How Trump’s Hard-Line Tactics Are Driving Down Migration

Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down to their lowest level in decades. Once-crowded migrant shelters are empty. Instead of heading north, people stranded in Mexico are starting to return home in bigger numbers.

The border is almost unrecognizable from just a couple of years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people from around the world were crossing into the United States every month in scenes of chaos and upheaval.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr., facing a swell of public outrage during the 2024 election campaign, clamped down on asylum seekers and pushed Mexico to keep migrants at bay. By the end of his term, the border had quieted significantly and illegal crossings had fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency.

Now, President Trump has choked off the flow of migrants even more drastically, solidifying a sweeping turn in U.S. policy with measures that many critics, especially those on the left, have long considered politically unpalatable, legally untenable and ultimately ineffective because they don’t tackle the root causes of migration.

“The entire migration paradigm is shifting,” said Eunice Rendón, the coordinator of Migrant Agenda, a coalition of Mexican advocacy groups. Citing Mr. Trump’s array of policies and his threats targeting migrants, she added, “Families are terrified.”

Mr. Trump is employing several hard-line tactics simultaneously: halting asylum indefinitely for people seeking refuge in the United States through the southern border; deploying troops to hunt down, and, perhaps just as crucially, scare away border crossers; widely publicizing deportation flights in which migrants are sent home in shackles; and strong-arming governments in Latin America — like Mexico’s — to do more to curb migration.

The new approach has yielded some eye-popping statistics.

In February, the U.S. Border Patrol said it had apprehended 8,347 people trying to illegally cross the border, down from a record high of more than 225,000 apprehensions in December 2023.

Those numbers had already been dropping sharply since the Biden administration unveiled its immigration restrictions last year. In December, the final full month Mr. Biden was in office, the Border Patrol apprehended 47,330 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

At 1,527 migrants a day, that was the lowest daily average for any month during the entire Biden presidency. But it was still five times as much as the number in February, the first full month after Mr. Trump took office.

If that trend holds for a full year, migrant apprehensions in the United States could fall to levels unseen since around 1967, according to Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nongovernmental organization.

There are signs that figures are plummeting farther south in the region, too. The number of people trying to reach the United States through the Darién Gap — the forbidding land bridge connecting South America and Central America that is a barometer of future pressure at the U.S.-Mexico border — dropped to 408 in February, down from more than 37,000 in the same month last year, according to Panama’s Immigration Institute.

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But developments on the ground in Mexico illustrate how migration dynamics are shifting.

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The number of migrants in Mexico seeking help to return to their own countries rose to 2,862 in January and February, according to the International Organization for Migration, Reuters reported.

A survey of more than 600 migrants in January by the International Rescue Committee also found that 44 percent of respondents who had initially intended to reach the United States now planned to stay in Mexico.

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Migration experts say the closest parallel to the current crackdown dates to the 1950s, when anger over an influx of Mexican laborers produced “Operation Wetback,” a short-lived military-style offensive that derived its name from a slur used to describe Mexican border crossers and that aimed to deport more than one million Mexican immigrants.

“You need to go back to the Eisenhower administration to see anything like this,” said Mr. Isacson, the migration expert.