Border Secure, Wages Up

In a recent Harvard/Harris poll, 63 percent of U.S. voters supported the Trump administration’s efforts to close the Southwest border. CBP just released its latest encounter statistics for May, and it looks like the electorate got what it wanted — not just a secure border, but the most secure in U.S. history. Those numbers are subject to revision, but if they hold, the president and his “border czar” Tom Homan have delivered — and the implications are mind-boggling, for working Americans most of all.

Border Patrol Apprehensions

In May, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended 8,725 illegal entrants.

That’s a modest 4 percent increase compared to April, but much more importantly, 92.6 percent fewer apprehensions than in May 2024 (117,905), a 95-percent decline compared to May 2023 (171,382), and — get this — 96.2 percent less apprehensions than in May 2022 (224,370).

You may remember a rather notorious article published in the Washington Post in March 2021, which appeared to support President Biden’s claim that a then-spike in migrant apprehensions at the then-outset of his term was nothing to worry about, but rather a phenomenon that occurred “every single solitary year”.

The original headline in that Post piece was “There’s no migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border. Here’s the data”, which was quickly changed to the more anodyne “The migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border is actually a predictable pattern”.

Of course, there was a migrant surge at the Southwest border, and it continued (with variations) throughout Biden’s term.

The Post analysis was useful in one important regard, however: There is a predictable pattern to illegal migration, and the article included a chart that graphed monthly apprehensions over a nine-year period (FY 2012 to FY 2020) to prove it.

That chart revealed that migrant apprehensions at the Southwest border traditionally rise from a nadir in January and spike in late spring — May to be exact — and then steadily decline throughout the year as the temperatures along the border rise and then fall storms set in.

Biden’s border policies threw that traditional pattern into disarray, because unlike previous migrants, the ones who came during the last administration didn’t have to play a cat-and-mouse game with agents to make their way into the United States; they simply crossed and waited for the agents to find them, in the (reasonable) expectation that they’d quickly be released.

Border Patrol Releases Drop to Zero

Trump quickly took steps to halt those Biden border releases. And last month, the president’s new migrant detention regime took full effect.

According to CBP’s Custody and Transfer Statistics, not one migrant who crossed the Southwest border in May was released: There were zero Border Patrol releases on an alien’s own recognizance and there were zero paroles.

Compare that to October, when just over 10,000 migrants were apprehended and cut loose, or better yet, to May 2023, when nearly 69,000 migrants crossed illegally and were released on nothing more than a promise to appear in the future and another 8,815 were paroled (with the promise of work cards).

If you crossed illegally in May, your next destination was either a quick border return or an ICE detention bed. It wasn’t a drop-off at a bus station or shelter with a ticket into the interior, the norm under Biden.

The climate at the Southwest border — which as noted traditionally drives illegal migration — is a force of nature, but the Biden migrant surge was man-made, driven by bad policies authored by ideologues. And the Biden release policies weren’t just bad — they were reckless, and illegal to boot.

Illegal migration is simple economics. If migrants can enter illegally, work, and make enough money here to pay off their smugglers and earn a profit, they will come. If they’re detained however, they can’t work and won’t come.

Remember when Biden claimed he needed Congress to act on the so-called “bipartisan” Senate border bill so he could have the “power” to make the border secure? All it really took was the stroke of a pen — or an autopen — to stop the releases and thus shut down the flow, as CBP’s May statistics reveal.

“Most Secure Border in this Nation’s History”

On June 17, after the CBP May numbers were released, Homan tweeted:

That may seem like puffery, but it’s truer than most of the president’s opponents care to admit.

We use border apprehensions as a proxy for illegal entries because the total number of aliens who enter illegally and evade apprehension is largely unknown — not that experts haven’t tried and made some very educated guesses.

In 2016, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) described various metrics DHS, its border enforcement predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and private groups had used to measure agents’ effectiveness in deterring illegal entries and securing the border.

Two surveys detailed in that report found that only between a half and a third of all illegal entrants in the past were apprehended “on any given crossing attempt”. Those who were apprehended usually were quickly turned around and again reentered illegally (a phenomenon known as “recidivism”), boosting their odds of their eventually getting in.

Consequently, when you go back to Border Patrol’s FY 1962 Southwest border statistics (21,103 annual apprehensions), for example, you will see that agents stopped roughly 58 aliens per day — 37 fewer than the 95 Homan claimed were nabbed on June 16.

An increasing number of those who enter illegally aren’t just being deported, they’re being prosecuted, as well.

As the foregoing shows, in reality somewhere between 116 and 174 migrants (or more) crossed the Southwest border per day during that first full year of the Kennedy administration. Their illicit entries weren’t recorded because they weren’t caught by the relative handful of agents then on the line.

Homan now has roughly 17,000 agents patrolling the 1,954-mile Southwest border, backed up by fencing and other infrastructure that didn’t exist in 1962.

Thanks largely to increased resources and staffing, by FY 2019 the apprehension rate was upwards of 94 percent, and likely would have been higher if agents weren’t babysitting nearly 474,000 adult aliens and children who entered illegally in “family units” (FMUs).

The apprehension rate declined to about 81 percent in FY 2021 (the last year for which an estimate is available), thanks to Biden’s then-burgeoning border surge, but now that illegal entries are low, it likely exceeds 97 percent — meaning fewer than 100 migrants are attempting to enter per day today.

What’s more, an increasing number of those who enter illegally aren’t just being deported, they’re being prosecuted, as well.

In March alone, nearly 1,600 aliens were prosecuted under section 275 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) for a first illegal entry (a misdemeanor), just over 1,000 others were charged with felony illegal entry under section 275 for a second or subsequent illegal entry, and nearly 3,000 more were prosecuted for illegal entry after deportation (also a felony) under section 276 of the INA.

Nothing cools the ardor of a would-be recidivist border crosser more than the prospect of spending two years or more in a federal prison, and Attorney General Pam Bondi is only too ready to put them on ice.

The Implications

In January, my colleagues Steve Camarota and Karen Ziegler estimated that — thanks largely to all those Biden migrants — “the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025”, both all-time highs.

With few migrants coming illegally, and none being released, the unauthorized inflow will soon dwindle to a trickle. And between DHS’s physical deportation efforts and voluntary “self-deportation”, somewhere around 750,000 and one million (or more) illegal aliens who were previously here when Camarota and Ziegler compiled their figures have now left.

Given that decline, it should come as no surprise that the White House announced on June 17 that blue-collar wages have increased during the five months of the second Trump administration by 1.7 percent, “their largest increase under any administration in nearly 60 years”.

The Biden administration ushered in millions of largely unskilled migrants, cheered on by many who received the benefits of cheap labor and bore few of the costs. With the border now secure, and the migrant inflow reversed, the economics of illegal migration are apparent for those who care to see.