As the Trump administration continues to overhaul the country’s immigration enforcement apparatus, encounters along the southern border are bottoming out to levels not experienced in decades, federal data shows.
Border czar Tom Homan, who is spearheading the White House’s ambitious deportation operation, revealed Monday that there were merely 229 Border Patrol encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border within the previous day, a figure he suggested to be the lowest rate since he first joined the U.S. Border Patrol in 1984. A review of past Border Patrol encounters, which are encounters made between ports of entry, shows he’s correct — and the numbers haven’t been this low since the 1960s.
In the last 24 hours the US Border Patrol has encountered a total of 229 aliens across the entire southwest border. That is down from a high of over 11,000 a day under Biden. I started as a Border Patrol Agent in 1984 and I don’t remember the numbers ever being that low.…
— Thomas D. Homan (@RealTomHoman) February 17, 2025
If Border Patrol agents working along the southern border encountered 229 migrants every single day, the fiscal year total would equate to 83,585. If encounters continue to decline throughout the year, the final tally for fiscal year 2025 could be even lower.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) provides annual encounter numbers along the U.S.-Mexico border dating back more than half a century. Calculating the daily average encounter rate from the CBP data shows Border Patrol agents haven’t experienced average numbers this low since fiscal year 1968, when there were only 62,640 reported encounters along all of the southwest sectors.
While daily encounters fluctuate throughout the year, immigration experts say the recent drop in numbers is a clear consequence of the policy changes handed down by President Donald Trump.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented decrease in the number of encounters at the border,” Eric Ruark, research director for NumbersUSA, a Washington, D.C.,-based immigration organization, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Obviously, that is a Trump effect.”
“There’s every reason to believe that we’re going to see historic lows when it comes to encounters now between ports of entry and people trying to sneak across,” Ruark said of future border activity under Trump. “The Trump administration is serious and they’re going to continue to be serious about not just talking about ending illegal immigration, but doing everything they can do to prevent it going forward.”
On average, the Biden administration was overseeing about 5,605 Border Patrol encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border every single day. The highest single-day record was broken on Dec. 18, 2023 when more than 12,600 migrant encounters were made on just that one day.
Since returning to office, Trump has undertaken an exhaustive list of actions aimed at controlling and discouraging illegal immigration, such as executive orders declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and ending birthright citizenship to individuals born on American soil to illegal migrant parents. The administration has defunded or entirely nixed Biden-era initiatives that promulgated immigration, such as the Safety Mobility Initiative, the CBP One app and parole programs for foreign nationals.
In the most recent action, Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that directs federal agencies to identify programs that provide taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal migrants and cease action. The order further prohibits federal funds from being used to promote sanctuary policies at the state and local level.
Soldiers deployed along the southern border have been able to assist Border Patrol agents and other CBP personnel with their mission, providing an added layer of security to stem the flow of illegal immigration and illicit drugs.
Many illegal migrants waiting in Latin America simply gave up and turned around after Trump was elected in November, figuring there was no hope of making it through under the new administration. That many migrants are not even bothering to attempt to reach the southern border is indicated in the incredible drop in crossings through the Darien Gap — a large jungle region between Panama and Colombia traversed by northbound migrants hoping to make it into the U.S.
The current border numbers are a far cry from the illegal immigration crisis that waged under the Biden administration.
There were roughly 2,045,800 Border Patrol encounters along the southern border in fiscal year 2023 and roughly 1,530,500 encounters in fiscal year 2024, according to CBP data. When including both Border Patrol and CBP encounters at ports of entry, fiscal years 2023 and 2024 were the highest and second highest in the country’s history, respectively.
Faced with tough re-election prospects and sinking approval ratings on his handling of the immigration crisis, then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order in June that limited the number of asylum seekers appearing before the border. That order began a downward trend in activity, but the numbers plummeted even further after Trump entered office and got to work on his immigration enforcement agenda.
“The actions taken by President Trump to secure our border and make A_merica safe again have been nothing less than historic, including by reducing illegal border crossings by over 60 percent in his first week in office alone,” House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green said in a Wednesday press release. Green pointed to Trump policies for the downturn, such as the rollback of the CBP One app and the “fraud-ridden” CHNV program that paroled thousands of Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants into the country.
The administration’s border enforcement effort is “without question” the biggest crackdown in American history, according to Ruark, who pointed out that Trump’s second term will likely far outpace the immigration record of his first administration.
“You had a lot of people initially who weren’t really on board with Trump’s immigration agenda,” Ruark said of the president’s first-term staff. “That’s totally different in the second term, and these are people who, from day one, and we’ve seen the results, have come in and are putting in effective policies that are in line with what Trump campaigned off.”
“We have every reason to be optimistic going forward, so we’ve certainly been happy, but again, the big challenge is, ‘what do you do you do about all the people who are who are here?’” Ruark pointed out. “And that’s going to be, I think, a huge challenge for the Trump administration because you had anywhere from seven to nine million people who got in illegally under the Biden administration, and many of them are still here.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
