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FFM Mogami at the Yokosuka Naval Base on April 8, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Japan wins huge Oz carrier contract, Migrant boat sinks off Yemen, US to require bonds from visa-seekers, Taiwan arrests chip snoops
$6.5 billion: Japan won a $6.5 billion defense contract to build 11 new warships for Australia’s navy on Tuesday. The deal comes as Australia undertakes a major defense overhaul in order to counter China’s expanding presence in the Indo-Pacific.
68: At least 68 African migrants have died after a boat capsized off the coast of Yemen on Sunday. Yemen is a major transit route for migrants from the Horn of Africa – which includes Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and Eritrea – who go to the Gulf monarchies in search of work. The overall death toll is feared to be greater than 140.
15,000: The US is planning to require some visa applicants to pay bonds of up to $15,000, as President Donald Trump continues his crackdown on immigration. The State Department said the measure will target countries whose citizens overstay their visas most often: looking at you, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Haiti, Venezuela, and Spain.
6: Taiwanese authorities have arrested six people suspected of stealing trade secrets from TSMC, the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturer. While their nationalities haven’t been made public yet, China’s Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) and the US’s Intel trail far behind TSMC, which supplies chips to Nvidia and Apple.Salvadoran police officers escort an alleged member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua recently deported by the U.S. government to be imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison, as part of an agreement with the Salvadoran government, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in this handout image obtained March 16, 2025.
Where does Trump’s immigration crackdown stand, nearly 100 days in?
President Donald Trump’s actions against migrants have generated among the most controversy of any of his policies during the first few months of his presidency. His administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a Salvadoran maximum security facility has drawn comparisons to the worst abuses of totalitarian regimes, and Trump’s approval rating on immigration issues has slipped a bit in several polls.
Here’s a brief rundown of three of the most salient actions Trump has taken on migration.
1. Mass deportations of alleged criminal migrants
In March, the Trump administration defied court orders to remove over 200 Venezuelan migrants whom it alleged – without providing proof or due process – were criminals without legal status in the United States. The White House claimed it had the authority to do so thanks to the 1789 Alien Enemies Act, which it invoked to target the Tren de Aragua, a gang it alleges to be conducting “irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
The Supreme Court ruled on April 8 that while the administration could use this act to deport alleged gang members, it must provide them the opportunity to challenge their removals in court first. Eleven days later, it ruled that the administration must halt deportations under the Alien Enemies Act pending a further ruling from the court. The White House derided challenges as “meritless litigation” – even though it admitted in one case, that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, it mistakenly deported him to a potential life sentence in El Salvador. Despite another Supreme Court ruling that the administration must facilitate his return to the United States, the administration says it cannot retrieve him from El Salvador.
2. Executive Order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”
Trump issued this broad executive order, aka PAPAI, within hours of his inauguration. It revokes several Biden-era executive orders related to immigration and attempts to further the crackdown Trump promised on the campaign trail.
For example, it removed restrictions on immigration authorities attempting to make arrests at sensitive locations like churches, schools, or certain workplaces. It urges state and local law enforcement to aid in immigration arrests, which are usually outside their jurisdictions, and threatens so-called sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funds if they do not assist. The order also mandates the creation of “Homeland Security Task Forces” in each state, reporting to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. These task forces are meant to marshall more manpower and resources to make arrests, but the White House has expressed frustration with the pace of detentions.
3. Militarized border protection
In another executive order signed on his first day in office, Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, enabling military forces to take a greater role in securing the region. He also assigned the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot wide strip of land running along much of the border from New Mexico to California, to the Defense Department. DoD has announced it will administer part of the reservation as a section of Fort Huachuca, a military base in Arizona. Doing so will allow military personnel to put up barriers and make arrests as part of their security duties, but those actions are likely to be challenged in court.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the crackdown along the border, apprehensions are way down compared to the Biden administration. Authorities detained just 11,017 attempted migrants along the southern border in March 2025 compared to 189,359 in March 2024.
The first U.S. military aircraft to carry detained migrants to a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, who Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called "highly dangerous criminal aliens," is boarded from an unspecified location on Feb. 4, 2025.
Trump’s plan to send migrants to Guantánamo meets first legal hurdle
On Sunday, Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico granted a temporary restraining order on jurisdictional grounds barring three Venezuelan men from being moved to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay.
It’s the first legal challenge to the Trump administration’s plan to use the base – best known as a prison holding detainees from the “War on Terror” – to house non-citizens to be deported. So far, around 50 people, all believed to be men, have been moved to the base from the US. But the agencies overseeing the flights and detentions haven’t released critical information about the people being held, including their identities or the status of their immigration cases.
The three men, Abrahan Barrios Morales, Luis Perez Parra, and Leonel Rivas Gonzales, all scheduled for deportation since 2023, have been held at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico since November 2023. They are part of a case challenging their indefinite detention at the center, a case that is also being overseen by Judge Gonzales.
“There’s only one purpose to bring [migrants] to Guantánamo,” Seton Hall law professor Jonathan Hafetz says. “To try to extinguish or limit rights that [migrants] have; to have greater secrecy, and fewer protections for migrants.”
This is not the first time that migrants hoping to settle in the US have been held at the base. But the earlier cases differ from those under Trump’s policy because they never made it to the US in the first place; migrants held at Guantánamo were typically coming from Haiti or Cuba and interdicted before they could get to the mainland. Trump is sending people already in the US to Guantánamo, which migrants and advocates see as a legal black hole.
The “War on Terror” made Guantánamo synonymous with human rights abuses and indefinite detention. And while there have been significant legal battles over the “War on Terror” detainees’ constitutional rights, Hafetz says the current situation is more clear-cut.
“Anyone who’s in the United States – and even if they're moved out – you cannot take away someone’s constitutional rights by moving them into an offshore prison,” he says. Furthermore, ICE has no congressional authority to hold migrants at the base; there’s no legal foundation for the plan, according to Hafetz.
Thus far, there are no legal challenges to the new administration’s policy – the lack of information about who’s been moved makes that difficult. But the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal aid and human rights groups have requested immediate access to and information about the people being held there, indicating that bigger legal challenges are coming.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro speaks during his visit and after a binational council of ministers, in Jacmel, Haiti, on Jan. 22, 2025.
White House: Colombia has agreed to take deported migrants
Petro had posted an announcement refusing to accept the flights early Sunday morning, saying, “The US cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals. I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory. The United States must establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them.”
On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted to Truth Social that he would apply “Emergency 25% tariffs on all goods coming into the United States [from Colombia]. In one week, the 25% tariffs will be raised to 50%.” Trump also imposed a travel ban and revoked the visas of Colombian government officials, their “Allies and Supporters” as well as all party members, family members, and supporters of the Colombian government.
In response, Colombia, the US’ third-largest trading partner in Latin America, threatened a 50% tariff on US goods – a risky prospect given that his country is facing a severe fiscal crisis.
By late Sunday, however, the White House said Colombia had agreed to Trump’s terms and would allow the US to send the migrants back to Colombia. This halted the threatened US tariffs, but the visa suspensions reportedly will remain in place until the first plane of deportees lands in Colombia.
We’re watching to see whether Petro continues to accept Trump's terms – or returns to tit-for-tat threats.
People inspect a damaged building after the Russian missile attack on the premises of the lyceum of the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management in Poltava, Ukraine.
Hard Numbers: Russian missile strike prompts fresh Kyiv calls for air defenses, Corruption makes African youth look abroad, Migrant boat capsizes in English Channel, Housing woes hit all-time highs in rich countries, US Marines assaulted in Turkey
51: A Russian ballistic missile strike on a military academy and a hospital in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday killed at least 51 people. After the attack, which occurred in the city of Poltava, about 200 miles from the front lines, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky renewed his call for Western allies to send more air defenses. Separately, the US and Ukraine are close to an agreement on the supply of long-range missiles.
60: How bad is corruption in African countries? Bad enough that 60% of the continent’s young people aged 18 to 24 want to leave because of it, according to a new study by the South Africa-based Ichikowitz Family Foundation. The top destination of choice was North America, followed by Western Europe.
12: At least 12 migrants are dead after their boat capsized in the English Channel en route from France to the UK on Tuesday. Last week, the French and British governments pledged to jointly crack down on the human trafficking networks that bring asylum-seekers across the channel in small boats.
50: The lack of affordable housing is a problem for at least 50% of people in the OECD, a group of nearly 40 wealthy democracies. That’s the highest level of dissatisfaction on record. A combination of high interest rates – which make home loans more expensive – and sluggish construction are to blame. In the US, housing costs are nearly 40% higher than when the Biden administration took office, making housing a key issue in the presidential election. See here for our special report on what Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have pledged to do about it.
2: Two US Marines were assaulted on Monday in Izmir, Turkey, by members of the Turkish Youth Union, a nationalist and anti-American youth organization. Police reportedly detained 15 people over the incident. A video of the altercation showed a group pushing and grabbing two men dressed in civilian clothes, and attempting to put a sack over one of their heads while chanting “Yankee, go home.” Police and other Marines in the area eventually intervened. The two Marines were taken to a hospital to be evaluated but were not injured and have returned to their ship, the USS Wasp.
Migrants, most with children follow a path along the concertina wire where ultimatley they will placed under guard by Border Patrol after having crossed the Rio Grande on May 27 2022 in Eagle Pass Texas, USA. Title 42, the Trump era mandate which was set to prevent migrants from entering the US, was to expire on May 23 but was blocked by a lawsuit filed by several states citing that the move to strike down the law “failed to meet standards set by the Administrative Procedure Act” and that there is no permanent solution to handling the inevitable surge in immigration. Opponents to upholding of the law voiced their demands stating that Title 42 is illegal in that it violates immigration laws that prevents immigrants from their right to seek asylum. Since the implementation of Title 42 in March 2020, US Customs and Border Protection has effected “more than 1.8 million expulsions, mostly on the southern border of the US-Mexico Border”.
Migrants rush to US border fearing Trump’s return
Hundreds of migrants from around a dozen countries left Mexico’s southern border area by foot on Sunday, heading north toward the US border. They hope to make it to the frontier before November’s election out of fear that Donald Trump could win and close the border to asylum-seekers.
Migrants in the group reported that they fear that a Trump administration might stop granting appointments to migrants through CBP One, an app used by asylum-seekers to enter the US legally — by getting appointments at US border posts, where they then make their cases to officials. The app only works in northern Mexico and Mexico City.
Trump is likely to use the caravan to make his case that the US needs a president who is tough on immigration. During the Republican National Convention, he promised to crack down on the border if elected, including increasing deportations of illegal migrants and making asylum-seekers wait in Mexico while their claims are processed.
If the caravan continues to make the headlines, it could be bad news for Kamala Harris, as she trails Trump on immigration and as a majority of Americans – some 55% – believe that immigration levels should be reduced for the first time in two decades.
The Galaxy Leader commercial ship, seized by Yemen's Houthis last month, is seen off the coast of al-Salif, Yemen, December 5, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Migrant boat capsizes off Yemen coast, US banana giant found liable for murders, EU stocks up on bird flu vaccines, “Pink slime” crisis in America
8: A South Florida jury found US banana giant Chiquita liable for the deaths of eight men killed by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, a right-wing paramilitary group designated as terrorists by the US. Chiquita, which financed the AUC with nearly $2 million, was ordered to pay the victims’ families $38.3 million in penalties. Under its former name, the United Fruit Company, Chiquita was famously meddlesome in Latin American politics – its infamous 1928 massacre of striking banana workers in Colombia was immortalized in Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
40 million: These vaccines are for the birds – literally. The European Union has secured 40 million doses of bird flu vaccine as cases of the disease continue to rise. So far, at least 10 US states have reported outbreaks among farm animals in recent months, with three cases of the illness jumping to humans.
1,265: Pink slime is oozing through America. A new study has found that at least 1,265 websites are masquerading as local news outlets while drawing funding from dark money sources or openly political financiers on the left and right. The sites are particularly concentrated in swing states. The grossest part of the story? Owing to the long-standing decline of local journalism, these imposter sites, known as “pink slime” (a beef industry term), now outnumber legitimate local outlets for the first time.
A US-Canada border crossing and monument.
The United States has another border crisis – with Canada
Former Republican nominee hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy was mocked for his proposal during one GOP debate to build border walls with Mexico and Canada.
The problems at the southern border are well-documented. In January, US Border Patrol reported 124,200 encounters with migrants trying to enter the country illegally – and that is a 50% drop from previous months. It is an issue that may cost Joe Biden the election: A Pew Research poll suggested 80% of those surveyed think he is doing a bad job at handling the migrant influx.
Less well-known is that northern border states like Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire are reporting their highest rates of illegal migration in years. Canada is seen as a stepping stone to the US by human smuggling organizations – and it has the added benefit of no border walls or razor wire.
In 2023, roughly 7,000 migrants were arrested for illegally entering the US from Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick – a number higher than the last 12 years combined.
Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia, who patrols the Swanton sector, the 295-mile section of rough border terrain that separates New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire from Canada, tweeted that between April 28 and May 4 there were 492 apprehensions – the same as the whole of 2021.
Erik Lavallee, a US Border Patrol Agent, told CBS News that multiple organizations are using Canada to smuggle individuals to the U.S. Those arrested come from 66 different countries, including India, Haiti, Venezuela, and Mexico.
While less dangerous than the southern crossing – Biden is expected to tighten access to asylum there with new regulations as soon as today – the northern border is not without its perils. Ten migrants died from drowning and hypothermia coming through the Swanton sector.
Lawmakers seem to have been caught flat-footed by the explosion in numbers.
When Biden visited Ottawa in spring 2023, he signed a deal with Justin Trudeau to update the Safe Third Country Agreement that allowed either country to turn back asylum-seekers at unofficial border crossings, on the basis that Canada and the US are “safe” countries for refugees and they should apply where they land. However, this was designed to close a loophole that saw 40,000 migrants a year cross from the States into Canada at the infamous and unofficial Roxham Road crossing in Quebec and hand themselves over to the first border agent.
Policymakers do not yet appear to have woken up to this latest surge of illegal migrants heading in the other direction.