What a difference a year makes.
For the first time in half a century, the United States experienced net negative migration, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. The reason, the report concluded, was President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.
“The report attributed the shift to a combination of the large drop in entries and an increase in enforcement activity leading to removals and voluntary departures,” ABC reported.
This is an important milestone as we reach the end of Trump’s first year in office. The reckless immigration policies of President Joe Biden turned the American people decidedly against immigration, both illegal and legal. Those policies would have almost certainly continued if Vice President Kamala Harris had won in 2024.
We’ve really seen an incredible turnaround. Just a few years ago, border towns were completely overrun by illegal aliens. The only defense border states had was to ship the newcomers off to northern sanctuary cities that also became entirely overwhelmed.
That’s halted entirely. The New York Times ran a story Sunday about how a migrant shelter in McAllen, Texas, which had been packed to the gills under Biden, was now practically vacant.
“We have not seen a single migrant in months,” Sister Norma Pimentel, who runs the facility, said to the Times in December. “We are completely empty.”
That’s an incredible change.
Even after their decisive defeat, Democrats have shown no loss of zeal for their open-border policies as they do everything in their power to impede the enforcement of the law in states and localities they control.
Nevertheless, the past year proves—that under the right leadership—America’s immigration laws can be enforced. It’s not impossible. We didn’t need additional legislation that did little more than put a Band-Aid on the problem and give cover to open-borders politicians. We just needed new leadership at the top.
This isn’t to say that Trump succeeded in other areas. As I and others have written, his administration has effectively run a counterrevolution against the deep state bureaucracy and the DEI ideology that’s infected practically every corner of American society.
It can legitimately be said that no Republican president has done more to curtail the bureaucracy and its surrounding web of parasitic, woke nongovernmental organizations than Trump in his second term.
But it’s on the border and immigration that Trump 2.0 has had the most astounding success.
Sure, many Trump supporters are disappointed that deportations haven’t happened fast enough. Some Republicans now lament that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in blue states are getting too “messy” and will surely turn the public against the administration.
However, given the challenge Trump faced when he returned to office after four years of President Joe Biden, it’s impossible to imagine the 47th president handling the situation without any major complications.
In the four years under Biden, Customs and Border Patrol recorded 11 million encounters at the border. Millions of illegal immigrants were simply allowed into the country under bogus asylum claims or were given notices of court appearances years in the future.
And as we’ve seen, some of those courts were willing to play fast and loose with the law to ensure that deportations wouldn’t take place.
That’s in part what the Trump administration is attempting to untangle, with Democrat-run “sanctuary states” doing everything in their power (and a fair bit outside their official power) to impede that effort.
Here’s a brief review of Trump’s impressive record on the border one year into his second term.
Early Actions to Undo Biden’s Manufactured Border Crisis
When Trump returned to office, the first thing he did was sign an executive order declaring the southern border situation a national emergency, allowing him to deploy additional resources to stem the Biden tide.
He also reinstituted the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico while they await a decision in their case. The “catch and release” policies of Biden were abandoned.
The administration funded detention facilities to house illegal aliens on the way to deportation, including “Alligator Alcatraz,” a massive facility built in the Florida Everglades.
The “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, allocated $170 billion for immigration enforcement. It provided funding for a surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and ensured that deportations would continue to be fully funded for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.
With these moves, the Trump administration showed that it wasn’t just going to halt Biden’s immigration policies, it intended to reverse them.
The Way Is Shut
The effect of Trump’s pivot was immediate.
In June 2024, Border Patrol agents apprehended 83,536 illegal aliens at the southern border. That was the lowest of the entire Biden presidency. Most months, that number was well over 100,000, and reached over 250,000 at its peak in 2023.
Under Trump, that number has fallen to a trickle. Center Square reported on the astounding difference in the two presidencies. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, which began in October, Border Patrol “recorded the lowest illegal border crosser encounter/apprehension totals ever reported” at the start of a fiscal year.
“A total of 91,603 encounters/apprehensions were reported nationwide—lower than any prior fiscal year to date, according to the latest CBP data,” wrote Center Square’s Bethany Blankley. “By comparison, record highs were reported under the Biden administration of 392,196 in Q1 of fiscal 2025; 988,512 in Q1 of fiscal 2024; and 865,333 in Q1 fiscal 2023, according to the data.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem celebrated this accomplishment on X.
Even more importantly, and this is almost certainly why those numbers fell so dramatically, the Trump administration just recorded its eighth straight month of allowing zero parole releases into the country.
The bogus asylum-seekers have melted away because they know that they are wasting their time. They can’t just show up at the border and expect to melt away into the U.S. population as they once did.
ICE Raids and the Future
The Left didn’t sit still while Trump undid one of their foundational policies. Democrat-run sanctuary states have done their best to put up as many roadblocks to deportation as possible. This has created a challenging situation for the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS noted in early January that ICE agents “now face a more than 1,300% increase in assaults, a 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks against them, and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”
ICE now must conduct frequent raids in blue states rather than pick up illegal immigrants detained by local authorities if it wants to enforce federal law. This has put ICE agents in more danger as leftwing activists and dangerous illegal immigrants have often attempted to impede their operations.
This is in part how the tragedy that led to an ICE agent shooting a woman in Minnesota took place.
Will this deter the administration?
Trump suggested that he may invoke the Insurrection Act in response to local Democrat officials, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, continuing to openly defy the federal government.
Trump seems to be serious about carrying out his election promise despite whatever resistance Democrats throw at him. Is there more work to be done? Yes. Still, it’s not hard to imagine how different things would have been had Walz and Harris had won. It would have been four more years of Biden’s unimpeded border madness.
