Since President Donald Trump launched the current immigration crackdown, at least 14 Mexican nationals have died in the custody of US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), and three more have reportedly died in arrests conducted by the agency. Most recently, on July 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had been living in the US without legal documentation for more than three decades.

His killing—which sparked protests in Houston, where Araujo had lived for nearly 35 years, and throughout Mexico—marked at least six people shot dead in ICE operations since early 2025, when Trump returned to office and launched a campaign of mass deportations. In addition to several formal diplomatic protest letters to the US government, demanding a “prompt and thorough investigation,” Sheinbaum’s government has also filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). However, in light of the new deaths and the apparent lack of tangible progress in the United States, the Mexican government has decided to escalate the matter to the criminal justice system.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to the Mexicans who have died,” Sheinbaum said during her daily press conference. “We cannot allow the mistreatment of our brothers and sisters who are in the United States—our fellow citizens. Therefore, we will propose other measures.”

She added that her government is prepared to assist all citizens who request it, but especially to “Mexicans whose only crime is working honestly in the United States.”

In addition to formally requesting that the US Department of Justice open criminal investigations into the killings, Sheinbaum said her government will bring civil lawsuits in the US courts against the companies that operate detention centers for ICE.

The announcement represents a significant escalation as relations between the two neighbors continue to worsen. Addressing the press during that day’s conference, Mexico’s Foreign Secretary Robert Velasco stated that a request will also be made to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to demand protection for Mexican nationals in ICE custody.

The move underscores Mexico’s growing willingness to challenge US immigration enforcement through international and legal channels, as pressure mounts for accountability over deaths tied to detention and arrest operations. With tensions already strained, the moves could further deepen the diplomatic rift between Washington and Mexico.

From JURIST, July 10. Used with permission.

See our last report on the struggle in Texas.

Photo of Houston protest against ICE: Jessica Bolanos via Wikimedia Commons

Sael Silva Cisneros, a prominent lawyer and advocate for Afro-Mexican and LGBTQ rights, was killed in a roadside attack outside the town of Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero state, on June 5, shortly after delivering a seminar titled “Afro-Mexican dissidences in Guerrero: history, justice and rights.” Silva Cisneros had a history of campaigning for Afro-Mexican rights, and dcoumenting the systemic intersectional marginalization of this community within Mexico and abroad.

The town of Cuajinicuilapa is located close to a stretch of the southwestern coast of Mexico known as the Costa Chica, heartland of the Afro-Mexican population. The seminar was the latest in a series Silva Cisneros had conducted this year in towns and villages throughout the region.

Silva Cisneros had also worked as a researcher for the Supreme Court of Mexico, which released a statement following his murder, honoring his work and condemning “any form of violence that attacks the dignity, equality and human rights of individuals.”

The UN experts reiterated Mexico’s commitments under international human rights treaties to protect marginalized groups, especially those facing intersectional and overlapping forms of discrimination, as well as to dismantle the systemic forces that facilitate these abuses. They also urged Mexico to provide “truth, justice, full reparation and guarantees of non-repetition” for said abuses.

Currently, Mexico has one of the highest rates of attacks on human rights defenders, and has been previously criticized by the UN for its failure to protect activists despite the enactment of the Law for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders & Journalists in 2012.

From JURIST, July 2. Used with permission. Internal links added.

See our last report on the Afro-Mexican struggle.

Photo: Facebook

The organizations report that the administration in April re-arrested and forcibly transferred to third countries people who had previously been granted withholding of removal by US immigration judges and had prevailed on habeas petitions challenging the legality of their detention. The report documents an attempted transfer of individuals to Libya last year in violation of a court order then in effect.

Approximately 16,000 of the documented transfers have been to Mexico. That figure includes thousands of individuals the administration failed to acknowledge in a March 5 disclosure to a federal court. Roughly 1,400 additional people have been sent to 20 other countries, including Eswatini, South Sudan and Uganda. A March 2026 agreement with Costa Rica provides for regular weekly transfers.

The tracker reports that the administration has paid at least $44 million to receiving governments in connection with the agreements and has used the threat of third-country transfer to pressure detained immigrants into abandoning their legal claims.

Separately, the tracker reports that government attorneys have filed motions to “pretermit,” or dismiss without merits review, thousands of pending asylum cases in immigration court on the basis of Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Uganda. Citing data compiled by immigration advocacy group Mobile Pathways from Executive Office for Immigration Review records, the tracker counts nearly 9,500 such pretermissions as of February 2026. The following month, the Department of Homeland Security directed Immigration & Customs Enforcement attorneys to stop filing new pretermission motions but did not withdraw those already pending.

The administration has invoked a range of statutory and constitutional authorities to justify the transfers, including the Alien Enemies Act, and the suspension-of-entry provision at 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f). Federal judges have held several uses of those authorities unlawful, including in challenges to expulsions of Venezuelans to El Salvador and to forced transfers of people with final removal orders carried out without notice or an opportunity to raise fear-based claims.

From JURIST, May 5. Used with permission.

See our last report on the third-country deportations.

See our podcast “MAGA-fascism and the struggle in Libya”

Photo: Venezuelan deportees in Honduras. Credit: ICE via Wikimedia Commons

The indictment accuses the officials of connections to the Sinaloa Cartel. US Attorney Jay Clayton said: “The Sinaloa Cartel is a ruthless criminal organization that has flooded this community with dangerous drugs for decades… [I]t would not operate as freely or successfully without corrupt politicians and law enforcement officials on their payroll.”

The indictment links the officials to one faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, “Los Chapitos,” run by the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is serving a life prison term in the US. The specific charges include narcotics importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess them, kidnapping to result in death, and conspiracy to kidnap. The indictment demands the forfeiture to the US of all assets gained through the alleged crimes.

In a seeming reference to the fact that Rocha Moya and others of those indicted are from Mexico’s ruling MORENA party, President Claudia Sheinbaum said:

We will not cover up for anyone who has committed a crime. However, if there is no clear evidence, it is evident that the objective of these charges by the Department of Justice is political… We will not allow any foreign government to…decide the future of the Mexican people.

The Foreign Relations Secretariat responded to the indictment in a statement on X, reading: “The Secretariat of Foreign Relations received requests for provisional arrest for extradition purposes, which will be forwarded to the Attorney General’s Office. No evidence is attached to the documents.”

Rocha Moya “categorically and absolutely” denied the allegations against him in a post on X, adding: “It is part of a perverse strategy to violate [Mexico’s] constitutional order, specifically the national sovereignty.”

From JURIST, April 30. Used with permission. Internal links added.

Map: Google

President Claudia Sheinbaum said after the revelation of apparent CIA involvement that she is considering sanctions against the government of Chihuahua, asserting that any security collaboration with the US must be approved by Mexico’s federal government. She is meanwhile demanding a meeting to discuss the matter with the governor of Chihuahua, María Eugenia Campos Galván of the right-wing opposition National Action Party (PAN).

Mexico’s Senate Commission on Constitutional Issues is attempting to broker a dialogue between Chihuahua and federal authorities on the question. But lawmakers from Sheinbaum’s leftist MORENA party accused Campos and the PAN of “betraying the homeland and the Mexican people” by concealing the CIA presence in Chihuahua. (CBS News, Animal Político, El Arensal, NACLA Update, Diario Red, La Verdad, La Verdad, Juárez)

The Washington Post reports that under CIA director John Ratcliffe, “the agency has taken a larger, more aggressive role in counternarcotics, one of Trump’s top priorities upon assuming office. The agency has shared more intelligence with Mexican antidrug units and increased training for local counternarcotics units… It has flown unarmed drones over Mexico to help track cartel leaders and locate illicit drug labs.”

CIA intelligence was apparently critical in the operation by Mexican federal forces in which Jalisco New Generation Cartel kingpin Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes AKA “El Mencho” was killed earlier this year.

Photo: AEI via CBS News

Featured speaker on April 3 was a ski-masked “Captain Marcos,” presumably the same charismatic spokesman once known as “Subcommander Marcos.” He delivered an exegesis entitled: “A Peephole into the Storm in the World: Nation-States Under Attack” (Una mirilla a la Tormenta en el Mundo: Los Estados-Nación bajo ataque). Marcos portrayed a supra-national imperialism under Donald Trump, in which “the nation-state has no decision-making power.” Marcos decried the “kidnapping” of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, and the US oil blockade on Cuba, especially noting that Mexico has been effectively barred from shipping oil to the Caribbean island nation. He hailed the tenacious resistance of the Cubans and Palestinians.

Marcos asserted that in the US-Israeli war against Iran, the big oil companies are the ones who benefit, as the price of oil has dramatically risen. “That’s what needs to be discussed: who is profiting from these wars?” (La Jornada via Mexico Solidarity Media)

Image: Enlace Zapatista

The CED announced that since it began monitoring the situation in 2012 it had received “well-founded indications that enforced disappearances in Mexico have been and continue to be committed as crimes against humanity.” The findings included the ongoing discovery of clandestine graves, with an estimated 4,500 graves found, containing over 6,200 bodies and 4,600 sets of human remains. This contributes to a total of approximately 72,000 unidentified human remains found by authorities or self-organized citizen search committees.

The CED stressed that it did not find evidence of a government policy to commit enforced disappearances. Even if many disappearances are committed by criminal groups, however, the committee found substantiated information suggesting direct participation or acquiescence by public officials in many cases. In response to Mexico’s assertion that such incidents should not be classified as enforced disappearances in the absence of state policy, CED chair Juan Albán-Alencastro stated: “International law does not require crimes against humanity to occur nationwide or be orchestrated at the highest levels of government. What matters is the scale, the pattern of the attacks, and the targeting of civilians.”

The current figures on the Mexican government registry indicate that at least 132,828 people are currently missing, although this figure may be incomplete. Regardless, the CED found that “the magnitude of the registered cases underscores the gravity of the situation.” The committee added that the situation has not substantially improved since the committee visited Mexico in 2021.

The CED request invoked Article 34 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. This provision enables the committee to bring the matter to the attention of the UN General Assembly when they have well-founded indications of systemic enforced disappearance. Albán-Alencastro expressed hope that this will result in substantive change, stating:

The Committee reaffirms its commitment to continue cooperating with Mexico through its different procedures. The procedure of article 34 is intended to facilitate timely cooperation and support so that the State Party can strengthen its response, protect victims and families, and prevent the situation from deteriorating further.

The Mexican government rejected the CED’s report as “biased and dismissive” of institutional advances in recent years.

The International Federation for Human Rights, which submitted evidence to the CED, welcomed the report, however. The organization expressed hope that the Mexican government’s rejection “will evolve into a dialogue with victims’ groups and civil society.”

Enforced disappearance occurs when an individual is taken by state officials or others acting on behalf of the state, who then deny knowledge of the individual’s whereabouts. This practice often targets human rights defenders, witnesses and lawyers, to repress political opposition. Rights groups have consistently issued warnings related to the enforced disappearance crisis in Mexico, including Amnesty International’s recent report on violence against women searching for their disappeared loved ones.

Media voices have also criticized Mexico’s “war on drugs” as contributing to the current situation, saying that militarized enforcement has enhanced collaboration between criminal groups and the government, and “ignited an explosion of human rights abuses linked to state forces and criminals—particularly disappearances.”

From JURIST, April 4. Used with permission. Internal links added.

See our last report on Mexico’s human rights crisis.

Photo via Twitter

Did Delcy capitulate?
Meanwhile in Washington, White House officials were briefing members of Congress, who were not notified beforehand of the Jan. 3 military operation in which Maduro was captured.

And in Venezuela, Maduro’s groomed successor, newly inaugurated acting president Delcy Rodríguez, showed signs of capitulating to the pressure from Washington. After the Pentagon raid in which Maduro was taken (which also claimed the lives of at least 60 people, including civilians and several members of a Cuban security detail), Rodriguez defiantly stated in a televised address: “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”

But the next day, she struck a conciliatory tone, writing on social media: “We invite the US government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence.”

Bellicose mid-flight press conference
Rodríguez is under explicit threat from Trump, who told reporters on a Dec. 4 flight from Florida to DC that if she doesn’t cooperate “she will face a situation probably worse than Maduro.” When asked about his boast that he will “run” Venezuela, Trump responded: “We’re dealing with the people. We’re dealing with the people that just got sworn in. And don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I will give you an answer and it’ll be very controversial.” When the reporter took this bait and asked him what that meant, he replied: “It means we’re in charge.”

Trump was similarly lacking subtlety in his claim to Venezuela’s oil: “The oil companies are ready to go. They’re going to go in. They’re going to rebuild the infrastructure. You know, we built it to start off with many years ago. They took it away. You can’t do that.”

Apparently refering to Venezuelan efforts to extend state control over the country’s oil resources following US investment in the sector over a century ago, he added: “It was the greatest theft in the history of America. Nobody has ever stolen our property like they have. They took our oil away from us. They took the infrastructure away and all that infrastructure is rotted and decayed, and the oil companies are going to go in and rebuild it.”

And indeed, shares of Chevron, the last US oil company that was authorized to operate in Venezuela, soared as much as 10% in pre-market trading after Trump’s comment. Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips shares also rose around 4%.

Queried about his supposed isolationism and antipathy to “nation-building,” Trump explicitly invoked the notion of Latin America as a US influence sphere, which was articulated in his recent National Security Strategy. He said of Venezuela: “This isn’t a country that’s on the other side of the world. This isn’t a country like we have to travel 24 hours in an airplane. This is Venezuela. It’s in our area, the Donroe Doctrine.”

Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland
He went on to directly threaten Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro: “He has cocaine mills, cocaine factories. He’s not going to be doing it very long.” So there will be another military operation?, the reporter asked. Trump: “It sounds good to me.”

Mexico was next. Invoking the flow of migrants across the US southern border, Trump reiterated his recent threat of military intervention: “Mexico has to get their act together, because they’re pouring through Mexico, and we’re going to have to do something.”

And even Greenland: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you. You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security in Greenland? They added one more dogsled. It’s true.”

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen prompty responded: “This is enough. No more pressure. No more innuendo. No more fantasies about annexation.”

And Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said in a statement: “It is necessary to reaffirm that in Mexico the people are in charge and that we are a free, independent and sovereign country. Cooperation, yes. Subordination and intervention, no.”

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio meanwhile warned that Cuba could be next, responding to a reporter’s question at a DC press conference: “Yeah, look, if I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” (PBS NewsHour, FreedomNews.tv, CNN, The Hill, Politico, NDTV, NBC News)

Photo: US Navy via Latin America Reports

Manzo’s assassin, who was killed by police on the scene, has been identified as a 17-year-old methamphetamine addict. Authorities are said to believe he was paid by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, whose suspected local plaza chief in Uruapan—identified as René N, or “El Rhino”—was arrested by city police in August.

This was the second prominent assassination in Michoacán in as many weeks. On Oct. 20, the body of Bernardo Bravo, president of the Apatzingan Valley Citrus Producers Association, was found in his vehicle on a rural road. He had been campaigning in recent months against the extortion demands of the cartels on local lime growers, and their cooptation of agriculture in the state to launder illicit activities.

Specter of US intervention
In a Twitter post after Manzo’s assassination, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau (who served as ambassador to Mexico during Donald Trump’s first term) wrote: “The US stands ready to deepen security cooperation with Mexico to wipe out organized crime on both sides of the border.”

But this comes as the specter of unilateral US military intervention has been raised. NBC News reported Nov. 3 that the Trump White House has started planning a “potential mission” involving US troops and intelligence officers to target the cartels on Mexican soil. Citing anonymous sources in the administration, NBC said that training has already begun for the mission, which could include drone strikes as well as ground operations inside Mexico. President Sheinbaum firmly rejected any possibility of US military intervention, stating that Mexicans are “united against any interference.”

In February, the State Department designated six Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations”—the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the New Familia Michoacana, the Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel, and the United Cartels. Simultaenously, the State Department conferred FTO designation on Central America’s MS-13 and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. (MND, MND, CBC, CNN, PRI, Milenio, CBS, NBC)

Photo: Juan José Estrada Serafín/Cuartoscuro.com via Mexico News Daily

“The initial 14 [deportees] were brought to Ghana on Sept. 6,” lead lawyer Oliver Barker-Vormawor explained to media outlets. “Three were deported [from Ghana] that night. Eleven were held in military detention. Out of that 11, 10 were deported with the matter in court, and eight of them are in Togo.”

The deportations arose from a “third country deportation” agreement between the US and Ghana earlier this year. Ghana’s parliamentary minority bloc has now called for its suspension, as leaders claim the government entered into the agreement without proper legislative approval. Samuel Abu Jinapor, a ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Ghana’s Parliament, argued:

The government’s conduct in operationalizing the agreement with the United States without parliamentary ratification is a direct constitutional violation of Article 75 and an affront to the authority of the [Ghanan] Supreme Court. It is therefore deeply concerning that the government continues to operationalize the agreement despite this flagrant operational breach.

Ghana’s Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa told local media that the decision to enter into the agreement was not a signal of support for the US administration, but rather a decision “grounded purely on humanitarian principle and Pan-African empathy.” However, reports have claimed that Ablakwa and President John Mahama may also be motivated by the hope that the White House will lift travel restrictions on Ghanaians entering the US as consideration for the agreement.

After initial pushback from federal courts, in July the US Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to enter into third-country deportation agreements with multiple nations, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda. International organizations have warned that the policy risks great harm to individuals, and skirts government accountability.

The West African deportees also filed a lawsuit in the US courts last month, asserting that they were taken from an immigration facility, shackled, placed in straitjackets, and flown to Ghana in a cargo plane without meaningful notice or hearing.

From JURIST, Oct. 7. Used with permission.

Photo: Venezuelan deportees in Honduras. Credit: ICE via Wikimedia Commons