The title of a presidential order handed down on Inauguration Day announces a bold new initiative: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” In 23 sections with dozens of subsections, the directive revokes a raft of the Biden administration’s executive orders (on addressing the causes of migration, safe and orderly processing of asylum seekers, reunification of families, and more) and launches new enforcement measures. Thousands of active military troops are being dispatched to the Mexican border, supplementing the 16,500 Border Patrol officers and 2,200 National Guard members already deployed under Biden. The order fulfills one of President Trump’s most repeated campaign promises: that on day one of his presidency he would move swiftly to detain and deport 11 million undocumented residents of the United States.
Trump has never felt constrained by facts. The alleged invasion, effective as it was as a campaign tactic, was one of his most transparent and egregious falsehoods. Those of us who live in the borderlands see a very different reality. My home in Green Valley, Arizona, is just 40 miles from Nogales, Sonora, where I travel often to visit migrant shelters, see my dentist, and visit favorite taquerias. From this vantage point, we have seen a dramatic ebb and flow of migration.
The massive influx in the first years of the 2020s, spanning the Trump and Biden presidencies, has given way to a sharp decline since 2023. Reported encounters between migrants and Border Patrol agents, leading either to release with a court date or to expulsion, reached 200,000 per month early in the Obama presidency, then dropped to a quarter of that number later in his term and early in his successor’s. They climbed back to 200,000 per month late in Trump’s first term, then higher still in the early Biden years. Since 2023, however, numbers have dropped even more sharply than in Obama’s term. By late 2024, the border was quieter and more orderly than at any time in the past two decades. That decline has continued, both before Trump’s inauguration and since.
