U.S.-Mexico Border Update: DHS leadership and oversight, detention deaths and “warehouses,” border wall in natural areas

Adam Isacson

WOLA

0
yesterday

Director for Defense Oversight

With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here.

Your donation to WOLA is crucial to keeping these paywall-free and ad-free Updates going. Please contribute now and support our work.

Sen. Mullin to replace Noem at DHS as partial shutdown continues: The Senate Homeland Security Committee approved the nomination of Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) to succeed Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security. The nominee would take over at a time when Republicans are seeking to carry out their “mass deportation” strategy with a different tone and profile, as it has become unpopular. DHS remains partially shut down, meanwhile, as Democratic legislators demand reforms after a string of human rights abuses.

Timeline may slow for detention “warehouse” plan, while in-custody deaths skyrocket: Noem’s plan for a network of giant warehouses to store undocumented migrants in detention may slow a bit as the Department transitions to Mullin’s direction, but appears likely to continue despite much local opposition. 13 people have died in ICE’s regular detention system so far this year.

Concerns about oversight of DHS: It has now been a year since the Trump administration gutted internal oversight offices at DHS, making accountability more difficult to achieve. Regular reporting of data from DHS has declined sharply.

In the courts: The Supreme Court will hear arguments over the next month about TPS cancellations and about “metering” at ports of entry. Some Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison without due process in March 2025 have filed a claim against DHS. Some of the Salvadoran men sent to the CECOT on that same day remain disappeared.

The border wall and natural areas: CBP appears to be backing off plans to build a border wall through Big Bend National Park in Texas, even as it inks a large wall-building contract in the region. Concerns of environmental harm from border barriers abound in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley and in the Rio Grande near Laredo.

Sen. Mullin to replace Noem at DHS as partial shutdown continues

President Donald Trump dismissed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5. On March 31, when she leaves after 14 months to serve as a “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas” initiative, Noem will be the first cabinet member to exit Trump’s administration. Trump named Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) as Noem’s replacement.

Noem’s tenure will be remembered for aggressive operations in U.S. cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis; incendiary and often untruthful rhetoric about migrants and people who defend them; frequent infighting within the Department; and numerous promotional videos and social media posts, often featuring Noem wearing the uniforms of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) law enforcement agencies, and once in front of people caged in a cell of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison.

During Noem’s tenure, Nick Miroff wrote at the Atlantic, “I regularly heard from staffers—career law-enforcement officers and political appointees alike—who were desperate for a return to institutional normalcy. Their concerns weren’t ideological. They felt, instead, that Noem was running the department and its law-enforcement agencies as an attention-grabbing spectacle, undermining their mission.”

Former Trump campaign official Corey Lewandowski, Noem’s powerful advisor who was nominally a temporary “special government employee,” is expected to depart along with Noem. Noem and Lewandowski had forced out “more than a dozen” senior Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees between October 2025 and February 2026, the Washington Examiner reported, in part due to a vendetta against CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott.

Sen. Mullin, the nominee, is a first-term senator and Trump loyalist who does not sit on the Homeland Security Committee or, though he is an appropriator, on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. He is a former mixed martial arts fighter and the only senator who lacks a four-year degree, having dropped out of college to take over his family’s plumbing business. Media profiles describe him as “affable” and able to get along with Democrats, though they also note episodes of aggressive behavior, including a 2023 hearing in which the Senator challenged a witness to a fight.

On March 19 the Senate Homeland Security Committee approved Mullin’s nomination, sending it to the full Senate, with an 8-7 vote. Mullin had to depend on the support of one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), in a committee where Republicans hold an 8-7 majority, because the committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), opposed the nomination.

Sen. Paul, a small-government libertarian who has opposed several of Trump’s spending, internal policing, and military intervention policies, confronted Mullin during his March 18 confirmation hearing over remarks that the nominee had made in February calling Paul a “freaking snake” and adding that he could “understand” why Paul’s neighbor assaulted him in 2017, breaking six of his ribs. “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force,” Paul said.

While much coverage conveys a sense that DHS might be under a steadier hand with Mullin in charge, the Oklahoma Senator has made his share of controversial statements. After the January 24 killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Mullin told Fox News that the nurse was “a deranged individual who came in to cause massive damage with a loaded pistol.” Appearing on Fox Business with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was “murdering U.S. citizens,” Mullin shot back, “Well, these American citizens are actually impeding federal officers from doing their job.”

Asked in December about the Trump administration’s lethal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which have now killed 158 civilians on mere suspicion of drug trafficking, Mullin replied, “I have zero problems with sending them to the bottom of the ocean, and I hope they rot in hell for it because they know what they’re doing when they get on that boat and they’re trafficking the drugs to our streets.”

In the March 18 hearing, Mullin said that he regretted his words about the Minneapolis shootings, but avoided direct apologies, arguing that investigations were ongoing and that officers had faced split-second decisions.

Policy continuity, though perhaps a change in tone

The change in DHS leadership does not signal any pullback in the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” agenda, though it likely indicates a shift in how it will be carried out. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said at his hearing, evoking the lower-profile but bureaucratically adroit approach of White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan, an immigration hardliner who was rarely in contact with Noem and Lewandowski.

With Mullin in Noem’s former role, the White House is likely to be in firmer control of the day-to-day management of border and immigration enforcement. “The DHS Secretary may be the least important person shaping immigration policy right now,” former Obama and Biden official Andrea Flores wrote. “Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, and border czar Tom Homan, a former ICE official, are the ones who wield true authority.” As a result, “Mullin’s job will simply be to execute Miller and Homan’s agenda.”

Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and arguably more hard-line on immigration policy than Homan or even Trump, “runs that department and will continue to run the department,” Sen. Chris Murphy told Reuters. Miller hosts daily 10 a.m. conference calls with DHS and other Cabinet agencies; last May, he imposed a daily quota of 3,000 arrests on ICE, a number the agency has not yet come close to reaching.

Even as the policies and top personnel remain similar, however, the administration and congressional Republicans are racing to improve the optics of a “mass deportation” agenda that has seen a collapse in public support.

As traumatic videos of ICE and CBP operations proliferate, along with accounts of mistreatment in custody, a Navigator Research poll showed Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration policy plummeting from a net -3 percentage points last April to -17 now. “Support for Trump’s mass deportation plan has now flipped entirely. In January 2025, it held a net +10 approval. Today it sits at net -14. Three in five independents oppose it outright,” added Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider, who reported on the poll.

As the November midterm elections approach and their control of both chambers of Congress looks shakier, Republicans appear aware of the immigration crackdown’s unpopularity and are seeking to soften the tone.

The number-two item on the Trump campaign’s 2024 platform was “Carry Out the Largest Deportation Operation in American History.” But at a March 10 House Republican retreat in Doral, Florida, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately urged legislators to stop emphasizing “mass deportations.” Blair urged a greater focus on removing the much smaller population of migrants with violent criminal records.

“We got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic and Latino voters, for certain, because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous,” House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) acknowledged. “But here’s the good news: We’re in a course correction mode right now.”

In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) runs one of the hardest-line state-level immigration enforcement operations, six out of eight sheriffs on the governor’s “Immigration Enforcement Council” publicly broke with the administration, calling for better guidelines on deportation targeting and proposing civil fines, rather than removal, for non-criminal undocumented immigrants.

Far from Stephen Miller’s 3,000-per-day target, ICE arrests actually dropped 11 percent from January to February, down to 1,115 per day, the New York Times reported, as aggressive, showy Chicago- and Minneapolis-style enforcement offensives have abated. The population in ICE detention has dropped from over 70,000 in January to about 63,000 in March, according to internal data reviewed by The Atlantic’s Miroff.

On the right, Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, urged the administration to stay the course in comments reported by Bloomberg Government. “The president ran on this in 2024. He promised mass deportations. It’s no time for some in the White House to go wobbly, or those on the Hill.”

Still, Mullin has signaled a willingness to walk back a few Noem-era policies.

The nominee told senators that he would instruct ICE agents not to enter residences without a judicial warrant, except in cases of hot pursuit. ICE has been using self-issued “administrative warrants” to enter homes when the agency believes that undocumented immigrants are inside. (“Kristi Noem acknowledged in her testimony in response to my questions that at least 28 break-ins have occurred,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said during Mullin’s confirmation hearing.)

Mullin said that he has no 3,000-per-day quota to meet.

The nominee said he will not insist on personally signing off on all DHS contracts over $100,000, as Noem and Lewandowski did.

The most visible face of the Noem-era mass-deportation effort, Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, will be retiring from the agency at the end of March, the New York Times and CBS News reported. Bovino, who appeared to relish confronting protesters, was removed from his role as an “at-large commander” shortly after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Still, Daniel Boguslaw wrote in an American Prospect analysis, “the reality is that an inner circle of Bovino allies continues to shape the agency’s incursion into the American heartland and its operational culture writ large.”

In Congress, offers and counteroffers

The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has remained partially shut down since February 13, with nearly half of its workforce going without a paycheck. (ICE and CBP are funded, however, thanks to separate appropriations through the mammoth “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress passed last July.)

The partial closure is a consequence of the Minneapolis human rights crisis, which led Senate Democrats to demand reforms to DHS practices as a condition for their support for the Department’s DHS appropriation. (The filibuster rule requires 60 of 100 votes in the U.S. Senate to move legislation to a vote, which means that at least 7 Democratic senators would have to agree on a deal to end the shutdown.)

On March 17, Homan and White House Legislative Affairs Director James Braid sent a letter to top Senate Republican appropriators outlining five concessions that the administration would be willing to make: expanded body-worn cameras, limiting enforcement at sensitive locations, visible officer identification, adherence to existing law permitting unannounced congressional oversight visits to detention facilities, and—notably offered as a concession—pledging not to deport U.S. citizens, as already mandated by law.

Democrats rejected this offer as falling too far short of a list of 10 reform demands issued in February. “We’re trying to move a little bit, but they’ve got to get serious,” Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said. “They are not getting serious.” Two of these are just pledges to follow the law,” noted the Cato Institute’s David Bier. Critics also pointed out that the White House offer would allow agents to continue using face masks during operations and would not mandate that body-worn cameras be turned on, or that footage be stored and made accessible.

Timeline may slow for detention “warehouse” plan, while in-custody deaths skyrocket

If confirmed by the Senate, Mullin will inherit Noem’s $38 billion plan to convert ICE’s network of detention centers into a 34-facility plan based on giant shipping warehouses converted to hold human beings. Once implemented, this plan would allow the agency to detain at least 92,000 people at a time; ICE currently has a capacity of about 70,000 people and was detaining 39,703 at the end of the Biden administration.

The plan’s timeline foresaw the warehouses becoming operational as early as the end of September, but officials are now signaling a likely pause or slowdown amid the top-level management change.

The so-called “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative” has now purchased 11 warehouses for a combined $1.04 billion, according to records kept by Project Saltbox, a citizen oversight initiative. Mainly due to community opposition, warehouse purchases at 12 locations have been canceled. Elsewhere, pushback continues:

In Social Circle, Georgia, where ICE plans an 8,500-bed “mega-center”—more than twice the town’s population, municipal officials have cut off water service to the facility, citing water and sewer capacity limits.

In Oakwood, Georgia, in the conservative Atlanta exurbs, the Hall County Board of Commissioners unanimously adopted an unenforceable “moratorium” on new detention centers after DHS purchased a warehouse for $68 million in February.

Veterans led the apparently successful resistance to a warehouse in Lebanon, Tennessee. “This ground you stand on is one of the highest concentrations of combat veterans in this country, people who have already faced tyranny abroad, people who recognize state cruelty because we’ve seen it up close and stopped it. I’m one of them,” local resident Chris McFarland told the Wilson County Commission.

The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reported on discomfort within ICE and DHS about the warehouse model, noting that “the warehouses could become white elephants if there’s a change in ICE policies and the detainee population decreases.” A longtime ICE official told Miroff, “those centers will be obsolete in three to five years” if “mass deportation” succeeds in reducing the undocumented population. (This also assumes that the warehouses’ purpose does not expand beyond holding undocumented non-citizens.)

Andrea Pitzer, whose book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps explores the characteristics of concentration camps and “concentration camp societies,” discussed the warehouse plan with author Anand Giridharadas, noting that a facility “does not need to be an extermination center to be a really harmful concentration camp.”

13 deaths in custody this calendar year, at least 42 during the Trump administration

The death toll, meanwhile, continues to mount within ICE’s existing, largely contractor-run detention system. Royer Pérez-Jiménez, a 19-year-old citizen of Mexico, was pronounced dead, apparently of suicide, on March 16 in the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida.

Pérez-Jiménez was the 13th person to die in ICE custody this calendar year, and the second death in a week, noted immigration analyst Austin Kocher, who is tracking ICE deaths closely. One person has been dying in detention every six days.

“The 13 deaths are more than triple the number that had died by this point last year,” CBS News reported. “In 2025, 31 ICE detainees died, a two-decade high, according to a CBS News analysis of ICE records.“ (That article includes a count of all ICE custody deaths by year since 2004, when 32 people died; most years have seen far fewer deaths.)

Kocher counts 42 known detention deaths since the Trump administration began. His count excludes a Honduran man who died after being struck by a vehicle while fleeing ICE custody, and two men killed by a sniper who fired on an ICE facility in Dallas.

Pérez-Jiménez died just two days after Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, a 41-year-old former Afghan special forces soldier evacuated with his family in 2021, who had his humanitarian parole status revoked by the Trump administration last August and was detained on March 13 near Dallas. He died of still-unknown causes a day later.

Paktiawal told his brother that he was feeling ill when he spoke to him from detention. The brother said an immigration officer told him, “‘Don’t worry about it… we have nurse. We will take care of him.’ And he hang up the phone on me.” His 12-year-old son told CBS News, “I just want answers for my dad. That’s it. I want to know why he died. He was healthy.”

The Washington Post noted that the administration’s warehouse plan is opting to work with newer, “relatively untested” for-profit detention contractors instead of Geo Group and CoreCivic, the companies most frequently chosen to run facilities in ICE’s existing system. “The high expectations that executives and investors had for the two companies following the reelection of Donald Trump have soured in recent months.”

In an earnings call reported by CNN, GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoley said that the company is “cautiously participating” in the warehouse plan “while aware of the logistical issues that could arise and the resistance on the ground.”

Geo Group and CoreCivic make money running prisons for government at all levels, but as a Migrant Insider review of detention companies’ lobbying efforts reported, ICE contracts make up 43 percent of Geo Group’s revenue and 30 percent of CoreCivic’s revenue. The two companies spent roughly $3.15 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and each contributed $500,000 to Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee.

Meanwhile, the architecture firm DLR Group, whose messaging has sought to promote the idea that good design can humanize imprisonment, decided to cease future work on ICE detention and deportation facilities after an outcry from its employees, Mother Jones reported.

Fort Bliss facility changing contractors, but apparently staying open

The March 4 Washington Post reported that ICE was “preparing to terminate its contract for Camp East Montana,” the sprawling tent facility on the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso, Texas, that is currently ICE’s largest detention center. The agency is indeed stopping its $1.2 billion contract, scheduled to run through September 2027, with Acquisition Logistics, a small Virginia-based business with no prior detention-contracting experience. It is not closing the facility, however.

As noted in several past WOLA Border Updates, “Camp East Montana” has been the site of numerous denunciations of unhealthy and hazardous conditions, medical neglect, disease outbreaks, and allegations of physical abuse by guards. Three men died there between early December and mid-January. It currently holds about 1,500 people, down from about 3,100 in January; ICE has planned for a capacity of 5,000.

“Far from closing, Camp East Montana is upgrading,” Reason reported that a DHS spokesperson told Fox News, noting, “This upgrade will include increasing oversight and detention standards at the facility, which are long overdue.” A review of contract postings by Jeff Abbott of the El Paso Times found that the new contractor is Amentum Services Inc., a major government services corporation based in Washington, DC’s Virginia exurbs.

Very long stays at the Dilley family detention center

Troubling reports continue to emerge from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, ICE’s detention facility for families in a Texas town near San Antonio. Though the 1997 Flores judicial settlement agreement governing detention of children prohibits keeping minors in detention facilities for more than 20 days, the average stay at Dilley is currently about 63 days, Faisal Al-Juburi, a co-CEO of the legal assistance group RAICES, told the Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson.

“Officials routinely violate the limit” on children’s detention stays, according to data collected by court-appointed monitors and reported by NBC News. “As of January, more than 900 children had been held in family detention for longer than 20 days .”

When a father named Aleksei “approached an ICE officer and asked why the deadline had been ignored,” NBC reported, “‘the officer said to take it up with his boss.’ ‘Who’s that?’ Aleksei asked. ‘Trump.’” In a statement, NBC added, “DHS attacked the Flores settlement as ‘a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources.’”

Meanwhile, according to ProPublica reporter Mica Rosenberg, who has reported extensively on trauma children have experienced at the facility, “The Dilley family detention facility disabled video calls on tablets after detainees’ call recordings were shared on social media, according to a document viewed by ProPublica.”

Concerns about oversight of DHS

One year since DHS internal watchdogs were gutted

A report and event (video) by the Nogales-based Kino Border Initiative (KBI) and WOLA explained and commemorated the one-year anniversary (on March 21) of the Trump administration firing nearly every employee at DHS’s internal investigative and oversight agencies, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. This was also the subject of an in-depth analysis by José Olivares at the Guardian.

A year later, including contract personnel, CRCL has seen its staff cut by 80 percent and OIDO by 96 percent. Litigation to undo the cuts continues in federal court. Many complaint investigations have been halted. No new recommendations have been issued. The ability to submit new complaints—through web forms in English—has been truncated. Investigations now stop if the complainant is no longer in ICE custody. Case updates are almost impossible to obtain after receiving a sparse form email.

The KBI-WOLA report recommends “a series of common-sense steps to uphold the dignity of victims, make repeated abuses less likely, and instill a culture that recognizes that respect for civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and detainees’ rights is a necessary element of success in securing the homeland—never an obstacle.”

Access to information is receding fast

An analysis by Rebecca Santana at the Associated Press identified several regular reports to Congress and the public that DHS has ceased to publish or update, making it difficult to evaluate the Department’s results, including numbers officials toss out in press statements.

Under the Biden administration, the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics was providing a monthly set of tables on Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes, including CBP encounters at the border, repatriations, humanitarian parole recipients, and much else. This useful report, which was not required by law, went dormant in January 2025.

ICE had an online data dashboard, too, that is now woefully out of date, even as the giant “beautiful bill” appropriation multiplied the agency’s budget.

The AP noted that ICE’s “annual report, typically released in December, had not been published as of mid-March.”

Though Congress requires ICE to publish updated detention statistics every two weeks, the agency has not posted this data since February 12. When ICE does update it, previous data get overwritten, requiring use of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to view prior numbers like detainee populations. The February 12 update showed a detained population of 68,289; the only way we know it has dropped to about 63,000 is that a source shared a number with the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff.

As of midday March 20, CBP has not yet published border migration or drug seizure statistics for February; while this is later than usual, it is not unprecedented. (Usually, though, the agency publishes numbers quickly if it wishes to tout a reduction in migration.)

“We’re all a little bit in the dark about exactly how immigration enforcement is operating at a time when it’s taking new and unprecedented forms,” Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute told the AP’s Santana. For now, there is no way even to know how many people ICE has deported since the Trump administration began:

In a Jan. 20 news release, DHS said it had deported more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, in a second release, the department put the figure at 622,000. In congressional testimony March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the figure was 700,000. …But ICE, an agency within DHS, also releases figures on how many people it has removed from the country, part of a large data release mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the figures put that number at roughly 400,000 over Trump’s first year.

…But ICE, an agency within DHS, also releases figures on how many people it has removed from the country, part of a large data release mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the figures put that number at roughly 400,000 over Trump’s first year.

In a February victory for congressional oversight, a federal judge struck down a DHS policy requiring members of Congress to arrange visits to ICE detention facilities well in advance, even though a 2024 law mandates full access for legislators. Yet on March 9, when members of Maryland’s congressional delegation visited ICE’s holding area on the sixth floor of the George H. Fallon Federal Building in Baltimore, they found it empty.

The facility has generated horrific accounts of miserable conditions, and an immigration lawyer who visited four days earlier found its holding cells “so packed that ICE agents were housing detainees in the attorney consultation room,” according to the Baltimore Banner. In advance of the legislators’ oversight visit, ICE had moved everyone across the country to its Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.

TPS before the Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from cancelling Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 350,000 citizens of Haiti and 6,000 citizens of Syria. The Court expedited the case, scheduling oral argument in April and a likely decision by the end of June.

Over the past year, the administration has sought to end TPS, a temporary status shielding some citizens from deportation if their countries are deemed unsafe, for citizens of Afghanistan (8,105 people), Burma (3,670, postponed), Cameroon (4,920), Ethiopia (4,540), Haiti (330,735, stayed), Honduras (51,225, vacated), Nepal (7,160, vacated), Nicaragua (2,910, vacated) Somalia (705), South Sudan (210, stayed), Syria (3,860, stayed), and Venezuela (605,015, upheld by the Supreme Court while arguments continue). It remains in place for citizens of El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen.

After lower courts struck down the administration’s Haiti cancellation, it appealed to the Supreme Court on March 11. In May and October, the Supreme Court had allowed the Trump administration to end TPS for Venezuelans while appeals were pending; this time, TPS remains in place for Haitians while the top court deliberates.

Constitutional law scholar Steve Vladeck sees “a referendum on the Supreme Court’s own work,” specifically, whether its earlier unexplained stays in Venezuela cases set binding precedent. The Haiti case (Miot v. Trump) includes district court findings that Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric about Haitians constitutes legally significant animus. The Court must decide whether judges can review DHS’s compliance with TPS procedures; whether the revocation of TPS violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA); and whether the administration’s animus or discrimination toward specific nationalities is legally relevant to the TPS issue.

“Metering” of asylum seekers before the Supreme Court

On March 24 the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, a case that goes back to 2017, when the first Trump administration implemented border-wide “metering”: the placement of CBP officers on the borderline outside of ports of entry to prevent asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil to ask for protection in the United States. “Lower courts have consistently sided with asylum seekers, saying that the federal government must process people who are coming to ports of entry for inspection,” noted Kate Morrissey at Beyond the Border. “Now the federal government has appealed to the top court.”

Thirteen former U.S. government officials who worked across the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Justice filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, which they summarized in a Just Security essay arguing that the administration’s position on metering and asylum access is “not just morally troubling; it is legally wrong.”

They emphasize the governing statute’s plain text: “Any person who is ‘physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States’ may apply for asylum,” interpreting it to mean that “arrives” deliberately encompasses those at the border before crossing.

The Biden administration had practiced a much looser form of metering, too, by requiring those who wished to approach ports of entry—with very few exceptions—to register for about 1,450 daily appointments, weeks or months in advance, using a mobile phone app, CBP One. “But regulating entry is not the same as denying it altogether,” the former officials wrote, noting that since its first day, the Trump administration has suspended all asylum access at the border and canceled use of CBP One.

“The right to seek asylum is not a policy preference or a loophole—it is a legal right and a moral commitment forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Seeking asylum is not like taking a number at a deli counter and waiting for your turn,” said plaintiff Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, of Al Otro Lado, which is based in Tijuana and San Diego where “metering” first occurred, on a limited basis, in 2016 at the end of the Obama administration.

CECOT victims, including still-imprisoned Salvadorans

Attorneys for Andry Hernández Romero and five other Venezuelan men filed administrative claims against DHS under the Federal Tort Claims Act on March 13. Hernández, a gay Venezuelan makeup artist, was among 252 Venezuelan men and a few dozen Salvadoran men whom the Trump administration sent, with zero due process, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison a year ago, on March 15, 2025.

“Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, individuals who say they were harmed by federal officials must first file administrative claims with the government before bringing a lawsuit in federal court,” the Advocate explained. “The government has six months to respond.” Hernández, who suffered torture and sexual abuse in CECOT, is seeking damages and to have his name cleared, as are the other plaintiffs.

The Trump administration sent some of the Venezuelan men to El Salvador under a rare invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The Washington DC District Court judge who sought to stop the administration from ordering the men’s planes to depart, James Boasberg, has ordered the administration to facilitate the return to the United States of any who wish to challenge their removals in U.S. court.

Human Rights Watch, marking the one-year anniversary of the March 15, 2025 deportation flights, has sought to document what happened to the Salvadoran men who were aboard those flights. They find that most were forcibly disappeared: a year later, we do not even know all of their names. The organization interviewed relatives and lawyers of 11 Salvadorans whose whereabouts were unknown for months, with no access to lawyers, no family contact, and no legal basis provided for detention.

“Under international law, an enforced disappearance occurs when authorities deprive a person of their liberty and then refuse to disclose that person’s fate or whereabouts, placing them outside the protection of the law,” Human Rights Watch recalled.

The Washington Post documented 23 Salvadorans—including Brandon Sigarán Cruz, who came to the United States at age 9—whom the Trump administration sent to El Salvador and still remain imprisoned, with no access to lawyers and no prospect of trial. U.S. officials paid the government of Nayib Bukele $4.76 million for the deportation-to-prison arrangement.

The border wall and natural areas

As noted in WOLA’s March 6 Border Update, CBP plans to use some of its $46.5 billion in border wall-construction funding from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to construct barriers in Big Bend National Park, a wilderness site along the Rio Grande that is a major tourist attraction.

Following communications from local sheriffs of both parties and 47 members of the Texas House of Representatives, CBP has since updated an online map of planned wall construction. It now shows “detection technology” designations, not 30-foot wall segments, for much of the Big Bend region.

An unnamed aide to a Texas lawmaker told the Washington Examiner, “Republican, Democrat, and everyone on the ground is very united against” border wall in the remote, sparsely populated Big Bend region. “This is something that’s just part of the culture and community down there. [Big Bend] is a very special place… there’s multiple ways to address this issue. The sentiment is clear that… a physical barrier isn’t wanted.”

Sheriff Thad Cleveland, the outspoken sheriff of Terrell County, Texas, and a former Border Patrol agent, told The Center Square that technology improvements were the proper way forward. “Border security isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, and if policymakers in Washington, DC, understood the purpose of a physical wall, the last place they’d build one is in the Big Bend region,” he said.

The map change should not be read as definitive, given DHS’s inconsistent recent record of transparency. On March 5, DHS gave Fisher Sand and Gravel, a North Dakota construction company that won several border wall contracts during the first Trump administration, a $1.2 billion contract to build a tall wall “from Ruidosa in northwestern Presidio County to the top of Colorado Canyon in Big Bend Ranch State Park,” not far from the national park, reported the Big Bend Sentinel.

Arizona’s San Rafael Valley

Fisher also has a $309 million contract to build a 27-mile wall segment in southeast Arizona’s San Rafael Valley, a biodiverse region that the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff called “one of the last wild open spaces along the border.” Blasting is already underway, with at least five miles now completed. Miroff pointed out that this part of Arizona saw relatively few illegal crossings because Mexico’s east-west border-zone road, Highway 2, “veers about 40 miles south, away from the border” in this area.

The wall, running east-to-west, bisects north-south mountain corridors—known as “sky islands”—that allow jaguars and other species to migrate. Trail cameras show mountain lions, black bears, and other wildlife blocked at the wall, while agents are now increasingly closing floodgates meant for wildlife passage.

A Rio Grande International Study Center report warned that planned buoys and border wall segments along the Rio Grande near Laredo could cause “catastrophic flooding” during high water events, exacerbating “future intense weather situations,” Border Report reported.

At the Guardian, Aaron Nelsen profiled Dr. Brian Elmore, a trauma doctor who co-founded the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute’s clinic that offers health services to migrants in Ciudad Juárez. Like doctors in San Diego and elsewhere along the border, Elmore was shocked by the number of injuries he treated from people who had fallen from the border wall, especially its newer, taller segments. Elmore came away with a strong sense that U.S. administrations have viewed the injuries and deaths as a tool for deterrence.

The National Defense Areas

A Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation uncovered new information about the implementation of so-called “National Defense Areas.” This is the Trump administration policy that has temporarily handed over a fringe of territory along much of the border—usually up to about 60 feet inland from the borderline—to the Department of Defense. This territory is now considered part of nearby military bases, and those who set foot on it can be prosecuted for trespassing on a military installation. One of the trespassing laws was passed in 1909 to keep spies away from arsenals.

Since April 2025, when the National Defense Areas initiative began, “at least 4,700 immigrants already charged with entering the country illegally have faced additional misdemeanor counts accusing them of trespassing on military property,” the Tribune and ProPublica reported. Of the 90 percent of cases that have been resolved, 60 percent were dropped or dismissed.

The Ciudad Juárez daily Norte meanwhile reported that CBP has begun blasting a recorded audio message from portable stations along the Rio Grande, warning in Spanish: “Attention, the river is a militarized zone. A security rule regarding property defense prohibits entry through the river. Entering this area constitutes a violation of this rule. If you cross the river, you will be entering illegally and will be prosecuted.”

The U.S. Northern Command’s Joint Task Force-Southern Border (JTF-SB) marked its one-year anniversary on March 14. A U.S. Army release informed that more than 20,000 active-duty or National Guard service members have since passed through the task force. The unit has conducted approximately 22,000 detection and monitoring missions, placed over 51,000 rolls of concertina wire, carried out nearly 3,000 joint patrols with Border Patrol, and over 800 “mirrored patrols” with CBP and Mexico’s National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA, which includes the Army and National Guard) on the other side of the border.

Orders from the Pentagon

Government Executive and Wired reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for the second time since last June, has issued a memo urging the Department’s employees to consider volunteering for 180-day stints supporting CBP and ICE. “Duties include data entry, developing operational plans for raids and patrols, providing logistics support for moving officers and agents and their equipment, and managing the flow of detained migrants,” according to Government Executive, which added, “The Defense employees do not carry out law enforcement responsibilities.”

The Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights released a report based on days of conversations with recently deported migrants at the airport facility in San Pedro, Sula, Honduras, where U.S. removal flights arrive. They found an alarming frequency of cases of parents deported without a chance to bring their U.S. citizen children, as laid out in ICE guidelines: “many family separations that, absent meaningful assistance with reunification, may become long-term or even permanent.” Though the Honduran government does not widely advertise its willingness to assist, “Honduran officials reported to researchers that 400 parents have sought reunification through the Honduran government over the past year.”

An investigation by Bellingcat, Evident Media, and CalMatters analyzed over 85 hours of footage to identify 25 Border Patrol agents who appeared in multiple U.S. cities—Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis—often alongside former “Commander at Large” Gregory Bovino. In many of the videos, these agents are carrying out highly inappropriate uses of force against migrants or U.S. citizen protesters.

The Human Rights First ICE Flight Monitor project released its latest monthly report, covering February. It documents at least 183 ICE removal flights last month, a 45 percent increase over February 2025. Deportation planes flew to 31 countries, with the most frequent destinations being Guatemala (45), Honduras (37), Mexico (16), El Salvador (12), and Venezuela (12). The report notes that flights last month included some “carrying non-Ecuadorians to Ecuador and non-Hondurans to Honduras under the respective Asylum Cooperative Agreements. Non-Guatemalans were also sent to Guatemala, and Non-Hondurans were sent to Honduras, outside the parameters of the ACAs.”

These third-country deportations, also noted in the CECOT renditions discussion above, were the subject of a March 12 hearing of the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. A coalition of 22 regional organizations presented documentation of nearly 13,000 third-country nationals deported to Mexico between January 20 and December 31, 2025, 23 percent of them women and 690 of them children. U.S. authorities, it appears, rarely notify Mexican counterparts when citizens are prohibited from deportation to their home countries due to protection concerns, and should not be sent back there. The organizations noted that many of these third-country removals violate due process, with no meaningful notice or opportunity to challenge the deportation, while receiving countries have been failing to conduct individualized risk assessments.

Bloomberg Law profiled Teresa Riley, who was appointed in December as the chief judge in the Justice Department’s immigration court system, and who is reshaping court operations in ways former officials describe as without precedent. Riley—who denied asylum in 81 percent of cases as a Cleveland judge, well above the 59 percent national average—has directed immigration judges that they are not bound by federal district court rulings requiring bond hearings, and has encouraged judges to deny asylum in most cases. The article recounts a courtroom episode in Cleveland when Riley, speaking from the bench, traumatized a 9-year-old Guatemalan girl with callous threats of deportation.

Bishop Mark Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso issued a strongly worded pastoral letter on March 15 calling the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” campaign “a grave moral evil, one which must be opposed, with prayer, peaceful action, and acts of solidarity.” He reminded immigration enforcement agents that “no one has to obey an illegal order.” In a column at America: The Jesuit Review, Bishop Seitz added, “In recent months, many of those detained at Fort Bliss have come from Minnesota… The gross enforcement actions which all of us witnessed in Minnesota are linked to the migration of human pain from the Twin Cities to places like Camp East Montana in El Paso.”

CNN obtained an internal DHS document indicating that Project Homecoming—a $915 million incentive program offering stipends of up to $2,600 and free flights for migrants who agree to “self-deport”—had facilitated 72,000 departures as of mid-March. 37,281 of those (more than half) were already in ICE detention at the time.

As more Mexican citizens without legal residency consider returning, real estate agents in Tijuana told Border Report that the rental housing market is heating up “as more and more parents bring their U.S. citizen children to live in cities like Tijuana.”

At the Guardian, Anna Oakes and Mariana Hernández Ampudia interviewed Haitian migrants in Tapachula, near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, and in Tijuana, finding that most are now planning to settle in Mexico if they manage to pass through the country’s slow, overburdened asylum system. That system was hit very hard by the Trump administration’s early-2025 funding cuts to UNHCR and other aid agencies.

An analysis from Spain’s El País found that the Mexican government’s human rights ombudsman’s office (National Human Rights Commission or CNDH) is of little use to migrants who suffer abuses while in Mexico. Between November 2019 and December 2025, the CNDH received more than 16,000 complaints about treatment received from Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM) and its refugee agency (COMAR), “but it only issued 111 recommendations, and only three of them for serious violations.”

Government data and a recent survey of Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia, compiled by the Colombian publication La Silla Vacía, found no significant change in the number considering returning to Venezuela following the Trump administration’s January 3 extraction of authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. While they remain in “wait and see” mode, only 11 percent are considering migrating onward toward the United States, which is “the lowest level in recent years.” In Florida, BBC reporter Rachelle Krygier found that many Venezuelans have been leaving voluntarily since the Trump administration’s suspensions of TPS.

With U.S. government support, Costa Rica’s right-of-center government carried out its first aerial deportation of migrants on March 13, sending 33 people of various nationalities to Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador. The Panama leg of the flight included people of Panamanian, Indian, British, Mexican, Chinese, Jamaican, Salvadoran, and Honduran citizenship, and Panama apparently agreed to send them on to their countries of origin.

Chile’s newly inaugurated far-right president, José Antonio Kast, traveled to the country’s border with Peru to oversee the start of construction of a border wall. If Kast’s plans are carried out, the barrier would stretch for 520 kilometers (323 miles) along Chile’s frontiers with Peru and Bolivia. Some of Kast’s supporters were seen wearing “Make Chile Great Again” caps. Peru’s government voiced concern about the possibility of Chile expelling thousands of migrants—principally citizens of Venezuela or Haiti—into its territory.

Links: “mass deportation” and human rights in the U.S. interior

Jonathan Blitzer, “Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign” (The New Yorker, March 15, 2026).

Even with Kristi Noem gone, the Administration’s immigration agenda shows no signs of flagging—in fact, it is leading toward a new humanitarian and legal crisis

Thomas L. Friedman, “Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future” (The New York Times, March 15, 2026).

Moms donating their breast milk to strangers, dads taking someone else’s kids to school: Minnesotans showed a basic human impulse to look out for their neighbors

David J. Bier, “A GOP Senator Said My Criticisms of Trump Were “Hyperbolic” — but I’ve Got the Receipts” (Cato Institute, MS NOW, March 12, 2026).

During testimony before the Senate Budget Committee this week, I argued with Sen. John Kennedy about the Trump administration’s growing extremism

Daniel Hunter, “It’s Time to Oust Stephen Miller” (Waging Nonviolence, March 10, 2026).

Noem’s firing shows our power, and now we must remove the real architect of Trump’s deportation machine and so many other harmful policies

Organizational culture at DHS law enforcement agencies

Abigail R. Hall, “ICE Is Bringing Military Occupation and Recruitment Tactics to America” (Reason, March 18, 2026).

When you combine military tactics, military tools, and military human capital then violent outcomes are predictable

Lauren Harper, “DHS Celebrates Sunshine Week With Illegal Firing of FOIA Officer” (Freedom of the Press Foundation, March 15, 2026).

Plus: Rep. Tlaib introduces the Ellsberg Act

Adam Scharpf, Christian Glaßel, “The Secret Police Playbook” (Hertie School’s Centre for International Security, University of Copenhagen, Can We Still Govern?, March 13, 2026).

How DHS reflects historical lessons from dictatorships

Spencer Ackerman, “ICE Tried to Turn This Minneapolis Teacher Into an Informant” (Forever Wars, March 12, 2026).

Brandon Siguenza was detained for doing legal-observer work. ICE’s real interest was in generating snitches

Tina Nguyen, “The Mysterious Case of the DHS White Supremacist Memelord” (The Verge, March 11, 2026).

Or: why some MAGA group chats leak, and others don’t

Dell Cameron, “DHS Ousts CBP Privacy Officers Who Questioned ‘Illegal’ Orders” (Wired, March 10, 2026).

Department of Homeland Security leaders removed top privacy officers who objected to mislabeling government records to block their public release, WIRED has learned

Campbell Robertson, “With Lots of Rumors and Little Information, Other Cities Prepare for ICE” (The New York Times, March 9, 2026).

After the sprawling and chaotic federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, jurisdictions in other states have been bracing for a range of scenarios

Andrew J. Campa, “Deported 6-Year-Old Deaf Boy Could Die in Colombia Without Medical Attention, His Attorney Says” (The Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2026).

Attorney Nikolas De Bremaeker said deaf 6-year-old boy Joseph Lodano Rodriguez, who was snatched from Northern California and deported to Colombia earlier this month, needs to be returned to the U.S. immediately or he may die

Sarah Blaskey, “After Rookie ICE Agent’s Paperwork Error, Man Is Detained for Days” (The Washington Post, March 17, 2026).

The new officer completed a basic training program that provided a third of the hours once dedicated to teaching recruits how to fill out a key form

Katie Phang, “The Cruelty Is the Point” (Katie Phang, March 14, 2026).

The Deaths of Daphy Michel and Nurul Amin Shah Alam

Pablo Manriquez, “The Lonesome Death of Daphy Michel” (Migrant Insider, March 13, 2026).

Haitian Woman, 31, Dies Alone at Pittsburgh Bus Stop Days After ICE Released Her Far From Home to Die.

Ruby Cramer, “The Preschool Teaching Assistant Shot by Border Patrol, Then Called a “Domestic Terrorist”” (The New Yorker, March 12, 2026).

When Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent, the D.H.S. justified it by calling her a “domestic terrorist.” In the aftermath, she’s been trying to recover her reputation and, with it, a sense of reality

Laura Romero, “‘Everything Gone’: Venezuelan Family Says They Lost Their Home and Jobs After Being Detained for 2 Months” (NBC News, March 9, 2026).

Adriana Laya and Miguel Alberto Caicedo thought their worst nightmare was over when they were released with their two children from a detention center in Dilley, Texas

The immigration system

Justin Wise, “Judges Flip Unitary Executive Theory on Trump Over Immigration” (Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, March 18, 2026).

Federal trial judges are starting to invoke President Donald Trump’s vision of a unitary executive against him in cases linked to his administration’s immigration crackdown

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada), “Cortez Masto, Durbin Lead Senate Democrats in Demanding DHS Reduce Delays for Daca Renewals” (U.S. Senate, March 17, 2026).

Daniella Silva, “Abused and Neglected Youths Granted Immigration Protections Are Being Detained and Deported” (NBC News, March 17, 2026).

Last year, ICE detained 265 and deported 132 young people with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, according to a letter DHS sent to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto

Patricia Caro, “The United States Deported Migrants to Iran and Venezuela Despite Plans for Military Interventions” (El Pais (Spain), March 9, 2026).

Since September, three deportation flights have been sent to Tehran. Meanwhile, deportations to Caracas have increased following the capture of Nicolás Maduro

Annie Karni, Tamir Kalifa, “Joaquin Castro Is on a Quest to Get Detained Immigrants Released” (The New York Times, March 13, 2026).

The Texas Democrat has used his perch in Congress to highlight sympathetic cases in his push to free detainees and call attention to the consequences of President Trump’s immigration agenda

Suzanne Monyak, “US Judge Calls Long ICE Detentions Absent Hearings ‘Shocking’” (Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, March 11, 2026).

A Washington federal judge rebuked the Department of Homeland Security for detaining immigrants for a month or longer without bond hearings, calling the practice “shocking” and a “huge whopping statutory violation”

Wendy Fry, “San Diego County Sues ICE After It Blocked Health Inspection at Detention Center” (CalMatters, March 10, 2026).

San Diego County is suing the Trump administration, alleging it illegally blocked officials from inspecting ICE detention centers.There have been ‘alarming reports’ about unsafe conditions inside the centers

Subscribe to get the latest on analysis and policy

Do you find our content useful and informative? Do you frequently visit the WOLA website? If so, please consider making a donation today to keep our website free and open to all.

© WOLA

visit website

Categories

Sources

Popular

U.S.-Mexico Border Update: DHS leadership and oversight, detention deaths and “warehouses,” border wall in natural areas

Adam Isacson

© WOLA