Americas Migration Brief - September 15, 2025
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Table of Contents
Integration and Development
🇲🇽 Mexico
IOM highlights the opportunity of migration for development in Mexico, noting, “The Employers’ Confederation of Mexico (COPARMEX) estimates that the country currently has about 1.6 million job vacancies. Labour shortages are particularly acute in manufacturing, wholesale trade, energy, agriculture, and livestock. Migrants and returnees bring valuable qualifications and experience that can help companies address these gaps through labour pathways or temporary regularization programmes.”
🇧🇷 Brazil
UNHCR and Islamic Relief USA have announced a new initiative to help integrate around 2,000 Afghan refugees in Brazil, alongside indirect benefits for around 10,000 Brazilians. The program’s activities include “Portuguese language instruction, legal assistance, job market counseling, promotion of formal employment opportunities, diploma revalidation, prevention of gender-based violence, and mental and psychosocial health support.” (press release)
🇨🇱 Chile
A new decree clarifies and expands access to higher education scholarships for migrants, now including those with temporary residence in Chile. (InfoMigra)
Migration offers an opportunity for economic development in Chile, write Centro de Políticas Migratorias’ Patricia Rojas and Diego Chaparro at El Mostrador. (see AMB 8/25/25 on a recent report from CPM and partners outlining more than 30 concrete recommendations for migration policy in Chile)
The first presidential debate in Chile included discussion on migration policy. Many candidates highlighted restrictionist concerns surrounding border enforcement and migrants’ access to services, and just two—including leading candidate Jeannette Jara—expressed support for a potential migrant regularization program. (Bloomberg, T13, La Tercera; see also AMB 8/25/25 on leading candidates Jara and José Antonio Kast)
Asylum, Protection, and Human Rights
🌎 Regional
TalCual highlights a new project by a group of journalists detailing the dangers faced by Venezuelan migrants traveling by sea to the islands of the Dutch Caribbean.
🇦🇷 Argentina
Argentina has published new regulations for the country’s refugee law. The changes include aims to speed up application processing times, ensure family unification, and clarify rights. (Economis, Ámbito)
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
The Costa Rican government administratively closed just over 55,000 asylum applications in recent months as part of their efforts to reduce backlogs (see last week’s AMB), asserting that such cases included those that had either left the country or otherwise rescinded their application due to transition to another migratory status (including temporary statuses). The country’s asylum application backlog remains over 170,000 cases long, primarily composed of Nicaraguan applicants. (Confidencial)
The Intercultural Association for Human Rights expressed concern “that many applications have been declared inadmissible, leaving applicants without the possibility of appealing. In these cases, the only option is to start the asylum process from scratch,” adds Confidencial.
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
“Under pressure to meet a weekly deportation quota of 10,000… Raids are increasing, and even people born in the Dominican Republic – with documents or not – are being rounded up and deported, flagrantly disregarding laws, according to human rights organisations,” reports The Guardian, highlighting Haitian displacement and abuses by Dominican authorities.
“Many Haitians are victims of a racket in which people are detained by corrupt officials whom family members must then pay to get their relatives freed… The government spells out the rules and rights around deportations but in practice, laws are broken and human rights are disregarded.”
🇺🇾 Uruguay
“Uruguay's Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin confirmed on Tuesday that his country was “seriously” and “very carefully” analyzing the possibility of accepting Palestinian refugees from Gaza. He emphasized that many people were “desperately” seeking to leave the region and contacted Uruguayan embassies for assistance,” reports MercoPress.
🇺🇸 United States
An ICE agent killed a Mexican immigrant during an operation in Chicago. Mexico condemned the incident and called for a full investigation. (EFE)
A federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can end the humanitarian parole protections granted to around 430,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. (AP)
A Strauss Center quarterly report finds that asylum pathways at the US-Mexico border are effectively closed, estimating that “approximately 6,600 individuals remain in Mexican border cities. These individuals are concentrated in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Ciudad Juárez, with these three cities hosting roughly 80 percent of the border’s estimated migrant population. We approximate this figure to be the lowest number of migrants in Mexican border cities since 2019.”
“A U.S. federal judge extended a block on a Trump administration attempt to deport Guatemalan unaccompanied children with active immigration cases, keeping the policy frozen until Tuesday to provide more time to consider the dispute,” reports Reuters. (see last week’s AMB)
WOLA’s Adam Isacson highlights stories related to the US-Mexico border and human rights at the Weekly Border Update, noting, “A September 8 Supreme Court “shadow docket” decision gave DHS a green light to resume carrying out sweeps and patrols targeting individuals based solely on “profiling” criteria like apparent race, ethnicity, language, location, or employment. The underlying lawsuit seeking to halt this practice continues, but six Supreme Court justices decided to allow profiling to proceed while the case moves through lower courts.”
“Justice Sotomayor, one of the three Justices who dissented, raised a clear alarm in her dissent. She warned that this decision risks turning Latinos into second class citizens. In her words: ‘We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,’” highlights American Immigration Council.
🇨🇦 Canada
Russian dissidents seeking asylum in the US fear deportation and are calling for Canada to intervene and provide protection. (The Globe and Mail)
Migratory Institutions and Regional and Bilateral Cooperation
🌎🇺🇸 United States and Regional
“U.S. President Donald Trump's administration plans to call for sharply narrowing the right to asylum at the United Nations later this month,” reports Reuters, explaining, “Under the proposed framework, asylum seekers would be required to claim protection in the first country they enter, not a nation of their choosing, the spokesperson said. Asylum would be temporary and the host country would decide whether conditions in their home country had improved enough to return, a major shift from how asylum works in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
“Ghana has become the latest “third country” deportation partner for the U.S. Yesterday it took in a “first batch” of 14 noncitizens, all West Africans, deported from the United States, reports the Washington Post.” (via Latin America Daily Briefing)
“Lawyers for five migrants deported to Ghana last week accused the Trump administration on Friday of ignoring court-ordered protections for their clients,” reports The New York Times.
Labor Migration
🇹🇨 Turks and Caicos
“In a landmark move, the Turks and Caicos Islands Government is introducing a transparent, point-based system for immigration decisions,” with a focus on locally-made decisions, reports Turks and Caicos Weekly News.
In addition to affecting decisions on who may migrate to the country, the new system will also apply to permanent residence and citizenship applications, notes Turks and Caicos Weekly News.
Migrants in Transit
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic’s migration agency claims that per their official statistics, more than 115,000 Haitian migrants have left the country “of their own volition,” reports EFE.
Borders and Enforcement
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago is planning to reinforce its maritime border enforcement efforts and to deport around 200 currently incarcerated Venezuelan migrants, reports Newsday.
🇺🇸 United States
Capacity issues, particularly bedspace in detention centers, limit the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, highlights Politico, noting, “As of late August, there were more than 61,000 people in long-term detention. The government has fewer than 65,000 beds.”
At the same time, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled this month “that any person who crossed the border unlawfully and is later taken into immigration detention is no longer eligible for release on bond,” thus “all but guaranteeing mandatory detention for undocumented immigrants,” per American Immigration Council.
AIC highlights concerns surrounding the ruling, including that many immigrants may “decide they can’t bear the inhumane costs of immigration jail—separation from their loved ones, medical neglect, lack of food and water, isolation, and physical violence and sexual abuse. They will even abandon cases that are easily winnable under our laws and leave the United States rather than face these deplorable conditions. Detention as an instrument of suffering—to coerce immigrants to abandon the legal process—is both the foreseeable result and the unstated goal undergirding (the ruling).”
“Several migrants sent by the United States to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had to be relocated to another part of the U.S. naval base there because of a water supply failure, raising more questions about whether Guantánamo can accommodate the 30,000 migrants President Trump has said he wants to send there,” reports NPR.
“Mexican nationals are more likely to be detained after being apprehended by federal immigration officers, according to data compiled by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse,” reports Border Report.
“ICE’s latest data on 287(g), a program that delegates immigration enforcement authority to non-federal agencies, continues to show massive growth during the Trump administration,” explains Austin Kocher at his Substack, noting that the program has now reached 1,000 active agreements across 40 states.
The ICE Flight Monitor, now at Human Rights First, notes “a small number of removal flights to new destinations” under the Trump administration and that “The administration increased the use of multi-country removal flights—where a single flight removes individuals to several countries in a region. These multi-country flights have left some individuals shackled for more than 30 hours, raising serious human rights concerns.”
More on Migration
🌎 Regional
Although remittances to Mexico have waned (see last week’s AMB), New York Times reports, “Money transfers to Guatemala, Honduras and other nations have increased in recent months, totaling billions of dollars. Undocumented migrants in the United States say they are sending money to relatives while they can.”
“For the first time in history, the fiscal impact of money sent by Colombians abroad to their families at home has equaled the value of the country’s oil exports. While Colombia has not yet reached the level of dependence on remittances of Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic (8.8%), the positive balance of these transfers is already approaching 3% of GDP, reports El País.” (via Latin America Daily Briefing)