When Donald Trump takes control of the White House on Monday, he will inherit something his voters hardly would have expected during a long campaign of berating outgoing President Joe Biden on immigration: a U.S.-Mexico border with the lowest number of illegal crossings in five years.
President Joe Biden accomplished that unlikely feat by working more closely with Mexico to increase enforcement there, and by implementing a mix of policies that allowed more people into the country to make humanitarian claims, while all but eliminating migrants’ ability to press for claims like asylum when crossing the border outside legal ports of entry.
The result was a delicate balance of diplomacy, incentives for crossing through legal ports of entry and added deterrence to discourage illegal crossings.
No one benefits from the drop in unauthorized crossings more than Trump, who campaigned promising a mass deportation effort that will require redirecting immigration enforcement resources from the U.S.-Mexico border to the interior of the United States.
But unwinding Biden’s border policies, as Trump has pledged to do, risks creating new challenges after a year in which unauthorized crossings dropped consistently.
“President Trump will inherit a quiet border from the Biden administration,” Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told HuffPost. “We will see how long it stays that way.”
Biden’s immigration enforcement legacy was largely defined in the public eye by chaos at the border: Televised images of thousands of people from around the world trying to cross into the United States and surrender to border agents in order to pursue asylum in the United States.
Border Patrol apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border jumped from 400,651 in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, to more than 1.6 million the next year after Biden took office — though many of those involved multiple encounters with the same individuals who were quickly sent back across the border. Encounters between ports of entry at the southern U.S. border reached nearly 250,000 in December 2023, the most recorded in a single month.
But things have changed: Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have plummeted in the past 18 months, while legal forms of migration have expanded. The number of border encounters in December 2024 was the lowest since July 2020, the Biden administration said last week.
After a three-year low in border encounters during Trump’s first term in April 2020, largely due to COVID-19, the number of encounters began to rise — then accelerated after Biden won the White House, in part on a message of restoring the United States’ “historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers.” The rise in encounters wasn’t solely a result of Biden’s presidency — encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border rose in each of Trump’s last months in office — but they continued ticking up with Biden in office.
Biden also watched as Republicans elevated border politics to a national story. Beginning in 2022, Republican governors led by Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida bused and flew asylum seekers to Democratic cities, usually without any advance warning to local officials or nonprofits.
Abbott also deputized National Guard troops and state troopers for “Operation Lone Star,” part of an effort to arrest thousands of migrants for state crimes like trespassing after they’d crossed the border. Soldiers deployed as part of the effort told HuffPost it was a made-for-TV display of force. They and others also relayed grave reports of abuse. The tactics went largely unanswered by the Biden administration.
“It was very politically savvy,” said Kristin Etter, director of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council, referring to Texas Republicans. “They were able to turn the border red, to blame Joe Biden, to benefit from illegal immigration economically, and create a prototype for the Trump administration.”
In his efforts to tamp down on border crossings, Biden did not totally abandon Trump’s practices. For example, hisadministration (and challengesin federal court from red states) kept “Title 42,” the pandemic-era authority that allowed immigration agents to turn away people at the border, in place for years. The program ultimately ended with the end of the COVID-19 national emergency, in May 2023. Biden expelled far more people under the program than Trump did.
But the defining policy practices of Biden’s time in office have taken place over the last year and a half — a “carrot-and-stick” approach that cracked down on asylum rights at the border while also providing pathways for parole and asylum-seekers away from the border.
The asylum restrictions started with the “circumvention of lawful pathways” rule in May 2023, then expanded with a major asylumcrackdown this year.
The Biden administration’s rule makes most people who cross the border between ports of entry ineligible to seek asylum — a sharp break from the past — and only ends if the weekly average of apprehensions between ports of entry drops below 1,500 for 28 days straight.
Critics argue that Biden has emulated the first Trump administration’s legal reasoning.
“The effects have been devastating,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, who has participated in litigation against the Biden rules. “We have documented many people with credible [asylum] claims being sent back. At a human level, there’s been real devastation.”
The Biden administration also negotiated with Mexico to ramp up immigration enforcement significantly within its borders over the last year, which acted as the most decisive factor for lowering unauthorized crossings, according to Ruiz Soto, the MPI analyst.
Mexico’s National Guard and military both played increasing roles in immigration enforcement and detention over the last year, establishing more checkpoints on highways and railway yards used by traveling migrants and detaining Central American migrants for longer periods of time, Ruiz Soto said.
The Biden administration also pressured Mexico to ramp up its “merry-go-round” strategy, in which Mexican authorities intercepted hundreds of thousands of migrants as they approached the border with the United States and deposited them in the south of the country. The tactic allowed officials to deter migrants from far-flung countries like Venezuela, whom Mexican officials cannot easily deport, from reaching the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Mexican enforcement has been a game changer for arrivals to the United States since January 2024,” Ruiz Soto said.
As the Biden administration cracked down on asylum, his administration also worked to incentivize more “orderly” means of migration: An app, CBP One, allowed migrants to schedule appointments at ports of entry, where they were paroled into the country and allowed to pursue humanitarian claims like asylum. (The app has been criticized for technical glitches, language limitations, and months-long wait times.)
The Biden administration also created a program allowing people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who were vetted and had financial sponsors in the United States to fly themselves into the country. The CHNV program relieved pressure at the border from citizens of those countries, while still allowing them the opportunity to pursue claims like asylum. More than 500,000 people availed themselves of the opportunity.
Biden also oversaw other expansions: During his four years in office, the United States naturalized a record number of new citizens — an estimated 3.5 million people, according to the Migration Policy Institute. He also ramped up refugee resettlement, bringing 197,000 refugees into the United States across four years — up from 118,000 during Trump’s first term. The Biden administration expanded “temporary protected status,” which shields people from deportation back to countries facing dire political turmoil or natural disasters. More than 1 million people are currently protected by TPS, which operates in 18-month periods. Biden recently added another 18 months of TPS status for program participants from El Salvador, Ukraine, Sudan and Venezuela. The latter group makes up more than half of the program.
Taken together, the “carrot-and-stick” policy package drew significant criticism from the left while failing to fend off attacks from the right. But it did succeed in drawing down the pressure at the southern border while offering novel opportunities for people to come into the United States.
“Ironically, they’re handing over to the Trump II administration a much more controlled border, and a much more robust legal immigration system,” Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said recently.
But soon, both sides of the equation could face dramatic changes.
Trump appears to be on a collision course with Mexico over tariffs, despite the fact that he depends on the country for help on immigration enforcement and expects Mexico to accept deportees from the United States who originally came from third countries like Venezuela and Cuba.
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And South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at her confirmation hearing Friday that she would seek to end both the CHNV parole program and do away with the CBP One app.
Noem on Friday referred to migration at the southern border as an “invasion” and pledged to reinstate Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as “Remain in Mexico,” which mandated that asylum seekers wait across the border for court appointments in the United States.
“It is a war zone down there,” she said.