Trump Highlights Immigration, Border, in Congressional Address

On March 4, Donald Trump delivered an address to a joint session of Congress — equivalent to a “State of the Union address”, only given by a newly inaugurated president. His speech highlighted immigration and the border, and his remarks on those points received strong grades in post-address polling.

“Most Successful” First Month Results in “Lowest Ever” Border Crossings. Trump has spent most of his life as a developer, salesman, and showman (and often all three at once), so it’s not surprising that he leans heavily into hyperbole when he speaks publicly.

This tendency was evident from the outset of his address:

it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency — it’s our presidency — is the most successful in the history of our nation. By many.

And what makes it even more impressive is that do you know who No. 2 is? George Washington. How about that? How about that? I don’t know about that list, but. But we’ll take it. Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border. And I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country. And what a job they’ve done. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded ever.

As St. Louis Cardinals’ Hall of Fame pitcher Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean once remarked, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.” While I cannot comment on President Washington’s achievements in his first 30 days, my colleague Todd Bensman has detailed Trump’s undeniable border successes during his first month back.

Here’s a quick recap: While official numbers won’t be released until the middle of March, Axios reports that Border Patrol agents apprehended approximately 8,300 illegal entrants at the Southwest border in the month of February.

CBP publishes monthly apprehension statistics for the Southwest border back to October 1999 (the first month of FY 2000), and the lowest reported monthly total during that period was 11,127, in April 2017 (two months into Trump’s first term). By that metric, Trump is clearly correct in stating that “illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded ever”.

That said, yearly Southwest border apprehension statistics are available back to FY 1960, a year in which just over 21,000 illegal entrants were nabbed coming in from Mexico.

That’s an average of 1,752 per month, much lower than the Axios total for February. But that doesn’t tell the full story, because those published figures represent the number of aliens apprehended coming in — not the total number of migrants who attempted to enter illegally.

For much of our recorded border history, many more aliens successfully entered illegally without being caught than the number who were apprehended. In FY 2003, for example, the department estimates that more than two illegal migrants got through successfully for every one who was actually caught.

You can’t blame Border Patrol, however. In FY 2003, there were fewer than 9,850 agents keeping watch over the 1,954 miles of border separating the United States from Mexico, or about 42 percent fewer than there were in FY 2020 (16,878), when nearly three-quarters of illegal entrants were apprehended.

Likely the Most Secure Border Ever. Illegal migrants who successfully evade apprehension and enter are defined in statute as “got-aways”, and the House Homeland Security Committee reports that there were “roughly” two million of them between FY 2021 and the end of November.

And as Biden’s last Border Patrol chief, Jason Owens, told CBS News last March:

what’s keeping me up at night is the … known got-aways. … Why are they risking their lives and crossing in areas where we can’t get to? Why are they hiding? What do they have to hide? What are they bringing in? What is their intent? Where are they coming from? We simply don’t know the answers to those questions. Those things for us are what represent the threat to our communities.

Thanks to the various policies that the Trump administration has implemented to deter migrants from entering illegally and the president’s deployment of 5,000 active-duty troops to assist Border Patrol in its mission, the “apprehension rate” (total apprehensions divided by “unlawful entry attempts”) at the Southwest border is now likely approaching 95 percent or more.

Given that, regardless of how you measure it, illegal border crossings right now are at or near their lowest level ever — or at least as long as there have been laws making unchecked crossings illegal. In other words, the Southwest border is almost definitely as secure now as it has ever been, and probably more secure than at any point in the past.

“The Largest Deportation Operation in American History”. Trump also underscored the threat posed by deadly drugs — and fentanyl, in particular — during his address, tying the insecure border under the prior administration to American overdose deaths:

The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels, which we are doing.

…

But we need Mexico and Canada to do much more than they’ve done, and they have to stop the fentanyl and drugs pouring into the U.S.A.

They are going to stop it. I have sent Congress a detailed funding request laying out exactly how we will eliminate these threats to protect our homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than current record-holder President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders.

While the president’s jump from Mexican cartels and fentanyl to his promise of “the largest deportation operation in American history” may make the latter seem like a non sequitur, I have described in the past how cartels have staged migrant entries to divert Border Patrol agents in order to create “controllable gaps” along the border that smugglers then exploit to bring drugs through.

I have also explained how an increase in deportations makes it less likely that would-be migrants will pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to bring them in illegally.

That said, “border czar” Tom Homan has his work cut out for him if he is to deliver on Trump’s promise of a deportation program that would challenge Ike’s.

Under the Eisenhower administration’s distastefully named “Operation Wetback”, more than a million aliens — mostly from Mexico — were reportedly removed from the United States. As History describes it:

The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants — some of them American citizens — from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.

With the help of the Mexican government, which sought the return of Mexican nationals to alleviate a labor shortage, Border Patrol agents and local officials used military techniques and engaged in a coordinated, tactical operation to remove the immigrants.

That said, at least one historian believes Eisenhower’s immigration officials inflated the number of aliens they actually deported. She argues that Border Patrol apprehended fewer than 300,000 migrants under the program, which ran from June 1954 to June 1955 — not the million-plus the government claimed.

In any event, the immigration adjudication system has improved significantly over the past 70 years, negating the possibility that U.S. citizens would be caught up in the president’s proposed removals.

But given the increased prevalence of so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions”, immigration enforcement is much more difficult now than it was in the mid-1950s, as well.

In December, my colleague Jason Richwine estimated that more than half — 56.3 percent — of aliens unlawfully present live in jurisdictions that either don’t cooperate with ICE or that actively impede the agency’s enforcement efforts. That means ICE officers and agents in those places must either go to those aliens’ residences or pick them up on the streets — a slow and time-consuming effort.

CBS News Poll. The Trump administration would thus have to bring either legal or political pressure to bear in those sanctuaries to boost enforcement. The good news for the White House is that Trump’s hardlines on illegal immigration and the border in his March 4 address were well-received by the American people.

CBS News and opinion outfit YouGov surveyed 1,207 U.S. adults after Trump’s speech to get their impressions. The margin of error in that snap poll was +/- 3.4 percentage points.

To be fair, that poll revealed that just over half — 51 percent — of those who tuned in and listened were Republicans, and therefore likely more inclined to buy what the president was selling.

Still, 74 percent of respondents described the speech as both “presidential” and “entertaining”, 71 percent stated that it was “inspiring”, and 62 percent thought it was “unifying”.

More importantly, however, 77 percent of those polled said that they liked the plans for immigration and border that Trump presented during that joint session. That tied those issues with Trump’s plans to cut waste in government spending for first place in terms of popularity.

Finally, 63 percent of respondents said that the president spent “a lot” of time talking about issues they care about and given how much time Trump spent discussing immigration and border issues; those topics still have salience with the American people, even as the border has been brought under control.

Trump highlighted immigration and the border during his March 4 address to a joint session of Congress for a simple reason — those are issues the American people care a lot about. Now all the president has to do is deliver on his promises. The good news for him is that he’s off to a historically good start — and, for now, the voters approve.