Latest on immigration enforcement in El Paso
Diego Mendoza-Moyers: Just over six months after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, his administration has ushered in a new regime of immigration enforcement in El Paso and throughout the United States.
Government agents are arresting more undocumented immigrants, and there’s been a huge decrease in the number of people attempting to enter through the southern border with Mexico.
In the El Paso region, Border Patrol agents in May encountered around 65 people per day trying to enter the U.S. At the same time last year, the number of daily encounters topped 750. So, the administration is making at least some progress securing the “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexico border that federal officials have said they’re seeking to achieve.
People living and working in the U.S. for decades are now being targeted by the administration for deportation. And the imagery of masked, plainclothes federal agents taking people from workplaces and court hearings and placing them into an opaque system of detention centers has become common in recent months.
And here on the border, it’s more than just a distant story. Military personnel are ever-present along the border. And students who cross over from Ciudad Juárez to attend school in El Paso are unsure if the U.S. state department will lift a pause on student visa applications. That’s disrupted enrollment at schools such as the Lydia Patterson Institute.
Other locals are protesting the construction of new border fencing that’s likely to be built along the iconic Mount Cristo Rey, a move government officials say is necessary to close an open gap in the border wall that Mexican smugglers exploit.
And tent facilities in El Paso that were once used to temporarily house asylum-seeking migrants are now being repurposed as detention centers for migrants before they’re deported.
To talk through all of this, I’ll speak with El Paso Matters CEO Bob Moore and Editor Cindy Ramirez in just a minute about their reporting on recent immigration-related issues in El Paso and what they think we should expect going forward. You can read their coverage at elpasomatters.org, and you can also sign up for our free newsletter to get updates about immigration and a lot of other El Paso topics. And feel free to rate and review this podcast on whatever platform you listen on.
And lastly, this El Paso Matters Podcast episode is sponsored by Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro: truck crash and injury attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.
Bob, Cindy, thanks for joining me.
Bob: Thanks for having us.
Diego: So, there are a lot of immigration-related things that I want to touch on with you both, but I wanted to start here. You both reported in mid-June for El Paso Matters about how dozens of women were quietly transferred from New Jersey to an ICE detention facility here in El Paso. And you highlighted one woman’s story in particular. She’s from Ecuador, but has lived in the U.S. for over 20 years with authorization to work here. She married a U.S. citizen last year, and her three children and relatives are all citizens. But, she was still picked up and detained by ICE last month. And, so, I’m curious if you can elaborate on her case and talk about your reporting and what it tells you about the kinds of people that ICE is now targeting for removal.
Bob: Yeah. So, this really is illustrative, I think, of who the Trump administration is going after, which are often, like, the easiest targets to get, and no serious criminal history with this woman.
She did face an arrest that grew out of, kind of, a domestic issue where both she and her ex-boyfriend had restraining orders against each other. They wound up at the same restaurant after a court hearing, the ex-boyfriend called the cops. The cops reviewed the video and she arrived second. So, they charged her with violating the mutual restraining orders they had against each other.
That charge was very quickly dropped and was referred back to a matter for the domestic courts. But ICE had been made aware of the arrest. The woman’s family thinks it was the former boyfriend who made them aware. So, she was arrested and then, before she could be released, she was taken into custody by ICE. This all took place in New Jersey. The families asked that we not use her name to protect her privacy.
She was initially detained at a rather infamous facility that opened recently in Newark, New Jersey, called Delaney Hall. This is one of the sites that’s been visited by members of Congress and had some scuffles break out there. In June, there was kind of a disturbance or uprising, depending on who you talked to, that led to four people escaping from the facility.
The day after, media could see a bunch of vans leaving the facility, but ICE would never talk about who was removed or where they were going. And we learned through the detainee’s family after she was moved to El Paso where she had gone. And they reached out to us because they wanted people to know about what had happened.
And, so, this woman and it looks like several dozen others were taken to a facility in far Northeast El Paso, right by the New Mexico state line, where, in 2023, Customs and Border Protection set up what they euphemistically call a soft-sided facility. Some people refer to them as tents. I think Homeland Security rejects that description, but it’s fairly accurate. And the Trump administration changed that from what had been a temporary processing facility for migrants shortly after they surrendered to Border Patrol into a detention facility used by ICE.
And, so, we know that this woman and some others from the facility in New Jersey were brought there in mid-June. I know that – this woman’s sister told me – she has since been moved to the Otero County center, which is a privately-run ICE detention facility, where she’s awaiting some court processes that she’s going through. But, we did discover – Cindy and I – in the reporting we’ve done that the number of people being detained at that soft-sided facility in Northeast El Paso just shot up dramatically in June. And this incident in New Jersey was apparently one factor that helped that, and Cindy could talk a little bit more about some of the numbers we saw.
Diego: Do you want to add anything, Cindy?
Cindy: Yes. So, that particular facility has a capacity of about 1,000, and in late June they had more than 900 people in there. So, they were getting very close to that capacity. It serves as both a decompression site to relieve overcrowding in other areas, which is where that transfer happened that Bob talked about. It’s also a staging area for deportation. So, that’s kind of where they set up people ready to board a flight to be deported.
Bob: And it’s worth noting that earlier in June, the daily population count there was about 75. So, between early June and the middle of the month, it had shot up more than tenfold.
Diego: Yeah. And, so, we know this federal tax bill that’s being negotiated by Congress, right, that’s going to include some additional funding for ICE and more dollars for enforcement, and, I think, to establish or to sort of bolster some of these facilities for detention. But I’m just curious if you can talk about maybe what we could see as a result of this tax bill and increased funding for ICE?
Bob: I think one thing worth noting before we talk about the potential impacts is Vice President (J.D.) Vance put out a tweet the other day that basically said the ICE funding and the border funding is the main reason to pass what the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress call the “one big beautiful bill.”
As we’re talking about this, the House and Senate have passed different versions of the bill, and it’s unclear where it’s going to go from here. But the Republicans have their differences on some of the spending issues and some of the taxation issues in the bill. The one thing Republicans largely agree on is the huge increase in funding to border enforcement. And, from the standpoint of ICE, this will rapidly expand ICE’s ability to detain people and then to deport them.
Cindy: I think if you’re looking at the numbers, it’s about $75 billion in supplemental funding for ICE, and, of that, $45 billion is for detention. And I think the goal is to have about 100,000 people in detention at any given time.
Bob: It’s worth reminding people that ICE is building a facility at Fort Bliss right now that would hold another 3,500 people. That’s separate from the extra spending we’re talking about now. That’s money already in the pipeline.
Diego: So, we could really just see an expansion of people being detained nationwide, right? And we kind of chatted about this, Bob, but it’s going to be – you were saying that the focus is now shifting from the border to facilities and businesses in the interior of the country, right?
Bob: Yeah. So, throughout the Trump presidency, the first time around, when Trump talked about immigration, it was almost de facto talking about the border and migrants crossing the border. That conversation has changed dramatically in his second term, as the number of border crossers has dropped dramatically because of actions taken both by President Biden and President Trump. And, now, President Trump is focusing more on these workplace raids, the arrests of other people who are kind of easy to get to as they meet this kind of self-imposed goal that it’s been reported that Stephen Miller, his main immigration advisor, set of arresting 3,000 people per week on immigration violation charges.
Diego: And beyond businesses and workplaces, we’ve seen the enforcement at courthouses as well. And Cindy, you were there and kind of witnessing some of these people showing up for their court hearings, right, and being detained. I’m curious if you can talk about your experience reporting and just kind of what you saw and how that played out?
Cindy: Right. Well, there’s several takeaways from that. I think one of the things is that a lot of people, it may have changed now, but weeks back, I think a lot of people who were showing up to these were not quite aware that these arrests following their immigration hearings were happening.
And, so, some of them at some point kind of started arriving with some hope that a judge would hear their case on a case-by-case basis and hear them out and then make a decision based on that discussion. As time went by, I think that hope started diminishing more and more as people started becoming more aware that these arrests were happening outside of the courthouse.
So, as long as people had a pending case in immigration court, they were generally authorized to be in the country. Many of them also had authorization to work here and had been. But, if a judge dismisses their case, then their case is no longer active and therefore could be put on fast-track deportation. And, so, that’s kind of what we saw happening.
These people who had appointments or had court dates would show up. The immigration judges, who work for the Department of Justice, would then, basically, out of a script, say “I agree with the government and that your case should be dismissed.” And then the cases were being dismissed. In some instances, the people still weren’t quite aware of what was happening. They were very – there was a lot of confusion in that courtroom. A lot of tears and, I think, a lot of concern about what was going to happen to them.
So then once they stepped out of the courtroom, just a few steps from there were federal agents, most of them ICE agents, but also, we believe, others who were then detaining them, taking them out from a back door at the federal building and being put into vans and driven away.
Diego: And you mentioned at the time most of the ICE agents were not wearing masks, but that changed over time, right?
Cindy: When we first started reporting on this and in part through Corrie Boudreaux, our freelance photographer, is one of the first to be out there and report on this. A lot of the agents were not wearing masks at that time. I think, as they started getting more publicity, at least here in El Paso, and having more people, whether it was media or just people who were watching this happen, they started getting or wearing their masks more and more. But, I think that the masks is something that we’ve seen across the country.
Diego: Yeah. And Bob, curious if you had any thoughts or any takeaways on that enforcement strategy of just targeting migrants at the courthouses?
Bob: So, it’s part of an overall picture where, as the pressure has mounted on ICE to rack up numbers, they’re going after the low-hanging fruit. People with court dates are super easy to get at. And, as long as they meet the guidelines for what’s known as expedited removal, which generally means they’ve been in the country for less than two years, the government knows where they’re going to be. They’re going to be at a courtroom on a specific date because they are keeping their promise to show up to court. Makes them very easy to get at.
It’s worth noting here that one of the talking points that you’ve heard repeatedly over the years is that people don’t show up for their immigration court hearings. They show up, and the government knows that. And, so, that’s why they’re very easy to get at. And increasingly, despite the rhetoric out of the Trump administration that they’re only going after hardened criminals, the data that a lot of the national media put out there is really clear that the overwhelming majority of people being arrested now have no criminal history at all, and only a very small minority have any sort of violent criminal.
Diego: Yeah. And I want to ask you both about your thoughts on the increased militarization and, sort of, the role the military is now playing in immigration enforcement.
But I’ll just mention I’ve done some reporting on the National Defense Areas that the Trump administration set up along the border of New Mexico. And then along a big stretch of West Texas from the border of New Mexico to, I believe, Fort Hancock. But there’s kind of this intentional lack of clarity over what are the boundaries of this military zone. And the thinking is that we can bring in the military to sort of conduct enforcement operations and temporarily detain people until Border Patrol shows up. And it seems to be one way to get around this, this sort of historical tradition in the US of not having the military be part of domestic law enforcement.
But, like I said, I mean, when we’ve had press conferences with military officials and we asked them, “Well, where is this military zone? And you’re not confused whether you’re on Fort Bliss or not, right? There are signs and big fences and so forth. But these military zones don’t really have the same thing. And we’ve seen the cases involving migrants who have trespassed in these recently-established military zones get tossed out because judges found the migrants weren’t aware that they were trespassing on these military zones.
And, so, that’s something that stood out to me, is this real lack of clarity over – and I think it’s an intentional thing to just sort of create this general fear of crossing and you’re going to get an additional charge. But, nobody knows really where it is, and to what extent U.S. citizens are at risk of getting arrested for trespassing. And also, the size is varied. I mean, there are points where these National Defense Areas go miles north of the border, but you don’t know where.
But so, in addition to that, we’ve seen these Stryker vehicles and these military tactical vehicles come in. And, so, I’m just curious if you all have any general thoughts on the increased role of the military and border and immigration enforcement recently?
Bob: So, this is kind of a typical Trump policy process, in that you declare this sweeping policy and then you make up the rules as you kind of go along. I sat in the courtroom for some of these first hearings to address this, and it was almost embarrassing for the Border Patrol agents who had to testify under very simple questions like, “Where was the nearest warning sign to where this person was apprehended? And the Border Patrol agent would have to testify “I don’t know. I’ve never actually been in that area.”
And, so, they were, in some cases, victims of this rapid policy process. That’s an easy thing to fix. And I’m sure in filling out the reports the Border Patrol agents are now documenting where these signs are. So, this process will become more enforceable as time goes along. But the real question remains: to what end? And, so, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Western District of Texas once a week puts out a press release that says a migrant pleaded guilty to entering this National Defense Area. And then it’ll note in there the judge sentenced the person to time served.
All of these people would have pleaded guilty to just the misdemeanor illegal entry charge and been sentenced to time served and would have been deported rather rapidly after that. What this process is doing is keeping people in jail for several weeks for, at best, the same outcome. So, it’s not really clear what lawful process is being served here. But, as you said, the main point behind this is to get around the Posse Comitatus Act, which is the law that basically says the military – except for very extreme circumstances – can’t get involved in civilian law enforcement.
And, so, they basically turn what previously had been a civilian area into a military zone, and that allows the military to operate there and, in theory, to make arrests. We have not, by the way, gotten any indication that the military is actively involved in arresting and detaining people. They are providing intelligence. They are providing this big deterrent force that is just one more thing that’s forcing people who are deciding to cross, which is at a much lower number than it was a year ago, forcing them to make much more dangerous crossings around these areas.
Diego: Yeah. And, Cindy, I’m just curious, in your experience covering the border, is this military involvement different or bigger than you’ve seen in the past?
Cindy: I think another point to remember is that we had seen some of this happen before the federal government got involved with the state government, with Governor Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. So, we had already seen the barbed wire going up, all these other kinds of barriers, the state National Guard (deployed). And they’re generally out by the river with their presence there.
So, to some extent, militarization of the border kind of started with the state. I think this adds to that. I think it also added to the confusion as to what roles people are playing? And, to Bob’s point, we still don’t have a clear understanding of what everybody does. And, so, when you’re talking now about the additional possible charges of crossing into this military land, so, now you just have another layer of law enforcement that’s creating more confusion out there for everybody from the time that people reach the river to the time that they are in court.
Diego: Yeah. And I think we’re seeing the potential of a new border wall being constructed on Mount Cristo Rey as well, just kind of below the mountain of this almost 30-foot-tall statue of Christ. And, so, we’ll see potentially more enforcement and actions there as well.
Just last question here. I’m wondering if you all can share any thoughts on maybe where we’re headed, right? And do you expect this enforcement to just continue indefinitely for the next few years under the Trump administration? And curious if you can share any thoughts on maybe the outcome or impact of this enforcement?
Bob: So, I think first of all, one thing we have not recognized that we should is that Trump won the election in 2024 largely on this issue. People were clearly frustrated with the lack of border enforcement. And, I think, the sense of the lack of control that was out there. So, Trump would argue, with some justification, that he is merely doing what he was elected to do.
The details matter, and a lot of people will say, “Oh, this isn’t what I was voting for. I mean, I wanted criminals removed and I wanted the border tightened up. I didn’t want a woman feeding her family by cleaning a hotel arrested.”
So, those details become trickier and trickier. The one thing that we know for sure is that President Trump believes that immigration is a winning issue for him. And the more he can talk about immigration, he believes, the better it is for him and maybe keeps the public attention away from pesky little things like cutting Medicaid and other issues that he perhaps doesn’t see as a clear win for him. So, I think as long as Donald Trump is president, immigration will remain a big issue and Trump will try to keep it in the forefront.
What we’re seeing now, obviously, is this issue playing out in Los Angeles and other major cities with these workplace raids, and then the reaction to it. President Trump also likes the reaction. He sees that as a win, too, when people protest his actions. I think we will begin to hear more and more stories here in El Paso of people being taken into ICE custody after living in this community for many years. So, these will remain very painful conversations that I think will require a really strong media presence to help tell these stories. And I’m really glad we have Cindy here to help keep an eye on that. Glad we have you here to help keep an eye on that. But it is one of those issues that can become all-consuming very quickly.
Diego: Any thoughts, Cindy, on what we expect to see going forward?
Cindy: I think we are starting to see a lot of it now, too, that there’s going to be a big impact not just of families being torn apart, but this issue of safety and security.
I think a lot of us might be thinking twice about whether we go visit our relatives just across the border, for example, in Juárez. Or vice versa, if we have relatives who live in Juárez, do they want to have to deal with any of this or have some negative consequences happen just because they’re wanting to visit family? And I think that fear and that sense of loss of safety and security applies to both people who are documented or undocumented. And I think that that is part of the greater goal, right, is to create this. And I think I think it’s happening already.
Diego: Yeah, and that’s an important point for us living on the border, right? This isn’t some distant thing. And this is something – people cross the border daily. And, so, I think that interference with day-to-day life is an important aspect.
And then, I’ll also just mention the phrase you hear consistently from the agencies involved in immigration is to secure “operational control” of the border. And that’s what you’ve heard a lot from various federal agents in recent months. And I think the line that the Trump administration is taking is, “We want operational control of the border.” Whatever that looks like, right? And, so, to your point, Bob, I think that’s definitely going to be a goal.
But, I think – unless you all have any additional thoughts – I think we’ll go ahead and wrap up there. And we’ll just continue to look to you guys to keep us informed on what’s going on with this really complex and difficult topic.
Bob: I don’t think this is the last conversation we’re going to have about this issue.
Diego: Yeah. Well, thank you both for joining me. I appreciate it.Cindy: Thank you.
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