Hi, this is Adam. If you're receiving this message, it means you signed up on my website to receive regular updates. If you'd like to stop getting these, just follow the instructions further down.

How is everyone doing?

It's certainly OK to be "not great." But it's not OK to give up or to carry on like everything is normal. And that goes triple for our elected officials (yes, you, Democratic Party).

Unsurprisingly, things have been chaotic at work for me over the two weeks since my last email. My ambition of sending these every weekend has been ground down by reality, like fielding many questions Sunday about the Colombia deportation flight fiasco. (There's nothing about that in this e-mail; I did several posts on social media, and then it was over almost as soon as it began.)

I feel like I've been yelling a lot lately, but not into the void. There's been lots of media work (NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, AP, CNN, Roll Call, a Q&A in Mother Jones, and others). I got to testify in the Senate two Thursdays ago (more on that below). And every item we write at WOLA about borders, migration, and Trump is getting more than 30,000 downloads per week.

But yes, it's all bad and going to get worse, as we go from an illegal border shutdown to an illegal spending freeze. Let's hope our political system's opposition party rises to the occasion: it would be good to have some accompaniment. But we're going to keep going, either way.

Below you'll see excerpts and links to the last two Border Updates; a WOLA memo about the executive orders; a podcast about Venezuela; my Senate testimony on "Remain in Mexico"; and links to this week's events. I didn't include links to recommended reading, because there just hasn't been time to read non-border-related writing and journalism lately. For the border-and-migration-related stuff, there are plenty of links in the Border Updates.

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Trump’s First Days

(Posted Friday, January 24)

• Read the whole thing here. See past weekly updates here.

This Update is the product of interviews and the review of over 210,000 words of source documents since January 18. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to keeping these paywall-free and ad-free Updates going. Please contribute now and support our work.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

The many actions and changes following Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration forced a change in the format of this week’s Border Update. Instead of narratives organized under three or four topics, this Update organizes brief points under the following headings:

• CBP One appointments canceled
• Shutdown of processing migrants and asylum seekers
• “Remain in Mexico” restarts
• Humanitarian parole programs end
• Declaring that the United States is under “invasion”
• Domestic use of the U.S. armed forces
• Placing criminal groups on the “terrorist list”
• Foreign relations
• Other provisions
• Reactions in Mexico and elsewhere
• Initial analyses

Read the whole thing here.

Support ad-free, paywall-free Weekly Border Updates. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to sustain this effort. Please contribute now and support our work.

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: New administration, mass deportation, Laken Riley Act, December migration

(Posted Monday, January 20)

This update was later than usual because of staff travel and congressional testimony in recent days. It reflects events as of the end of January 17, making it slightly out of date. Weekly publication resumed on time on Friday, January 24.

• Read the whole thing here. See past weekly updates here.

THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• The Incoming Administration’s Likely Initial Actions

Media are reporting that about 100 executive orders will follow Donald Trump’s inauguration, many related to the border and migration. We can expect an end to the CBP One mobile phone app and humanitarian parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicarguans, and Venezuelans. We can expect a push to renew “Remain in Mexico,” possibly Title 42 and “safe third country” agreements: programs that require the cooperation of Mexico and other nations. A gigantic piece of spending legislation to fund this, plus a mass deportation plan, may soon move in Congress.

• Mass Deportation

The Wall Street Journal reported that ICE may begin raids seeking to detain undocumented migrants in Chicago immediately after Inauguration Day. Near Bakersfield, California, Border Patrol agents spread fear among farmworkers by carrying out a large-scale operation of their own. Officials like “Border Czar” Tom Homan are promising conflict with so-called “sanctuary cities” as they call for more detention and deportation capacity, while Mexico prepares to receive large numbers of people.

• “Laken Riley” Bill Nears Passage

Enough Democratic senators voted “yes” to break a filibuster and permit likely passage of the Laken Riley Act. The Republican-led bill, named for a woman murdered by a Venezuelan migrant, would allow migrants with pending immigration cases to be detained even if just arrested and charged with a petty crime, and would empower state attorneys-general to challenge aspects of U.S. immigration law in court. The Senate’s cloture vote passed with the votes of 10 of 45 Democratic-aligned senators present, all of them from electorally competitive states.

• Migration continued to decline in December

December 2024 saw the fewest Border Patrol apprehensions per day of the entire Biden administration. The administration’s June rule barring most asylum access between ports of entry is the main reason. For the second time ever, more migrants were encountered at the official border crossings than apprehended by Border Patrol between them. Texas’s Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector measured the most apprehensions, edging out San Diego, which had been number one since June 2024.

Read the whole thing here.

Support ad-free, paywall-free Weekly Border Updates. Your donation to WOLA is crucial to sustain this effort. Please contribute now and support our work.

WOLA Podcast: Authoritarianism, Resistance, and Repression: What’s Next for Venezuela?

(Posted Friday, January 24)

Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro got himself sworn into office again 2 weeks ago, despite losing an election, riding a wave of repression. WOLA’s latest podcast episode is a situation report from my colleague Laura Dib, who runs our Venezuela program.

Here’s the text of the podcast landing page at wola.org.

The director of WOLA’s Venezuela Program, Laura Dib, joins the podcast to discuss the political, human rights, and diplomatic reality following Nicolás Maduro’s January 10 inauguration. Maduro’s new term begins amid severe tensions, as he plainly lost July 28, 2024 presidential elections and has employed waves of repression, including rounding up and in some cases forcibly disappearing political prisoners, to deny the result.

Despite the context of repression and intimidation, Laura underscores that on January 9 Venezuelans still took part in 157 reported protests, including one with the participation of opposition leader María Corina Machado, who is in hiding. The response was further crackdowns, including the temporary detention of María Corina, the enforced disappearance of the son in law of the election’s true winner Edmundo González Urrutia, and the enforced disappearance of Carlos Correa, director of NGO Espacio Público, who was recently released after being missing for nine days.

With repression worsening and space closing for civil society—particularly through implementation of a harsh new NGO law—it is difficult to perceive a path forward. Laura emphasizes, however, the remaining areas of hope; possible cracks within the ruling coalition, significant consensus within the international community, and the persistent bravery of Venezuela’s civil society and diaspora. Laura acknowledges the complexities of the deep-rooted corruption and private sector ties that make Maduro’s hermetic regime difficult to assess and counter.

She also discusses the confused and contradictory nature of the new Trump administration’s likely approach to Venezuela. A transactionally minded president uninterested in democracy promotion is leading a group of officials with different, and potentially clashing, priorities: some are staunchly “anti-communist” but others are focused on stopping migration and enabling deportations to Venezuela.

Laura also discusses the complexities of sanctions, economic collapse, and Venezuela’s relations with its neighbors. The episode ends with a strong call for the international community to focus its efforts on supporting Venezuelan civil society and preserving the civic space that exists.

For more up-to-date information, read Laura Dib’s commentary “Venezuela: Authoritarianism and Resistance”; a commentary by Carolina Jiménez, President of WOLA, “Venezuela between repression and resistance,” and watch WOLA’s recent event, “Autoritarismo y Resistencia: Análisis de la Situación en Venezuela.”

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.

Trump’s Executive Orders and Latin America: Key Things to Know

(Posted Friday, January 24)

Here’s an explainer WOLA posted on Friday, sounding alarms about the likely impact of these changes from the second Trump administration’s first few days. This is all before the feud with Colombia and the effort to halt a huge amount of federal spending.

It covers the following changes that will, if implemented, gravely harm Latin America:

• Ending asylum and other legal pathways
• The “invasion” justification and dangerous domestic use of the U.S. military
• Mass deportation
• Placing criminal groups on the “terrorist list”
• Ending all federal diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs and mandating the recognition of only two sexes
• Pausing U.S. Foreign Assistance
• Exiting the Paris Climate Change Agreement

Read the whole thing here.

Senate Testimony

(Posted Thursday, January 16)

It was fun—at times—to engage with senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this morning on Republican-led proposals to revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy. There’s a lot to say about it and I’ll post more later. For now:

• The hearing page and full video are here.
• My written testimony is here as a PDF.

WOLA’s landing page is here. Here’s the text of my opening statement:

Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today.

I did a lot of fieldwork and data work along the U.S.-Mexico border when Remain in Mexico—MPP—was first implemented. The evidence I saw is clear: Remain in Mexico enriched cartels. It failed to meaningfully deter migration. And it soured relations with a key ally. Pursuing it again would harm U.S. interests.

Instead, I urge this Committee to focus on fixing our asylum system. That system saves tens of thousands of lives each year, but we need it to be both fair and efficient. No one supports the idea of five-year waits for asylum decisions: the backlogs create a pull factor of their own. But this is an administrative challenge, and the U.S. government is good at handling administrative challenges. It’s just a question of processing, case management, and adjudication.

People truly did suffer while remaining in Mexico. I personally heard harrowing accounts of torture and abuse. Nearly all of that abuse was the work of organized crime groups, or cartels.

The cartels’ cruelty and sadism wasn’t just a human rights issue, though. These criminals aren’t barbaric just for its own sake. This is their economic model, and that makes it a national security issue.

Organized crime is trying to extract as much money out of migrants and their loved ones as it can while those migrants are present on the “turf” that they control. Cartels fight each other for this business.

“Remain in Mexico” kept migrants on cartels’ turf for very long periods of time: months or even years in Mexican border cities waiting for their hearings. MPP created a new market opportunity for cartels.

That’s a big difference from CBP One. The app also requires months-long waits to come to a U.S. port of entry, but it makes it easier to wait elsewhere, in parts of Mexico that are safer than its northern border zone, where states are under State Department travel warnings because of cartel crime and kidnapping.

When outsiders are waiting for months in Mexico’s border zone, they are sitting ducks for the cartels:

• First, there was extortion: foreigners had to pay just to exist for that long in cartel-controlled neighborhoods. If you don’t pay, it’s not safe to go outside your shelter.
• Second, if people wanted to give up on the long wait for MPP, cartels offered “coyote” services: the chance to cross the border and try to evade Border Patrol. They charge several thousand dollars for that.
• Third was kidnapping for ransom: cartels held people in horrific conditions, raping and torturing them, as their relatives—frequently in the United States—had to wire thousands of dollars to free them.

The financial scale of this exploitation is staggering. Let’s consider it. Take a conservative estimate of $1,000 per migrant in extortions, ransoms, or coyote fees—I ran that figure by some border-area experts and they laughed at how low that estimated amount is. Multiply that by 71,000 people in MPP, and you get $71 million in cartel profits, an amount equal to the annual base salaries of 1,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents.

For all that, Remain in Mexico didn’t really do that much to reduce or control migration.

For more than 10 years now, there’s been a series of crackdowns on asylum seekers. My testimony maps them out in a graphic. These crackdowns follow the same pattern: you get an initial drop in migration numbers, it lasts a few months, and then there’s a rebound.

Title 42 and its expansions? A classic example. So was “Remain in Mexico.”

After it expanded in June 2019, Border Patrol’s apprehensions did fall for four months. Then the migration numbers plateaued—at the same level they were in mid-2018. In fact, at the same level as the Obama administration’s eight-year monthly average. And that’s where the numbers stayed.

And then in the first months of 2020, Border Patrol apprehensions started rising. They were on pace to grow by a double-digit percentage from February to March. But then COVID came, and all but ended March 10 days early.

Title 42 ended up eclipsing Remain in Mexico: no more hearing dates; asylum seekers got expelled. Remain in Mexico became irrelevant and the Trump administration rarely used it again.

MPP also strained relations with Mexico. The Mexican government at first resisted the program, agreeing to it only after very heavy diplomatic pressure. This complicated cooperation on other shared priorities.

There are a lot of those priorities, from trade to fentanyl. Mexico is one of the ten largest countries in the world, with the 14th-largest economy. The border is just one reason why the United States needs good relations with Mexico.

Compelling Mexico to agree to a new Remain in Mexico takes bandwidth away from those priorities. Why do all that for a policy that actually enriches drug cartels? Why do all that for a policy that doesn’t even have a clear and lasting effect on migration?

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

“Migrant Crime” is a Distraction, and the Laken Riley Act is a Dangerous Bill

(Posted Sunday, January 19)

Another congressional hearing testimony, another nasty shouting match. These aren’t fun because you don’t have the floor, but you have to stand up to bullies.

If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s how the Fox News website covered it:

“Here’s Laken Riley,” said Hawley as her picture was posted behind him. “Her murder, her horrific murder at the hands of this illegal migrant who was also unlawfully paroled in the United States. [Is] her death not an actual issue?”

The activist, Adam Isacson, who works as director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, responded by saying: “Of course it’s an issue, it’s a tragedy.”

“I didn’t say that Laken Riley’s death was not an actual issue, I said that migrant crime is not an actual issue,” said Isacson. “Migrant crime is much less of an issue than U.S. citizen-committed crime.”

To which Hawley answered, “[Riley] is dead because of migrant crime.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) was citing these two sentences from a March 1, 2024 “Border Update” video. (It took me a while even to find it, because things said in videos don’t show up in online searches. That’s good opposition research.)

The horrific murder of a nursing student in Georgia has a lot of people on the right talking about ‘migrant crime’ like it’s an actual issue. But the data, in fact, show that migrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens.

Of course I stand by that. I’m telling the truth. Evidence shows that migrants—undocumented, asylum-seeking, and otherwise—commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens. If you’re governing a community and want to make sure it’s protected from crime, you’re doing it wrong if you divert law enforcement resources to targeting immigrants, who (with tragic exceptions because all humans commit crimes) break laws less often.

Here are some of the sources I was drawing from at the time:

• “Illegal Immigrants Have a Low Homicide Conviction Rate” by Cato Institute expert Alex Nowrasteh
• Washington Post fact-checker: “Immigrants tend to be more law-abiding“
• NBC News: “Trump’s claims of a migrant crime wave are not supported by national data“
• “More recently, there’s been an explosion of research in this area because of public perception and interest. And what’s pretty amazing is, across all this research, by and large, we find that immigrants do not engage in more crime than native-born counterparts, and immigration actually can cause crime to go down, rather than up, so quite contrary to public perception.” — Charis Kurbin of UC Irvine, author of the book Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, on PBS Newshour.
• “The repetition of the phrase ‘migrant crime’ is a tactic stolen from Victor Orban, who used to use ‘Gypsy crime’ in the same way.” — writer Anne Applebaum, author of a few books about democracy and authoritarianism, on Twitter.

In full smarm mode, Sen. Hawley feigned shock that a witness invited by the Democrats might oppose the Laken Riley Act, a bad bill. In fact, more than three-quarters of Senate Democrats voted against it on Friday: it avoided a U.S. Senate filibuster due to just 10 Democratic senators’ votes.

This bill is almost certainly unconstitutional and could harm innocent people, some of them people seeking protection in the United States:

• It will require that migrants be detained—including those with documented status like DACA and TPS recipients, and people with pending asylum cases—until an immigration judge resolves their cases, which could take a year or more, if they’re accused of minor crimes like shoplifting. And I mean “accused”: the text of the law reads “is charged with, is arrested for.” They don’t have to be found guilty in court: all it takes is a false accusation that leads to an arrest, even for allegedly stealing a candy bar from a CVS. “Innocent until proven guilty” goes out the window. The potential for abuse is tremendous.
• It gives state attorneys-general superpowers to sue to block aspects of U.S. immigration law, disfiguring the federal government’s ability to carry out immigration policies for the greater good. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent pointed out, this could even cause a schism within MAGA. Trump backers who oppose legal immigration, like Steve Bannon, have been in a public fight with Trump’s tech-sector backers, like Elon Musk, over visas for skilled overseas workers. Bannon will need only enlist an attorney-general like Texas’s Ken Paxton to sue to block migrants from countries like India, from where companies like Musk’s hire many immigrants.

The hearing episode got me a wave of insults on social media and in my comms accounts from people who hate migrants or think I somehow don’t care about a tragic murder. Most of the insults are lame and probably written by people in Belarus, but some of them (like “beta-male f*ckstick”) are sheer poetry and I plan to use them.

Latin America-Related Events in Washington and Online This Week

(Posted Sunday, January 26)

(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)

Monday, January 27

• 4:00-5:30 at wilsoncenter.org: The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (RSVP required).

Tuesday, January 28

• 10:00 in Room 253, Russell Senate Office Building and online: Hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Examining the Panama Canal and Its Impact on U.S. Trade and National Security.
• 12:00-1:00 at georgetown.edu: Crime and Money Laundering: Measuring the Impact of Criminal Activity and Money Laundering (RSVP required).
• 5:00 at CODHES YouTube: Colombia: Revisión de la Crisis Humanitaria y los conflictos armados vigentes

Thursday, January 30

• 1:00-2:00 at thedialogue.org: Tracking China-Caribbean Relations — New Tools and Takeaways (RSVP required).

And Finally