Americas Migration Brief - April 21, 2025
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Table of Contents
Integration and Development
🌎 Regional
“While the Trump administration is focused on deporting vast numbers of unauthorized immigrants by directing unprecedented resources to ramp up arrests, a longer-term, significant issue is receiving comparatively little policy attention: The future for returnees to Mexico and Central America, which historically have accounted for the overwhelming share of removals,” explains MPI, highlighting the importance of reintegration and reviewing current efforts.
🇺🇾 Uruguay
Uruguay has officially updated the information presented in passports to comply with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommendations and indicate citizenship, an advancement for naturalized citizens. (Montevideo Portal, El Observador)
The move was celebrated by IOM.
🇵🇪 Peru
A Peruvian congressperson called for violence against migrants and a mass deportation campaign, causing xenophobic commentary on social media to increase over 550%, per El Barómetro. (see also here)
An Encuentros SJM report examines how Peru has shifted from a “hospitality” to “securitization” based approach to migration.
🇨🇱 Chile
Various events, including commentary from presidential candidates, incited xenophobic narratives about migrants on social media, per El Barómetro. (see also here)
🇺🇸 United States
“DOGE is collecting federal data to remove immigrants from housing, jobs… At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing,” reports Washington Post.
Asylum, Protection, and Human Rights
🌎 Regional
For the first time, Venezuelan was the leading nationality among asylum seekers in the European Union in January 2025, reports El Tiempo, adding that Colombian was the 5th-most frequent nationality.
However, “The European Union published a list of seven countries it considers "safe" on Wednesday, in an attempt to speed up the return of migrants by making it more difficult for citizens of those nations to apply for asylum in the bloc,” reports Infobae, noting that Colombia is on the list.
🇭🇹 Haiti
With over 1 million internally displaced in Haiti primarily due to violence, IOM is calling for greater support from the international community. IOM data show that “between March 31, 2025 and April 3, 2025, more than 31,000 people have been forced to flee, especially from the towns of Mirebalais and Saut-d’Eau. That number has increased since then due to continued violence,” per CARE. (see also “Haiti: Escalating Violence Puts Population at Grave Risk,” from HRW)
Despite the conditions, “The Trump administration returned 40 Haitians on Tuesday, the administration’s third deportation flight this year. Three other flights — two from the neighboring Turks and Caicos and another from The Bahamas, sent back 56 others. They are among more than 65,800 Haitians who have already been deported or who have returned on their own this year, most coming from the neighboring Dominican Republic,” reports Miami Herald, highlighting challenges faced by deportees.
🇪🇨 Ecuador
Despite the thousands of Ecuadorians internally displaced due to violence, “Presidential Executive Decree 493 of January 2, 2025, which imposed the ninth state of emergency in a year in response to criminal violence, does not mention displacement or its numbers.” (Researching Internal Displacement; via Forced Migration Current Awareness)
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
“A group of human rights lawyers is suing Costa Rica, alleging the Central American nation violated the rights of dozens of migrant children by detaining them in a rural camp for nearly two months after they were deported from the U.S. in February,” reports AP.
Delfino explores conditions at the rural shelter, CATEM, based on limited access to entry. (see also last week’s AMB)
🇺🇸 United States
“The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members under a rarely used wartime law,” the Alien Enemies Act, reports Reuters. (see below on cooperation with El Salvador to deport via the AEA)
“The Trump administration is pushing to allow immigration judges to drop asylum cases without a hearing if the case’s request form is "legally deficient," reports Ximena Bustillo of NPR. The repercussions especially could affect people without legal representation, as judges would be allowed to make decisions on asylum cases based on a form that can take even experienced attorneys 50 to 70 hours to prepare, Bustillo reports.” (via National Immigration Forum’s The Forum Daily)
“What Owen’s memorandum does is further limit the number of people who even get to have their cases heard in court by encouraging judges to treat asylum applications with minor issues as if they had never been filed in the first place. Based on initial reports from immigration attorneys, it seems like this could include a range of fairly simple omissions or deficiencies—or even questionable claims of minor omissions or technical deficiencies,” writes Austin Kocher.
The Trump administration has nearly halved the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), but “The stated explanation for this change — eliminating inefficiencies — does not adequately explain how nine of those removed from the board had been appointed by the Biden administration. As pending cases at the BIA have increased nearly tenfold in the last decade, reducing the size of the board by nearly half will only worsen an already daunting backlog, working at cross-purposes with the administration’s stated justification for its move to deny asylum hearings,” says HIAS.
Public support for Trump’s immigration policies have dropped steadily: “recent polls show the priority of immigration plummeting, and majority disapproval for Trump on the issue. In the most recent YouGov/Economist poll, he is now 11 points underwater, down 16 points since he was inaugurated. Among Latinos, he is now 46 points underwater,” reports The American Prospect.
“The Trump administration’s plans to restart a program that requires asylum seekers to remain in Mexico pending their appeals experienced a setback after a federal court put the program on hold nationwide,” reports Bloomberg, noting “The case was put on hold after the Biden administration revoked the MPP, and resumed when the second Trump administration announced an intention to reinstate them.”
“Immigration attorneys say international students fighting immigration crackdowns are on solid legal ground, reports Andrew Kreighbaum of Bloomberg Law. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed and more are expected, as Billal Rahman of Newsweek reports. Additionally, Hannah Allam of ProPublica dives deep into the case of Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk.” Allam adds, “Immigration lawyers describe the case as a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street.” (via The Forum Daily; see also last week’s AMB)
“Universities Told Students to Leave the Country. ICE Just Said They Didn’t Actually Have To: In their haste to comply with apparent directives from Trump, universities became unwitting handmaidens of the deportation machine,” says The Intercept.
“For decades, Cuban migrants enjoyed exceptional privileges in the US regardless of who was in power. Now President Donald Trump is attacking those benefits,” reports Bloomberg, highlighting the dismantling of access to protection for Cubans fleeing to the US—and how the Cuban-American community and politicians are responding.
WOLA’s Adam Isacson highlights stories related to the US-Mexico border and human rights at the Weekly Border Update, noting, “With 7,181 Border Patrol apprehensions, March 2025 was one of the quietest months at the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1960s. The main reason is the Trump administration’s shutdown of asylum access at the border. The ratio of uniformed personnel at the border to March migrant apprehensions is now about 4.6 to 1.”
Isacson adds, “The White House has declared that a 20-yard fringe of territory along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico is now the equivalent of a “military installation.” This raises important questions about the role of the U.S. military on U.S. soil. As is widely expected, these questions will deepen if the administration invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807.” CNN later reported, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will not recommend invoking the Insurrection Act in a memo the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security are preparing to send to President Donald Trump about the conditions at the southern border.”
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands
The government of the Cayman Islands has granted an exemption to the spouse of an asylum-recipient and has recognized inconsistencies between local law and international obligations related to the principle of family unity. (Loop)
Migratory Institutions and Regional and Bilateral Cooperation
🌎 Regional
“The Dominican Republic will host the high-level regional forum on migration organized by the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) on April 29,” reports Diario Libre.
🌎🇺🇸 United States and Regional
Despite a unanimous US Supreme Court ruling calling for the Trump administration to facilitate the return of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration “says it’s not required to bring back wrongly deported man,” per Washington Post, and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele said while visiting DC that he would not return Abrego Garcia, per The Guardian.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer “said Monday that it might take a contempt order to prompt the U.S. government to return him from that country,” reports ABC.
“Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Sunday that El Salvador ‘tried really hard’ to prevent him from seeing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, before the government reversed course late last week,” reports CBS. The case is receiving bipartisan criticism, notes NPR.
Abrego Garcia has been transferred from the notorious CECOT to “a lower security facility” in El Salvador, reports CBS.
“Lawyers challenging the incarceration in El Salvador of more than 200 Venezuelans deported by the U.S. said the Salvadoran government is denying the prisoners access to attorneys and contact with the outside world,” reports Reuters.
“Four Reasons Why the U.S. Should be Concerned about What’s Happening in El Salvador” (WOLA)
“The human cost of the repressive cooperation between the US and El Salvador” (Amnesty International)
“El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has proposed a prisoner swap that would see Venezuelans deported from the United States to his country exchanged for “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In pointed remarks directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday, Bukele suggested the countries reach a “humanitarian agreement” amid Caracas’s demands for the repatriation of Venezuelan deportees,” reports Al Jazeera.
“Asylum seekers rebuffed at the Canadian border and returned to the United States are increasingly being detained there, a shift in policy that critics say calls into question the Safe Third Country Agreement, a long-standing bilateral treaty premised on both countries being safe for refugee claimants,” reports The Globe and Mail, noting, “a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that it is now the organization’s policy to place asylum seekers and migrants redirected from Canada into custody and transfer them to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for removal from the country.”
The Trump administration is indefinitely pausing regular bilateral immigration talks between the US and Cuba, reports CiberCuba, noting, “the interruption of talks could also jeopardize the current deportation operations.”
🇻🇪🇪🇨 Ecuador and Venezuela
Newly re-elected president Daniel Noboa is looking to formally renounce a 2010 agreement between Ecuador and Venezuela that sought to “facilitate the regularization and permanence of migratory flows to eliminate irregular migration” between the two countries. Noboa says the move is due to foreign aid cuts to IOM and UNHCR, reports El Universo. (see AMB 4/7/25 on a recently cancelled regularization program due to the cuts)
🇺🇸 United States
An alleged draft executive order restructuring the US State Department would reportedly eliminate the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). (New York Times, Politico)
🇱🇨 St. Lucia
After a recent IOM-coordinated workshop among key stakeholders, St. Lucia is progressing in the development of a comprehensive national migration policy, reports The Voice.
🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands
The government of the British Virgin Islands has officially introduced to the legislature the Immigration and Passport (Amendment) Bill.
Migrants in Transit
🌎 Regional
The great increase in migration through the Darien Gap post-COVID brought an economic boom to local areas; “With that burst of wealth, many in towns like Olea’s Villa Caleta, in the Comarca Indigenous lands, abandoned their plantain and rice crops to carry migrants down the winding rivers. Olea installed electricity in his one-room wooden home in the heart of the jungle. Families invested in children’s education. People built homes and more hopeful lives,” reports AP. But as the northbound migration has slowed to a trickle, the cash inflow for locals has vanished.
“The Gulf Clan, the criminal group that profited from the northward migration, now scouts the coast to see if it can make money off migrants going the other way, said Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst for International Crisis Group.”
“The border between Nicaragua and Honduras, at the Las Manos crossing, is desolate, with hardly any migrants for at least two months,” reports EFE, highlighting the southbound return of primarily Venezuelan migrants.
The Atlantic highlights southbound return migration through Costa Rica, noting how bus companies and smugglers alike have shifted their services to head south, not north. Some, though, are looking to stay in Costa Rica, and shelter space is limited: “For migrants heading south, Costa Rica—a middle-income nation and the only stable democracy in the Central American corridor—is a natural place to seek refuge… Early results from an unpublished IOM survey in Costa Rica show that 22 percent of polled southbound migrants plan to stay, while 73 percent plan to continue farther southward.”
Some Venezuelan migrants in Mexico are seeking flights to return to Venezuela, reports El Pitazo.
Niskanen Center reviews some of the available data on southbound return migration from Honduras and Colombia, noting “a critical data gap.”
Borders and Enforcement
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
“The Dominican Republic will begin implementing a migration verification protocol on Monday across 33 public hospitals as part of President Luis Abinader’s efforts to tighten immigration control, particularly targeting Haitians,” reports EFE. (see AMB 4/7/25 on other newly announced enforcement efforts)
🇺🇸 United States
Dara Lind explains at Immigration Insight the recent controversy surrounding misleading emails sent en masse to immigrants to “‘Leave the United States’ Within 7 Days”—and the fear it instills. (see also New York Times)
““The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua,” undermining the Trump administration’s rationale for invoking the Enemy Alien Act to summarily deport alleged gang members, reports the Washington Post.” (via Latin America Daily Briefing)
“Trump is Quietly Building a Deportation Army out of State and Local Agencies” (Austin Kocher)
The Border Chronicle highlights the growing militarization at the US-Mexico border and the risk of the military taking on civilian law enforcement duties.
Although the number of individuals in immigration detention has flatlined, “people are moving through the detention system more quickly—including due to faster deportations,” explains Austin Kocher.
More on Migration
🌎 Regional
Inter-American Dialogue reviews the state of the remittance industry and outlook for 2025, finding that “Digital and cash-originated transactions are now almost evenly divided, though they are not entirely separate or mutually exclusive channels.”