The Border Is More Secure than Ever

When then-candidate Donald Trump promised border security on the campaign trail, he meant it. The official CBP encounter statistics for the month of July are out, and show the Southwest border is more secure than it has ever been in history. Credit the president, his “Border Czar” Tom Homan, and his CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott — and thousands of agents who held the line through the Biden Border Storm.

“Operational Control” of the Border

When would-be voters voiced concerns about “immigration” in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, what they really meant was illegal migration at the Southwest border, as “improper entrants” poured into the United States in numbers never imagined — let alone seen — in American history.

Border Patrol keeps annual Southwest border apprehension statistics dating to FY 1960, the last full year of the Eisenhower administration, and in the 61 fiscal years before Joe Biden first sat behind the Resolute Desk, agents never apprehended 1.65 million illegal migrants at the U.S.-Mexico line in any given year.

They set their pre-Biden record in FY 2000, the last full year of the Clinton administration, when they nabbed 1.644 million illegal entrants who were headed north.

That trend changed in the wake of 9/11, as Congress got serious about border security, an effort that culminated in the Secure Fence Act of 2006 (SFA).

In April 2022, I referred to the SFA as “the most important border law”, not so much because of the fence part but because in section 2(a) of the act, a fed-up bipartisan Congress gave the DHS secretary 18 months to “achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States”.

If you think “operational control” was a vague and purely aspirational directive, you’re in good company (I guess), because that’s how Biden’s DHS secretary, the later-impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, viewed it, too.

Mayorkas’s contentions that he had “operational control”, in fact, were key to Article 2 of the impeachment resolution’s claim that the secretary had made “false statements” to Congress.

That’s because Congress was very clear in section 2(b) of the SFA what it meant by the term: “In this section, the term ‘operational control’ means the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.” (Emphasis added.)

Honestly, I could have highlighted “terrorists” in that passage as well, because Mayorkas wasn’t able to keep all of them out either, as my then-colleague Todd Bensman explained in January 2022, but I digress.

Border Patrol under the Biden administration blew past that Clinton-era Southwest border record in short order, apprehending 1.659 million-plus illegal entrants in FY 2021 and more than 2.2 million in FY 2022.

To be fair, CDC orders issued pursuant to Title 42 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic were in effect in both of those fiscal years, and those orders mandated the quick expulsion of all aliens who entered illegally from the United States, in lieu of the more time-consuming removal processes under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Many of those expelled aliens turned right around and came back in illegally, and thus were double- and triple-counted, but the Biden administration didn’t do much to keep them out and increasingly narrowed the class of illegal migrants it would expel (and that Mexico would receive).

Consequently, the number of illegal migrants who were processed under the INA rose from 1.152 million in FY 2022 to 1.496 million in FY 2023 (the year the Biden administration ended Title 42) before topping 1.53 million in FY 2024 — the latter, curiously enough, viewed as a “good year” by Biden-era standards.

Changing Demographics

The much bigger issue with that Biden-era migrant surge had to do with the demographics of the aliens who were coming.

Some 98.2 percent of the migrants apprehended in FY 2000 were Mexican nationals, almost exclusively single adult males coming here to work. Border Patrol agents could quickly process those migrants in about eight hours and then turn them around and send them back home through the nearest port of entry.

By contrast, two-thirds (67 percent) of Border Patrol’s FY 2024 Southwest border apprehensions (more than 1.028 million migrants) involved “other than Mexicans” (OTMs), including nearly 38,000 Chinese nationals, 25,000-plus migrants from India, and more than 134,000 Venezuelans.

There’s no door at the border leading to Shanghai, Mumbai, or Caracas, but even if there were, most of those aliens were certain to make asylum claims, and there was little Biden’s CBP could or did do to screen either them or their claims before releasing them.

Worse, of those millions of illegal entrants apprehended at the Southwest border under Biden, more than 123,000 were unaccompanied alien children (UACs) from countries other than Mexico and Canada in FY 2022, as were 106,000-plus in FY 2023 and nearly 70,000 in FY 2024.

If the SFA is the most important border law, then section 235 of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA) is the most tragic, because it requires DHS to quickly transfer those children to custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at the Department of Health and Human Services, most for placement with “sponsors” in this country.

Section 235 of the TVPRA was quickly exploited by adults in this country (usually the child’s own parent or close relative, but not always) — and more importantly, by smugglers — to run hundreds of thousands of kids from “non-contiguous countries” (i.e., not Mexico or Canada) illegally into the United States.

Don’t take my word for it — President Obama asked Congress to close that section 235 loophole in June 2014 and sent his vice president (Joe Biden, ironically) to Guatemala City that month to warn adults that the child smugglers they were hiring were by and large predacious criminals — and sexual abusers, as well.

In that speech, Vice President Biden warned, “These smugglers — and everyone should know it, and not turn a blind eye to it — these smugglers routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse, and extortion of these innocent, young women and men by and large”, but as president he largely turned two blind eyes to the problem, and his only solution to it was encouraging ORR to release the kids in its care to sponsors more quickly.

July 2025 Apprehensions

Contrast that pre-Trump II history with what happened at the Southwest border in July, and it all seems like the clear dawn on the morning after a major storm.

Last month, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended 4,601 illegal entrants, the lowest monthly total ever recorded (those records go back to October 1999, but the previous pre-Trump II low was under Trump I: 11,127 in April 2017). Just a third of whom were OTMs, and just 106 of whom (2.3 percent) were non-contiguous UACs.

Keep in mind that, historically, July is one of the busiest “travel months” for illegal entrants at the Southwest border, though Biden administration policies managed to skew those prior patterns as well (the all-time monthly record was December 2023, which should have been slow, but saw nearly 250,000 apprehensions).

Given that the Southwest border appears to be returning to its more traditional patterns, agents may set even more records if the current Trump policies remain in place as winter falls along the Southwest border.

The Big “If”

That’s a big “if”, though, given that the Ninth Circuit issued an order on August 1 requiring DHS to give more legal protections to illegal entrants apprehended at the border.

It doesn’t appear from a search of the Supreme Court’s docket that DOJ has sought a stay of that order, but that might not be a high priority for the administration, given the $45 billion Congress recently provided DHS to expand migrant detention.

One problematic development on the migrant detention front, however, relates to so-called “family units” (FMUs), adult aliens who enter illegally with children.

As I have explained at length elsewhere, various court decisions issued under the Obama administration interpreting the January 1997 Flores settlement agreement (FSA) have limited DHS’s ability to detain children in those FMUs for more than 20 days.

To avoid allegations of “family separation”, DHS has largely opted to release both the adults and the kids in FMUs within that 20-day timeframe, but DOJ in May asked Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (who oversees the FSA) to lift those restrictions, terming them an “intrusive regime”.

The department unsuccessfully made a similar bid under Trump I, so it’s little surprise that Judge Gee on August 15 denied the government’s motion to terminate the FSA and dissolve her 2019 injunction in the case.

That sets the matter up for another go-round at the Ninth Circuit, though Attorney General Pam Bondi likely has set her sights on a Supreme Court review of Flores.

In the interim, the FSA and its various interpretations are the law, which raises the specter of an FMU run on the border similar to what happened in FY 2019 under Trump I.

That fiscal year, 55.6 percent of the more than 851,000 Border Patrol Southwest border apprehensions involved aliens in family units, the vast majority likely drawn by Flores’s promise of a quick release.

In July, just 318 illegal migrants apprehended at the Southwest border were in FMUs, but that’s 40 more than in June, and family units were the only demographic that increased between those two months.

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The president picked a great team. Homan, a former Border Patrol agent, served as a senior ICE official under Obama, and Scott’s a former Border Patrol chief. They understand the border, and unlike Mayorkas, each knows what “operation control” means. But don’t forget the thousands of agents who made it through the Biden Border Storm and who stuck around to see the Trump II Transformation.