Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts. Kang said his firm, WidePoint, had technology that could help the Department of Homeland Security track down cellphones given to immigrants who had been released on bail, pending deportation hearings. All the company needed was a foot in the door. “So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”  Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the second Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions. > “We are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they > could get us in the door.” Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration. Kang’s WidePoint, which won a DHS cellphone contract in the last months of President Donald Trump’s first term and is angling to win another worth up to $3 billion, is just one of several companies that have reportedly tried to enlist Homan’s help in drumming up federal contracts. In June, Homan met with companies seeking contracts to build new immigration detention facilities, Bloomberg reported. Many of those contracts are being awarded by the US military, and Homan, according to the report, “was then expected to discuss the matter with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”  In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts. Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue. Among would-be contractors, “the perception is that Homan can put in a good word—whether compensated or not compensated in cash, with or without a bag man—and in some sense, the damage is done,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics. Homan’s perceived influence, even after the alleged bag incident, sends “the message…that this is not disqualifying and people who want some portion of the trough that is DHS at this point can look to Homan, among others, for assistance,” Clark said. Homan referred questions to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who dismissed concerns. “As the Border Czar, Tom Homan occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people – in doing so he continues to adhere to the federal ethics and [conflict] of interests rules,” Jackson said. “Tom has no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract. Tom is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant, with the utmost integrity, who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”  A White House official also said Homan “has not had any conversations, nor been involved in any conversations,” with WidePoint or any of the other companies discussed in this article “regarding contracts or business interests.” The official said Homan, a White House employee, has “no role in deciding or awarding contracts for DHS.” Homan was well-situated to capitalize on his insights and government connections. He spent three decades working for the US Border Patrol and in 2013 was appointed to a high-ranking position with ICE by President Barack Obama—a post in which Homan pioneered the idea of using family separations as a tool to discourage illegal immigration. Homan stayed on into the first Trump administration, but left his role as acting ICE director in June 2018—soon after the public outcry over family separations reached a fever pitch. > Homan’s consulting company boasted that it has “a proven track record of > opening doors.” Apparently, he already had been planning a leap to the private sector. In May 2018—just days after he announced that he would leave the administration—the state of Virginia approved paperwork incorporating a new business he founded, called Homeland Strategic Consulting. He spent the rest of Trump’s first term and the Biden years transforming himself from a lifetime government official into an advocate with insider perspectives and connections to the powerful for the many business interests trying to score government deals. As of last December, the website of Homan’s consulting company boasted that the firm has “a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.”  In 2021, Homan’s firm registered to lobby in Texas for Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota-based construction company that was seeking work building portions of border wall. Texas records show Fisher paid Homeland Strategic Consulting up to $186,000.  Fisher is a controversial company. In 2019, it built short sections of border wall in Texas and New Mexico. The work was financed by “We Build the Wall,” an effort involving Steve Bannon in which organizers crowdsourced private donations to fence off the country from Mexico. In 2020, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, Bannon, and two other men were charged with defrauding donors by misappropriating money they raised. While the other three defendants were convicted and jailed, Bannon escaped federal prosecution when Trump pardoned him hours before leaving office in 2021. Bannon pleaded guilty in February to defrauding donors in a similar case brought by Manhattan’s district attorney. The sections of wall Fisher did complete have been lambasted as poorly built. In 2022, Fisher reached an undisclosed agreement with the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit over the project. Fisher has also repeatedly been sued by environmental groups. But Fisher, whose CEO Tommy Fisher has supported many GOP lawmakers, has tapped Trump world support to continue landing contracts. Last year, with Homan’s help, the company scored a $225 million contract from Texas to build a new section of border wall there. And in June 2025, this erstwhile Homan client won a $309 million contract from Customs and Border Protection to build a 27-mile section of wall in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County. The company did not respond to inquiries. Fisher isn’t the only former Homan client continuing to seek federal contracts that intersect with Homan’s White House portfolio. USA Up Star, a company that specializes in quickly constructing temporary buildings in response to emergencies, is a former client of Homan’s that donated $100,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration committee in January and $15,000 in June 2024 to a pro-Trump super-PAC called Right for America. A Federal Election Committee database does not show any other corporate contributions from that company, though its owner and president, Klay South, previously donated to PACs supporting Ron DeSantis. In the months before the 2024 election, according to Bloomberg, “USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention.” The construction company, Bloomberg reported, was pitching “a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures.” This September, the US Navy awarded a massive border security and immigration enforcement contract to dozens of companies, including USA Up Star. The deal could ultimately be worth up to $20 billion for each contractor over several years, according to a government press release. The contract includes work providing “safe and secure confinement for aliens in the administrative custody of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” per contracting records, as well as less controversial work, such as providing support in response to natural disasters. In response to written questions, South declined to comment. He also wrote: “Get Fucked.” Another past Homan client is SE&M Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm that, like Homan’s former consultancy, helps other companies win government contracts. SE&M’s CEO is Charles Sowell, who also serves as chairman of the board of the Border911 Foundation, a border security-focused nonprofit founded and led by Homan. According to Sowell’s bio, he served in the Navy for 27 years, managed a Texas-based federal facility for unaccompanied migrant children in 2021, and attended the Border Patrol Industry Academy. USA Up Star is also an SE&M client, per reporting from ProPublica. SE&M’s website has touted “access to senior leaders in government.” In August, according to Bloomberg, two SE&M clients met with Mark Hall, a top adviser to Homan who works in the administration. Hall is a former longtime Border Patrol agent who also served as a Border911 Foundation board member. (Another former board member is Rodney Scott, the head of Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol.) SE&M Solutions and Border911 did not respond to requests for comment. And then there’s GEO Group, a private prison behemoth that runs a sprawling network of immigrant detention centers. ICE’s largest contractor, GEO Group also offers related services such as transporting detainees and tracking immigrants who are not detained. Homan reported on his financial disclosure form that he had worked as a consultant for GEO’s health care arm during the prior year. GEO Group donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration. That’s in addition to 2024 contributions from GEO’s political action committee, senior executives, and a GEO subsidiary totaling more than $1 million to Trump-aligned political entities, according to a Project On Government Oversight review of Federal Election Commission records. GEO has seen its fortunes rise this year as the current administration has set new records for the number of people held in immigration detention, recently hitting 66,000. The population of detainees is up nearly 70 percent since Trump’s inauguration—the vast majority have no criminal convictions. Since Inauguration Day, ICE has awarded GEO new detention contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  “This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our Company’s history,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s executive chairman, said in a November statement.  GEO did not respond to a request for comment. But it has been vocal about benefiting from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “As a long-standing support services provider for ICE with a 40-year-long track record, we believe we are uniquely positioned to assist the agency to meet its objectives,” Zoley said over the summer. This story was reported with the Project On Government Oversight. Samantha Michaels contributed reporting.

Tucked into Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill—which passed in the House last month, and promises major cuts to Medicaid—is a provision to spend $46.5 billion in taxpayer dollars on building his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border. The White House says that the funding will provide an additional 701 miles of primary wall and 900 miles of river barriers—but given how the construction of the wall played out in Trump’s first term, those numbers are wildly optimistic. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to build 1000 miles of border wall for $8 to $12 billion—and said Mexico would pay for it. As a first-term president, he asked Congress for $5.7 billion towards the wall; it allocated $1.3 billion in border security funding instead, and Trump ended up invoking emergency powers to transfer funds from elsewhere in government to the project. As reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, costs quickly ballooned: by the end of Trump’s first term, only 47 miles of previously unwalled land received new barriers—at a public cost of about $15 billion. An appeals court ruled in October 2020 that Trump’s use of emergency powers to divert billions in military funds to border wall construction was unlawful. Mexico, of course, did not pay for it.   This time, the bill that includes the massive wall spending narrowly passed the House in a 215-214 vote that saw two Republicans join all Democrats in voting no, with three others voting present or missing the vote altogether. Trump’s bill has faced criticism from Republicans, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) specifically calling for cuts to its border wall spending. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found on Tuesday that the House bill would increase deficits by $2.8 trillion over the next decade.  To balance out the wall funding, other Senate Republicans have called for further cuts to Medicaid—despite the House bill already cutting hundreds of billions in Medicaid funding, which one analysis from the Annals of Internal Medicine found would increase the number of uninsured people by 7.6 million, and the number of annual deaths by more than 16 thousand. The cuts have been condemned by the medical community, including in a recent statement by the American Hospital Association. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blasted the Senate GOP’s version of the bill, saying that its “cuts to Medicaid are deeper and more devastating than even the Republican House’s disaster of a bill.” An AP-NORC poll released Monday found that the vast majority of Americans do not want to see Medicaid cut, with only 18 percent of US adults saying the program has too much funding.  The bill itself is also unpopular among the American people: A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 53 percent of voters opposed it, with just 27 percent in support and 20 percent not offering an opinion. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 42 percent of Americans were not in favor of the bill, with 23 percent supporting—and that fully 52 percent of Americans are specifically against spending $50 billion to complete the border wall.  But—as with tariffs and attempts to cut agency funding without congressional approval—the administration is evidently willing to put Americans’ concerns aside when spending their money.  

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The lynxes of the Białowieża forest once freely prowled through 548 square miles of ancient woodland. Then, in 2022, the habitat was abruptly sliced in two. Poland built a 115-mile wall across its border with Belarus to stop refugees and migrants entering the EU. About 15 lynxes were left stranded on the Polish side of the forest, forced into a genetic bottleneck. The 18-foot-high barrier, which is topped with wire and cameras, also dissects the forest’s population of bison, wolves, and elk. Researchers monitored 10 sites along the border, walking along sections and counting signs of humans and wildlife. “I could not have foreseen the diversity of impacts that we ended up finding,” says the lead author of the report, Katarzyna Nowak, from the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Mammal Research Institute. > There are now an estimated 74 border walls globally, up from six in 1989, with > more in the pipeline. Humans have been building walls for thousands of years, but the speed and scale with which they are now being constructed has ballooned over recent decades. With refugee crises in Europe and Asia, and the rise of governments cracking down on immigration, the planet is increasingly crisscrossed with steel barriers, chain-link fencing and razor wire—with significant consequences for wildlife. There are now an estimated 74 border walls globally, up from just six in 1989, with more in the pipeline. “The hardening of international borders through fortification and militarisation is on the rise,” researchers say in the report on the impacts of the Polish-Belarusian border wall. In a separate paper published in February, another researcher argues for “ecological peace corridors” to protect wildlife movement amid growing human conflict. At the same time that borders are strengthened, the need for humans and other animals to migrate is being supercharged by climate breakdown. “It is a worrying future in multiple respects,” says Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International. “This is a worldwide phenomenon that is going to become of increasing importance.” His research found that border walls obstruct the ranges of more than 700 species of mammals, including leopards, tigers, cheetah, and the critically endangered Saiga antelope. The study identified 20,000 miles of borders fortified with fences and walls, which can cause habitats to fragment and create injuries from entanglement, genetic bottlenecks and blocked migration routes. > The US-Mexico border call crosses the Madrean Sky Islands, home to the > greatest diversity of mammals, reptiles, and ants in the United States. The US-Mexico border wall—which was found to have the most impact of those studied—bisects the ranges of 120 mammals alone. Pygmy owls, which stay close to the ground for safety, do not fly high enough to cross the wall, and populations of pumas and coatis—a raccoon-like animal found across Latin America have fallen. Bighorn sheep risk becoming “zombie species” as the populations become too genetically fragmented and unable to move sufficiently to adapt to climate change. The study of the Polish-Belarusian border showed animals were keeping their distance from the wall because they were scared of it. Despite the fact that it passed through a rich forest habitat, Nowak says: “We had very few signs of animals along the border.” Thirty-six cameras were up for more than a year and images of lynxes were only found on them twice. Humans were more frequently seen on cameras than wildlife, especially at border sites. Sound recordings revealed human sounds—such as vehicles, music, dogs, and gunshots—penetrated up to nearly 275 yards into the forest, which is a Unesco world heritage site. Rubbish lined the border, drawing dogs, cats and other scavengers to the area. “This again creates an unnatural interface, not just between people and wild animals, but also domestic animals,” says Nowak. Plant surveys suggested invasive species might be able to survive in the “sun-streaked strip in the middle of the forest,” says Nowak, who is worried that the forest could start to split into two. A bird sits perched on amid razor wire over the US-Mexico border fence. Such barriers break up habitats, stop migration and injure animals.David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images Borderland regions such as Białowieża Forest can also be among the continent’s most biodiverse places. The border fence between Slovenia and Croatia has sliced up the Dinaric mountain range, home to some of the most important brown bear and wolf populations in Europe. The region’s lynx population is threatened with high levels of inbreeding, with researchers warning that the fence “may just be the last push for the population to spiral down the extinction vortex.” The 3,000-mile border between China and Mongolia, which is almost entirely fenced, has blocked the migrations of Asiatic wild ass. Even if these fences are removed in the future, migratory routes are not easily re-routed. Red deer on the border between the Czech Republic and the former West Germany still do not cross what was the “Iron Curtain” —even though the electric fence that divided the countries was taken down 25 years ago, a study found. The life expectancy of a deer is 15 years, so no deer alive at the time of the study would have ever encountered the barrier. A 2025 review of the impacts of border walls had four key recommendations to make them less damaging: Leave gaps in the fencing; cut down on light and noise; avoid the concertina razor-wire tops, which many animals die on; and increase cooperation between countries on the borders. To ease the pressure on wildlife, scientists are pushing for small gaps in fencing to allow species through. The US-Mexico border wall covers more than 700 miles of the almost 2,000-mile long frontier, and crosses the Madrean Sky Islands—patches of woodland that are home to the greatest diversity of mammals, reptiles, and ants in the United States. A study looked at the 13 small passages for wildlife along 80 miles of continuous border—roughly one every 6 miles—each about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Researchers collected and analyzed more than 12,000 videos of animals encountering them. Deer, bears, wolves, and pronghorn sheep were all blocked by the wall, but cameras showed coyotes, wild pig-like peccaries, American badgers, and even some smaller mountain lions were squeezing through. “We were surprised by how busy the A4 holes ended up being,” says Eamon Harrity, wildlife programme manager at Sky Islands Alliance in Arizona and lead author of the study of the wall along the US-Mexico border. “We want more of them,” says Harrity. “They need to be, at a minimum, every half a kilometer.”

The barrage has begun. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders aimed at reshaping immigration to the United States. He took various actions on top of the orders, too—impacting a wide range of aspects of the US immigration system, from indefinitely suspending refugee resettlement to summoning the military to perform border enforcement. It has been hard to keep track of the already chaotic push to end immigration as we know it. Trump ended the use of the Biden administration’s CBP One application and took away thousands of appointments for migrants and would-be asylum seekers. Flights for refugees already vetted and cleared to come to the United States have also been cancelled, leaving many in limbo and even stranded in transit countries. Among these, perhaps the most notable, and disturbing, development has been an aggressive, and seeming illegal, crackdown on access to asylum. This week, the Trump administration has taken steps to effectively seal the southern border by declaring an “invasion” and invoking section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that allows the president to, under certain circumstances, deny entry to foreigners if “detrimental to the interests” of the country. In one executive order titled “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” Trump references that authority to suspend “the physical entry of aliens involved in an invasion into the United States across the southern border until I determine that the invasion has concluded.” > “There is now no such thing as asylum at the US-Mexico border” The proclamation also bars migrants “posing threats to public health, safety, and national security,” preparing the terrain for a future travel ban. As a result, CBS News reported that Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP) agents have been instructed to summarily deport migrants—including families with children—without allowing them the opportunity to ask for protection in the United States. “It’s like Title 42 but for everybody,” Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said in reference to the pandemic-era public health order the Trump administration previously relied on to shut down the border for most migrants. Mother Jones spoke with Isacson about Trump’s executive orders and their impact on the asylum system and beyond. On day one, Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders related to immigration. What stood out to you from the bunch? The first thing that jumped out at me was they are closing the border and refusing to process anybody who’s undocumented. I don’t think it will stand, but it is an enormous deal. Between the existing Biden administration rule from June and this new closure of the border which, of course, includes the cancelation of the CBP one app, there is now no such thing as asylum at the US-Mexico border. Section 208 of the immigration and national Nationality Act (INA) might as well not exist. They have all but repealed it for the time being, pending challenges. People who need protection now just simply cannot get it. Wrapped in with that is the restart of the “Remain in Mexico” program. And the closure of the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, which leaves more people in limbo. There’s also a deployment of 1,500 active duty soldiers and Marines on their way to the border. The United States has a 150-year-old tradition of not using its military for law enforcement duties on US soil, but we’re about to really part with that and give the military, perhaps, like we’ve already seen happen under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s command, the ability to confront civilians domestically. Some of these executive orders invoke an authority under section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to essentially bar any migrant and asylum seeker from entering the country by claiming an “invasion.” Can you explain what that authority is and how the Trump administration is trying to use it? It’s an incredibly broad authority and it gives the president power to just deny or prohibit the entry of broad classes of foreign citizens. Trump used it for his famous Muslim ban, and Biden has used it for his asylum ban on everybody who crosses improperly between ports of entry. One reason the Biden administration waited so long to implement that asylum ban was because the Ninth Circuit [Court of Appeals] had ruled that the 212(f) ban does not cancel out the right to asylum once you’re on US soil. You can prevent people from entering, but if they’re actually physically here and they say, I fear returning to my country, 212(f) doesn’t let you just kick them out. The way that the [Trump] executive order is squaring that illegality of kicking out asylum seekers who are on US soil is by claiming there’s an invasion. It seems like an all-purpose, break-the-law free card if they get away with it. This is [also] almost certainly laying the groundwork for a larger travel ban, not giving visas to [certain] countries, not letting people into airports. You could see this administration targeting Muslim-majority countries like it did in the past. You could also see them targeting countries whose governments don’t allow a lot of deportation planes to land like China and India, if they want to play hardball. How do you see the courts responding to this “invasion” argument?  The use of the Constitution’s article for invasion language to justify what they’re doing is incredibly broad and incredibly vague. It’s a legal theory that came out of a couple of Republican attorneys general and people in the Heritage Foundation orbit only around 2021 or 2022. Now they’re trying to claim that leaderless, stateless people with humanitarian needs are somehow the equivalent of an invading army. That is an incredibly wild legal theory. If courts actually defer to them and say the president gets to decide whether we’re under invasion or not, then the suspension clause of the Constitution lets them suspend habeas corpus and they could just start arresting us if they don’t like us without charge because there’s an “invasion.” In the nightmare, outlandish, worst case, red team scenario, they can say that these 47,000 migrants coming to the border every month constitute an invasion. I don’t think they’ll try it, but it’s the same way [with] the Insurrection Act in the name of an invasion or just a disturbance of the public order, a president can bring in the military. If there’s future George Floyd-type protests, they can use combat-trained soldiers who have no law enforcement background to use maximum force against those protesters. Those are two very big loopholes that could affect our basic freedoms anywhere, and in both cases, [you can see them] using the situation at the border as a pretext. Does this strikes you as different from Trump’s first term? They’re deliberately flooding the zone to keep us off balance, and they’re going for as much as they can get right off the bat. I imagine [they are] expecting to lose a lot of ground in court and in reality, but they’re trying for everything right now. They’re doing this at a time when border patrol apprehensions are way down. So it’s like they’re coming late to the emergency. The Trump administration of the first couple of years you had people like Stephen Miller and [former Acting Homeland Security Secretary] Chad Wolf running around, but you also still had General [John] Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, who was a career government person. You had some more grown-ups. Near the end of the Trump administration, from George Floyd to January 6, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum and it was getting a lot scarier. This is like that latter phase but on steroids.

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed around 10 executive orders to restrict immigration to the United States. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense,” he said during his inauguration speech. “It’s all about common sense.” The promises, many pushed by top advisor Stephen Miller, were striking. Trump vowed to declare a “national emergency” and “send troops” to the US-Mexico border (even though border crossings have reached a low point at the end of the Biden administration), among other major actions. Asylum seekers and refugees will feel the consequences. And the executive orders are bound to get caught in legal fights. Here’s a recap of Trump’s day-one executive orders on immigration:  BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP True to his campaign promise, Trump did issue an order to go into effect in 30 days to deny citizenship to certain US-born children if the mother does not have legal status or is on a temporary visa at the time of birth and the father is not a US citizen or legal permanent resident. That may sound complex. But the reality is simple: If Trump gets his way, no longer does being born in the US mean you’re a citizen. It didn’t take long for immigrant rights groups and several states to file lawsuits challenging the executive for violating the 14th Amendment of the constitution—and more than a century of legal precedent—that guarantees birthright citizenship. (We have written about the long crusade to kill birthright citizenship before.) REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS Trump signed a blanket suspension on the resettlement of refugees until it “aligns with the interests of the United States.” That suspension will go into effect on Monday, January 27 and last at least four months. It also mandates that states and local jurisdictions should have a larger role in the resettlement process. Alongside the suspension, Trump is bringing back the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy: forcing tens of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants to wait in dangerous US-Mexico border towns as their cases go through the backlogged immigration courts. His administration also ended the use of the Biden-era CBP One phone application for asylum seekers to present at the border lawfully. (Appointments were canceled as a result, leaving thousands of people stranded.) Finally, he cited extraordinary presidential authorities to declare an “invasion” at the border and allow government officials to “repel, repatriate, or remove” migrants, including asylum seekers. FAMILY SEPARATION As part of an executive order to protect “the American people against an invasion,” Trump revoked several presidential actions taken during the Biden administration. That includes an executive order that established a Department of Homeland Security task force to work on the reunification of families that had been separated at the border during the first Trump administration. As of March 2024, the task force had helped 795 children reunite with their parents. As I have reported, many families are still separated seven years later. MASS DEPORTATION Many of Trump’s executive orders boost the detention and deportation apparatus his administration would need to conduct mass deportations. That includes the US military. Trump has declared a “national emergency” at the southern border in an effort to unlock federal authorities and additional resources and called on the Armed Forces—including reserves and the National Guard—to help the Department of Homeland Security with immigration enforcement. It also instructs the Department of Defense to provide support in the form of detention space and transportation airplanes.  ALIEN ENEMIES ACT Trump is moving to designate drug cartels and certain gangs—such as MS-13 and Tren de Aragua—as foreign terrorist organizations. This action prepares the terrain for Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite detentions and deportations without due process. During his inauguration speech, the president said he would use this wartime statute to unleash the “full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement” against what he calls an “invasion.”  Despite the breadth and depth of these presidential actions, this is just the beginning. The Trump administration is also upending the immigration system in hard-to-track ways: He has already fired several top officials in charge of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review that oversees the immigration courts, where there are an estimated 3.7 million pending cases. Trump also revoked a policy by the Biden administration discouraging US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from arresting immigrants “in or near protected areas” such as schools, hospitals, and churches.  The federal government is on the attack. The administration has further signaled it will attempt to defund sanctuary cities and deny grants to organizations offering services to immigrants. It will also double down on cooperation agreements between ICE and local and state sheriffs and police departments. States and local authorities can still stand up to Trump’s mass deportation plans. That will require key Democratic officials to take a stance. Notably, New York Mayor Eric Adams attended Trump’s inauguration and later sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson, instead of fighting back.  

Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2024 campaign has been the darkest in modern memory. He has emphasized grievance and demagoguery ever since he first ran for president, most infamously with his build-up to the January 6 insurrection. But in recent months he has gone to new extremes. In numerous speeches and media appearances, he has peddled false conspiracy theories about the two assassination attempts against him and stoked fear and anger nonstop about an alleged “invasion” of murderous migrants, who he claims are “poisoning the blood of” America and “conquering” cities and towns nationwide. Throughout the election homestretch, Trump has woven these virulent strands into his core message about a supposed grand conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from him. Trump and multiple top surrogates have spent months asserting that his political opponents “even tried to kill him” as part of this plot—a canard Trump further amplified when he returned for a second rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman opened fire in mid-July. During a speech in Atlanta, Trump reiterated lies about Democrats conspiring to use undocumented migrants to transform America. “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world.” Trump has drawn on such “Great Replacement” themes—an extremist ideology embraced by multiple mass shooters—ever since he was in the White House. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, is now also advancing this theme, speaking at Trump rallies and posting with massive reach on his social media platform, X. Most news media rarely, if ever, frame Trump’s rhetoric for what it is: methodical, sustained incitement. Proving a direct connection between Trump’s incendiary messaging and acts of violence can be all but impossible—a gap of plausible deniability that is central to the method of stochastic terrorism, as it’s known to national security experts. Nonetheless there is a long history of Trump’s rhetoric correlating strongly with subsequent menace and violence: a surge in threats targeting journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a Trump supporter attacking an FBI field office after Trump raged against the raid on Mar-a-Lago, threats to kill FBI agents over a “stolen election” and the Hunter Biden case. The intensifying demagoguery from Trump this election season has caused high concern among threat assessment and law enforcement experts, as I’ve been reporting since June. Fortunately, their worst fears about the kind of catastrophic violence it might provoke have yet to be realized. But according to two senior federal law enforcement sources I spoke with in recent weeks, Trump’s extremism has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. According to these sources, multiple cases of threats have involved individuals citing or parroting Trump’s ongoing claims about violent migrants invading and taking over the country. Trump’s continual focus on that alleged menace has produced a noticeable hardening effect, one source told me: “We see that the longer it’s talked about, the more it becomes perceived as fact.” Other cases have included talk of “payback or revenge” against Trump’s political adversaries for the assassination attempts, including threats focused on elected officials. > “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the > edge to take extreme actions.” Trump’s hyperbole at recent rallies has included macabre descriptions of alleged rape and murder by migrants, such as telling his supporters, “they’ll cut your throat.” After his rally last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, most media coverage focused on his lewd comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals, but less noted was that Trump also conjured a specter of war against migrants: “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.” He has continued to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for this non-reality: “She’s letting vicious gangs take over whole communities,” he inveighed at a rally on Monday in Greenville, North Carolina. “She’s bussing and flying them in by the millions.” A threat assessment expert who consults for federal law enforcement told me that the fear and contempt generated by such rhetoric is potent, and can be interpreted by some people as permission to commit violence. “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.” In September, the town of Springfield, Ohio, endured waves of paralyzing bomb threats and other harassment after Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating neighbors’ pets. Risk for violence escalated in the southeastern US when Trump and his allies seized on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing FEMA and the Biden administration of abandoning victims. These repeated lies were debunked by state and local leaders, including Republicans, but that didn’t stop Trump. “They spent their money on illegal migrants,” he declared again at Monday’s rally in Greenville. “They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina.” Trump has continued to tell this lie in his stump speech—even after a Trump supporter armed with multiple guns was arrested in western North Carolina in mid-October for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. That and other armed threats disrupted the agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims.   Risk for violence around Election Day remains a high concern and a focus for law enforcement, the sources confirmed to me. As one longtime election official in Georgia explained this week to the Wall Street Journal: “People have had four years of just marinating in all sorts of different conspiracy theories, and we worry they’ll come in looking for a problem. Then you got, ‘Hey everyone come down to the polling place,’ and mobs showing up, maybe armed, and it can really snowball very quickly.”  The temperature also has been rising with adversarial partisan crowds, as seen in Pennsylvania on Sunday in the vicinity of a McDonald’s where Trump posed briefly as a fry cook. Concern will extend well beyond Election Day, through a period of uncertainty about voting results that is likely to follow—and that undoubtedly will be further weaponized by Trump and his allies using baseless claims of fraud, sand-in-the-gears litigation, and beyond. National security and threat assessment experts told me after the January 6 insurrection that quashing the violent extremism unleashed by Trump requires a fundamental change in what political leaders treat as acceptable rhetoric. But through the years of Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican Party, that standard has trended in the wrong direction, with many Republican politicians excusing or even joining in on Trump’s tactics. With Election Day fast approaching, no Republican member of Congress or high-profile figure in the party is speaking out forcefully against Trump’s dark rhetoric. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others stick to misdirection or feigned ignorance, if they address the matter at all. As one threat assessment source told me: “Silence is its own form of participation.”

Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite. > It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence > predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms. The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.” The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.) The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice.  But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration. Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year. Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term. “Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?” All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.” > Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad > when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with > his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. > Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3 > > — Same Story (@samestoryvoices) September 24, 2024

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump campaigns for a second term in the White House, the former president has repeatedly promised to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say should be taken seriously, despite the significant technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting 11 million people from the United States.  Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration—with its laser focus on removing immigrants who live in the US without permanent legal status—has the potential to uproot countless communities and families by conducting sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers. Mass deportation would also, according to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the economy and disrupt the food supply chain, which is reliant on many forms of migrant labor. The ramifications of a mass deportation operation would be “huge” given “immigrant participation in our labor force,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of workers, environment, and climate at the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nonprofit that advocates for health justice. Immigration is one of the reasons behind growth in the labor force, said Liebman. “And then you look at food, and farms.”  > “Button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the > restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken? Like, hello?” The possibility of deportation-related disruption comes at a time when the US food system is already being battered by climate change. Extreme weather and climate disasters are disrupting supply chains, while longer-term warming trends are affecting agricultural productivity. Although inflation is currently cooling, higher food costs remain an issue for consumers across the country—and economists have found that even a forecast of extreme weather can cause grocery store prices to rise.  Mass deportation could create more chaos, because the role of immigrants in the American food system is difficult to overstate. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them to enter the US as seasonal agricultural workers and then return home when the harvest is done. But people living in the US without legal status also play a crucial role in the economy: During the pandemic, it was estimated that 5 million essential workers were undocumented. And the Center for American Progress found that nearly 1.7 million undocumented workers labor in some part of the US food supply chain. Mexican migrant workers on a Colorado farm load boxes of organic cilantro onto a truck, in 2011.Getty Images North America/Grist A stunning half of those immigrants work in restaurants, where during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they labored in enclosed, often cramped environments at a time when poor ventilation could be deadly. Hundreds of thousands also work in farming and agriculture—where they might work in the field or sorting produce—as well as food production, in jobs like machine operation and butchery. The agricultural sector is just one of several industries in recent years that has experienced a labor shortage, which the US Chamber of Commerce has classified a “crisis.” This ongoing shortage makes the Trump campaign’s proposal to force a mass exodus of people without legal status an inherently bad policy, said Liebman. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, button your seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken?’ Like, hello?” > “With fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly > difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.” The health and safety risks undocumented immigrants have undertaken to keep Americans fed—both in times of crises and during all other times—have been met with few legal and workplace protections. A bill to give undocumented essential workers a legal pathway to citizenship, introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, died in committee in 2023. Padilla told Grist he will continue working to “expand protections for these essential workers, including fighting for a legal pathway to citizenship.” “Agricultural workers endure long hours of physically demanding work, showing up through extreme weather and even a global pandemic to keep our country fed,” he added. “They deserve to live with dignity.”  If this workforce were to be unceremoniously deported, without regard for their economic contributions to U.S. society or consideration of whether they actually pose a threat to their communities, it would be disastrous, according to Padilla.  “Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations as a part of Project 2025 are not only cruel but would also decimate our nation’s food supply and economy,” said Padilla, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a Trump presidency. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) US farmers, who rely on many forms of migrant labor (including undocumented workers and H-2A temporary visa holders), have said that a crackdown on undocumented immigrants would essentially bring business to a grinding halt. In response to federal and state proposals to require employers to verify the legal status of their workers, the American Farm Bureau Federation has said, “Enforcement-only immigration reform would cripple agricultural production in America.” The Farm Bureau, an advocacy group for farmers, declined to comment on Trump’s mass deportation proposal, but a questionnaire the group gave to both presidential candidates states, “Farm work is challenging, often seasonal and transitory, and with fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s increasingly difficult to find American workers attracted to these kinds of jobs.” Small farmers agree. A first generation Mexican-American immigrant who works in Illinois as an urban farmer, David Toledo says that the consequences of mass deportation for the country’s food system would be hard to imagine, especially since he believes that “many Americans don’t want to take the jobs” that many undocumented workers currently fill for very low pay. “We need people who want to work in fields and in farmlands. [Farmworkers] are waking up way before the sun because of rising temperatures, and living in horrible conditions,” said Toledo. He added that the US should remember “that we are a welcoming community and society. We have to be, because we are going to see a lot more people shifting [here] from countries all over the world because of climate change.”  Stephen Miller, the advisor who shaped Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, has touted mass deportations as a labor market intervention that will boost wages for American-born workers. But analysts point out that previous programs aimed at restricting the flow of immigrant workers have failed to raise wages for native-born citizens. For example, when the US in 1965 ended the Bracero Program, which allowed half a million Mexican-American seasonal workers to labor in the US, wages for domestic farmworkers did not increase, according to analysis from the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Additionally, a recent analysis found that a Bush- and Obama-era deportation program known as Secure Communities—which removed nearly half a million undocumented immigrants from the US—resulted in both fewer jobs and lower wages from domestic workers. One reason is that when undocumented immigrants were deported, many middle managers who worked with them also lost their jobs. Immigrants apprehended on farmland near the US-Mexico border by US Border Patrol agents.Mario Tama/Getty Images/Grist Such a shock to the agricultural labor force could result in higher food prices, too. If farmers lose a large portion of their workforce due to mass deportation, they may not have enough people to harvest, grade, and sort crops before they spoil. That sort of reduction in the supply of food could drive up prices at the grocery store.  Many experts note that even attempting to deport millions of immigrants would disrupt the nation’s economy as a whole. “It will not benefit our economy to lose millions of workers,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “There is no economic rationale for it.” For instance, mass deportation would deprive governments of essential tax revenue. A report from the American Immigration Council found that a majority of undocumented immigrants—or three-fourths—participated in the workforce in 2022. This tracks with other analysts’ understandings of the undocumented workforce. “Undocumented immigrants, when they get to the United States of America, they have an intention to work, to make money and contribute not only to their families, but also to the federal, state, and local government,” said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A recent report co-authored by Guzman found that undocumented immigrants paid a whopping $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Moreover, advocacy groups worry about the impact mass deportation would have on families. “What does this look like on the ground?” said Liebman, who wondered who would be tasked with enforcing mass deportation, and whether it would require local law enforcement agencies to carry out raids in their own neighborhoods and communities. She noted that the bulk of migrant families across the country are “mixed status”—meaning that some members of a household have documentation while others don’t. “Are we going to go into people’s houses and rip families apart?”   > “My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement > [mass deportations] a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution.” Immigration is the purview of the federal government, and for decades, elected leaders across the political spectrum have failed to pass policies to fix America’s strained immigration system. “It has been very hard to find solutions on immigration reform,” said Gandhi. “And we do have bipartisan solutions on the table. But we just have not been able to get them through.” In the absence of other policy solutions—such as addressing the root causes of migration to the US from other countries, including climate change—all-or-nothing imperatives to “close the border” have become popular among conservatives. In fact, a Scripps News/Ipsos poll released last month found that a majority of American voters surveyed support mass deporting immigrants without legal status.  Experts have debated the feasibility of Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations—pointing out that deportations during Trump’s first term were lower than under his predecessor, Barack Obama. (The Biden administration has also enacted considerably more enforcement actions against immigrants than were carried out during the Trump administration.) Although the specific details on how the proposal would be carried out and enforced have yet to be clarified by Trump’s campaign, Paul Chavez, litigation program director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit law firm, is highly skeptical about the likelihood of such a move holding up in federal court.  “I can’t imagine any sort of mass deportation program that doesn’t result in racial profiling of both immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants,” said Chavez. Any form of racial profiling that came out of such an enforcement process would be in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which effectively prohibits a state from adopting policies that target any person in its jurisdiction based on race, color, or national origin. A mass deportation operation would lead to people being profiled across the country and treated in “a discriminatory fashion based on national origin,” said Chavez—triggering all sorts of lawsuits.  “My sense is that it would be impractical and then impossible to implement in a way that doesn’t inevitably violate the Constitution,” said Chavez.  But whether or not courts upheld mass deportation, the threat of raids would send a strong message to workers, according to Antonio De Loera-Brust, an organizer with United Farm Workers, a labor union for farmworkers that represents laborers regardless of their immigration status. He posited that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is purposefully designed to have a chilling effect on US residents without legal status. “The point is not to remove millions, it’s to scare them,” said De Loera-Brust.

For six days, a man we’ll call Martín walked across a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and southern Arizona with a guide and six other migrants. It was February 2023, and the nights were frighteningly cold. One morning, he awoke to the desert painted white—the first time he had seen snow. They walked and walked. It snowed again, and they kept walking—until Martín couldn’t walk anymore. Three months earlier, the 23-year-old had left his home in Guatemala’s western highlands. A father of three, Martín (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) had never finished elementary school, and good jobs were hard to come by. So he did what so many others from his region have done: He headed north, hoping to cross the border undetected and find better opportunities in the United States. Martín’s journey ended on a hillside in the Baboquivari Mountains, 26 miles north of the US-Mexico border. When he began suffering chest pains and stopped to rest, the group continued without him, leaving him with a gallon of water and no food. High on the mountain, his cellphone had enough service to call 911. He kept calling—11 times in total over the ensuing three days. But help never came from official channels—not from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which has a team of search and rescue deputies, or the US Border Patrol, which has specialized search and rescue-trained agents. Instead, upward of 14 volunteers initiated a chaotic three-day mission to rescue Martín. In their multiple attempts to reach him through locked gates and terrain too punishing to navigate, one question kept surfacing: Why had the agencies tasked with rescue work along the world’s deadliest migration route failed to act? Why had they left this man to potentially die on a mountain?   Martín’s case is just one example of how the search and rescue system in the borderlands often fails migrants caught up in the US’ decadeslong efforts to deter unauthorized migration. It is symptomatic of a scattershot emergency response system with little accountability, in which responsibility for saving migrants’ lives is divided among Border Patrol agents whose primary duty is law enforcement, not search and rescue; overtaxed county search and rescue teams; and unpaid volunteers from humanitarian groups who take it upon themselves to come to migrants’ aid when no one else will. The result is a system in which stranded migrants like Martín can fall through the cracks—sometimes with deadly consequences. Migrants crossing the Southwest border have faced particularly perilous conditions since the 1990s, when the Border Patrol began implementing an immigration enforcement strategy known as “prevention through deterrence,” which closed off popular crossing points near urban ports of entry, pushing migrants into more remote parts of the Sonoran Desert. In theory, the harsh natural environment of the desert was supposed to discourage unauthorized migration. But instead of deterring migrants, these policies only made the journey more dangerous—a reality that even the Border Patrol could not ignore. From the mid-1990s, when the prevention through deterrence policies were implemented, to 2005, the number of migrant deaths approximately doubled, with the majority of the increase occurring in the Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona, sector, which includes a large swath of the Sonoran Desert. The federal government created a search and rescue training program called BORSTAR in 1998. Since then, the Border Patrol has conducted thousands of rescues along the Southwest border: In 2022, agents rescued 22,075 people, up from 12,857 in 2021 and 5,336 in 2020. That increase partly reflects overall trends in migration—border crossings surged after 2020 in large part due to Title 42, a Trump administration policy that immediately expelled migrants seeking asylum at the border, prompting more repeat crossings. It also reflects improved search and rescue infrastructure in the borderlands: Cellphone coverage has expanded in some remote parts of the Sonoran Desert, and the Department of Homeland Security has invested more money into resources like rescue beacons and placards instructing migrants to call 911 if they are in trouble. Despite these investments, migrant deaths have remained high. The Border Patrol recorded 895 deaths along the Southwest border in 2022, compared with 568 in 2021 and 254 in 2020. Given that the Border Patrol has long struggled to collect complete data on migrant deaths, those numbers are likely a significant undercount. Martín’s call for help came from a remote corner of Pima County, which sees the majority of migration-related distress calls in the Sonoran Desert, averaging four to five per day. Throughout the US, county sheriff’s offices are typically responsible for providing search and rescue services for anyone in their jurisdiction, a norm codified under Arizona state law. But unlike neighboring Cochise and Yuma counties, which respond directly to migrants calling in distress, dispatchers at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department refer all calls they suspect are migration-related to the Border Patrol—a practice that critics allege is discriminatory and results in an often-substandard emergency response. Pima County has significant resources at its disposal to respond to those calls, including seven dedicated search and rescue deputies, the volunteer-run Southern Arizona Rescue Association, helicopters, infrared cameras, drones, and a trained canine team. But according to Deputy Adam Schoonover, a public information officer for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the Border Patrol can respond faster to lost or injured migrants in remote parts of the borderlands. “It’s all about getting the person help as quickly as possible and that has many variables to it,” he said in an email, noting that the department’s search and rescue deputies often are out on a call and may be unavailable. “BORSTAR units can respond faster and are well equipped to handle calls for service in the border area.” The data, however, often suggests otherwise. A recent investigation by Tanvi Misra for High Country News and Type Investigations found that of the 3,000 emergency calls handled by the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector in 2022, 38 were categorized as medical emergencies, but only six appeared to have triggered a search and rescue operation. Another 299 callers routed to the Border Patrol were never found. In the absence of a reliable emergency response from local law enforcement and the Border Patrol, an informal network of volunteers with local nonprofits has for years been navigating the difficult and dangerous work of conducting search and rescue operations themselves.    The call came at 1 p.m. to the hotline run by an Arizona humanitarian aid group: A man’s brother was stranded somewhere on the US side of the border and needed help. It was Martín’s brother calling. After Martín had called 911 and no one had come for him, he tried his brother, who lives in the US and knew about the hotline. The hotline dispatcher called the Border Patrol, as is the group’s protocol, and relayed the information about Martín, including his location. Hours later, the hotline dispatcher received another call from Martín’s brother. Martín was still out there, his brother said. “Didn’t you call Border Patrol? What’s going on?” The dispatcher passed the case to the Frontera Aid Collective (FAC), another group that conducts search and rescue missions and water drops along the border. Taylor Leigh and Scott Eichling, two FAC volunteers, decided to mobilize immediately to try to rescue Martín. It was 9 p.m., and as Leigh got ready, she called the Border Patrol, “freaking out,” she said. Temperatures were already below freezing, and Martín had been out there for a night and a day. As Leigh and Eichling loaded supplies into the FAC vehicle, Leigh was transferred five times to different Border Patrol stations. She finally reached an agent, who she said told her that the Border Patrol couldn’t do anything about Martín. Eichling called back and got the same response from that agent. He called again and said another dispatcher laughed at him. Although the Border Patrol often touts the existence of BORSTAR and a more recent initiative called the Missing Migrant Program as proof of its commitment to providing search and rescue services, the reality is more nuanced. The agency’s Missing Migrant Program, which began in 2017, was responsible for installing the thousands of 911 signs and more than 170 emergency beacons along the border to facilitate rescues, but many migrants in distress are reluctant to use them until the situation is dire, knowing that contacting the Border Patrol will lead to arrest and deportation. Not only that, neither BORSTAR nor the Missing Migrant Program are independent entities with dedicated personnel to help migrants in distress. Rather, the Missing Migrant Program is a set of protocols governing how the agency responds to 911 calls from migrants and families inquiring about loved ones who have gone missing while trying to cross the border. For instance, agents first check whether the missing person is in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, before instructing a family to call their consulate for more information (as agents are typically barred from providing direct information on specific cases to civilians). Similarly, BORSTAR is not the equivalent of a dedicated search and rescue team, ready to mobilize for any emergency call. Rather, it is a relatively tiny initiative, employing roughly 300 agents spread out among the nine Border Patrol sectors along the Southwest border. Essentially, BORSTAR agents are regular Border Patrol agents with specialized training: They attend a five-week BORSTAR Academy, where they learn various search and rescue skills and become certified emergency medical technicians. Despite that training, they actually spend most of their time out in the field performing regular enforcement duties. Calls from or about lost or injured migrants forwarded to the Border Patrol by 911 dispatchers or humanitarian groups are first categorized and assessed for their urgency, then forwarded to the local Border Patrol station with details like GPS coordinates or a last known location. Rescues—which the Border Patrol also conducts for lost or injured US citizens—are handled by individual stations and often are collaborative endeavors among BORSTAR agents, regular Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Operations, another branch of Customs and Border Protection that deploys the helicopters and small planes patrolling the Southwest border, which can also be used for search and rescue. Occasionally, the Border Patrol will also ask local officials for assistance. > “Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling > a million people, you’re kind of screwed.” According to Steven Davis, a former volunteer with Pima County’s Southern Arizona Rescue Association who now volunteers with the humanitarian group the Tucson Samaritans, the Border Patrol does, in theory, have more search and rescue resources than Pima County, particularly in the remote regions of the border where people tend to run into trouble. The problem, he said, is their response is hampered by a lack of personnel to conduct large ground searches. And the Border Patrol is seen primarily as a law enforcement organization. “People often won’t call until it’s too late,” he added. Leigh echoed Davis’ observations. “Border Patrol is supposed to send out BORSTAR—or just whatever agents are in the field—to go help somebody,” she said. “But it seems like that doesn’t really happen very often or effectively. Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling a million people, you’re kind of screwed.” I asked Robert Daniels, a public affairs specialist for the Border Patrol, how the agency decides whether to respond to someone in distress. He denied that the Border Patrol ever declines to initiate a rescue. “We don’t do that,” he said, emphasizing that no one deserves to die crossing the desert. “We don’t tell somebody that they’re too far away, that we can’t get to them. If we can’t get to them on the ground, then we’re going to fly.” When Daniels did not respond to further calls and questions about Martín’s case, I reached out to another public affairs specialist, who spoke to me on background, reiterating that the Border Patrol will always respond to a call for help but that the agency does triage calls. If the person isn’t injured, has food and water, and is in no immediate danger from weather conditions, the Border Patrol might wait to initiate a rescue. “You’re not going to send agents up a mountain overnight in order to get somebody, or fly an aircraft into the mountains to get somebody, when they’re perfectly content and capable of being walked down the next morning,” the specialist said.                        That night, Leigh and Eichling drove south on State Route 286, a lonely two-lane highway that leads to the border. As the darkened mass of the Baboquivaris blotted out the skyline ahead, the magnitude of what they’d set out to do began to set in. Leigh and Eichling turned down a ranch road, but they kept running into locked gates, blocking their way forward. It was past midnight and they were alone on private property, so they decided to turn back. Another rescue effort that night mounted by members of the Phoenix-based Abolitionists aid group, along with another FAC duo, also proved unsuccessful. Martín would spend his second night out in the cold. In the morning, Leigh and Eichling set out again with two other FAC members, having finally identified a better route up the mountain where Martín lay. They reached a locked gate. A tense discussion ensued; one volunteer was nervous about trespassing and risking arrest. Kyle Richardson, another FAC member, was adamant they continue. “We’re not going to let this abstract law get in the way of saving him,” Richardson said. The group dismantled part of the gate to get through. Soon, the road grew so rough that they had to abandon their vehicle and walk down the private ranch road. Past a creepy-looking abandoned cabin, they finally came to a cattle tank at the base of the canyon that led up to Martín. There, they saw a Border Patrol agent sitting in his truck. Leigh explained what they were doing, and the agent pointed to the mountain in front of them. Martín, he said, was “just on the other side.” “Why aren’t you going up to him?” Leigh asked. The agent told her that his orders were to stay put. According to the Border Patrol public affairs specialist I spoke with, Border Patrol dispatchers initially had trouble locating Martín, and it was dark by the time they were able to establish contact. “We determined that he was stable and didn’t need immediate evacuation,” the specialist said, before acknowledging that humanitarian aid groups and Martín’s family might not have agreed. The group headed up the canyon. Between them and Martín lay 4 to 5 miles of dense brush and boulders. The terrain was so steep that at times they had to climb on their hands and knees. A helicopter whirred in the distance and they saw it approach, assuming it had come to rescue Martín. Instead, it hovered near the top of the mountain where they were aiming for 20 seconds and then flew away. After five or six hours, they reached a grassy saddle between two peaks. They crawled under a barbed-wire fence and walked along the trail, calling Martín’s name. Finally, they heard him. A faint yell in the distance, and then again. When they reached him, he was lying in the middle of a bare grassy hillside, extremely dehydrated and in the early stages of shock. Richardson was struck by how visible he was—his black faux leather jacket and personal belongings scattered around him stuck out vibrantly against the light green backdrop. The mood was somber as they slowly made their way back down the steep canyon, Eichling piggybacking Martín when he grew too weak to walk. Martín and his family had scraped together the equivalent of about $16,000 to pay for the journey in the hope that he would make it to the US and find work. Instead, once they reached the Border Patrol agent at the bottom of the mountain, he would be deported. In the year and a half since Martín’s rescue, volunteers in southern Arizona and along other parts of the border have continued to mount search and rescue operations for migrants, some of whom had called 911 and been transferred to the Border Patrol multiple times, but received no response. There was the woman who called for help deep in the Ironwood Forest National Monument, 25 miles northwest of Tucson. To try to find her, FAC volunteers drove on some of the worst roads they had seen in the middle of the night, far from cell service. She had moved, so they never found her, but two days later, workers on a ranch did. She was nearly dead, but they brought her to a hospital and she survived. And a few weeks after FAC rescued Martín, a 23-year-old woman, also from Guatemala, called for help from the Baboquivari Mountains. Like Martín, her family had called 911 with her exact coordinates more than 60 times, but according to Leigh, every time, the dispatcher would say, “Not Spanish,” and hang up. Frantic, the woman’s family called the hotline for help. When volunteers located the woman, she had already died. It’s difficult to know how many cases like these never received a response. A report from another humanitarian group, No More Deaths, audited 911 calls in Pima County from June 2022 and found that of 64 emergency cases received by the county and transferred to the Border Patrol during that month, there were 17 in which the distressed person was never located. In at least 10 of those cases, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department took no further action upon learning that the Border Patrol had not found the 911 caller.  > “They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border. In reality, > they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum > applications processed.” The Border Patrol does not disclose how many emergency calls it receives or fails to act on, or the outcome of its search and rescue efforts. This lack of transparency and accountability in efforts to reduce migrant deaths has been well-documented for decades. In 2006, the federal government’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report that found that the Border Patrol’s efforts to reduce migrant deaths could not be fully evaluated due to insufficient data. The report also pointed out that the Border Patrol’s primary role as an enforcement agency often occurred simultaneously with its search and rescue activities, making it difficult to assess their efficacy. More recent GAO reports on the Missing Migrant Program have found that its recordkeeping on migrant deaths has long been incomplete and that Customs and Border Protection has not been transparent about disclosing those data limitations to Congress, though its data collection efforts have improved in recent years.   Reece Jones, a political geographer at the University of Hawaii who has written extensively about the Border Patrol, attributes the agency’s unreliable response to migrants in distress to a disconnect between its mission and the actual needs it encounters at the border. “They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border,” he said. “In reality, they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum applications processed.” In the years since 9/11, when the agency’s mission was reframed around terrorism, the Border Patrol has grown increasingly militarized, Jones said. That militarization has only exacerbated the conflict of interest between enforcing border policies and reducing the death toll created by those same policies. “The Border Patrol hired Rambo when they needed Mother Teresa,” Jones said, paraphrasing journalist Garrett Graff. “That’s essentially the problem that’s happened over the last 20 years.” When I last spoke to Martín, he was back in his hometown, struggling to find a job. What he wants most, he told me, is the opportunity to buy a house and give his children a better future. After what happened to him, Martín has no immediate plans to cross the border again. But he has entertained other possibilities. He had heard that adults who arrive at the US-Mexico Border with their children to seek asylum, handing themselves over to the Border Patrol directly, faced an easier pathway into the United States. “Maybe it will be better with one of my children,” he told me. “Maybe I would do it.” Last November, I drove with members of FAC along a section of the border wall near Sasabe, a town straddling the border. Hundreds of migrants—many of them young children—had been arriving there, climbing through holes in the wall or walking across the border where the wall ends. They would wait for hours and sometimes days for Border Patrol agents to pick them up so they could claim asylum, a legal right under US and international law. That day, we came across two groups of 100 people or more, waiting in the shade of the wall. Twenty-five-year-old Sharon Mishell Valderramos had traveled 20 days with her son, Esquin, a smiley 6-year-old wearing a tie-dye baseball cap. “The government doesn’t protect us,” she said, when I asked her why she had left. All she wanted was to work and for Esquin to get an education. A few miles west of Sasabe, the border wall ends in a canyon known colloquially as Smuggler’s Canyon. No fence exists there, just trails crisscrossing an invisible line in the scrubby desert, where a child’s jacket hung from a bush next to the trail. I thought of how Martín had left open the possibility of another journey north, this time with his children, and what might happen if they needed help.

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said. Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts. One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.” Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?” > Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about > undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to > frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have > come on immigration. Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”) But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border. “A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said. Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration. In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation. But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s catastrophic plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries. Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.) It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.” But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.” It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.” If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker‘s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.