Historic Plummet in Illegal Border Crossings Reveals the Root Cause of the Biden Border Crisis

The massive flood of illegal aliens across the southern border has become a trickle, disappearing almost as swiftly as it first emerged four years ago.

The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas reported on Tuesday that, according to the White House and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the number of border apprehensions in January fell to the lowest point in five years.

February looks to have even lower numbers than January. According to the New York Post, “about 359 illegal migrants per day have been caught across the entire southern border — down more than 90% from February 2024.”

“Total illegal border crossings for fiscal year 2025 are on track to fall to the lowest rates since 1968,” Lucas reported. On Monday, President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, noted how remarkably quiet the border has suddenly become.

Isn’t it interesting how quickly the issue at the border has begun to solve itself now that we have a president who is willing to uphold the law? It seems even before he returned to office, potential border crossers got the message they wouldn’t be here to stay.

If you recall, the Biden administration insisted for years that there was no crisis at the border and that it was “secure.”

Not only was there a very real crisis, but given the timing of the surge at the southern border and now its sudden halt, it seems clear that this whole thing was intentionally fabricated. The Biden border problem wasn’t merely a result of incompetence, it was the product of an intentional subversion of U.S. immigration laws.

In some of his first official acts as president, Joe Biden decimated Trump’s border policies. The Daily Signal reported in 2021 that the “Biden administration immediately stopped wall construction, ended the Remain in Mexico program, tore up the Cooperative Asylum Agreements, started releasing illegal aliens into the U.S., and ended 90% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement removals.”

The result was four years of mayhem. The border was completely overrun. Cities across the country were filled to the brim with illegal aliens and were begging the Biden administration for help.

In 2021, the Biden administration enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris in a mission to uncover the “root causes” of illegal immigration from South and Central America. Whether she identified those root causes or not, the problem not only continued, it exploded.

A new record for illegal border crossings was set nearly every year of the Biden presidency.

According to an October report from the House Homeland Security Committee, federal law enforcement encountered nearly 11 million illegal aliens crossing the border since Biden took office.

To put those numbers in perspective, this is more people than the entire population of all but seven states, according to the 2020 census.

When the border issue became politically toxic, the Biden administration attempted to create the appearance of orderliness while doing nothing to stem the real “root cause” of the problem: its insistence that border enforcement was fundamentally illegitimate.

The only significant thing the Biden White House did in four years was to insist that Congress pass legislation to send money to mostly Democrat-run cities (and Ukraine) and to codify the catastrophic new border policies into law. This was billed as an attempt to solve the problem that they had loudly insisted didn’t exist.

It wasn’t a solution, it was a farce meant to distract the American people and construct a sophist argument that it was really Republicans who didn’t want border security. That argument was about as believable as Biden’s absurd claim that Republicans were the ones who wanted to defund the police.

I do believe that peddling these fantasies and the legacy media’s complicity in promoting them are at least part of the reason Trump marched back into the White House in January with even more support than his first go around.

The bottom line is that the stunning turnaround at the border is primarily due to two simple factors. The Biden administration didn’t want to uphold the law, and Trump does. As the Washington Examiner noted on Wednesday, it didn’t take any new legislation from Congress to see immediate and spectacular changes at the border.

“Biden did not need new legislation, as he had claimed, to push Mexico to help strengthen the border,” editors at the Examiner wrote. “Trump did not need congressional action to reinstate his successful Remain in Mexico policy. Congress can still improve our immigration system, but Biden’s claims that his hands were tied by limited resources dictated by Congress was always a lie.”

The problem for the Trump administration going forward is what to do about the millions of people now living illegally in the U.S.

The Biden administration and its immigration activist supporters no doubt hoped that by bringing in so many people, they would make it both messy and unpopular to attempt to deport even a small percentage of them.

But so far, Trump’s border policies seem more popular than ever. Biden’s border madness created a historic vibe shift. It’s up to the Trump administration to clean up the mess.

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