Updates from Adam Isacson (August 26, 2025)

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I’m on vacation at the moment, in the second of two weeks. So most of the content here is more than a week old. It includes links to a mid-month Border Update and some dispatches from a big research trip at the end of July and beginning of August.

I’ve spent a good amount of this break at home, in a city under occupation. As noted below, I’ve been seeing lots of soldiers: National Guard people with day jobs and families elsewhere, who did not sign up for this mission. The presence of ICE and CBP—who absolutely did sign up for this mission, and who are scarier and more politicized than the soldiers—is more episodic, and I have not seen them yet, even though I’ve been walking and riding around the city quite a bit.

I recognize that this is my first email in a while. Putting them together each week fell to the lower ranks of my to-do lists during the past several months, which, for obvious reasons, has been one of the busiest stretches of my now 30-year career. That is unwise, though: we’ve got a lot of information to share, and we should be using every available channel. From now on, I don’t know if I’ll manage to send these every week, but I will avoid months-long lapses.

Sephora Is Secure

(Posted Saturday, August 23)

The Sephora cosmetics store on 14th Street NW in Washington DC is secure. I repeat: Sephora is secure.

For those who don’t know DC, 14th Street—where I took these photos—is a fancy corridor of boutiques, pricey restaurants, beer gardens, and cafes, the outcome of 25 years of rapid gentrification about a mile from the White House.

The vibe was not too “military occupation” because these National Guard personnel were not accompanying ICE or CBP. No face-coverings, no aggressive Proud Boy “about to slam a bike messenger’s head into the pavement” energy, less of that “I can do whatever I want and you liberals can’t stop me” attitude.

This is just soldiers—in these photos from Saturday the 23rd, a group of very young-looking kids from Ohio. Forced to be away from their civilian jobs and families because their state’s Republican governor responded to a request from a White House in need of political props for security theater in the Democratic Party-run capital city.

So, not a “military occupation” vibe—at least not yet.

Last Saturday I saw Ohio National Guard personnel pull up aboard a big white bus, on a side street lined with million-dollar-plus houses (see the Zillow graphic below). They divided up into small groups and began walking along a tony stretch bounded by a Whole Foods near P Street and a Trader Joe’s near U Street.

It was a cloudless, 80-degree day. People (those in this city who still haven’t lost their jobs yet) are all over the sidewalks and filling the shops and pubs. Some pushing strollers, many wearing exercise gear.

It’s hard not to feel bad for these 23-year-old kids who maybe got briefed that they were being dropped into a crime-infested hellhole, only to find themselves looking awkward and a bit sheepish in full camouflage over by Jeni’s Ice Cream, Le Diplomate, and SoulCycle on a dazzling Saturday afternoon.

The next day, Sunday the 24th, my wife and I went out to a fancy restaurant in the same neighborhood to celebrate our 23rd wedding anniversary. They gave us a nice table in the window. Unfortunately, that gave us a view of troops—now carrying pistols strapped to their thighs—walking past us every few minutes.

It was like having a pricey dinner in Baghdad's Green Zone, except without even the barest hint of any danger.

From WOLA: Five Reasons Why Trump’s Anti-Cartel Military Plan Will Fail

(Posted Thursday, August 13)

After the New York Times revealed that the White House had directed the Defense Department “to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels,” the team at WOLA got to work cobbling together a forceful, deeply informed response. Here it is.

This one only gives a nod to the “sovereignty” and “history of U.S. military interventions” angles, which unfortunately don’t resonate much among “serious national security” types. Instead, this piece digs into what the Trump administration is fundamentally misunderstanding about organized crime, and how useless and doomed a mission is if it puts a military response at the center.

The five reasons are:

1. The objective is not clear.

One cannot shoot and bomb organized crime out of existence, and trying to do so will be a bitter experience for the Trump administration. If it follows through on plans to use the U.S. military to fight organized crime overseas, expect a lot of “Mission Accomplished” moments followed by embarrassing setbacks.

2. Fighting organized crime like it’s an anti-government insurgency or terrorist group fundamentally misunderstands the adversary and is a recipe for failure.

Combining “plata” with “plomo” makes organized crime far harder to fight than insurgencies or terrorists through military force alone. The “enemy” is so interwoven with the security forces, the justice system, government at all levels, and the legal economy, that it becomes very hard to distinguish friend from foe.

3. Sending out the U.S. military to fight “cartels” won’t achieve anything that the drug war has not already done, repeatedly, with no lasting effect–despite enormous bloodshed.

Not only do new leaders keep coming, but illegal drugs remain readily available despite decades of effort to stem production and supply. The purity and inflation-adjusted price of a gram of cocaine on U.S. streets has barely budged in more than 30 years of measurement.

4. Achieving this “same result” would come at a huge cost. There are significant reasons why the United States has avoided pursuing military operations in non-adversary countries without the host government’s consent.

The foreseeable rupture in relations with Mexico, for instance, would undermine or end cooperation on a wide range of issues, including any potentially productive strategies to address crime and violence. 

5. If non-consensual military operations were to occur in an adversary country, such as Venezuela, the outcome would be even more complicated.

Again, it is difficult to discern the objective here. 

Read the whole thing, including an equally forceful discussion of what to do instead, at WOLA’s website.

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: August 15, 2025

(Posted Friday, August 15)

• Read the whole thing here. See past weekly updates here. View a topic index of 2025's Border Updates here.

I don't include the full text of the Border Updates here because they're long. If you'd like a separate email with the full text, you can sign up to this Google Group.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• CBP releases July data showing migration hitting new low at the border: Due to the unavailability of asylum and word of a growing crackdown throughout the U.S. interior, the number of migrants entering CBP custody at the border in July fell again, to a level not seen since the 1960s. Zero asylum seekers were released from custody at the border, while Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector saw the most migrant apprehensions. Fentanyl seizures continue to decline sharply, while cocaine seizures are rising. 
• Notes on “mass deportation”: DHS made striking, and hard-to-verify, claims about the number of undocumented migrants choosing to leave the United States voluntarily, and the number of people signing up for employment with ICE. Some of the agency’s online recruitment messaging evoked  20th-century White supremacist themes. Several controversies, including growing public health concerns, surrounded the Florida state migrant detention facility in the Everglades.
• Notes from Mexico: The New York Times followed fentanyl smugglers and found evidence of corruption on both sides of the border. Groups that preyed on migrants in Ciudad Juárez are now preying on the local population and getting more involved in street drug sales. A migrant “caravan” in Chiapas does not seek to reach the United States but intends only to gain the right to live and work elsewhere in Mexico. 

Read the whole thing here.

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WOLA Podcast: “We Are in the Middle of a New Family Separation Crisis”

(Posted Thursday, August 14)

This and the next four sections are updates from a late July-early August research trip. We're working on a full report, too.

Here’s a new episode of WOLA’s podcast, recorded with colleagues from the Women’s Refugee Commission with whom I traveled to Honduras, Guatemala, and three cities in Mexico in late July and early August.

If you’ve been reading this site, you’ve seen a lot of posts about this trip—but Zain Lakhani and Diana Flórez do an even better job of explaining the importance of what we were seeing and hearing. This is a very good episode.

Here’s the text from WOLA’s episode landing page:

Since January, the United States’ migrant detention and deportation system, which was already troubled, has become increasingly opaque. Access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities is restricted, internal oversight agencies have been hollowed out, and credible information about conditions inside is scarce. Yet reports that have emerged, some from those who have recently been deported, tell a troubling story echoing the darkest moments of recent U.S. immigration history.

In late July and early August, researchers from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) set out to pierce this “black box” by visiting cities in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico that are key deportation hubs. There, they interviewed deported migrants, service providers, advocates, experts, and government officials to learn what they are hearing about conditions in U.S. detention.

The findings are disturbing. They point to a resurgence of family separations, cruel treatment, miserable, unhealthy conditions, and deportation processes that violate migrants’ rights and dignity. With transparency mechanisms dismantled, these abuses are happening out of public view.

In this episode, host Adam Isacson talks with two colleagues from WRC with whom he traveled:

• Zain Lakhani, WRC’s director of Migrant Rights and Justice.
• Diana Flórez, a consultant to WRC, an attorney and expert on gender, transitional justice, development, and peacebuilding.

During their travels, Isacson, Lakhani, and Flórez shared photos and initial findings in four “dispatches” published to our organizations’ websites, from Honduras, Guatemala, Tapachula, and Ciudad Juárez.

We heard consistent accounts of:

• Family separations: A larger number than expected of parents deported without U.S. citizen children, often without being given the choice of being removed with them. The crisis is approaching the scale of the “zero tolerance” family separations that shocked the nation in 2018.
• Inhumane conditions: Overcrowded cells, lack of medical care, and verbal and physical abuse by guards.
• Threats to the health of pregnant and lactating women and their children: Insufficient and poor-quality food, difficulty in obtaining medical attention, and even being forced to sleep on floors. (The podcast refers to a July 30 report on abuse in detention, especially of pregnant women and children, by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia).)
• Targeting of vulnerable populations: Harassment of LGBTQ+ individuals, especially trans individuals who are now detained with the gender to which they were assigned at birth.

As Lakhani notes, “Historically… we were able to enter detention centers and visit them and speak with migrants,” but “now we’re seeing the deliberate creation of a black box.”

We hope that the WOLA–WRC delegation’s findings will guide future, more intensive on-the-ground research enabling advocates to refer egregious abuses requiring legal action, build a rigorous archive of known cases, and inform public opinion and policymakers.

Download this podcast episode’s .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

Dispatch from the Border: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas

(Posted Monday, August 11)

This update from the Ciudad Juárez part of our trip is cross-posted from WOLA’s website.

As the United States’ immigration detention system becomes a black box, researchers from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission are traveling through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico to better understand the conditions faced by individuals recently deported from US detention centers—and how those conditions, particularly for women and children, have changed compared to previous years. After interviewing officials, service providers, experts, rights advocates, and deported individuals in San Pedro Sula, Honduras and Guatemala City, Guatemala, the team proceeded to Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala. After Tapachula, our team traveled north to the U.S.-Mexico border, stopping first in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and then in El Paso, Texas.

Our findings at the U.S.-Mexico border echoed much of what we learned in Tapachula: Mexico has received a comparatively small number of deportations to date, though the number of people who have been deported from the U.S. interior after living there for many years is larger. The border city of Ciudad Juárez, meanwhile, remains home to many displaced asylum seekers from other countries who were either waiting for CBP One appointments or who had their appointments cancelled. Many of them are now in limbo, unsure of where to go next or how to rebuild their lives. Those who remain in Ciudad Juárez face insecurity and violence, while service providers in El Paso are struggling to keep up with the pace of immigration detention.

We heard significant concerns about the ICE detention center at Fort Bliss (the sprawling Army base in El Paso, TX) that opened while we were there. Little is known about the contractor, Acquisition Logistics, which was awarded $1.26 billion to operate what will eventually be a 5,000-bed tent facility. But even as the site remains under construction, an estimated 1,000 migrants will be relocated there by August 18.

Further concern surrounds another new U.S. military mission: the Trump administration’s declaration that a fringe of territory along the border, stretching from the Arizona line to about 50 miles east of El Paso, is now considered a “National Defense Area.” This means that the land will essentially serve as an extension of nearby military bases Fort Bliss and Fort Huachuca. Migrants who pass through this fringe, and who perhaps fail to note minutely lettered signs warning them that they are entering Defense Department territory, are now subject to prosecution for trespassing on a military installation, a charge carrying up to a year in prison. As of early July, federal prosecutors had filed such charges against more than 1,400 people.

Under these circumstances, getting access to information about detained migrants’ experiences during arrest, detention, and deportation remains extremely challenging. Still, we obtained some important and disturbing information about what migrants are currently facing, and what is likely yet to come.

1.      Ciudad Juárez is preparing for large numbers of migrants, many of whom will have substantially different needs than in prior years.  

The physical infrastructure in Ciudad Juárez evokes a city in waiting. Large tent shelters, pictured below, have been erected to house returned migrants near the city center, but they are largely empty. The city’s network of shelters is at about 30 percent capacity.

The tents, along with a shelter managed by Mexico’s federal government, are off-limits to nearly all non-governmental service providers and rights advocates. This limits access to those who would seek to learn from deported individuals about abuse that they may have endured in U.S. custody, or to help them file complaints or pursue legal remedies.

Mexico’s immigration agency (National Migration Institute, or INM) takes some deported people, particularly from third countries, to a detention facility in Janos, Chihuahua, about two hours south of Ciudad Juárez. From there, they are bused to the southern part of the country. This further limits access to recently removed migrants.

As a result, service providers and rights advocates in Ciudad Juárez had little to report about abuse suffered during the detention and deportation process. Still, we heard allegations including a man being returned with ribs broken during his arrest, women in a detention center being searched and examined in rooms with only male personnel present, and people frequently being returned without their identification documents.

2.      Violent kidnappings of locals, including migrants who were unable to cross the border using CBP One, are on the rise. 

Many service and shelter providers described a rise in violent kidnappings by criminal organizations, increasingly perpetrated against the local and displaced population. Kidnapping for ransom has long been one of the most prevalent dangers for migrants traveling from Central America to the U.S., especially once migrants reach Mexico.

In Ciudad Juárez, ransom kidnappings of migrants increased sharply in 2023, peaking in 2024. However, with the decrease in migration to the border, criminal organizations have begun to kidnap and extort the local population in order to replace the income they previously generated by extorting migrants. Many reported that the kidnappings have become increasingly violent, with sexual assault and amputations becoming common means of extorting ransom.  

The rise in kidnappings against the local population reveals one of the many oft-hidden ways in which closing the U.S.-Mexico border impacts the entire migration ecosystem, creating new forms of danger and amplifying existing violence. For women, the danger of violent kidnappings increases their already perilous vulnerability to violence in one of the most dangerous regions for women in the world.

The UN named Ciudad Juárez Mexico’s deadliest city for women last year, with more than 2,500 known victims of femicide and hundreds more disappeared over the past three decades. Less than two percent of homicides result in a criminal sentence. Displaced women, who lack support systems or legal means to engage in the formal economy, are at even greater risk of violence. As an increasing number of migrants are deported and little relief remains for those already clustered at the border, we fear that the violence will only get worse.

3.      Nonreturn of valuables, including cash and vital identification documents, is a significant and systemic problem. 

In Ciudad Juárez, we again heard stories of deported migrants whose valuables and identification documents were seized from them during arrest and deportation and never returned. Collectively, these incidents amount to tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, in cash and valuables that are taken from migrants during immigration enforcement and simply disappear.

Migrants apprehended shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are less likely to be carrying large amounts of cash. However, migrants apprehended in the U.S. interior—whose numbers are far larger amid the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” campaign—are more likely to be carrying significant amounts upon their arrest, because they are usually employed and often relegated to the cash economy. U.S. law enforcement officials and their agencies must account for, and return, the cash and valuables that migrants are surrendering to them.

4.      Indiscriminate courthouse arrests in El Paso are separating families and leading to the detention of pregnant women, elderly migrants, and other vulnerable populations.

In El Paso, we heard heartbreaking accounts of ICE’s dragnet approach to courthouse arrests. The indiscriminate approach to arresting anyone who walks through the courthouse doors has led to family separations, the detention of pregnant or nursing women, and even elderly migrants who cannot walk without assistance. These corridor arrests function as a “second courtroom,” in which there is no trial and migrants always lose. One religious worker who engages in weekly court watching recounted a judge saying, “Your case is closed. That is my response to you as a judge. But I cannot speak to what will happen outside these doors.”

One of the most disturbing yet underreported aspects of the courthouse arrests is their role in facilitating family separations. Many service workers reported instances of parents who either came to court alone, or who brought only some of their children with them to court. When they were caught up in ICE’s dragnet, they were separated from the children who did not accompany them. The new Detained Parents Directive, which replaced ICE’s 2021 Parental Interests Directive, weakens protections for migrant families, but nonetheless imposes affirmative obligations on ICE to verify and document parents’ preferences about whether they want their children to accompany them, and what alternative care arrangements they want to make. Our research suggests that this is not happening. 

Our time in El Paso deepened our already grave concern about the scope and scale of the new family separation crisis, in which parents are detained and deported without being given an opportunity to make care arrangements for their children, or to bring their children with them to their country of removal.

5.      ICE detention remains a black box, with service providers, religious workers, and even legal service providers losing much of their access.

Our experiences in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso echoed what we saw across the region, with humanitarian organizations, legal service providers, and human rights defenders facing significant challenges accessing, monitoring, and serving migrants who are detained or deported. As with the case of organizations in Central America, funding cuts to U.S. service providers, including legal service organizations, substantially worsen this problem and weaken protections for detained migrants amid increasing reports of serious abuse.

Advocates, legal service providers, ministers, and other service providers used to be able to enter ICE detention facilities to provide Know Your Rights training, legal advice, and even ministry. Now, though, ICE has significantly collapsed access. Much of immigration enforcement and detention now occurs in a black box, where we have little visibility over what happens to migrants once they are detained. Much of the mistreatment in custody, an El Paso-based service provider said, may be a deliberate effort to “grind people down to get them to abandon their cases.”

As we have discussed in our prior dispatches, the Department of Homeland Security’s functional elimination of its own internal oversight bodies, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, mean that even the government is not tracking abuses in detention centers, and migrants and their attorneys have no place to report abuse.

WRC and WOLA are deeply disturbed that we needed to travel to five different cities in three different countries to learn about what is happening in our own. However, what we learned on this trip reinforced the vital need for this research and documentation, especially as the scope and scale of immigration enforcement increases. We cannot allow these abuses to happen in the dark. 

Dispatch from Mexico: Difficulties Abound for Both Deported Individuals and Service Providers

(Posted Tuesday, August 5)

This update from the Tapachula part of our trip is cross-posted from WOLA’s website.

As the United States’ immigration detention system becomes a black box, researchers from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission are traveling through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico to better understand the conditions faced by individuals recently deported from U.S. detention centers—and how those conditions, particularly for women and children,  have changed compared to previous years. After interviewing officials, service providers, experts,  rights advocates, and deported individuals in San Pedro Sula, Honduras and Guatemala City, Guatemala, the team proceeded to Tapachula, a city in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala.

In Mexico, we learned that human rights defenders and service providers in this region, battered by the U.S. government’s budget cuts, have difficulty interacting with what, for now, is still a relatively small number of deported people, nearly all of whom leave Tapachula as quickly as possible. 

Before they depart, Mexican authorities sharply limit access to them, complicating receipt of testimonies. The city’s poor security climate adds to the difficulty. For these reasons, our interviews in Tapachula yielded less information about allegations of harm done to migrants in U.S. custody whom the U.S. government has deported than our other site visits. Still, we obtained some important information and noticed disturbing trends. 

1. Southern Mexico is a growing destination for deportation flights from the U.S.

A city of 350,000 in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, Tapachula sits along a major route for U.S.-bound migrants entering Mexico through its southern border. Since January 2025, though, the unlawful White House executive order banning access to asylum or other protection at the U.S. border, along with knowledge of the climate of fear that the Trump administration’s policies have created in the U.S. interior, has sharply reduced the number of people arriving from Guatemala.

Between February and May 2024, Mexican authorities reported encountering 165,001 migrants in Chiapas. During those same months in 2025, that number fell by 93 percent, to 11,620.

Instead, like San Pedro Sula and Guatemala City, Tapachula is now a growing destination for U.S. deportation planes. With the pretext of sending them as far from the U.S. border as possible, purportedly to ensure safer returns, the Trump administration began flying removed Mexican citizens here in February 2025 through the Interior Repatriation Programme (PRIM). Deportees are not given any choice of their destination within Mexico. Some service providers who managed to speak with returnees told us the individuals didn’t even know where they were being sent. This, combined with the fact that some were flown to southern Mexico, only to then be bused by the government back to Mexico City, raises serious questions about the logic and transparency of the process.

Since then—as of July 28, 2025—6,045 people had arrived in the city aboard 56 ICE contractor planes. The administration has sent a similar number to Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco, another state that borders Guatemala. With the passage of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” in early July, which adds $14.4 billion to ICE’s aerial deportation budget through 2029, the number of flights to Tapachula and Villahermosa is very likely to grow.

So far, most of the Mexican citizens returned to Tapachula have been adult men deported alone, though some cases of family groups have also been reported. They come from all over the country; some are from northern states, flown to a city that is 1,000 or more miles from their homes, which are closer to the U.S. border. “One guy was even from Matamoros,” a human rights defender told us. Matamoros is directly across from Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, and it is almost as far away from Tapachula as one could be while still in Mexico.

“People arrive in shock,” this individual said. They are shackled by the hands and waist during the flights and often arrive not knowing where they are. “Mental health needs are great among the migrant population,” an international organization official said, referring to both the northbound and deported populations, “but nobody is really able to respond.”

2. Access to deported migrants is difficult.

Mexican migrants aboard the U.S. planes, most of them captured after long periods of living inside the U.S., “arrive without having received any information while in detention centers, nor any guidance on  what to do once in Mexico,” a Tapachula-based human rights defender told us. “They are very distrustful of anyone who gets close to them. They are very concerned about what they’ve left behind in the United States.”

Still, it is difficult to determine the extent of mistreatment and abuse that deported people are suffering in U.S. custody prior to arrival in Tapachula, because opportunities for monitors to interact with them are scarce. Almost none of the people deported to the city stay there for very long, and for much of the time they are there, Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, or INM) is processing and transporting them at sites, and aboard vehicles, where aid agencies and monitors may not interact with them—presumably by design.

The INM, which faces frequent allegations of human rights abuse and corruption among its ranks, does not coordinate, or even have much contact, with human rights groups, aid groups, or international organizations in Tapachula. Getting a meeting is difficult: WOLA and WRC were turned down, and three different organizations in the city told us that INM had responded negatively to recent attempts to meet with officials. INM and the Mexican government’s refugee agency (Mexican Refugee Aid Commission, or COMAR) “have a very hostile posture toward organizations that denounce abuse, or that are parts of networks that denounce abuse,” said a non-governmental expert who has worked with migrants in Tapachula for years.

Most deported people accept the Mexican government’s offer of a 2,000-peso ($110) subsidy for bus fare. After a quick ride to Tapachula’s terminal, they depart for elsewhere in Mexico. While the Tapachula terminal may offer monitors a fleeting chance to inform people of opportunities to detail abuse or mistreatment, other deported individuals don’t even stop here. Since July 15, INM has been transporting some people who come from northern Mexico all the way to Mexico City’s Terminal del Norte bus station. They don’t see Tapachula at all.

When deported migrants arrive in Tapachula, then, they spend most of their time in the custody of agencies that keep outside monitors, service providers, and advocates at a distance. “There’s no entry into the reception area; we have to stay in the common area of the airport,” a human rights defender said. “We can only talk to any migrants left over” who remain briefly at the airport before departing. This makes it much harder to learn about what repatriated individuals experienced in U.S. custody.

Tapachula’s municipal government had considered setting up shelters to prepare for deportations, and officially,  the Mexican government says it is relocating its repatriation centers—moving the one in Nuevo Laredo (along the border with Texas) to Tapachula to improve deported individuals’ access to services. As of now, no such center exists, and the municipal government has not received any deported people.

Mexican citizens are not the only U.S. deportees in the city. On July 11, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters that the U.S. government had deported 6,525 citizens of third countries to Mexico since the Trump administration began. It appears that these non-Mexican citizens are not being flown to Tapachula (at least not yet).

However, these third-country citizens still end up in Tapachula and elsewhere in Mexico’s far south. When U.S. authorities send them into a northern Mexican border city, the INM quickly places them on buses that whisk them across the country to Tapachula or Villahermosa. (The agency delivers some citizens of Central American countries directly to the Guatemalan borderline, too, with the expectation that they will keep going south.) No source had any clear sense of how many non-Mexican citizens have been bused to Tapachula this year, much less how they could be contacted to discuss their experience in U.S. custody.

As we were not able to learn as much in Tapachula about abuse that migrants have suffered in US custody, much discussion centered on potential strategies for hearing complaints and testimonies once, as is very likely, deportation flights to the city increase. Tapachula will need a reception center to link people with services, as well as, perhaps, a “module” or other semi-constant presence in the city’s bus terminal. Such spaces should offer opportunities for people to share their testimonies of involuntary family separation, non-return of valuables, misuse of force, neglect that endangers health (including the health of pregnant and lactating mothers and their children), and other cruel treatment.

3. Deportees face rising insecurity.

Deportees will need support in a city that has grown sharply more dangerous in the post-pandemic period. The state of Chiapas—a longtime corridor for cocaine transshipment, migrant smuggling, and human trafficking—has seen an upsurge in criminal violence between trafficking groups competing over territory. In October 2024, an urban public security poll taken by the Mexican government’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) found Tapachula to be the Mexican municipality with the highest proportion of residents (91.9 percent) judging it “insecure.”

Now, with fewer northbound migrants, the city is in a sharp economic downturn. Landlords, cab drivers, grocers, restaurants, and other service providers have fewer customers. Among those losing income are criminal organizations that were smuggling migrants, and those that were preying on them, often kidnapping them for ransom—a “business” whose victims suffered assault, sexual violence, and torture. Kidnapping became so widespread—with the apparent collusion or acquiescence of government officials—that by 2024, kidnappers were issuing paper bracelets or hand stamps that served as proof that their released victims had paid.

Women have been frequent victims of sexual violence associated with ransom kidnappings in the Tapachula area. One international organization’s staff indicated that women from Haiti have been especially vulnerable: Language barriers make it difficult for survivors to report these crimes or begin asylum procedures. If the number of deported women and girls increases, there is real concern that similar patterns could become more widespread.

As these violent actors’ income streams have dried up, they are turning to Tapachula’s non-migrant population. Extortion of businesses, from restaurants to informal street vendors, has worsened across the city.

Tapachula’s security climate further complicates the situation for people aboard the deportation flights. If more planes arrive in the coming months, some people may be left stranded in the city due to insufficient resources and networks. Here, they will be vulnerable to kidnappers and extortionists. “The entire criminal infrastructure that thrived on northbound migration will very likely shift its focus to deportees,” warned a human rights defender.

The danger extends to human rights defenders and humanitarian workers who assist migrants in the city. One prominent local group’s members rarely make the 20-mile trip from Tapachula to the Guatemalan border anymore because their work to reveal kidnappers’ activities and state collusion brought a wave of threats. Government-issued security measures, like GPS-enabled “panic buttons,” offer little reassurance of protection. “This is our problem,” a staff member from that group said, “but what about the people we serve who are always on the street?”

4. The U.S. aid cuts have already drastically reduced support for migrants—and they leave the region unprepared for a surge in U.S. deportations.

Tapachula’s human rights monitors and humanitarian workers have been another group hit by the U.S. government’s severe 2025 cuts in aid for programs seeking to guarantee migrants’ safety and ability to integrate into Mexico. Because of the funding cuts, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has reduced staffing in southern Mexico, closing offices in some cities and downgrading others from offices to “field presences.” Service providers that received support, either directly from the U.S. government or from UNHCR and other international agencies, are closing doors, laying off staff, and canceling programs. Gender -based violence-related services, as documented elsewhere in the region, have been among the most heavily affected. 

The Trump administration is sending people to an environment that is ill-equipped to receive them. A city with a long experience of migration but no experience of receiving U.S. deportees, Tapachula may one day become an important site for monitors to learn about the treatment that Mexican citizens are receiving in U.S. custody before and during deportation. For now, the necessary infrastructure and relationships that would allow this are far from being in place.

Dispatch from Guatemala: Five Alarming Trends in U.S. Immigration Detention and Removal

(Posted Friday, August 1)

This update from the Guatemala part of our trip is cross-posted from WOLA’s website.

Following a visit to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, researchers from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission traveled to Guatemala City, the capital of Central America’s largest nation, to speak with officials, scholars, and service providers about what migrants are experiencing in United States government custody. Here is what they found.

1. There has been a shift in who is being deported: from recent border crossers in 2024, to people who have lived in the U.S. for years or decades in 2025.

The airport here receives more U.S. deportation flights than any other: 212 in the first half of 2025, according to Witness at the Border. During the first half of 2025, 18,350 citizens of Guatemala arrived aboard those flights. This represents a reduction of about 48% from the 35,235 Guatemalan citizens aboard 295 flights at the same time in 2024.

But the reduction is deceptive. The Guatemalan people removed from the U.S. in 2024 were largely recent border crossers—people who had spent little to no time in the country. The population being returned in 2025 is very different. Those working with the deported population unanimously agreed that a majority are individuals who have spent a significant amount of time—years, or even decades—building lives and families in the U.S. As we found in Honduras, many of these deported migrants were forced to leave not only their lives but also their families, including children, behind. The emotional and mental health toll is severe.

They are entering U.S. custody through ICE operations in cities throughout the U.S., far more often than through Border Patrol or CBP actions at the border. Many are older and often have U.S. citizen children.

A giant funding bill passed in early July (known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) adds unprecedented resources to the Trump administration’s deportation machine—$45 billion for detention, $15 billion for deportation, and $13 billion to expand the size of ICE. These numbers are staggering: The budget for immigration detention is now more than 62%  larger than the budget for the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons. With the vast scope and scale of these resources, the number of people removed after long periods in the U.S. is very certain to grow. 

2. Migrants are experiencing harm and abuse when arrested, in detention, and during deportation.

As with our findings in Honduras, our time in Guatemala reveals that this immigration enforcement is being undertaken dangerously, with migrants subject to needless harm and abuse. We asked service providers, government officials, advocates, and academic experts what they had heard from deported people about how ICE, CBP, and their contractors have treated them upon arrest, in custody, and during deportation. Once again, what we heard left us deeply concerned.

• Migrants reported to authorities and organizations incidents of verbal abuse, intimidation, and discriminatory language by guards in U.S. detention facilities; some also described cases of physical mistreatment.
• One interviewee said they had documented two cases of gender-based sexual violence in ICE detention centers. One victim was an Indigenous woman who did not speak Spanish. The effective closure of the government’s own internal oversight agencies, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), which monitor sexual assault and abuse in detention, suggests that these cases are likely going underreported.
• As in Honduras, we heard of denial of care to children, particularly during the often lengthy deportation process. “Children arrive with very dirty diapers because the parents aren’t able to change them,” a government official said. “They arrive unbathed, and, after spending many hours without eating, often dehydrated.”
• A government official confirmed that cases involving individuals with psychiatric conditions appear to be increasing this year. However, they noted that deportees are returned with psychiatric medications but no medical diagnoses. 
• Consular officials are having greater difficulty accessing Guatemalan citizens in some detention facilities. An interview subject specifically cited the family detention centers in Texas as problematic in this regard.

3. Family separation is pervasive.

Echoing what we documented in Honduras, families with U.S. citizen children are being separated, in some cases with little or no opportunity for parents to decide whether to bring the children with them. “People have to make instant decisions at what is the worst moment [arrest]. Under intense emotional circumstances, some are able to choose to be deported with their children or leave them behind, but others—probably the majority—are not,” a service provider told us.

As we noted in our Honduras dispatch, the scale of these family separations is likely to increase under the new Detained Parents Directive, which substantially reduces ICE’s existing obligations to facilitate reunification of parents with their children before deportation. 

There seems to be some variability in the likelihood of family separation across ICE deportation staging areas. Two interviewees separately told us that people who departed the ICE facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, were more likely to report separation from their children than those flown from other sites like Harlingen, Texas.

4. Non-return of money, valuables, and identity cards is common.

Non-return of money, valuables, and identity cards is a common problem, though these initial conversations indicate that it might be less pervasive than in Honduras. In some cases, migrants told organizations that the cash they were carrying at the time of arrest was not returned after deportation. In others, officials told of migrants’ surrendered cash being replaced with stored value cards that, for some reason, “only function in the state of Kansas.” Identity documents often get returned to Guatemala “in a big load all at once,” days or weeks after their owners have departed reception sites, a government official noted.

5. Guatemala is providing reception services, but there are gaps.

Guatemala’s government is implementing a new “Return Home Plan” that offers some services to those arriving, with an option to take a 75-question survey about their backgrounds and needs while at a new reception center in the capital. Those questions, however, do not include any content about mistreatment suffered in the U.S.

What is needed, an official said, is “more time; you need a direct relation.” Some interviewees called for an ability to let people know that there is some entity with which they can talk, when they are ready, about what they experienced.

“The response isn’t in the airports, it’s at the local level,” said a longtime migration scholar who cited a rich “ecosystem” of social organizations, churches, local governments, and support networks in communities throughout the country where deported people are returning. However, many of these vital services are experiencing severe funding cuts due to the loss of USAID funding and other U.S. assistance. The loss of these funds imperils our ability to document the abuses committed while in U.S. custody, as well as migrants’ ability to rebuild their lives after deportation.

The testimony of migrants arriving following deportation is a crucial vector for learning about abuse, mistreatment, and potentially unlawful practices committed against them by U.S. agents and contractors inside the U.S. As the deportation machine’s tempo increases, there is a critical need to gather information about the everyday abuses and the egregious cases, to document and verify them, and to ensure proper follow-up. 

However, obtaining this information does not mean asking exhausted, highly stressed people about mistreatment while they endure the trauma of arrival at airports or reception centers. “Unlike last year, people are arriving in far worse condition—many don’t even want to talk,” a service provider recalled.

Next Stop: Southern Mexico

As we transit to Mexico, WOLA and WRC will continue to determine how to improve documentation and accountability, to ensure that examples of abuse, mistreatment, and unprofessional behavior do not go ignored, forgotten, or unaccounted for. We will not allow immigration detention to remain a black box.

Dispatch from Honduras: Four Things You Need to Know About ICE Deportations—It’s Worse Than Expected

(Posted Monday, July 28)

This update from the Honduras part of our trip is cross-posted from WOLA’s website.

Researchers from WOLA and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) just visited San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city. This is where Honduras receives its deported citizens aboard ICE contractor flights (and now some U.S. military flights).

We spoke with people who provide services to help reintegrate the deported population, all of whom have had to cut staff and programs because of the Trump administration’s evisceration of USAID and State Department migration programming. We also spoke, briefly, to people who arrived on a deportation flight.

We came away alarmed. Here are four reasons why.

1. The extent of involuntary family separation is far greater than we expected.

In recent months, the number of Honduran parents who have been seized, detained, and deported without their U.S. citizen children—even when they are willing to be removed with them—appears to total well into the hundreds, and new parents arrive every day.

ICE has an affirmative obligation to allow parents to reunify with their children before they are deported or make alternative caregiving arrangements for them in the United States. On July 2nd, ICE issued a new version of the policy previously known as the “Parental Interests Directive.” The new guidance substantially weakens ICE’s obligation to help parents facilitate reunification with their children before removal, which raises grave concerns that these involuntary separations are going to increase.

However, even the policy states that parents “will be afforded an opportunity prior to their removal to elect (in writing) to have their dependent remain in the U.S. and make alternative caregiving arrangements if necessary.” Numerous interviews so far have coincided in affirming that this is not happening. 

In some cases, parents report to service providers that they are being removed without even getting a chance to communicate with their families at all. “They want to punish them for entering the United States, and they do it by targeting what they love the most—separating them from their families. It’s not a coincidence;  it’s something that’s been well planned,” said a social worker who works with deported families.

Service providers spoke of these parents’ great anguish and mental health crises. “It’s a lie that they’re giving them the choice to bring kids back with them,” one told us. “Every day, women arrive crying, but what can we do? I don’t know how to help.”

2. Inadequate care puts mothers and babies at risk

An issue that caused frustration among service providers was the condition in which breastfeeding mothers, babies, and young children are returned. We repeatedly heard that the food provided is inadequate—often frozen meals, chips, and apples. Children arrive sick, with diarrhea, coughs, and signs of malnutrition. Hygiene is also a serious concern: they aren’t allowed to bathe for days, and mothers don’t receive enough diapers to change their babies regularly. In the days before deportation flights, access to food and water is extremely limited.  When asked about breastfeeding mothers, one provider said: “They arrive with hardly any milk—or milk that looks like water—and this affects the babies’ weight.” As another put it: “It’s not fair that children should be treated like this—taken from the only environment they’ve ever known and subjected to such awful conditions.”

These stories confirm our fears about the suspected treatment of pregnant women and new mothers in ICE detention. Media reports and reports from congressional staff on the conditions inside ICE detention facilities suggest that access to healthcare and adequate nutrition for these women are dangerously low. Our findings from the field confirm that pregnant, breastfeeding, and nursing women as well as the newborn babies are lacking essential care.

3. Authorities are refusing to recognize trans and non-binary people’s identities in detention.

We came away shocked by the experience of trans and non-binary people in detention. A trans woman who had been living in the United States since 2021 told us that her time in ICE detention was “a nightmare I want to forget.” She was placed in a male detention unit where she was one of three trans women. She said that they were forced to shower with men, who harassed her—especially because she had breast implants—and that guards shouted offensive remarks at them for being trans.

4. Thousands in Cash and Valuables Unaccounted For

We heard troubling accounts of deported people arriving in Honduras without the cash, cellphones, jewelry, identification cards, and similar valuable items that they had surrendered to ICE or contractor personnel. These migrants are arriving with handwritten receipts that note the items, but with no instructions on how they might retrieve them. For each planeload, there are thousands of dollars’ worth of unreturned cash and valuables. Where are they?

There is more to tell, and we’ll be visiting other countries on this trip. But we’re already gravely concerned by what we’ve heard.

This is happening with almost no accountability and little public knowledge. Changing that has to begin with finding out about it, which has become almost impossible to do from inside the U.S., the administration continues to restrict oversight and visibility into ICE detention.  WOLA and WRC are working to uncover these harms in one of the only possible remaining ways. We will not let these abuses happen in the dark. 

Links from the Past Week

• Tren de Aragua: Fact vs. Fiction (InsightCrime, Sunday, August 17, 2025).

I learned a lot from this series: "Three years of on-the-ground reporting across various countries sheds new light on the reality of Tren de Aragua — how it has evolved, how it currently operates, and how it might change in the future."

• Cindy A. Morales Castillo, Tres Ataques en Menos de 24 Horas: El Poder Armado Arrincona a la Paz Total de Petro (El Espectador (Colombia), Saturday, August 23, 2025).

A horrible day of attacks spurred anguished reflections on the Petro government's negotiation and security strategies and the failure to implement the 2016 peace accord.

• David Frum, How Ice Became Trump's Secret Army (The Atlantic, Wednesday, August 20, 2025).

Transcript of a podcast interview with journalist Caitlin Dickerson about "ICE’s explosive growth, Trump’s detention surge, and the future of U.S. immigration enforcement."

• Miriam Jordan, An Ohio City Faces a Future Without Haitian Workers: ‘It's Not Going to Be Good' (The New York Times, Monday, August 18, 2025).

A report from Springfield, Ohio, whose Haitian community—demonized by the Trump campaign despite local businesses' dependence on immigrant workers—is now clearing out rapidly.

• Fernando Silva, Jared Olson, Juan Lopez Investigo Corrupcion en la Alcaldia de Adan Funez Antes de Ser Asesinado (ContraCorriente (Honduras), Monday, August 18, 2025).

The hemisphere's nexus of official corruption, organized crime, land theft, extractive industries, environmental harm, and gross impunity is strikingly virulent in Honduras's conflictive Bajo Aguán region, as illustrated by the frustrating aftermath of last year's murder of environmental leader Juan López.

And Finally