Cars wait in line to cross into the US from Mexico through the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona
Cars wait in line to cross into the US from Mexico through the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona
Illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border are down to their lowest level in decades. Once-crowded migrant shelters are empty. Instead of heading north, people stranded in Mexico are starting to return home in bigger numbers.
The border is almost unrecognisable from just a couple of years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people from around the world were crossing into the US every month in scenes of chaos and upheaval.
President Joe Biden, facing a swell of public outrage during the 2024 election campaign, clamped down on asylum seekers and pushed Mexico to keep migrants at bay. By the end of his term, the border had quieted significantly, and illegal crossings had fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency.
Now, Trump has choked off the flow of migrants even more drastically, solidifying a sweeping turn in US policy with measures that many critics, especially those on the left, have long considered politically unpalatable, legally untenable and ultimately ineffective because they don’t tackle the root causes of migration.
“The entire migration paradigm is shifting,” said Eunice Rendón, the coordinator of Migrant Agenda, a coalition of Mexican advocacy groups. Citing Trump’s array of policies and his threats targeting migrants, she added, “Families are terrified”.
Trump is employing several hardline tactics simultaneously: halting asylum indefinitely for people seeking refuge in the US through the southern border; deploying troops to hunt down, and, perhaps just as crucially, scare away border crossers; widely publicising deportation flights in which migrants are sent home in shackles; and strong-arming governments in Latin America — like Mexico’s — to do more to curb migration.
The new approach has yielded some eye-popping statistics.
In February, the US Border Patrol said it had apprehended 8,347 people trying to illegally cross the border, down from a record high of more than 2,25,000 apprehensions in December 2023.
Those numbers had already been dropping sharply since the Biden administration unveiled its immigration restrictions last year. In December, the final full month Biden was in office, the Border Patrol apprehended 47,330 migrants at the US-Mexico border.
At 1,527 migrants a day, that was the lowest daily average for any month during the entire Biden presidency. But it was still five times as much as the number in February, the first full month after Trump took office.
If that trend holds for a full year, migrant apprehensions in the US could fall to levels unseen since around 1967, according to Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nongovernmental organisation.
There are signs that figures are plummeting farther south in the region, too. The number of people trying to reach the US through the Darién Gap — the forbidding land bridge connecting South America and Central America that is a barometer of future pressure at the US-Mexico border — dropped to 408 in February, down from more than 37,000 in the same month last year, according to Panama’s Immigration Institute.
The shift is cause for celebration among figures who have been calling for tougher restrictions for years.
Under Biden, “the White House leadership promoted a narrative of impotence when it came to immigration”, said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the first Trump administration.
“Securing the border is easy if you have the will to do it,” said Cuccinelli, a prominent hawk on immigration issues. “In the first Trump administration, Trump didn’t have the will to do it,” he argued. “But he does now.”
Trump’s hardened stance on migration is, in some ways, an extension of Biden’s moves at the end of his term. Biden had promoted less-restrictive policies that swelled the number of migrants entering the US during his first three years in office.
But as the backlash to the surge grew, Biden barred asylum for migrants if they crossed illegally and pressured the Mexican and Panamanian governments to do more to curb migrant flows, delivering to his successor a relatively calm situation at the border.
Political sentiment in the US has also shifted. Leaders who once championed their cities as sanctuaries for migrants are growing quieter in their resistance to Trump’s policies. And some Democratic governors have highlighted areas of potential cooperation on migration enforcement.