Lost in the din of a violent week is CBP’s release of its statistics for agency “encounters” for the month of November. They reveal that not only is the border secure, but historically secure and becoming more so. Illegal migrant “travel season” starts in February, however, and we’ll soon see how long it lasts, but for now the greatest border accomplishment of Trump II can be measured in the record low number of alien children who are attempting to cross illegally – news you likely won’t hear about anywhere else.
“Encounters”
By way of background (or refresher), the term “encounters” refers to the total of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol entering illegally between the ports and other alien “applicants for admission” stopped by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the ports of entry because they are deemed “inadmissible” to the United States (usually because they lack proper entry documents).
Under section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), DHS must detain both categories of aliens until they are either admitted, expelled, or granted some form of immigration “relief” that allows them to live here legally.
That detention mandate, however, was largely ignored by Biden’s DHS – a misbegotten policy that drew historic numbers of aliens to enter illegally, and that triggered passage of the first bill to become law in the current 119th Congress, S.5, the “Laken Riley Act”.
Southwestern Border Apprehensions
In November, Border Patrol apprehended 7,350 aliens who had entered the United States illegally, 8 percent fewer than in October (7,990), and an 84-percent decline compared to November 2024 (46,609).
Traditionally (pre-Biden), November and December were slow periods for illegal entries, for a simple reason: most people in the West want to spend the holidays with family, not starting a new life in a strange country.
So many aliens entered illegally during the last administration, however, that this calculus was reversed: nearly 250,000 illegal migrants were stopped in December 2023, the highest figure for any given month in recorded history, and it’s safe to assume they were coming because they wanted to spend Christmas and New Year’s with their loved ones who were already here.
By contrast, the lowest monthly totals for Southwest border apprehensions (monthly totals go back to October 1999) have all been recorded under Trump II. The all-time low (4,592) was set in July 2025, and if Border Patrol was busier than that last month, it’s only because of how well agents had it in the summer.
Demographics
More important, from an enforcement standpoint, is who’s coming, and on that score the news is even better. Nearly two-thirds, 67.4 percent, of the migrants apprehended at the Southwest border in November were Mexican nationals, most of whom agents can process and return in about eight hours.
Even better, more than 85 percent of those aliens were single adults. It’s a lot easier for agents to detain and process aliens over the age of 18 travelling alone for a variety of reasons (some legal, some practical).
Traditionally (prior to the 2010s), nearly all aliens apprehended at the U.S.-Mexican line were single adults from Mexico, and the closer CBP can get to that standard, the better.
“Unaccompanied Alien Child” Apprehensions Plummet
In that vein, the number of apprehensions of “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs) at the Southwest border has plummeted under Trump II.
Again, briefly (I’ve written reams about UACs elsewhere) a poorly reasoned – and even more poorly implemented – 2008 law divides alien children encountered by DHS without parents or guardians into two different groups: those who are from “contiguous” countries (Mexico and Canada); and those from “noncontiguous” countries (everywhere else).
Kids from contiguous countries can be quickly returned if they haven’t been trafficked and don’t fear persecution, while DHS must send any child from a non-contiguous country to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) within 72 hours for “shelter” and placement with a “sponsor” (usually the parent or guardian, mostly here illegally, too), regardless of whether those UACs have been trafficked or face persecution.
If that sounds like a “loophole” to you, you’re in good company: then President Obama and the editorial board of the Washington Post came to the same conclusion in 2014, and in practice it’s been like adding a pack of hyenas to a collection of bunnies, lambs, and capybaras at the local petting zoo.
Not that Congress has paid much attention to the numbers of migrant children who have been robbed, raped, trafficked, exploited, and abused thanks to the law. Anything that’s complicated, sympathetic, or lucrative is easily demagogued, and the UAC issue falls into all three buckets.
So, the UAC beat goes on, and there’s likely little “Orange Man Bad” can do to fix that 2008 law, but in the interim Border Patrol agents apprehended just 679 UACs at the Southwest border in November, and most (69 percent) were from the contiguous country of Mexico.
To put total UAC Southwest border apprehensions in November into context, consider the that in March 2022, agents apprehended 28 times as many – nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children, more than 87 percent of whom were from non-contiguous countries (including almost 16,000 from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras).
In the 10 full months of Trump II (February to November 2025), agents have apprehended just under 5,700 UACs at the Southwest border, 570 per month and on track for a 12-month total of about 6,840 UAC apprehensions.
By comparison, nearly 100,000 UACs were apprehended at the Southwest border in FY 2024, a “good year” by Biden standards compared to the 131,500-plus kids stopped (“saved” might be a better term in this context) by Border Patrol at the Southwest border in FY 2023 and nearly 145,000 Southwest border UAC apprehensions in FY 2022.
Monthly records for Southwest border UAC apprehensions date to October 2009 (when smugglers began leaning into the 2008 loophole), and prior to Trump II, apprehensions dipped below 1,000 just three times: in December 2009 (998); and in the depths of the late pandemic-related global travel shutdown in April (712) and May 2020 (966).
Aside from last May (1,007), monthly Southwest border UAC apprehensions under Trump II have never exceeded triple digits, and note that November’s total is lower than even those Covid-19 nadirs.
That frees up Border Patrol to attend to other duties (like apprehending criminals and stopping guns, drugs, and other contraband), while giving ORR and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a breather to evaluate how to do UAC-related things better.
That Trump II decline in Southwest border UAC apprehensions is likely the greatest accomplishment of the president, his “border czar” Tom Homan, and CBP Commissioner (and former Biden Border Patrol Chief) Rodney Scott, but good luck hearing about it from any other source.
OFO Encounters
Just to close the loop, CBP officers in OFO encountered 21,162 inadmissible applicants for admission in November, a 2.2 percent increase compared to October (20,705) but a fraction (27.3 percent) of OFO encounters in November 2024 (nearly 77,500).
That year-over-year decline can be easily explained: with the border an increasingly heavy political albatross around its neck, the Biden-Harris administration in January 2023 began using “novel” (read: “likely illegal”) policies to discourage would-be migrants from entering illegally by funneling them through the ports instead.
Under those two policies, “CHNV Parole” (for nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) and what I’ve dubbed the “CBP One interview scheme” (which allowed migrants to use an app to schedule appointments at the Southwest border ports), up to 72,000 aliens presented themselves at the ports monthly, all of whom were de jure “inadmissible” because they lacked admission documents (like visas).
Consequently, they were all “encountered” by CBP, which explains why, for example, OFO logged more than 121,000 encounters nationwide in the month of August 2023 alone, and nearly 120,000 others in December 2023, the same month Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border hit a new record.
Trump II quickly ended CHNV Parole and the CBP One interview scheme, which explains why CBP port encounters have fallen to more reasonable (and traditional) levels ever since.
* * *
Border and port security isn’t hard; the INA provides a panoply of tools to achieve it. For the first time in a long time, however, the department is willing to use those tools and the result can clearly be seen in a set of figures CBP releases monthly – and one involving unaccompanied alien children, in particular.