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, Mr. 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.
The shift is cause for celebration among figures who have been calling for tougher restrictions for years.
Under Mr. Biden, “the White House leadership promoted a narrative of impotence when it came to immigration,” said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the first Trump administration.
“Securing the border is easy if you have the will to do it,” said Mr. Cuccinelli, a prominent hawk on immigration issues. “In the first Trump administration, Trump didn’t have the will to do it,” he argued. “But he does now.”
Mr. Trump’s hardened stance on migration is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Biden’s moves at the end of his term. Mr. Biden had promoted less-restrictive policies that swelled the number of migrants entering the United States during his first three years in office.
But as the backlash to the surge grew, Mr. Biden barred asylum for migrants if they crossed illegally and pressured the Mexican and Panamanian governments to do more to curb migrant flows, delivering to his successor a relatively calm situation at the border.
Political sentiment in the United States has also shifted. Leaders who once championed their cities as sanctuaries for migrants are growing quieter in their resistance to Mr. Trump’s policies. And some Democratic governors have highlighted areas of potential cooperation on migration enforcement.
Upon taking office in January, Mr. Trump plowed ahead with his anti-immigration measures. They included using the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold migrants; firing off online posts to taunt and threaten potential migrants; and vowing to revoke visas for foreign officials thought to facilitate illegal immigration to the United States.
Still, caveats abound. A similar lull in migration at the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, though less precipitous than the current decline, proved to be temporary. Migration experts warn that sanctions and other measures targeting Venezuela and Cuba, two large sources of migration, could worsen economic conditions in those countries and produce a new exodus.
The Trump administration’s embrace of tariffs is also weighing on larger economies in the region, potentially intensifying economic desperation among poor families struggling to get by, a top factor influencing migration. Uncertainty over the tariffs could have already pushed Mexico into a recession, economists fear.
But developments on the ground in Mexico illustrate how migration dynamics are shifting.
On a recent morning, hundreds of migrants stood in line under the scorching sun outside the Mexico City offices of the country’s refugee agency, COMAR.
Many had been in line since the crack of dawn, and others had camped outside the building, sleeping on the sidewalks or in the middle of a dirt road, hoping to increase their chances of getting an appointment and starting their asylum process.
“Obviously, staying here was not our plan,” said Peter Martínez, a migrant from Cuba, who said his asylum appointment in the United States was canceled in January.
Asked whether he planned to go back to Cuba, given the struggles, he said, “Mexico can be dangerous and hard, but it is still better than going back to our country.”
Many migrants like Mr. Martínez are stranded in Mexico and having second thoughts about crossing into the United States. Some plan to put down stakes in Mexico, while others are doing all they can to return home.
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.
“When people see that one door shuts down in front of them, another window opens,” said Rafael Velasquez García, the former head of the International Rescue Committee office in Mexico.
This decision does not come without limitations, he said, including that migrants face significant obstacles to gain access to employment.
In other countries in the region, migrants from Venezuela and other nations automatically receive humanitarian visas that allow them to look for jobs. But in Mexico, the only option for migrants is to request asylum, which can take months to complete.
All of this is unfolding before other hard-line measures championed by Mr. Trump, like his vow to drastically ramp up mass deportations, get underway. He is also planning to invoke an obscure American law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants while providing them little to no due process.
Migration experts say the closest parallel to the current crackdown date 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.