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Table of Contents
Integration and Development
🇧🇷 Brazil
Correo del Caroní highlights the challenges faced by Warao Indigenous Venezuelan migrants in Brazil; poverty and discrimination are reportedly prevalent, including in the government-run shelters, which some allege are used as a means of controlling and limiting the independence of these migrants.
🇺🇸 United States
Despite claims by some, research consistently shows that immigrants, including irregular immigrants, commit crimes at lower rates than the US-born. Cato has a new piece looking at data in the state of Georgia, finding that irregular immigrants are less likely to commit homicide or be incarcerated in comparison to the US-born and legal immigrant population.
“New research indicates that babies born to immigrants are healthier in states that make driver’s licenses available to undocumented immigrants, Margot Moinester of Washington University and Kaitlyn Stanhope of Emory University write in The Conversation.” (via National Immigration Forum’s The Forum Daily)
Asylum, Protection, and Human Rights
🇪🇨 Ecuador
“One year after the declaration of ‘internal armed conflict’ by the Ecuadorian President in the country, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) urges the government and the international community to recognise, and provide comprehensive humanitarian assistance to, all people who are being forced to flee their homes due to violence from organised criminal groups.” (press release)
For more on violence, humanitarian concerns, and displacement in Ecuador, check out a recent CEDA report highlighted in AMB 12/23/24.
🇲🇽 Mexico
“Jared Olsen reports on the oft-overlooked forced displacement crisis in Mexico from the frontlines of Michoacán — including the links between criminal groups, extractive interests and shadowy state collusion — in The Baffler.” (via Latin America Daily Briefing)
A growing number of Russians are seeking asylum in Mexico to escape the country’s war against Ukraine or to seek protection against persecution for being LGBTQ. (EFE)
A REDIM report explores the dangers of disappearances and human trafficking for migrant children in Mexico.
🇧🇿 Belize
A Jamaican man visiting his sister in law in Belize for vacation alleges that he was assaulted by a Belizean official after being refused entry by immigration, reports 7 News, noting, “Jamaicans are quite regularly refused entry because authorities believe that many of them are using their visa free CARICOM status in Belize to head north to the US. His sister in law believes he was racially profiled.”
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
Although a mass deportation campaign was announced in October 2024, Western University researcher Masaya Llavaneras Blanco writes in The Conversation, “During my research visit of July 2024, it was clear that the Dominican army, police and migration officers had been given deportation targets long before the president’s October announcement. I spoke to people who said migration raids became more violent and arbitrary when the deadline approached and targets had not been met… The pressure to meet the president’s targets is propelling the current wave of deportations without regard to either domestic or international law.”
“A tragic accident on Dec. 24 highlighted the dangers Haitian migrants face during deportations. An overcrowded vehicle, carrying deported migrants and lacking basic safety measures, collided with a food delivery truck in the town of Pedro Corto, San Juan. The crash left the truck driver dead and several women injured,” reports The Haitian Times.
🇧🇷 Brazil
“Brazilian labor regulators flagged last month that 163 foreign construction workers employed at a new plant for Chinese auto giant BYD had been working in ‘slave-like conditions,’” explains Catherine Osborn at Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief, adding, “Prosecutors said the workers were housed in cramped conditions and had their passports and parts of their salaries withheld.” (see also Reuters)
A Refugee Survey Quarterly paper critiques Brazilian courts’ “unwillingness to perform judicial review over the merits of administrative refugee status determination (RSD) decisions,” arguing that the stance is based on “unfounded premises and incompatible with Brazil’s obligations under international law.”
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
A Journal of Refugee Studies paper finds that in Costa Rica, “refugee claimants find themselves in an ‘eternal’ wait, lacking access to jobs and social protections, and pressured to abandon their claims. The article also highlights the dynamics of resistance and negotiation among various actors and nonperformance of internal bordering practices by state officials.”
🇺🇸 United States
The Biden administration has extended TPS for current beneficiaries from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela, continuing to protect a total of approximately 940,000 individuals from deportation until the second half of 2026.
Axios reviews the Trump administration’s plans for the first day in office (January 20), including plans to reinstate Title 42, which facilitates rapid expulsion from the border and prevents access to seeking asylum.
New York Times reports on efforts to identify a health threat to justify invoking Title 42.
“Hundreds of veterans and current and former U.S. officials want President-elect Donald Trump to preserve U.S. special visa and resettlement programs for Afghans at risk of retribution for working for the United States during the 20-year war against the Taliban,” reports Reuters, noting calls for “an additional 50,000 Special Immigration Visas (SIVs).”
IRAP explores lessons for the US from the Chile Declaration last month. Focusing on climate-related migration policy, IRAP asserts that US policy lacks “serious discussion regarding legal protections for climate displaced individuals.”
“As Trump did during his first administration, border humanitarian workers will be painted as criminals and persecuted, as will journalists, people migrating, and any elected officials who refuse to carry out mass deportations and openly criticize the administration’s policies. Civilian militias emboldened by Trump have already begun escalating threats and harassment against immigrant shelters and humanitarians,” according to The Border Chronicle in their forecast for 2025.
WOLA’s Adam Isacson highlights stories related to the US-Mexico border and human rights at the Weekly Border Update, including the current debate surrounding the “Laken Riley Act,” which is advancing in Congress. “The Laken Riley Act would require that any “inadmissible” migrants arrested—not found guilty, merely arrested—for even minor theft be detained until their cases are resolved… The bill would also empower U.S. states’ attorneys-general to sue the federal government if a released immigrant commits crimes, and petition federal judges to place injunctions freezing aspects of federal immigration policy, including banning visas to entire nationalities” under certain conditions.
“Rather than federal supremacy, states could have the power to second-guess decisions made throughout every level of the federal government and potentially overrule the president himself… Giving a state attorney general veto power over everything from visa bans to individual release decisions made by ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers, threatens to make the entire immigration system even more chaotic than it already is,” writes American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick at NBC.
ICE is warning that without emergency funding, the mandated detention requirements could force the agency “to release tens of thousands of immigrants — including potentially some deemed to be public safety threats.” (Axios)
Migratory Institutions and Regional and Bilateral Cooperation
🌎 Regional
A Fwd.us white paper devises “A New Approach to Regional Migration and Border Security,” including working to expand access to humanitarian and labor pathways in the Americas and “developing a federal resettlement process for asylum seekers” in the US. (press release)
🇻🇪🇺🇸 United States and Venezuela
“In comments over the weekend, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno suggested the Trump administration will recognize the de facto legitimacy of the Maduro regime and work with Maduro on deportations as a priority. Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan made vaguer remarks, saying that he hoped the US would work with Venezuela on deportations but that the Trump administration would find other ways to deport Venezuelans even if they could not send them to Venezuela,” writes James Bosworth at Latin America Risk Report.
Labor Migration
🌎 Regional
IOM Director General Amy Pope outlines at Foreign Affairs a plan for fixing how migration works across the world, updating to current realities and looking to meet needs where they are at. Highlighting current challenges, for example, “In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act established the type and number of labor visas available to employers. The act set the cap for H-2B visas, the main visa for low-skilled nonagricultural workers, at 66,000 per year. The demand for H-2B visas, however, has rocketed since the program’s inception, and the industries supposed to benefit from them have faced unprecedented labor shortages in the last several years. Yet the U.S. government has been unable to respond beyond allowing modest but temporary increases in the cap, creating legal employment opportunities for only a fraction of the foreign workers that U.S. industries rely on.”
🇨🇦 Canada
A Canadian winery “has been permanently banned from hiring temporary foreign workers and fined $118,000,” reports CBC. A lawyer at the Migrant Workers Centre told CBC, “To me, it reads that they are coming out hard on a likely pattern of systemic violations of the temporary foreign worker program and of the rights of migrant workers who have come here under the pretence of being promised a job in Canada.”
“Out of 957 infractions listed on the government website since 2016, only one other company has been permanently banned from the Temporary Foreign Worker Program,” notes CBC.
Migrants in Transit
🌎 Regional
“The wide gulf between what migrants are sharing and what they’re actually experiencing—coupled with the near-endless stream of enticing videos made accessible by algorithmic platforms like TikTok—is having powerful consequences for their communities back home, where many people are relative newcomers to the mobile Internet,” reports The New Yorker, highlighting the role of social media in driving migration with a focus on Ecuadorian migration to the US.
“Minor migrants in transit through Mexico increase by 514% in six years. Figures on registration of children and teens on their way to the United States reflect that more families now undertake the journey together, and show a marked increase in Venezuelan nationals” (El País)
🇭🇳 Honduras
An IFPRI working paper develops models to forecast a given Honduran household’s probability of internal and international migration.
Borders and Enforcement
🇨🇱 Chile
Possible upcoming presidential candidate Evelyn Matthei has announced a series of border enforcement proposals including building physical barriers at the border and establishing mobile migrant detention centers. Current Interior Minister Carolina Tohá, however, has rebutted the list of proposals, asserting that the government is already implementing similar policies in many cases. (G5Noticias, El Mostrador)
🇲🇽 Mexico
AP reports on the continued use of “dispersion and exhaustion” tactics by Mexican officials to deter migration north to the US, highlighting a group of migrants now stranded in Acapulco.
🇺🇸 United States
“The number of migrants arrested illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in December was lower than when President-elect Donald Trump ended his first term in 2020,” reports Reuters, highlighting the recent drop in migration.
“Donald Trump’s team is looking at using military bases to detain migrants and military planes to boost deportations, the president-elect’s incoming border czar Tom Homan said,” reports Wall Street Journal, noting, “Trump’s team plans to declare a national emergency on immigration on day one of his presidency, Trump has confirmed.”
“The Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield on Tuesday, descending on businesses where day laborers and field workers gather,” reports CalMatters, noting, “This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations.”
“The day after Donald Trump was reelected U.S. president, stocks in private prison firms soared. These firms may soon expand prisons to house detainees awaiting deportation and propel an increase in surveillance and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies to accomplish this task,” explains Just Security, highlighting the role of border technology.
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands
“The Cayman Islands Government says it returned a second group of Cuban migrants to Havana last month under revised legislation rolled out in 2023 that enables officials here to process asylum claims very quickly and deport almost all of those who have landed in Cayman,” reports Observer, noting, “Usually, the Cuban migrants that land in Cayman waters do so because of problems with the makeshift vessels many use to leave the neighbouring island or problems with supplies and weather. According to the CBC, in most cases, the groups are ultimately bound for the United States and target Honduras as their starting point for that land journey.”