Trump sees lowest border numbers in history, declares invasion ‘OVER’

The Border Patrol apprehended just 8,326 illegal immigrants at the southern border in February, President Trump announced Saturday, calling it the best month on record.

“The month of February, my first full month in Office, had the LOWEST number of Illegal Immigrants trying to enter our Country in History – BY FAR!” the president said on social media. “The Invasion of our Country is OVER.”

February’s figure tops the previous low of roughly 11,000 illegal immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents in April 2017, near the start of Mr. Trump’s first term.

For a time, his tough talk deterred people from making the journey.

Despite ups and downs, his administration handed a relatively calm border to President Biden in 2021.

Mr. Biden oversaw the worst migrant crisis in U.S. history. At the peak of the surge in December 2023, agents along the U.S.-Mexico border caught nearly 250,000 illegal immigrants.

The vast majority were caught and released. Mr. Trump said those caught on his watch last month were “quickly ejected from our Nation or, when necessary, prosecuted for crimes.”

The border numbers were calming in the final months of Mr. Biden’s tenure. For the last half of 2024, agents caught 46,000 to 58,000 people monthly. With Mr. Trump taking office in January, the number dropped below 30,000.

To fall to about 8,000 is nearly miraculous.

Todd Bensman, a border expert at the Center for Immigration Studies, said Mr. Trump’s success “disproved and debunked” the claims of immigrant rights groups that external factors caused the migrant surge.

“There’s no intellectual choice left now but to just finally accept that starting and stopping events like this is so simple,” Mr. Bensman told The Washington Times. “You just detain, expel, deport. That’s it. That’s closing the border. It’s nothing complicated.”

He said it challenged the claim of former Vice President Kamala Harris, who blamed “root causes” in other countries for spurring the wave of migrants, and congressional Democrats, who said Congress had to pass legislation to stop the migrant surge.

“We didn’t need any Senate bill then, we don’t need any Senate bill now,” Mr. Bensman said. “We never needed comprehensive immigration reform to send billions of dollars to reduce root causes of immigration by rebuilding other countries. The immigration system was never broken and needed to be fixed. All of that stands as totally debunked now.”

Mr. Trump vigorously flexed the powers he already had, in some cases testing the limits of what Congress gave him, to shut down the border.

He declared a border emergency for what he called an “invasion.”

It’s not clear whether his declaration that the invasion is over will undercut his legal justification for the emergency.

Through the threat of tariffs, Mr. Trump roped Mexico into helping block people from crossing its territory.

At the president’s direction, the State Department listed several Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, giving the U.S. new tools to tackle them. That paid off last week when the administration announced it had extradited 29 high-profile targets from Mexico, including major cartel leaders.

One of the 29, Rafael Caro Quintero, has been on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most wanted fugitives list in connection with the slaying of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.

Another, Martin Sotelo, is accused of participating in the 2022 slaying of Deputy Sheriff Ned Byrd in Wake County, North Carolina. He escaped a U.S. jail and traveled to Mexico, where he fought extradition.

“The era of harming Americans and walking free is over,” FBI Director Kash Patel said.

The Justice Department said many of the 29 had been subjects of long-standing extradition requests not honored under Mr. Biden. It took the terrorist designation to compel Mexico’s cooperation, the department said.