Closed Borders?

Trumpists sometimes point to the Trump campaign promise to close the southern border after four years of an "open border" under President Biden as an accomplishment, or "promise kept". If you listen to news releases from the Department of Homeland Security, the problem is solved. Zero people are getting in. Ask yourself if you can believe anything that the Trump regime says. 

I'm not in favor of open borders. To my knowledge, no serious person is in favor of open borders. Under President Biden we didn't have open borders. Border Patrol was apprehending those who crossed the border illegally. People were being deported. What we had was a system that was unprepared and unable to process the numbers of people who legally entered the country, some by requesting asylum, and adjudicate in a timely manner whether they would be admitted. It's legal to request asylum. It's even legal to enter the country at a non-port of entry, present yourself to the Border Patrol, and claim asylum. 

The real solution to the many people petitioning to become American citizens would be to exponentially increase the number of judges assigned to review asylum and immigration claims; to set a maximum time frame for review whereby a failure to review would be result in an automatic permission to enter. Asylum claims by those in fear of violence should be fast tracked. The whole bureaucracy supporting green cards, visas and citizenship would be revamped and made easier, faster, and cheaper. Biden and Trump chose vastly different "solutions". 

President Biden chose to effectively ignore the problem. While it's true that a lasting solution needs Congress to get involved — and they didn't — the Biden administration made no effort to unclog the backlog of asylum claims and allowed claimants to remain in the country while their applications were pending, essentially placing them in legal limbo — here technically legally, but with no legal status. Trump did the opposite, refusing all asylum claims and immediately deporting anyone that was caught crossing the border. Trump's approach was effective if all you were trying to do was prevent immigration, but it also cut off legal entry, i.e. asylum seekers. He has also declared that a zone adjacent to the southern border is a "military base", turning illegal entry, a civil offense, or possibly a misdemeanor, into a felony, turning the people who do manage to cross into the U.S. de jure felons. 

One of the reasons that it appears that Trump has solved the problem of illegal immigration is that Trump says he has solved the problem of illegal immigration. He throws around statistics that are suspect and often compares apples to oranges. For example, early in his second term he compared the total number of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encounters for one week of Biden's term with the average daily numbers for a week early in his own term. Figures that you seldom see are the comparison of the average number illegal crossings that Biden inherited from Trump's first term with the number that Trump inherited from Biden. Trump walked into a much better scenario than Biden did. Trump also tends to take credit for the actions of others. While it is true that Biden's action on border security came late in his term, and only after tremendous pressure, what we are seeing now is a continuation of the downward trend that began under Biden.

One of the metrics that CBP uses is the number of encounters per month. (An "encounter" is an attempt by someone to enter the country, whether they were allowed in for various reasons or immediately turned back) Using CBP's own numbers from the official gov't website, the numbers of encounters are indeed down. Using the encounters at the Southwest border only, the highest number was in December 2023, with 245,000 encounters. (The data that I saw only went back as far as October 2023, the beginning of the previous fiscal year) The average for the next five months, however, was around 127,500 per month. In June 2024, after changes put in place by the Biden administration, the number was only 82,000. The next five month average was 42,500, with January, Biden's last month, seeing 28,200 encounters. The encounters for February - May, the only months where statistics are available, lists an average of 7,400 with no material change up or down. 

One thing is immediately obvious and a second not so obvious in these statistics. Despite extremely high numbers of encounters during the Biden administration, the numbers were beginning to trend downward halfway through 2024 when changes were made to the way illegal entry was handled and the trend slightly accelerated (compare January was 60% of December, while February was only 27% of January) once Trump was back in office. What is not evident in these numbers is how asylum applications were reported. The Trump administration counts all encounters as illegal, even if there is an asylum claim. They are retroactively counting asylum seekers during Biden's term as illegal, even though they were granted legal permission to remain in the U.S. until their cases could be heard. This makes Biden's numbers look worse than they actually are with respect to illegal immigration.  

The "success" of the Trump Regime at the Southern border seems to be a combination of good public relations and the refusal to consider any asylum claims. 

While it's clear that illegal immigration through the southern border is a fraction of what it had been at its peak, what's not clear is why. People who are fleeing poverty and gang violence can be pretty tenacious about getting out of those situations. We haven't increased the number of Border Patrol agents (although the Army and National Guard are patrolling sections of the border) and we haven't yet built Trump's Wall. It's possible that potential illegal immigrants have checked out the political situation here and have decided that it isn't worth the risk. In that case it isn't that the border is more secure, it's just that the millions facing starvation and death think coming here is a worse deal for them. Or maybe the coyotes are just getting more creative. But what happens if one day things get so bad in their home countries that they all think it's worth the risk? The Border Patrol will still be the same size as it was in 2024 and we're back where we started. Personally I think it's suspicious that illegal crossings are supposedly down when one of the main avenues of legal entry, asylum claims, have been virtually eliminated. I would think that cutting off a legal way to come here would increase illegal attempts. Me, I don't trust the numbers; we know from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that Trump only believes numbers that are favorable to him. Trump already fired Noem when she embarrassed him, he'll can Mullin if the border situation flares up. Which it will, eventually. And since the infrastructure to handle immigration barely exists, it will be a crisis. Again.