President Donald Trump pushed border encounters to historical lows, and did so without signing into law a bipartisan border deal relentlessly lauded by his Democratic opponents.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that there were a mere 200 migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border on Feb. 22, marking the lowest single-day apprehension number in over 15 years. This milestone was followed up by President Donald Trump’s announcement that there were only 8,326 migrant apprehensions at the border during his first full month in office, a figure dwarfed by the regular monthly averages seen during the previous administration.
The southern border is becoming so quiet that Tom Homan, who is leading the Trump administration’s deportation operation, says he doesn’t recall activity this calm in his entire career in federal immigration enforcement. The border czar first began working for the Border Patrol in 1984.
Control of the southern border happened despite bipartisan border legislation introduced in early 2024 never becoming law. Then-President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — who both claimed the bill was absolutely necessary in fixing the border crisis that began under their watch — repeatedly blamed Trump for its failure to pass Congress.
“Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it’s bad for him politically,” Biden said in February 2024 about the bill’s failure. “Therefore, he doesn’t — even though it would help the country, he’s not for it.”
“He’d rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it,” the former president continued.
The bipartisan border deal — introduced by Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford, Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and former independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — was a multi-billion dollar package that aimed to reduce border crossings by imposing stricter immigration and asylum laws. However, the bill also included provisions that ostensibly had nothing to do with the border crisis, such as aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, and it quickly fell out of favor with many GOP lawmakers.
Biden was far from the only Democrat to blame Trump and claim the legislation was paramount to fixing the border crisis. Harris, who replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee following his disastrous debate performance, made it a top theme in her immigration platform.
“But you know what happened to that bill?” Harris asked during her presidential debate with Trump in September. “Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress, and said kill the bill.”
“And you know why? Because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said.
However, since re-entering office, every metric appears to indicate that the Trump administration is fixing the immigration crisis. Not only have migrant encounters along the U.S-Mexico border fallen to historical lows, but popular migrant routes far south of Mexico have plummeted in activity — indicating that many would-be illegal migrants are simply not even bothering to enter the U.S. under the current administration.
More than half a million migrants crossed the Darien Gap, a vast jungle region between Panama and Colombia, at the height of the migrant crisis in 2023. Migrant crossings through the Darien dropped a staggering 94% in January compared to the same month last year, according to data released by Panama’s National Migration Service.
Authorities in Central America have since reported on a reverse migratory trend unfolding in the region, with many migrants now actually heading the opposite direction to reach destinations in South America — and even paying smugglers to help them.
“Along the U.S. – Mexico frontier, Customs and Border Protection is currently reporting some of the lowest numbers of illegal alien encounters ever,” Matt O’Brien, investigation director for the Immigration Reform Law institute, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This is proof-positive all that has ever been needed to secure America’s borders is a Trump-style commitment to actually using the enforcement authorities that have been in the Immigration and Nationality Act for decades.”
“The Biden Administration claims that it couldn’t end illegal migration without passing an absurd new immigration bill were never anything but lies aimed at gaslighting the American public,” O’Brien said.
On his first day back in the Oval Office, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders aimed at controlling the southern border. His orders included a national emergency declaration allowing him to divert more military resources to the U.S.-Mexico border and resume wall construction, a designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a pause on refugee admissions and an end to birthright citizenship for individuals born on U.S. soil to illegal migrant parents.
Trump successfully coerced both the Mexican and Canadian governments to do more to bolster border security, including a commitment of 10,000 national guard troops by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to help stop the flow of illegal immigration and illicit drugs.
The White House has also overseen a number of administrative changes, such as the cancellation of the CBP One app, the removal of “sensitive location” restrictions for deportation officers, and the marshaling of nearly every federal agency to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement in its arrest and deportation mission. The result has been the arrest of more than 20,000 illegal migrants in Trump’s first month in office, a rate far outpacing the Biden administration.
The actions are a far cry from Biden’s first month in office. The former president began by immediately attempting to order a moratorium on deportations for his first 100 days, and went on to issue a slate of executive orders that specifically unrolled the immigration enforcement apparatus built under Trump’s first term.
Biden also immediately halted border wall construction, shuttered the Remain in Mexico program, ended Safe Third Country agreements with key Latin American nations and undertook other actions that opened up the country to illegal immigration. Altogether, his administration made 296 executive actions on immigration issues in his first year in office.
What followed after these executive orders was an unprecedented level of unlawful migration into the U.S. Fiscal year 2024 was the second worst year in history for illegal immigration, with nearly three million inadmissible encounters taking place, a number only surpassed by the record level experienced the previous year. An analysis by The New York Times found the level of net migration into the country under Biden was the largest in the country’s history.
Immigration hawks argue that all it took was the enforcement of laws already on the books, not the passage of new laws, to get the southern border under control.
“Instead of securing our borders, President Biden refused to enforce America’s immigration laws and instituted four years of open-borders policies,” Joey Chester, communications manager for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said to the DCNF. “The only reason he and others pushed for the Senate border bill last year is because it codified many of those open-borders policies into law and gave them a talking point to cover for years of reckless policies.”
“The Trump administration has shown that the president has the authority to secure America’s borders, and illegal border crossings have plummeted as a result,” Chester said. “President Trump is doing this by enforcing our immigration laws, apprehending and detaining illegal aliens who cross the border, halting mass parole programs, ending asylum abuse, and shutting down the abuse of the CBP One app for illegal aliens to make appointments to enter the U.S.”
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