President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but his looming border crackdown promise is already stoking fear among migrants, who have started thinking twice before illegally entering the US.
The recent deluge of illegal crossings — which under Biden administration “border czar” Vice President Kamala Harris soared to around 8 million — has slowed to a trickle dating back to the presidential election, officials spanning the US-Mexico border told The Post.
And they don’t think the timing is a coincidence.
“It’s been very slow,” said one Border Patrol source, another noting that “since November” foot traffic has “seemed to start to slowly repair itself” following a nearly four-year free-for-all at the southern border.
“Now we are just waiting for the go ahead to return to what our job is, which is protecting US citizens from bad people,” he said.
One border officer shared that agents feel they’re getting their “mojo back” as workloads become more manageable thanks to fewer illegal crossings to deal with.
At some border sectors, agents said they’ve seen the number of migrants slashed by nearly half — one source at the El Paso, Texas, border said agents at one point were processing some 1,500 illegal migrants per day.
That number has since dropped to 800.
Further out west, border agents in San Diego last year were catching around 2,000 migrants each day, making the region one of the top sectors for illegal crossings.
Now agents are making roughly 1,000 apprehensions per day, Manny Bayon, National Border Patrol Council president for the San Diego sector, told The Post, adding that ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, “Mexico has improved military presence and checkpoints.”
In Terrell County, a remote border region of the mountainous West Texas desert, Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland said there’s been a “recent uptick” in illegal crossings, however, he clarified that it has nothing to do with the impending change in administration.
He said overall crossings have decreased compared to 2024 peaks, when officers saw a 417% increase in illegal migrant apprehensions and a 467% increase in gotaways.
“We are back to the pre-ebb-and-flow of the pre-Biden administration,” said Cleveland.
The unprecedented immigrant surge added 0.6% to the US population during each year of Biden’s term, approaching the increase in migration during the Ellis Island era of the 1850s.
America’s foreign-born population now makes up a record 15.2% of the US, leaping past the previous high of 14.8% recorded in 1890 — just two years before the famed New York immigrant gateway opened as a way to cope with the influx of immigrants, according to the CBO and US Census Bureau.
From the start of his presidency, Biden made his priorities clear on immigration, rolling back a wave of hardline Trump-era policies in January 2021 that helped usher in an explosion of migrants from Central and South America across the US-Mexico border.
But the stage is set for the pendulum to swing right back as Trump prepares to assume the White House for a second term.
He’s already tapped Tom Homan — a no-nonsense former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — to be his administration’s border czar, and to carry out his pledge to oversee “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
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