The illegal passages on the American-Mexican border have been at their lowest level for decades. The migrant shelters once wedged are empty. Instead of heading north, people blocked in Mexico are starting to go home in greater numbers.
The border is almost unrecognizable from just a few years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people around the world crossed the United States every month in scenes of chaos and upheavals.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr., faced with a swell of public indignation during the 2024 electoral campaign, tightened asylum seekers and pushed Mexico to keep migrants remotely. At the end of its mandate, the border had calmed significantly and the illegal passages had fallen to the lowest levels of its presidency.
Now, President Trump has stifled the flow of migrants even more radically, solidifying a turning point in American policy with measures than many criticisms, in particular those on the left, have long considered politically unpleasant, legally untenable and ultimately ineffective because they do not attack the deep causes of migration.
“The whole paradigm of migration changes,” said Eunice Rendón, coordinator of Migrant Agenda, a coalition of Mexican advocacy groups. Citing the Trump’s range of policies and its threats targeting migrants, it added: “Families are terrified.”
Mr. Trump simultaneously uses several hard -on -line tactics: halting Asylum indefinitely for people looking for refuge in the United States through the southern border; deploy troops to track down and, perhaps just as crucial, scare the border crossroads; largely aware of the expulsion flights in which migrants are returned home in chains; And governments with strong reinforcement in Latin America – like Mexico – to do more to limit migration.
The new approach has given some breathtaking statistics.
In February, the American border patrol said it had apprehended 8,347 people trying to illegally cross the border, from a record of more than 225,000 apprehensions in December 2023.
These figures had already dropped sharply since the Biden administration unveiled its immigration restrictions last year. In December, the last full month, Mr. Biden was in office, the Border Patrol apprehended 47,330 migrants on the American-Mexican border.
At 1,527 migrants per day, it was the lowest daily average for every month throughout Biden’s presidency. But he was still five times more than the number in February, the first full month after Mr. Trump took office.
If this trend is a full year, apprehensions by migrants to the United States could fall to invisible levels since around 1967, according to Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office Onrica, a non-governmental organization.
There are signs that the figures also drop further south of the region. The number of people trying to reach the United States through the gap of Darién – the prohibited land bridge connecting South America and Central America which is a barometer of future pressure on the American -Mexican border – fell to 408 in February, of more than 37,000 people the same month last year, according to Panama’s Immigration Institute.
Change is a reason for celebration among figures that have been calling stricter restrictions for years.
Under M. Biden, “the management of the White House promoted an account of helplessness with regard to immigration,” said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former interim security secretary in the first Trump administration.
“Securing the border is easy if you have the will to do so,” said Cuccinelli, a leading hawk on immigration issues. “In the first Trump administration, Trump did not have the will to do so,” he said. “But he does it now.”
Mr. Trump’s hardened position on migration is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Biden’s movements at the end of his mandate. Mr. Biden had promoted less restrictive policies that swelled the number of migrants entering the United States in his first three years in power.
But as the backlash of overvoltage increased, Mr. Biden prohibited asylum for migrants if they crossed illegally and put pressure on the Mexican and Panamanian governments to do more to limit the flows of migrants, delivering to his successor a relatively calm situation at the border.
In the United States, political feeling has also changed. The leaders who once defended their cities as sanctuaries for migrants become quieter in their resistance to Mr. Trump’s politics. And some Democratic governors have highlighted the potential areas of cooperation on the application of migration.
After taking office in January, Trump has advanced his anti-immigration measures. They included the use of the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold migrants; drawing online publications to taunt and threaten potential migrants; and promising to revoke visas For foreign officials, thought of facilitating illegal immigration to the United States.
However, warnings abound. A similar lull in migration at the start of Mr. Trump’s first mandate, although less precipitated than the current decline, turned out to be temporary. Migration experts warn that sanctions and other measures targeting Venezuela and Cuba, two major sources of migration, could worsen economic conditions in these countries and produce a new exodus.
The Trump Administration Administration of prices also weighs on greater economies in the region, which can potentially intensify economic despair among poor families who fight to get out of it, a most important factor influencing migration. The uncertainty about the prices could have already pushed Mexico into a recessionEconomists fear.
But developments in the field in Mexico illustrate how the dynamics of migration change.
One recent morning, hundreds of migrants made up in line under the hot sun outside the Mexico City offices from the country’s refugee agency, Comar.
Many had made up for the dawn, and others had camped outside the building, sleeping on the sidewalks or in the middle of an earthcate, hoping to increase their chances of obtaining an appointment and starting their asylum process.
“Obviously, staying here was not our plan,” said Peter Martínez, a Cuba migrant, who said his asylum appointment in the United States was canceled in January.
When asked if he planned to return to Cuba, given the difficulties, he said: “Mexico can be dangerous and hard, but it is always better than returning to our country.”
Many migrants like Mr. Martínez are blocked in Mexico and have a second reflection on crossing the United States. Some plan to make challenges in Mexico, while others do everything they can to go home.
The number of migrants in Mexico looking for help to return to their own country pink At 2,862 in January and February, according to the International Migration Organization, Reuters reported.
A survey of more than 600 migrants in January by the International Rescue Committee also revealed that 44% of respondents who initially intended to join the United States now planned to stay in Mexico.
“When people see that a door stops in front of them, another window opens,” said Rafael Velasquez García, the former chief of the International Bureau of the Rescue Committee in Mexico.
This decision does not come without limits, he said, including that migrants face significant obstacles to access employment.
In other countries in the region, Venezuela migrants and other nations automatically receive humanitarian visas that allow them to search for jobs. But in Mexico, the only option for migrants is to ask for asylum, which can take months.
All this takes place before other hard measures defended by Mr. Trump, such as his wish to considerably increase mass deportations, begin. He also plans to invoke an obscure American law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798To speed up the deportations of undocumented immigrants while providing them with little or no regular procedure.
Migration experts say that the parallel closest to the current repression dates from the 1950s, when anger at an influx of Mexican workers produced “the Wetback operation”, a short -term military style offensive which has drawn its name from an insult used to describe the Mexican borders and which aimed to deport more than a million Mexican immigrants.
“You have to go back to the Eisenhower administration to see something like that,” said Isacson, the migration expert.
