Candidate Donald Trump vowed to curb the flow of illegal aliens into America and, and as president, boy howdy has he.
Consider these numbers:
- Arrests in the Rio Grande Valley dropped from 15,579 in January to just 4,143 in March
- That means the daily number has dropped from 291 to only 37
- 16,600 were arrested across the entire Mexican border in March compared to 66,000 last October
- The numbers are a 17-year low for the region
Want to see that info in a chart? Here you go, courtesy of the Daily Mail.
The numbers have plunged across the entire border, the Mail says.
In Yuma, Arizona, only 336 were arrested trying to cross the border in March whereas 1,155 were stopped in January.
El Paso, another busy crossing in Texas, saw only 976 arrested in March, a decrease of 1,803 since January.
The drop bucks a five-year trend of increases. Since 2012, the total number of immigrants either arrested or turned away from the border has risen.
What’s more, after the spike in the fall — more than 56,000 crossed in October — things slowed once Trump was elected.
Trump got to work on fulfilling his promise just five days into office, signing an executive order on Jan. 25. The order set new tougher regulations on the border and mandated that already existing rules be enforced. And the order also set out the first stages of building a new wall along the border.
Combined, the moves have had a dramatic effect, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“This area used to be really hot,” Marlene Castro, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, told the Times about the Rio. “You couldn’t move. Every time you turned a corner, you’d run into group after group.”
Migration experts, Border Patrol agents and advocates offer plenty of reasons for the sharp decline in people crossing over, from President Trump’s aggressive stance on securing the border and media coverage of recent immigration raids to heightened security on Mexico’s southern border. A rise in smuggling fees could also be a factor.
“We don’t really have a normal anymore,” said Castro, who has worked for Customs and Border Protection for nearly 20 years. She insists agents are not doing anything differently; the Trump administration’s executive orders are simply enforcing laws already on the books.
“Are you going to risk a 1,000-mile journey and pay $8,000 to be smuggled if you’re not sure you’ll get to stay?” Castro said, offering a reason she thinks fewer asylum seekers are crossing over. “I wouldn’t.”
Source: Daily Wire