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Table of Contents
Integration and Development
🌎 Regional
A UNDP working paper explores the human mobility and development nexus in Latin America and the Caribbean, including “the integration gaps and discrimination challenges that migrants and forcibly displaced persons, especially women and girls, experience,” as well as “how human mobility may affect resilience and development in countries of transit and destination, but also in countries of origin and return.”
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
“Seven Costa Rican political parties signed an electoral ethics guide on migration on Thursday, in which they agreed to reject all xenophobic narratives and respect the rights of migrants ahead of the general elections on February 1, 2026,” reports EFE. (see also Confidencial for more about the guide)
🇨🇴 Colombia
A UNHCR project evaluation report finds that a program to support the labor market integration of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia “achieved notable gains in employability, entrepreneurship, and quality of life, especially for women, with 92% of supported businesses still active by early 2025. Success was driven by experienced teams and strong partnerships, though sustainability was constrained by irregular migration status, weak local labour markets, and limited post-project follow-up.”
🇵🇪 Peru
“Foreign Aid Cuts Halt Migrant and Refugee Health Project in Peru: More than 7,000 Venezuelan migrants in Peru were set to benefit from comprehensive medical care, but recent actions by the U.S. government unraveled everything,” says Partners in Health. (see last week’s AMB on the role MDBs can take on filling the gap left from US foreign aid)
🇬🇹 Guatemala
A report by Fundación Carlos F. Novella, Fundación Real Madrid, and IDB based on surveys of Guatemalan migrant returnees in late 2023 explores returnees’ needs and perceptions of the institutional response.
Asylum, Protection, and Human Rights
🌎 Regional
Refugees face the risk of transnational repression by their home governments across the globe, and recent cases are highlighting this concern in Latin America. Reuters reviews recent cases of killings of Nicaraguan political exile in Costa Rica. In Colombia, meanwhile, two Venezuelan political activists were shot last week in a “targeted, hitman-style attack,” per DW.
To improve protections, Dejusticia and partners call for “the urgent need for the Colombian government to expeditiously resolve asylum applications from at-risk Venezuelan migrants.”
And a UCAB-Provea report highlights challenges that recent Venezuelan arrivals in Colombia are facing: “Despite the increase in Venezuelans fleeing for political reasons, especially following the July 2024 presidential election, Colombia has failed to recognize them as people in need of international protection… The report highlights a serious omission in Colombian migration policy: the absence of differentiated mechanisms to identify and protect people fleeing for political reasons, including activists, journalists, and human rights defenders persecuted by Nicolás Maduro’s security forces.” (see also El País)
🇭🇹 Haiti
“The number of people displaced by violence and instability in Haiti has reached an unprecedented level, with more than 1.4 million people forced from their homes this year,” per IOM. (see also last week’s AMB on the impact for children)
🇺🇸 United States
Reporting is highlighting human rights abuses and due process violations in immigration detention centers run by the for-profit prison company GEO Group. (GEO Accountability Report, The Guardian, Migrant Insider)
For more on this type of issue, check out the new book Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants. Stony Brook University interviews one of the authors, Nancy Hiemstra, highlighting “A far-reaching web of economic dependence… that includes food, medical, commissary and transportation companies, along with communities, who all come to see detention as a stable revenue source… Hiemstra says it’s critical to figure out how to remove those profit incentives.”
“More than 170 American citizens have been caught up in immigration sweeps, with many treated roughly in the process, Nicole Foy reports in ProPublica with photos by Sarahbeth Maney. The count likely is incomplete, Foy notes, because the government doesn’t track such cases. More recently, citizens have been detained amid enforcement operations in Chicago, Billal Rahman of Newsweek reports.” (via National Immigration Forum’s The Forum Daily)
A Mixed Migration Centre report “critically examines the evolution of U.S. migration and asylum policy under the Biden administration, taking stock of the many policy changes that occurred between January 2021 and December 2024. At its core, the Biden administration’s approach was two-fold: creating and encouraging the use of alternative legal pathways while also disincentivizing and physically preventing border crossings. The report argues that former President Biden’s approach resulted in a set of highly bifurcated policies that failed to garner favour from either pro-immigrant factions or more hardline conservatives that deemed the situation at the border a “crisis”. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s willingness to resort to policies that severely undermined the right to territorial asylum in the U.S. paved the way for many of the restrictionist measures implemented during the initial months of the second Trump administration.”
🇲🇽 Mexico
WOLA’s Adam Isacson highlights stories related to the US-Mexico border and human rights at the Weekly Border Update, noting, “The Fundación para la Justicia, a prominent Mexico City-based human rights organization, published Bajo la Bota II, a 300-page sequel to its May 2022 report on the Mexican military’s increasing involvement in internal migration enforcement. Numerous new testimonies from victims indicate that “the participation of the National Guard,” a new military branch, “in coordination with other civilian security forces, normalizes the use of force and violence against those who migrate, increasing their vulnerability.””
“73% of migrants surveyed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) through September 2025 said they did not have any immigration or asylum documents to remain in Mexico, according to data obtained through nearly 1,500 surveys of 3,000 people from more than a dozen countries. Of those interviewed in the north of Mexico, more than half said they had been a victim of crime, primarily kidnapping, but also robberies and extortion,” reports InSight Crime.
🇨🇦 Canada
“A broad coalition of civil liberties, data privacy, refugee, migrants rights and gender justice organizations denounced the Canadian government’s introduction of Bill C-12… asserting that it fails to resolve the human rights and refugee protection issues in the controversial Bill C-2,” reports Jurist. (see last week’s AMB)
Migratory Institutions and Regional and Bilateral Cooperation
🌎 Regional
The Regional Conference on Migration (CRM) and the South American Conference on Migrations (CSM) held joint meetings in Costa Rica last week, bringing together officials from over 20 countries in the Americas. (1, 2)
🌎🇺🇸 United States and Regional
Belize has agreed in principle to serve as a “Safe Third Country” for deportations by the US. Although Belize’s Cabinet “has agreed to move forward with the proposal, the process remains in its early stages and will require formal approval by the (Belize) Senate before any agreement can be finalized or implemented,” reports LoveFM.
🇧🇷 Brazil
João Chaves expresses at MigraMundo some concerns surrounding Brazil’s new National Policy on Migration, Refuge and Statelessness, including a lack of mention of climate-related mobility and a lack of attention to migration of Indigenous persons. (see also last week’s AMB)
Labor Migration
🇬🇹 Guatemala
LaMP highlights the work of GAREX, the “first responsible recruitment association in Latin America… conformed of twelve Guatemalan recruitment agencies united by a mission to promote safe, transparent, and ethical recruitment practices for Guatemalans. Each year, its members help connect more than 20,000 Guatemalan workers to jobs in sectors like agriculture, construction, hospitality, landscaping, and food processing—primarily in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.”
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands
“The government of the Cayman Islands has released a bill with its planned immigration law amendments, to which the public has until mid-November to respond,” reports Gleaner, noting that proposals include that “work-permit holders would not be permitted to change employers within the first two years of their permit being granted,” as well as moves to require longer residence before naturalization.
Migrants in Transit
🌎 Regional
Spain is increasingly becoming a destination for Latin American migrants. In the first nine months of the year, 63,326 Venezuelans and 11,845 Colombians filed asylum applications in Spain, reports Europa Press. Spain is also the second-greatest destination of interest for the 65% of Nicaraguans that report wanting to emigrate, notes EFE.
As US-bound migration has slowed to a trickle (see last week’s AMB) and US deportations to Mexico have increasingly sent flights to further south in the country, Mexico’s government is dismantling recently built migrant shelters along the US-Mexico border in Nogales. (The Latin Times)
An IOM report explores extracontinental transit migration through the Americas.
Borders and Enforcement
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
“The Dominican Republic has deported more than 370,000 undocumented Haitians in the last year, following the tightening of immigration policies by the Luis Abinader administration, amid reports of human rights violations and mass raids,” reports EFE.
🇧🇸 The Bahamas
The Bahamanian government has proposed the Smuggling of Migrants Bill 2025, which “expands The Bahamas’ authority to prosecute to cases committed inside or outside of the country, particularly where The Bahamas is the point of origin, transit, or destination for smuggled migrants,” per The Tribune.
🇺🇸 United States
“The booming business of Trump’s deportation flights: Companies are jostling for billions of dollars to fly immigrant detainees out of the US” (FT)
“U.S. officials have deported 18 migrants who were being held at the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, leaving the temporary holding site vacant once again… The operation cleared the base of migrants six days before a federal court hearing in Washington. Civil liberties lawyers are challenging the legality of holding migrants at the base from previous detention on U.S. soil,” reports The New York Times.