Breaking Down the Latest Border Numbers for April

CBP has released the latest numbers on aliens encountered at the borders and the ports in April, and they show that the security that has prevailed at the Southwest border since Donald Trump returned to office continues. More pertinently, however, they also show that illegal migration has returned to its historic pattern, primarily involving Mexican nationals seeking illicit entry; and they reveal what Congress avoided in not passing the so-called “Senate border bill”.

Border Patrol Apprehensions

In April, Border Patrol agents at the nation’s borders — Southwest, Northern, and coastal — apprehended 10,014 illegal entrants, a 22 percent increase compared to March, but a 92.4-percent decline compared to the 131,078 apprehensions in April 2024.

At the Southwest border, however, that month-to-month increase was more modest, with agents at the U.S.-Mexico line apprehending 8,383 illegal entrants last month, just 16 percent more than in March.

The much more interesting fact, though, is that of those 8,383 aliens apprehended after entering illegally in April, nearly three-quarters — 73 percent — were Mexican nationals. In March, two-thirds (66.3 percent) of all apprehended aliens were from Mexico, and in February, just over half (50.7 percent) were. Let me explain why that’s key to continued security.

Traditionally, nearly all illegal aliens at the Southwest border were from Mexico. In FY 2007, 93.2 percent of all Southwest border apprehensions involved Mexican nationals, and in FY 2000, that figure was 98.2 percent.

In fact, FY 2014 was the first year that apprehensions of “other than Mexican” (OTM) nationals exceeded Mexican apprehensions and even then it was close: 252,600 OTM apprehensions compared to 226,771 apprehensions of Mexican nationals, or about 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent.

That said, nearly all the OTMs in FY 2014 (237,860 or 94 percent) came from just three countries, the so-called “Northern Triangle of Central America”: El Salvador; Guatemala; and Honduras.

It’s much easier for CBP to deal with Mexicans than OTMs, because agents can generally send Mexicans back across the border in a matter of hours — not weeks to months as is the case for, say, a Haitian or Asian migrant.

It was only under Joe Biden that illegal migration went “global”, as would-be illegal entrants flocked to the Southwest border from every continent, save Antarctica. Or, as I put it in May 2024: “CBP Stats Reveal the World Is Coming Illegally to the Southwest Border”.

Of the roughly 2 million illegal migrants apprehended there in FY 2023, for example, about 1 million (49.8 percent) weren’t from Mexico or the Northern Triangle, including more than 24,000 from China, nearly 42,000 from India, 154,000-plus from Colombia, and 200,668 nationals of Venezuela.

Wanna guess how many Chinese, Indian, Colombian, and Venezuelan nationals Border Patrol agents caught at the Southwest border in April? If you said “327” (1.4 percent of the total), you win.

Note that when then-Vice President Kamala Harris was put in charge of stemming the flow of migrants under the Biden administration, her strategy focused solely on addressing the “root causes” (crime, corruption, poverty, etc.) purportedly driving migrants to this country, and then only those from the Northern Triangle.

But as border entries went increasingly global, that plan — which was never going to do real good in any reasonable timeframe, given “root causes” that are largely intractable — made even less sense.

Perhaps Harris’ root causes efforts weren’t as fruitless as I had believed them to be, however, because last month, just 1,363 Northern Triangle nationals were nabbed at the Southwest border — 6 percent as many as in April 2024 (22,903), and a nearly 97-percent decline compared to April 2022 (41,453).

The key point, however, is that it’s much easier for CBP to deal with Mexican migrants than OTMs, because agents can generally process Mexican nationals and send them back across the border in a matter of hours — not weeks to months as is the case for, say, a Haitian or Asian migrant.

For what it’s worth, Mexico is often amenable to accepting Northern Triangle nationals, as well. The further migrants travel to get to this country, however, the less willing Mexico is to take them back.

That shift back to a largely Mexican migrant flow means ICE won’t need to expend many if any resources detaining illegal border entrants, which frees up its limited bed space for criminals and other illegal aliens the agency apprehends in the interior.

Simply put, it’s a lot easier ending “catch and release” when migrants don’t need to be detained long-term but instead can be quickly processed and turned around.

That demographic shift in the migrant flow at the Southwest border is almost definitely due to the effectiveness of Mexican government efforts on the other side of the line.

As my colleague Todd Bensman reported in November, Trump started putting pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum months before he returned to office, threatening “massive, debilitating tariffs” on the country if OTMs were allowed to transit through on their way to the United States.

That tariff threat was no bluff, and when Trump quickly imposed them shortly after taking office, Sheinbaum responded by sending 10,000 Mexican National Guard and Army troops to her side of the shared boundary “to reinforce the border and crack down on fentanyl smuggling”.

OTMs can’t cross our Southwest border illegally unless they can get there, and for now at least, they can’t.

CBP Encounters at the Ports of Entry

CBP Officers in the Office of Field Operations (OFO) encountered fewer than 19,250 inadmissible aliens at the ports of entry nationwide last month, the lowest monthly total in the past four fiscal years.

That’s an 83.5 percent decline compared to April 2024, and it’s almost exclusively due to the Trump administration’s termination of two controversial (and unauthorized) Biden-era migrant programs: “CHNV Parole”, which allowed up to 30,000 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly directly into interior U.S. airports per month; and what I’ve termed the “CBP One app interview scheme”, which made 1,450 OFO appointments at the Southwest border ports available daily for would-be illegal migrants who used the titular app — nearly all of whom (95.8 percent) were then paroled in.

With the unlawful parole programs ended, monthly port encounters have returned to manageable, historical levels — freeing up CBP to stop traffickers, smugglers, and aliens seeking admission through fraud.

Beneficiaries of the two programs were all inadmissible, because though the Biden administration claimed those migrants were coming “lawfully”, all lacked visas or other admission documents. For that reason, when they showed up at U.S. ports, they were included in CBP’s monthly encounter totals.

The demise of the CBP One app is clearly reflected in the OFO Southwest border encounter numbers for April. In the first three full months of the Trump administration, CBP officers encountered 10,850 inadmissible aliens at the Southwest land ports of entry, roughly one-fifth as many as in the month of April 2024 alone (50,842).

And with CHNV Parole out of the way, total encounters at the coastal and airports dropped to a manageable 11,421 in April, a far cry from the 51,101 at those ports in April 2024.

With CHNV Parole and the CBP One app interview scheme now ended by executive decree, monthly port encounters have returned to manageable, historical levels — freeing up CBP officers to now stop traffickers, smugglers, and aliens seeking admission through fraud.

Section 3301 of the “Senate Border Bill”

The OFO Southwest border port stats would have been a whole worse had Congress passed the little-understood (but wildly oversold) “Senate border bill”, proposed by Sens. Jim Lankford (R-Okla.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Krysten Sinema (I-Ariz.) in the winter of 2024.

That bill dropped on a Sunday night, which was a sign it wasn’t great, but in any event, it quickly turned into a last-ditch effort to blame then-candidate Donald Trump for the border crisis after the once and future president publicly opposed it and urged Republican senators to vote no — allegedly for political reasons.

How great was the hype machine behind the bill? When I testified this week before the House Judiciary Committee, panel Democrats were still lauding its virtues.

The bill itself was 370 pages long, and drafted in such a way that you’d have to be an expert in immigration law to even begin to understand what it did. Most in the media simply accepted that it was a silver bullet to end the border crisis because Lankford, a conservative, signed on to it.

Section 3301 of that bill would have created a complex mechanism to allegedly shut down the border once apprehensions reached 5,000 per day, but if you go to page 219, lines 8 to 15, you’ll see that even when that cap was met, OFO would still have had to process “a minimum of 1,400 inadmissible aliens” per day “across all southwest land border ports of entry”.

In other words, had that bill become law, there would have been an additional 42,000 OFO port encounters in April (and more than a half-million per annum), thanks to that loophole on page 219, which applied whether there were 5,000 Border Patrol apprehensions per day or none.

“A Two-Edged Sword”

Politically, border security has become a two-edged sword for the president.

On the one hand, 31 percent of respondents in a recent Harvard/Harris poll stated that “stopping illegal immigration across the border” was the “biggest achievement” of Trump’s first 100 days, the leading choice out of 13 options.

On the other hand, now that the border is secure, it no longer weighs on the minds of most American voters, who have turned their attention to pocketbook issues like the economy and drug prices. That means it might not be as potent a political issue as it has been.

Trump’s not doing anything to secure the border that Biden couldn’t have done — the difference is will, which Congress can’t legislate. Congress can enact bad policies, however, and in resisting pressure to pass the vaunted “Senate border bill”, Congress — and the American people — dodged a big border bullet.