Has the Dark Lord actually reduced border crossings?

One can argue about his tactics (sanctuary cities, deportation rules...) but Trump's been elected twice on the issue of illegal immigration. Generally speaking most Americans want a more secure border. They now have one.

Ironically, in the decades before Joe, our border policy was generally a massive success. Sure, millions of Mexicans entered our nation illegally, but they assimilated and quickly became employed (good citizens).

Biden's pivot was to let too many people in too fast. The Venezuelans that entered did not have the work skills of their predecessors. Will they also assimilate and do fine? Probably after the bad apples (a minority of those who entered are sent back.

Border Crossings Grind to Halt as Trump’s Tough Policies Take Hold

Illegal crossings at southern border are at lowest levels in decades, as a trend that began before the election has continued under new administration

By Kejal VyasFollow, Elizabeth Findell and Santiago Pérez, WSJ

April 19, 2025 9:00 pm ET

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico— In this border city, large groups of migrants marching toward the U.S. have all but halted. Migrant encampments are disappearing, and few people are trying to sneak across remote desert areas to start new lives in the U.S.

“The door is closed,” said Yorman Briceño, a Venezuelan migrant staying at a church-run shelter in Ciudad Juárez, just across from the border from El Paso, Texas.

He had been waiting about six months for his Jan. 23 appointment to request asylum in the U.S. under a Biden-era program, until it was scrapped by President Trump on Jan. 20. Now, after watching how others have been rounded up in immigration sweeps and extradited by the U.S. to a notorious prison in El Salvador, he said he wasn’t even sure he wanted to go anymore.

“There’s no more hope for entering legally as long as Donald Trump is there, and anyone telling you otherwise is lying,” said Briceño.

During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to shut the U.S. border to illegal immigration after surreptitious crossings reached record levels under the Biden administration.

As the issue featured prominently in the campaign, migrant encounters tallied by U.S. authorities fell precipitously in the months leading to the election. Since taking office, Trump has delivered on his pledge as encounters have since fallen further to their lowest levels since the 1960s.

For the moment, tighter controls by the U.S. and Mexico, along with Trump’s moves to shut down legal immigration pathways has brought migrant crossings to all but a standstill. The administration’s targeted and dramatic expulsion of migrants to the prison in El Salvador has also created a powerful deterrent.

Though Trump is struggling to deliver on another campaign promise—mass deportations—the border is an early political victory. According to a Wall Street Journal poll in March, 53% of voters approve of Trump’s handling of border security, while 43% disapprove.

At an annual Border Security Expo this month in Phoenix, administration officials celebrated the low border crossing numbers to a crowd of hundreds.

Border czar Tom Homan said “gotaways”—an agency guess of how many people might have crossed the border without getting caught, based on clues such as footprints and camera sightings—had dropped to 41 the day before.

“Forty-one is pretty good,” he said. “But we’ll get to zero. And when we get to zero, we’ll have operational control of the U.S. border for the first time in this nation’s history.”

Behind the numbers

Illegal border crossings declined significantly in the final year of the Biden administration, from a period of record highs that at one point saw 250,000 Border Patrol arrests in a single month. That number dropped to around 48,000 in December, the last full month of former President Joe Biden’s term, and to just over 7,000 in March.

Border-security experts say that crossings often fall with changes of policy or administration, but also frequently rise as migrants and human smugglers adjust. Still, experts say the current reversal at the border is startling.

The administration has credited the drop in crossings to its decision to send thousands of active duty troops to the border as a deterrent and its move to shut down a program known as CBP One, which migrants used to make appointments to ask for asylum. As a result, tens of thousands of migrants who were awaiting a turn are now stranded in Mexico. Many are now heading back to their communities.

Trump’s emphasis on closing the border has been effective, but some of Biden’s later immigration policies—implemented after immigration policy became a top campaign issue—have given Trump helpful tools, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

Biden officials pushed Mexico to step up immigration enforcement in early 2024, which eliminated large concentrations of asylum seekers in border communities that would then overwhelm U.S. border towns. And an agreement last year to provide funding for Panama’s government to deport migrants crossing the treacherous jungle paths of the Darién Gap has deterred asylum seekers from heading north.

To halt migrants trying to brave the harsh desert terrain in Mexico, police for the state of Chihuahua, which includes Ciudad Juárez and shares the longest land border with the U.S., have been increasing patrols along the porous frontier in tandem with their American counterparts.

On a recent day, more than a dozen officers carrying rifles piled into pickups. They surveyed holes in the mesh border wall that traffickers had cut open to sneak people across, but which had been recently patched up by U.S. authorities.

“We’ve noticed a big reduction in the flows,” said Inspector Eduardo Esparza as he led the patrol, He pointed out homes in a shantytown that hugs the border wall where police have identified numerous coyotes, or smugglers, helping migrants get to the U.S.

Esparza said he was worried crossings could pick up again because the trade war with the U.S. threatens to weaken Mexico’s border economy and could drive more residents toward illicit activities such as human-trafficking and drug smuggling.

U.S. immigration officials and analysts now expect illegal migration dynamics to be similar to those seen in the 1980s and 1990s, when most Mexican and Guatemalan job seekers would sneak into the U.S. and try to evade detection, instead of surrendering to U.S. authorities and requesting asylum as Venezuelans and migrants from other countries have done in recent years.

Mass arrivals of asylum seekers required a heavy logistical effort of U.S. authorities because of shelter and legal-processing standards, while undocumented job seekers caught crossing the border are usually subject to immediate deportation.

While the Trump administration hasn’t executed mass deportations, Selee said the U.S. government is sending a clear message with its harsh rhetoric and increased use of social media to show the incarceration of Venezuelan migrants in a prison for gang members in El Salvador.

What happens next

Though he was happy with progress on the border, Homan said deportation efforts needed to be intensified. “We’ve got to find them,” he said in an interview. “We’ve got to step our game up.”

The Mexican government has installed nine tent cities along the 2,000-mile-long border in anticipation of the mass deportations that Trump has promised. In Ciudad Juárez, a cluster of white tents resembling warehouses were erected on the site where Pope Francis gave an address in 2016 pleading for migrants’ rights.

The facility, with capacity to hold 2,500 people, offers hot meals, beds and psychological counseling. But it has sat largely empty since opening Feb. 20. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said her government could close some of the shelters if they weren’t being used.

“Deportations have been much lower than what we were expecting, even below the rates we saw under President Biden,” said Ana Laura Rodela, who helps manage the shelter in Ciudad Juárez.

Among the few deportees at the center on a recent day was 21-year-old Leonel Ramos, who recounted his experience seeking his American dream—one that lasted a mere few minutes. Last month, he and a neighbor from their poor town in southern Mexico hopped the wall to the U.S. only to be arrested by U.S. Border Patrol, which Ramos said was sitting just yards away. He was detained for four days before being sent back to Mexico without any of his belongings.

“For now, I don’t want to try crossing again,” he said.

Rio Grande near the U.S.-Mexico border with a border wall in the background.