Vicente, the New York Times reported. Ghasemzadeh said, “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages. They gave us a stale piece of bread. We are sitting on the floor.”
A February 20 flight from San Diego brought 135 citizens of Uzbekistan, China, Afghanistan, Russia, and other countries to Costa Rica. About half were children and at least 2 were pregnant women. The government of Costa Rica is transporting them to a facility along the Panama border, about six hours’ drive from the capital, that had been used to register northbound migrants arriving from the Darién Gap.
They will be held at that site, unable to leave, for “four, five, six weeks,” Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves said, as IOM helps arrange their U.S.-funded repatriation to their home countries. It is not clear whether those repatriations will be voluntary and what might happen if people express fear of death, torture, or imprisonment upon return.
President Chaves told reporters that Costa Rica is helping its “economically powerful brother from the north,” in part to avoid economic retaliation. “If they impose a tax in our free zones, it’ll screw us,” Chaves said. “I don’t think they’ll do it, thank God … love is repaid with love … 200 will come, we treat them well and they will leave.”
A statement from an IOM spokesperson characterized the UN agency’s role as “providing humanitarian support and facilitating return when it is safe to do so.” When it is not safe to do so—for instance, when people credibly fear return to their countries—it is not clear what the agency’s role might be. Faced with long-term confinement in a primitive camp in a remote part of a Central American country, some threatened individuals might opt for a highly risky return. Badilla said that some may have the option to seek refugee status in Costa Rica.
El Salvador and Guatemala have also agreed to accept third countries’ citizens, but no such “bridge deportation” flights have yet arrived. Honduras, as discussed below, received Venezuelan citizens sent from the U.S. base in Guantánamo, Cuba, but they never left the airport before being transferred to Venezuela.
In Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, where many Venezuelan migrants are stranded and homeless, the Mexican government’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) is offering to fly people back to Caracas aboard voluntary “humanitarian flights,” Chiapas Paralelo reported. While they do not want to return to Venezuela, some migrants interviewed by reporter Ángeles Mariscal said they were considering moving south to Costa Rica because the United States is closed off and conditions in Mexico are too hostile.
The Miami Herald noted that Venezuelans stranded in Mexico who lack passports cannot purchase plane tickets home even if they want to, “because the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico is refusing to issue a letter of safe conduct to return home.”
Developing note: On the afternoon of February 20, a civilian Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight took 177 Venezuelan citizens from the Guantánamo Bay base to Honduras. There, a Venezuelan government plane retrieved them and brought them back to Caracas.
As of late February 20, we lack more information. A February 20 Justice Department court filing noted that 178 people were detained at the base on February 19. Of that number, all but one, who was brought back to the United States, are now in Venezuela. The base in Cuba is, at present, empty of detained migrants.
What follows is the text of this update’s original Guantánamo narrative, drafted before this big, late development:
The Trump administration has, as of February 19, transported more than 175 men to detention facilities at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, according to a thorough New York Times examination of information that reporter Carol Rosenberg has been able to uncover. (CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, citing federal data shared with the network, cited 142 people on February 19th.)
They have arrived aboard 13 military aircraft. “All have been described as Venezuelans who have been issued final deportation orders,” the Times explained. “But it is not known why these men in particular were sent there.”
Rosenberg reported that about 700 military and 150 civilian personnel are now carrying out migrant operations at the base. “A military blueprint for the migrant operation shows plans to house more than 3,500 U.S. forces near tent encampments for more than 11,000 migrants.” The Times overview discussed “concern about mission creep and the militarization of a civilian security challenge,” as well as “whether it is legal, or a misappropriation of funds.”
Of the 178 people being held on February 19, 127 were considered “high threat” detainees, held at Camp 6, the medium-security military prison that held so-called “enemy combatants” during the United States’ 2000s-2010s “global war on terror.” The rest are in the base’s Migrant Operations Center, a DHS-run facility that for three decades has held migrants apprehended on the high seas.
Reports continue to emerge about detainees at Guantánamo who have no criminal records. At his “Huddled Masses” newsletter at the Bulwark, Adrián Carrasquillo spoke to the mother of Mayfreed Durán-Arape, a 21-year-old man who had been in ICE detention for 18 months after being apprehended at the border, only to get sent to the U.S. base. His mother said that he faces charges after he “intervened to stop an officer from repeatedly hitting a friend during an altercation” in the detention center where he was being held last November.
Following a February 13 Armed Services Committee hearing at which they could not get satisfactory answers, Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) sent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a letter requesting information about the Guantánamo operation’s cost and impact on military readiness and morale.
“Long seen as a legal black hole, Guantánamo has historically evaded traditional government oversight, and immigrants previously detained there have faced mistreatment,” read an analysis by Nicole Narea at Vox. “You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse… and the inability to contact the outside world is intense,” Yael Schacher of Refugees International told the Guardian.
The U.S. Senate met through the night on February 20-21 to consider and approve a budget resolution that would create a framework for massively increasing spending on tough border measures and mass deportation. The bill is moving forward despite disagreement between House and Senate Republican leadership about how to proceed, which will likely delay consideration well into March.
The budget resolution would pave the way for a future bill granting DHS an additional $175 billion, with more going to the Departments of Justice and Defense. (For comparison, currently the entire annual DHS budget—including non-border agencies like FEMA, the Secret Service, and the Coast Guard—is just over $100 billion.)
An unidentified Senate Republican aide told the Washington Post that the $175 billion “is expected to go toward pay raises, hiring and retention bonuses for ICE agents; immigration judges and support staff; assistant U.S. attorneys; the border wall; additional detention space; and local and state law enforcement agencies to support ICE.”
Senate Republicans control 53 out of 100 seats. Normally, a Senate rule (the “filibuster”) requires 60 votes to end debate and proceed to a vote. This spending measure, however, is proceeding under a complicated rule called “reconciliation,” which can only be invoked occasionally but allows a bill to pass with a simple majority—without a single Democratic vote—if all of its provisions can be shown to have a budgetary impact.
Under that procedure, senators spent the night of February 20-21 considering dozens of amendments, mainly brought by Democrats. These failed along party lines but were introduced for their symbolic value. Politico had reported that most expected Democratic amendments would center on Trump administration cuts, taxes, and spending freezes—not border or migration issues.
The Senate passed the budget resolution at 4:46 AM on February 21. The House is expected to pass a different version next week or possibly the following week. At some point, though, both houses must pass an identical resolution. “Both chambers must pass the same resolution in order to kick off reconciliation in earnest. Then Republicans can begin constructing the package that will contain the policies in Trump’s agenda,” Punchbowl News explained.
That may not happen right away. House and Senate Republican leaderships disagree on whether the resolution should separate the party’s priorities—taxes and “border plus immigration”—into two bills or one. Senate leaders favor two bills, and are moving ahead with border-immigration first. House leaders, with a razor-thin Republican majority that might not sustain two votes, want to combine taxes and border-immigration into one bill, and President Trump has endorsed that approach.
The bill that Senate Republicans just passed, then, is “widely seen as a backup plan for now,” and not the actual framework for the big spending package, Punchbowl News explained.
In other budget developments, the Washington Post revealed a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instructing the U.S. military to prepare for an 8 percent budget cut over the next 5 years. One of 17 Defense Department categories that would be exempted from cuts is military “operations at the southern U.S. border.”
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