News/Commentary

‘The Trump effect’: Border crossings drop to levels not seen in decades

February 14, 2025 | | Print Article

Illegal alien crossings along the southern border have reportedly dropped to a record low under President Donald Trump’s leadership.

As of February, only about 359 illegal aliens per day were being caught crossing the border, according to an analysis from the New York Post. That’s 90 percent lower than the number of illegals who were being caught daily in February of 2024.

“That puts the US on track to have the lowest monthly border crossings in at least 25 years. If the trend continues, the number of illegal migrants coming into the US could hit a level not seen since 1968, nearly 60 years ago,” the Post notes.

It’s the lowest level of illegal migration America has seen “in almost a lifetime,” Center for Immigration Studies executive director Mark Krikorian told the paper.

“If you kind of break down the numbers, divide them by 365, we haven’t had numbers this low since the 1960s,” he added. “So we’re talking 60-year lows if it’s sustained, obviously.”

A total of 3,953 illegal alien border crossers had been caught by Feb. 11th. If these numbers hold, somewhere around 10,000 illegal aliens total will have been caught by month’s end.

This is a big difference from the numbers seen during the Biden administration, when close to 10,000 were being caught daily:

“[That] is a number that hasn’t been seen since CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] began tracking month-to-month data in 1999,” the Post notes. “The closest crossings have come to 10,000 was in April 2017 — shortly after Trump took office the first time — when monthly crossings exceeded 11,000.”

“That’s a very, very low number,” Pew Research Center associate director John Gramlich told the paper.

The effects of this drastic drop in illegal migration are reportedly being felt all across the southern border, including in Texas, where Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland said his office is no longer being flooded with reports of illegal alien crossings.

“It’s a relief,” he said. “We’ve gone from one extreme to the other extreme, historic levels of people crossing, historic levels of the low apprehensions. It’s very surprising.”

All this comes following President Trump’s decision to institute mass deportations, deploy troops to the border, and end his predecessor’s widely panned “catch and release” policy.

“Already in the last few weeks a message is being sent out that the border isn’t going to be trampled over anymore, that national security isn’t a joke to us,” a Border Patrol source told the Post.

It helps too that Trump’s threats of a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports inspired President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo to deploy 10,000 of her own troops to the border.

“Meanwhile, the new administration has also focused on ramping up ICE raids, leading to 11,000 arrests of illegal migrants roaming the country within the first 18 days of Trump’s tenure,” the Post notes.

“Trump has also started sending illegal migrant criminals to Guantanamo Bay and restarted deportation flights to Venezuela after the Maduro regime halted the effort for nearly a year,” the reporting continues.

During a recent Fox News appearance, Border Patrol chief Mike Banks made it clear how much Trump’s leadership has made a difference.

“US Border Patrol knows how to get the job done, we know how to secure the border,” he said. “All we needed was a president that was going to empower us — a strong leader like President Trump — and a secretary like Secretary [Kristi] Noem that knows exactly what we need to do to secure the border.”

Vivek Saxena
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