Border Officials Announce Dramatic Drop in Yuma Sector Rescues, Deaths
Yuma Sector Chief Patrol Agent Justin De La Torre told reporters at a press briefing in Yuma, Arizona, that for fiscal year 2025, his agents have so far conducted 19 rescues and recorded one death.
That's about a 79 percent drop from the 89 rescues and six deaths agents recorded over the same period last year.
The decrease tracks with the overall
'The people who previously were coming here for economic reasons, we believe the message is out that this is not the way to cross, because we've seen such a drastic reduction in the number of people crossing for those reasons,' De La Torre said.
He attributed that change to one major policy reversal: the end of the so-called 'catch-and-release' policy.
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'We are no longer releasing people after arresting them into the United States before the adjudication of their immigration hearing,' De La Torre said.
As for the decrease in deaths, De La Torre attributed that to CBP's Missing Migrant Program, launched in 2017, which he described as a 'technology-based intervention program that improves the chance of survival for those lost in the desert.'
He noted that the Yuma Sector has 24 rescue beacons and 124 rescue signs scattered throughout the desert that display the viewer's coordinates and instructions for calling 911 for help.
While the number of illegal crossings has significantly decreased, De La Torre said his agents were still seeing people—mostly single adults with criminal records—attempting to enter unlawfully 'through remote and dangerous terrain.'
To those individuals, he issued a warning: 'It's still not worth your life to be smuggled in by the criminal organizations. It's not worth losing your life or being subjected to exploitation to come to the United States.'
The press briefing included officials from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.
Juan Pablo Valdivieso, ambassador and consul general of Ecuador, stressed the importance of transnational cooperation to thwart the criminal organizations that are trafficking people and drugs throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Valdivieso noted that just 15 days prior, the Ecuadorian government incinerated 340 tons of cocaine that had been seized over the previous few months.
Drug trafficking, he said, brings these criminal organizations 'a lot of money, more than we can imagine.'
He added that the same can be said for human trafficking, which also brings 'a lot of suffer[ing] to those people who risk their lives and to their family that do not know what's going on, what happened to them.'
Concluding his remarks in Spanish, Valdivieso praised CBP's Missing Migrant Program for the lives it has saved—'lives that are invaluable to their families.'
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Los Angeles Times
37 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Bolivian voters are hungry for change — and disillusioned by the options ahead of election
LA PAZ, Bolivia — The campaign billboards adorning the streets of Bolivia for Sunday's presidential election make grand promises: A solution to the dire economic crisis within 100 days, an end to fuel shortages and bread lines, unity for a divided nation. One vice presidential candidate pledges to 'Make Bolivia Sexy Again.' In their efforts to draw votes, all eight candidates — two right-wing front-runners, a conservative centrist and splintered factions of Bolivia's long-dominant left-wing — are vowing drastic change, launching searing attacks on the status quo and selling a message of hope. But for many Bolivians, hope has already hardened into cynicism. Promises of quick fixes — like right-wing candidate Samuel Doria Medina's pledge to stabilize the upside-down economy within '100 days, dammit!' — fall flat. Vandals add extra zeroes to his campaign posters, suggesting a million days might be a more realistic goal. Tuto, the nickname of Jorge Quiroga, the other right-wing favorite, turns up on city walls with its first letter swapped to form a Spanish insult. Some signs for left-wing candidate Andrónico Rodríguez, pledging 'unity above all' have been defaced to read 'unity in the face of lines.' And few know what to do with the acronym of the governing party candidate, Eduardo del Castillo: 'We Are a National Option with Authentic Ideas.' (No, It's not any catchier in Spanish). Yet for all their disenchantment with politicians, Bolivians are counting down the days until elections, united in their relief that, no matter what happens, leftist President Luis Arce will leave office after five difficult years. Inflation is soaring. The central bank has burned through its dollar reserves. Imported goods have vanished from shelves. 'I have no faith in any candidate. There's no one new in this race,' Alex Poma Quispe, 25, told The Associated Press from his family's fruit truck, where he slept curled into a ball in the front seat Wednesday for a second straight night, stranded with 50 other trucks in a fuel line en route from farms in the Yungas region to markets in Bolivia's capital of La Paz. 'The only thing we're enthusiastic about is Arce leaving.' A bitter power struggle between Arce and former President Evo Morales has shattered their hegemonic Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, giving the right-wing opposition its best shot at victory in two decades. 'I've seen that socialism has brought nothing good to this country,' said Victor Ticona, 24, a music student, as he left Quiroga's campaign rally Wednesday. 'We have to become more competitive in the world.' Doria Medina, a 66-year-old multimillionaire businessman, and Quiroga, a 65-year-old former vice president who briefly assumed the presidency in 2001 after then-President Hugo Banzer resigned with cancer, are familiar faces in Bolivian politics. Both have run for president three times before. While their calls for economic freedom and foreign investment appeal to voters desperate for change, they have struggled to stir up excitement. Nearly 30% of voters are undecided, according to polls. Doria Medina, a former minister of planning, acknowledged in a recent social media video that 'people say I have no charisma, that I'm too serious.' Quiroga's association with Banzer, a former military dictator who brutally quashed dissent over seven corruption-plagued years before being democratically elected, has turned some voters off. 'It was a bloody era,' recalled 52-year-old taxi driver Juan Carlos Mamani. 'For me, Tuto is the definition of the old guard.' Poma Quispe and his 24-year-old brother Weimar have no idea who'd they vote for — or if they'll vote at all. Voting is compulsory in Bolivia, and about 7.9 million people in the country of 12 million are eligible to cast ballots in Sunday's election. Non-voters face various financial penalties. Over the past year, fuel shortages have brought much of Bolivia to a standstill. Truckers waste days at a time queuing at empty gas stations around Bolivia, just to keep their vehicles moving. The diesel arrives on no set schedule, and the rhythm of life is forced to adapt. If the diesel arrives before Sunday, the Poma Quispe brothers will vote. If not, 'there's no way we're giving up our spot in line for those candidates,' Weimar Poma Quispe said. This year's election coincides with the 200th anniversary of Bolivia's independence. But instead of celebrating, many Bolivians are questioning the validity of their democracy and state-directed economic model. Crowds booed at President Arce during his bicentennial speech earlier this month. His government invited left-wing presidents from across Latin America to attend the event; only the president of Honduras showed. The lack of enthusiasm among ordinary Bolivians and beleaguered officials seems matched by that of the candidates. Authorities allowed televised presidential debates — banned under Morales — for the first time in 20 years. The front-runners turned up to just one of them. Personal attacks overshadowed policy discussions. Doria Medina accused Del Castillo of ties to drug traffickers, while Del Castillo mocked the businessman's record of failed presidential bids. Rodríguez and Quiroga traded barbs over alleged involvement in extrajudicial killings. The median age in Bolivia is 26. For comparison, it is 39 in China and the United States. Having grown up under the government of Morales and his MAS party, many young Bolivians are restive, disillusioned by current prospects as they become more digitally connected than any generation before them. Quiroga in particular has energized young voters with his running mate, JP Velasco, a successful 38-year-old tech entrepreneur with no political experience who vows to reverse a brain drain in Bolivia and create opportunities for youth in exploiting the country's abundant reserves of lithium, the critical metal for electric vehicle batteries, and developing data centers. Young crowds packed Quiroga's Wednesday night campaign rally, even as 20-somethings in goth makeup and tight-stretch dresses expressed more interest in the lively cumbia bands than the political speeches. Others sported red MAGA-style caps with Velasco's slogan, 'Make Bolivia Sexy Again.' Cap-wearers offered varying answers on when Bolivia was last 'sexy,' with some saying never, but agreed it meant attractive to foreign investors. 'It won't just be tech companies coming here, McDonald's might even come,' Velasco told the crowd, eliciting whoops and howls. 'Young people, if you go abroad, let it be for vacation.' Debre and Valdez write for the Associated Press.
San Francisco Chronicle
37 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Bolivian voters are hungry for change — and disillusioned by the options ahead of election
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — The campaign billboards adorning the streets of Bolivia for Sunday's presidential election make grand promises: A solution to the dire economic crisis within 100 days, an end to fuel shortages and bread lines, unity for a divided nation. One vice presidential candidate pledges to 'Make Bolivia Sexy Again.' In their efforts to draw votes, all eight candidates — two right-wing front-runners, a conservative centrist and splintered factions of Bolivia's long-dominant left-wing — are vowing drastic change, launching searing attacks on the status quo and selling a message of hope. Slogans fail to break through Promises of quick fixes — like right-wing candidate Samuel Doria Medina's pledge to stabilize the upside-down economy within '100 days, dammit!' — fall flat. Vandals add extra zeroes to his campaign posters, suggesting a million days might be a more realistic goal. Tuto, the nickname of Jorge Quiroga, the other right-wing favorite, turns up on city walls with its first letter swapped to form a Spanish insult. Some signs for left-wing candidate Andrónico Rodríguez, pledging 'unity above all' have been defaced to read 'unity in the face of lines.' And few know what to do with the acronym of the governing party candidate, Eduardo del Castillo: 'We Are a National Option with Authentic Ideas.' (No, It's not any catchier in Spanish). Yet for all their disenchantment with politicians, Bolivians are counting down the days until elections, united in their relief that, no matter what happens, leftist President Luis Arce will leave office after five difficult years. Inflation is soaring. The central bank has burned through its dollar reserves. Imported goods have vanished from shelves. 'I have no faith in any candidate. There's no one new in this race,' Alex Poma Quispe, 25, told The Associated Press from his family's fruit truck, where he slept curled into a ball in the front seat Wednesday for a second straight night, stranded with 50 other trucks in a fuel line en route from farms in the Yungas region to markets in Bolivia's capital of La Paz. 'The only thing we're enthusiastic about is Arce leaving.' New campaigns, old faces A bitter power struggle between Arce and former President Evo Morales has shattered their hegemonic Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, giving the right-wing opposition its best shot at victory in two decades. 'I've seen that socialism has brought nothing good to this country,' said Victor Ticona, 24, a music student, as he left Quiroga's campaign rally Wednesday. 'We have to become more competitive in the world.' Doria Medina, a 66-year-old multimillionaire businessman, and Quiroga, a 65-year-old former vice president who briefly assumed the presidency in 2001 after then-President Hugo Banzer resigned with cancer, are familiar faces in Bolivian politics. Both have run for president three times before. While their calls for economic freedom and foreign investment appeal to voters desperate for change, they have struggled to stir up excitement. Nearly 30% of voters are undecided, according to polls. Doria Medina, a former minister of planning, acknowledged in a recent social media video that 'people say I have no charisma, that I'm too serious.' Quiroga's association with Banzer, a former military dictator who brutally quashed dissent over seven corruption-plagued years before being democratically elected, has turned some voters off. 'It was a bloody era,' recalled 52-year-old taxi driver Juan Carlos Mamani. 'For me, Tuto is the definition of the old guard.' At the pumps, not the polls Poma Quispe and his 24-year-old brother Weimar have no idea who'd they vote for — or if they'll vote at all. Voting is compulsory in Bolivia, and about 7.9 million people in the country of 12 million are eligible to cast ballots in Sunday's election. Non-voters face various financial penalties. Over the past year, fuel shortages have brought much of Bolivia to a standstill. Truckers waste days at a time queuing at empty gas stations around Bolivia, just to keep their vehicles moving. The diesel arrives on no set schedule, and the rhythm of life is forced to adapt. If the diesel arrives before Sunday, the Poma Quispe brothers will vote. If not, 'there's no way we're giving up our spot in line for those candidates,' Weimar Poma Quispe said. Personal drama over political debate This year's election coincides with the 200th anniversary of Bolivia's independence. But instead of celebrating, many Bolivians are questioning the validity of their democracy and state-directed economic model. Crowds booed at President Arce during his bicentennial speech earlier this month. His government invited left-wing presidents from across Latin America to attend the event; only the president of Honduras showed. The lack of enthusiasm among ordinary Bolivians and beleaguered officials seems matched by that of the candidates. Authorities allowed televised presidential debates — banned under Morales — for the first time in 20 years. The front-runners turned up to just one of them. Personal attacks overshadowed policy discussions. Doria Medina accused Del Castillo of ties to drug traffickers, while Del Castillo mocked the businessman's record of failed presidential bids. Rodríguez and Quiroga traded barbs over alleged involvement in extrajudicial killings. Chasing the youth vote The median age in Bolivia is 26. For comparison, it is 39 in China and the United States. Having grown up under the government of Morales and his MAS party, many young Bolivians are restive, disillusioned by current prospects as they become more digitally connected than any generation before them. Quiroga in particular has energized young voters with his running mate, JP Velasco, a successful 38-year-old tech entrepreneur with no political experience who vows to reverse a brain drain in Bolivia and create opportunities for youth in exploiting the country's abundant reserves of lithium, the critical metal for electric vehicle batteries, and developing data centers. Young crowds packed Quiroga's Wednesday night campaign rally, even as 20-somethings in goth makeup and tight-stretch dresses expressed more interest in the lively cumbia bands than the political speeches. Others sported red MAGA-style caps with Velasco's slogan, 'Make Bolivia Sexy Again.' Cap-wearers offered varying answers on when Bolivia was last 'sexy,' with some saying never, but agreed it meant attractive to foreign investors. 'It won't just be tech companies coming here, McDonald's might even come,' Velasco told the crowd, eliciting whoops and howls. 'Young people, if you go abroad, let it be for vacation.'
Newsweek
38 minutes ago
- Newsweek
ICE Makes Major Change for New Recruits
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) no longer requires new recruits to take a five-week Spanish-language training program, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). "ICE simply replaced the five-week in-person Spanish course with a more robust translation service for all officers regardless of when they entered on duty," DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement to Newsweek. The Intercept first reported the policy change. DHS did not provide details of the translation service. However, Axon, a company with a $5.1 million contract to provide Homeland Security with body-worn cameras, advertises that its latest body camera includes real-time "push-to-talk voice translation" in more than 50 languages. A deportation officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts a brief before an operation in the Bronx borough of New York on December 17, 2024. A deportation officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts a brief before an operation in the Bronx borough of New York on December 17, 2024. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Why It Matters President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration agenda has pushed ICE into the center of the national conversation surrounding immigration enforcement. Since the beginning of Trump's second term, thousands of suspected undocumented migrants have been arrested. Last month, Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which increased funding for ICE—allocating $45 billion to expand detention capacity to almost 100,000 beds, $14 billion for transportation and deportation operations, $8 billion to hire 10,000 additional deportation officers, and additional funding for technology upgrades. ICE is expected to experience a hiring boom after the passage of the key legislation. DHS has said that more than 100,000 people have already applied to join the nation's top immigration enforcement agency. The legislation is expected to support the administration's efforts to accelerate deportations as Trump seeks to fulfill his pledge of widespread mass deportations. What To Know The decision reflects both the federal government's increasing reliance on translation technology and a broader trend under the Trump administration toward scaling back non-English services. Speaking of the new service, McLaughlin said, "This translation service allows our officers to communicate with individuals with all dialects and dozens of different languages." Earlier this year, after Trump issued an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States, several agencies reduced multilingual assistance—despite the order stating that it did not require changes to agency services. DHS, for example, will no longer provide translation help for callers seeking information about employment status or benefits. Given that the vast majority of those arrested by ICE are from predominantly Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, the removal of formal Spanish training for officers is a significant operational shift. ICE's Spanish-language requirement dates back to its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Office of Detention and Removal Operations, which maintained the policy until March 2003, when the office was absorbed into ICE under the newly created DHS. ICE reinstated the program in 2007. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office—Congress' nonpartisan research agency—warned that DHS's failure to adequately assess its language needs posed operational risks. "According to DHS officials, foreign language skills are an integral part of the department's operations," the report said, adding, "These officials told us that while Spanish language proficiency may be identified as an existing capability, it may not always be available and generally the levels of proficiencies vary." In a 2007 memo, ICE described its Spanish-language training program as a five-week course to strengthen listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, with an emphasis on the first two. By 2016, the curriculum shifted to focus on grammar and the ability to perform arrests and complete related documentation. In addition to dropping the Spanish-language training, DHS announced in August that ICE would lower the minimum applicant age from 21 to 18 and remove the previous maximum age limit, which barred applicants over the age of 37 or 40. What People Are Saying DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement to Newsweek: "We are using technology not only to save U.S. taxpayer dollars but to also broaden our ability to communicate with illegal aliens we regularly encounter from countries across the globe."
