WH: ‘Illegal Border Crossings “Plummeted” in January’

CBP released its latest encounter numbers for the month of January, and it didn’t take long for the White House to take a victory lap, crowing “Illegal Border Crossings ‘Plummeted’ in January”. The folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are referring to the decline as “the Trump Effect”, a likely inadvertent nod to a term my colleagues and I have long used to describe the impact of the president’s rhetoric on illegal entries. How long it lasts depends on what the president — and Congress and the courts — do next.

Border Patrol Apprehensions

At the outset of Title 42 in March 2020, CBP began using the term “encounter” to refer to two different law-enforcement actions: apprehensions of aliens entering illegally over the nation’s borders; and aliens deemed “inadmissible” (generally because they lack proper entry documents) at U.S. ports of entry.

Those apprehensions are carried out by agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, and in January they stopped 29,116 migrants attempting to enter illegally at the Southwest border — a 38.5 percent decline compared to December, but more significantly, less than a quarter of total apprehensions in January 2024 (124,215).

As my colleague Todd Bensman has reported, Southwest border apprehensions declined in the last year of Biden-Harris largely because the prior administration struck a “backroom deal” under which Mexican troops would stop “other than Mexican” migrants who were traversing through our neighbor to the south illegally on their way to the United States.

As the Wall Street Journal described the impacts of that Biden deal with Mexico City in analyzing the latest numbers: “The significant shift went largely unnoticed during the presidential campaign, when Trump used the border crisis to campaign against Biden and other Democrats.”

That is true but misses a major point. It’s beyond cavil that Trump campaigned heavily on illegal immigration, but he was able to do so successfully because the Biden — and then Harris — presidential campaigns largely ceded the issue to the challenger.

Why those successive Democratic presidential campaigns failed to play up their diplomatic victories with the Mexican government is no mystery, even if it’s not received a lot of popular attention.

Although “immigration” was the second biggest issue on voters’ minds in a Harvard/Harris poll three weeks before the election, it was the third-lowest polling issue for Democrats (just ahead of parental rights and the Israel-Gaza conflict), who in any event preferred Kamala Harris’s handling of immigration by a 65-point margin over Donald Trump.

For Harris to have any hope of victory, she had to turn out her Democratic base, and images of Mexican troops forcefully turning back migrants likely would not have played too well with them. Consequently, Harris never mentioned the role her White House played in that deal, and Trump had no interest in making the then-vice president look good over the issue.

But, almost as soon as he took office, Trump did Biden one better, using tariff threats to convince the Mexican government to put 10,000 more troops on its side of our Southwest border. That’s one reason why — according to that White House press release — apprehensions declined by 85 percent in the 10 days after Trump was sworn in for a second time, compared to the same period one year before.

On February 17, Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, tweeted:

If that figure is correct (and Homan wouldn’t tweet it if it weren’t), the Border Patrol is on track to make fewer than 6,500 Southwest border apprehensions this month, which would be far and away the lowest monthly total in the last 26 fiscal years, and likely the lowest since FY 1967.

In any event, USBP’s Southwest border apprehension total in January is the lowest monthly figure since May 2020 (21,593), which was less than three months after migrant expulsions under Title 42 began.

Things are not quite so rosy on the Northern border, however, but they are still not bad.

In January, Northern border USBP agents apprehended 616 illegal entrants, less than 20 percent more than in December, but just two-thirds of what their apprehensions were in January 2024 (926).

Like Mexico, Canada also caved to Trump tariff threats to secure its border against illicit traffic, moving 10,000 additional Canadian Border Services Agency staffers, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers, and local and provincial cops to the “world’s longest undefended border”. The impact of those moves won’t be known until CBP’s February numbers come out.

Every illegal entry is a security risk, but respectfully that slight uptick in January is little more than a rounding error compared to what illicit entries at the U.S.-Canada line have been in recent years.

In FY 2023, Northern border apprehensions more than quadrupled from the prior fiscal year, to just over 10,000, before more than doubling again to nearly 24,000 in FY 2024.

A March 2023 expansion of the U.S.-Canada “Safe Third Country” asylum agreement that permits each country to return illegal entrants to the other should have driven USBP Northern border apprehensions down, but it didn’t because the Biden DHS continued processing asylum claimants heading south as it had been doing, for reasons unknown.

As a result, the only benefits of the Safe Third Country expansion accrued to Ottawa and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — not to Americans. Though it’s not received much attention, I seriously doubt that Trump has followed Biden’s lead on asylum claims coming from Canada.

Port of Entry Encounters

In January 2023, in a political gambit to drive the number of apprehensions at the Southwest border down, the Biden-Harris administration announced what it termed two “lawful pathways” for would-be illegal migrants to enter the United States.

The first, “CHNV parole”, allowed 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States monthly on two-year periods of “parole”.

The second — which I dubbed the “CBP One app interview scheme” — permitted inadmissible aliens to schedule appointments at select Southwest border ports using the pre-existing CBP One app “to initiate a protection claim instead of coming directly to a port of entry to wait”.

In short order, CBP was making up to 1,450 port appointments available per day for app users, and while there wasn’t much visibility into that interview process, congressional disclosures did reveal that nearly 96 percent of app users were subsequently paroled in.

Both CHNV parole and the CBP One app interview scheme were riddled with fraud, and the latter was vulnerable to human- and sex-trafficking as well. Those facts, coupled with the inconvenient truth that neither was authorized by statute (and thus were facially illegal) spelled their doom as soon as Trump took office.

Because beneficiaries of the two programs lacked lawful admission documents when they arrived, they were counted in CBP’s tally of inadmissibles. That was a key reason why agency encounters at the ports rose from just less than 552,000 in FY 2022 to nearly 1.344 million in FY 2024.

In January, nationwide port encounters (51,653) dropped by almost a third compared to December, and by more than half compared to January 2024 (more than 117,000), showing both how quickly Trump shut down CHNV parole and the CBP One app interview scheme and the adverse impact those programs had on port security.

Southwest border ports saw a similar decline, with encounters there falling to fewer than 32,400, as opposed to nearly 49,000 in December.

Overall Encounters

Overall, CBP tallied fewer than 82,000 encounters in January, less than two-thirds what they were in December and just over a third of what they were in January 2024 (242,500-plus).

As the White House explained:

During the previous administration, the average number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border in January was 141,710 — the result of dangerous policies that ferried illegal aliens directly into our communities, where they were allowed to stay indefinitely.

Now, under President Trump, illegal border crossings are at record lows as illegal aliens are promptly arrested and sent home.

To maintain this pace, the administration must keep the diplomatic heat on Mexico and Canada, expand DHS migrant deterrence efforts and detention space, and win some ongoing legal battles.

As the Journal notes:

Border Patrol officials have said that the administration’s new policy of completely ignoring asylum claims — the legality of which is being challenged in court — has meant that migrants, no matter their circumstance, can be quickly deported back to Mexico or loaded onto removal flights.

It’s common knowledge that illegal migrants (and, more importantly, their smugglers) have gamed the asylum system for years in bids to be released into the United States.

Regardless, Trump treads on trickly legal grounds in restricting migrants’ asylum claims, but as Finley Peter Dunne noted, “No matter whether the constitution follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns”.

Whether that’s enough to overcome challenges to the asylum bars in Trump’s January 20 presidential proclamation, “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion”, remains to be seen, but Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, hasn’t shied away from tough legal fights in the past.

Still, Trump will need to expand migrant detention regardless of how the courts rule, and right now the detention money is tied up in Congress’s ongoing reconciliation discussions. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is a tough nut to crack, but there’s no shortage of nuts on Capitol Hill.

The good news for the White House is that CBP border and port encounters are down, largely due to a combination of new policies and the “Trump Effect”. The not-so-good news is that the border was in similar shape when the president first arrived in 2017, but the security didn’t last. That said, “47” has plainly learned the hard lessons of “45”, and is moving quickly to keep his good news coming.