The drop started at the end of Biden’s watch and with Trump’s media blitz has continued DOWNWARD Strongly….
Trump asking for Billions more in funds is probably a waste of money….
Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down to their lowest level in decades. Once-crowded migrant shelters are empty. Instead of heading north, people stranded in Mexico are starting to return home in bigger numbers.
The border is almost unrecognizable from just a couple of years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people from around the world were crossing into the United States every month in scenes of chaos and upheaval.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr., facing a swell of public outrage during the 2024 election campaign, clamped down on asylum seekers and pushed Mexico to keep migrants at bay. By the end of his term, the border had quieted significantly and illegal crossings had fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency.
Now, President Trump has choked off the flow of migrants even more drastically, solidifying a sweeping turn in U.S. policy with measures that many critics, especially those on the left, have long considered politically unpalatable, legally untenable and ultimately ineffective because they don’t tackle the root causes of migration.
“The entire migration paradigm is shifting,” said Eunice Rendón, the coordinator of Migrant Agenda, a coalition of Mexican advocacy groups. Citing Mr. Trump’s array of policies and his threats targeting migrants, she added, “Families are terrified.”
Mr. Trump is employing several hard-line tactics simultaneously: halting asylum indefinitely for people seeking refuge in the United States through the southern border; deploying troops to hunt down, and, perhaps just as crucially, scare away border crossers; widely publicizing deportation flights in which migrants are sent home in shackles; and strong-arming governments in Latin America — like Mexico’s — to do more to curb migration.
The new approach has yielded some eye-popping statistics.
In February, the U.S. Border Patrol said it had apprehended 8,347 people trying to illegally cross the border, down from a record highof more than 225,000 apprehensions in December 2023.
Those numbers had already been dropping sharply since the Biden administration unveiled its immigration restrictions last year. In December, the final full month Mr. Biden was in office, the Border Patrol apprehended 47,330 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border…
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Still, caveats abound. A similar lull in migration at the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, though less precipitous than the current decline, proved to be temporary. Migration experts warn that sanctions and other measures targeting Venezuela and Cuba, two large sources of migration, could worsen economic conditions in those countries and produce a new exodus.
The Trump administration’s embrace of tariffs is also weighing on larger economies in the region, potentially intensifying economic desperation among poor families struggling to get by, a top factor influencing migration. Uncertainty over the tariffs could have already pushed Mexico into a recession, economists fear….
Then there is This…..
President Donald Trump’s White House is celebrating his use of a rarely invoked wartime authority to carry out the mass deportation of hundreds of alleged gang members to El Salvador in an episode that fueled doubts about the ability of the U.S. court system to constrain the Trump administration’s actions.
After a federal judge issued an unusual order Saturday evening that required all planes carrying those covered by Trump’s Alien Enemies Act declaration to return to the U.S, at least one planeload of Venezuelan deportees continued on to San Salvador and discharged its passengers to a waiting brigade of Salvadoran soldiers, police and videographers….
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Justice Department lawyers submitted a vague two-page filing to Boasberg on Sunday afternoon that appeared to assert that planes carrying the deportees were outside the judge’s jurisdiction by the time he ordered them to turn back.
“Some gang members subject to removal under the Proclamation had already been removed from United States territory under the Proclamation before the issuance of this Court’s … order,” Justice Department lawyers wrote.
The DOJ submission also suggested Boasberg’s order wasn’t effective until it was noted in the court’s electronic docket at 7:26 p.m., even though the judge issued the order verbally about 45 minutes earlier and said it had to be “complied with immediately.”…
Update…
It does appear that the Federal judge that ordered no migrants shipped to Venezuela got the order in AFTER 300 Gang members had LANDED in Venezuela ….
If they ARE gang members?
I’m WITH TRUMP…….
The Trump people are now saying they they did NOT disobey the judge….
The receiving country has NOT complained….
And the judge’s order stands at this time….