The Border Crisis Is Over

JUAREZ, Mexico – On New Year’s Eve 2020, as President-elect Joe Biden was at home in Delaware celebrating his imminent move into the White House, a mob of some 300 Cubans stormed out of Juárez, Mexico, in a mad banzai charge over one of the international bridges toward El Paso, Texas. 

They swept past Mexican border guards, leapt pell-mell the wrong way over Mexican pay turnstiles, and sprinted for America in a crisscrossing stampede through traffic over the bridge lanes.

But alas, the outgoing Donald Trump was still in office, and his U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mobile Field Force, already riot-ready and waiting behind heavy concrete blocks tipped by concertina wire, stopped the migrant charge cold. Bunched up behind the barricades, the foiled mob loosed a telling chant: 

“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”

“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter. 

“There is an expectation. There is hope and there is enthusiasm in those who believe that, with the change of administration, will come new measures and that they will immediately enter and there will be new conditions that will allow them to request asylum,” Enrique Valenzuela, head of the Chihuahua State Council for Population and Migration, told a Mexican newspaper that night. 

They were right in their interpretation of Biden’s campaign promises, if a tad early. An estimated 10-12 million foreign nationals would more successfully answer the call starting on Biden’s inauguration day a few weeks later, in record-smashing populations of between 200,000 and 350,000, ushered straight into America every month for the next four years.

And all of that is now at an end. With frankly shocking speed, the Trump Administration has cut off the flood tide of illegal immigration that raged for all of Biden’s term. By the second full month of Donald Trump’s new term, just 8,300 had attempted a crossing, and every one of them was detained and deported—a record-breaking nadir.

The catastrophe at the U.S. southwestern border is over. I declare its end not as a government official anointed with some special authority, but as the author of a 432-page book on the subject, someone who accurately foretold in 2020 that it was imminent and then, for the ensuing four years, covered the predicted flood of foreign humanity in seven countries.

One of my favorite of the nine Border Patrol sectors to visit was the “El Paso Sector,” covering the western tip of Texas and all of New Mexico. It has always been emblematic of what was happening everywhere, and it remains so now.

Well over a million illegals crossed from Mexico’s megalopolis of Juárez into El Paso and nearby New Mexico in the four years after that first foiled charge over the bridge. By 2022’s end, 307,844 (of 2.4 million total) had hurried into the El Paso Sector. During 2023, another 427,471 (of 2.5 million) passed through. In 2024, another 256,102 (of 2.1 million) crossed. Biden and Harris’s fantastical promises—of a bill that would grant coveted citizenship to aspiring illegal (mainly economic) migrants, a moratorium on all deportations, sharp curbs on ICE detentions, free health insurance, an end to prosecutions for illegal border crossing, an immediate halt to border wall construction, and, most irresistibly, mass releases into the nation on unverifiable asylum claims—hit the migration system like an adrenaline rush. Once the administration followed through, the mania spread far and wide thanks to social media selfies sent from the American side of the journey.

In Juárez, thousands of arrivals from 170 different countries would flock daily by plane, bus, and freight train, then make their way directly to the Rio Grande, which is usually no more than a shallow creek at that part of the border. I was often present in Juárez among these thousands as they’d hop over the mud puddles and over to waiting Border Patrol and National Guard crowd controllers, who would arrange them into neat but massive lines on the U.S. side. Agency parlance called these milling masses “give-ups.”

The ”give-ups” would compliantly wait their turns as the agents brought them food, water, baby formula, and all other needs, then transported them to an overnight center where almost all would be stamped into the country on temporary personal recognizance. A conveyor belt of nonprofit groups arranged transport to preferred cities.  

Here, as in many other sectors, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott injected an especially strong dose of drama into the mix in 2023 when he ramped up “Operation Lone Star” in the corridor, part of an ongoing $11 billion bid to stop, block, and deter illegal immigrants from reaching the green-uniformed Border Patrol intake squads just behind them. State troopers and Texas National Guard built miles of concertina-covered fence line on the El Paso side and began using brawn and non-lethal weapons to keep the immigrants from reaching those Border Patrol intake processors.

I was there in April 2024 to watch sheer madness on the Juárez side among organized crews of immigrant wire-cutters who would wait for trooper patrols to pass, then go to work clipping holes in the wire. Dozens would then rush through past the Texans and to the Border Patrol, who would dutifully process them into America. At night, they’d camp with fires seen for miles along the Texas riverbank, with troopers and Texas guardsmen parked blocking their way. The two agencies were working in total opposition to one another.

But elsewhere in the corridor, a vast hidden traffic flowed into nearby New Mexico. These were the so-called “runners,” immigrants who didn’t want to give up to the Border Patrol like the rest, knowing their criminal histories would get them expelled even under Biden. The La Linea cartel was moving hundreds a day, thousands per month, through holes they’d cut in a miles-long stretch of old steel mesh border wall paralleling Mexican Highway 174, starting a few miles west of Juárez.

On both of my trips to the Highway 174 wall, cartel operatives confronted me. Once, cartel smugglers with at least one AR-15 rifle caught me filming inside a fresh hole they’d cut and needed to use right then. On another occasion, two gunmen, one with a pistol in his belt, presumed I’d brought the half dozen migrants climbing over a ladder. They demanded payment. 

So naturally, when immigrant crossing numbers started to plummet under Trump, it was time for another visit to the El Paso Sector. It was the obvious choice to go see what the new record-low crossing statistics looked like on the ground.

Peace After War

The first thing I saw was a vast, trackless emptiness for miles along the Juárez side of the Rio Grande. In the same places where I had so often swum in a sea of immigrants facing Texas troops and their cutting fences and pepper-ball guns, it felt as though a peace treaty had ended a war. All that was left was the detritus of trash and clothes still on the ground and hung up in the concertina wire. 

Gone were the thousands of immigrants pouring off the “La Bestia death trains” in Juárez. The huge, soft-sided processing centers up Highway 54 northwest of El Paso stood mostly empty and were slated to come down. Given the historically low January and February crossing numbers, none of this came as much of a surprise. But it was a big surprise that I could not spot a single Texas trooper on the Texas side—just a few Border Patrol and army vehicles. When I asked the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) why, officials admitted that so few immigrants were crossing now that they’d quietly pulled everyone off the line in this sector for the first time in four long, expensive years, and many from the river in other sectors. A kind of “peace dividend” for Texas.

“Due to the overall decrease in illegal border crossings and lack of large groups of illegal immigrants crossing the river to claim asylum, DPS has been able to increase its focus on the criminal element in the border regions stemming from the border in areas across the state,” DPS spokesman Lt. Chris Olivarez told me.

And over on Mexican Highway 174? Nothing. I cruised it for two full days on the Texas side and visited it on the Juárez side too. Gone were the hundreds of criminal aliens per day the local La Linea cartel was putting through. Gone were the “halcones,” or cartel field enforcers who’d always been spaced at intervals in the desert across from the old wall.

I waved over a welder on the U.S. side who was slow-cruising the wall looking for repair work. He’d been patching upwards of 10 holes every day just a few months ago, but now he patched maybe two or three a day, and sometimes none. I checked for tracks along solar farm fencing full of cuts. Where in the recent past footprints churned the sand at these cutouts, now there was nothing but ridge patterns formed by wind. 

Landon Hutchens, an El Paso Sector Border Patrol spokesman, told me there are days when not a single crossing is reported. He called them “zero days.”

The Highly Informative “Why”

These changes are no mystery. On his very first day in office, Trump reconverted Border Patrol from intake processors back to the duty for which they are trained. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security ordered them to hunt, detain, and deport to home countries every single illegal crosser they could lay hands on. Trump’s DHS set about creating a dragnet of surveillance technology and search parties in the form of thousands of active-duty U.S. Marines, National Guard troops, the 10th Mountain Brigade, and Stryker Brigade soldiers.

Today, the Juárez-El Paso border is such a gauntlet that wannabe immigrants who got stuck in Juárez told me the cartels have dramatically raised smuggling prices to unaffordable price points. And with the threat of deportation very real now, they dare not spend the money only to end up back at square one, broke or in debt. Or prosecuted by the Americans for illegal entry and put in prison. The cartel’s customer base has dried up.

A dozen different immigrants told me they planned either to settle in Mexico if they could get papers to avoid Mexican deportations, or just go home.

“The Americans will put you in jail for two years if they catch you,” a former Venezuelan soldier named Angel told me while working as a parking lot attendant in Juárez. He’d gotten caught flat-footed by Trump’s new policies and won’t gamble the exorbitant $2,500 smuggling fee someone cited him. Now he’ll try to settle in Mexico until the American border opens up again one day, except that Mexico is rounding up people without papers like him and deporting them now too, he said.

Jonathan Leonardo Montilla, father of a Venezuelan family of four, told me no family can surrender to Border Patrol anymore, and there are no better options beyond going home. “The Americans would just grab us and deport us,” he lamented. “Now, your president is very tough.”

“How much would the cartel charge to help your family run through?” I asked, knowing young families like his rarely choose that option. He said the price was $4,000 each for a total of $16,000. Then he revealed a surprise that would short-circuit even that option: “They say the mafia is not even working right now because the situation is too strong on the American side.”

The worn-out El Paso-Juárez part of the border stands as the penultimate lesson about mass migration events that anyone anywhere paying even the slightest attention cannot help but learn beyond any shadow of a doubt. 

It is that very simple policy choices triggered the greatest and most prolonged mass migration event in U.S. history at noon on January 20, 2021, when Biden entered office and okayed letting everyone in. The same policy choices, in reverse, just as quickly ended it at noon on January 20, 2025, when Trump reentered office.

No complex “bipartisan Senate bill” was necessary to fix “a broken immigration system,” nor were the vast U.S. wealth transfers the Democrats insisted were necessary to alleviate the “root causes” of emigration in misgoverned foreign-sending countries. Ditto “comprehensive immigration reform.”

No other theory survives as proven but this one: Biden’s policies quickly admitted almost all illegal border crossers and tossed the possibility of deportation. Trump’s punished all illegal border crossers by quickly detaining and deporting them.

All that was necessary to take down Biden’s neon border welcome sign was Trump’s campaign promises—and his follow-through. The crisis was a choice. Ending it was always as easy as flicking the switch.