Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard will all visit the United States’ southern border on Wednesday as illegal border crossings are at all-time lows.
This comes as the Trump administration continues to use the “whole of government” approach to deal with the crisis at the border and move deportation efforts forward. Vance, Hegseth, and Gabbard will visit a federal facility that handles immigration in Eagle Pass, Texas, the Daily Wire reported.
During Trump’s first month in office, the number of people crossing the border illegally has dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s.
According to the Border Patrol, about 359 migrants are processed every day at the southern border. This is 90% less than at the same time last year, when Biden was president.
During the Biden administration, the border town caused a lot of trouble when Texas police took over a park that had been used to process and release immigrants coming into the US.
The Trump administration has promised to support the mass deportation effort with the “full might” of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). This visit comes at the same time.
“In 30 days, the president sealed the border shut, declared the cartels to be terrorist organizations, has increased ICE deportations to levels not seen in decades, and we are shortly on the verge of achieving a pace and speed of deportations this country has never before seen,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller recently remarked.
According to internal data obtained by Axios, the number of people crossing the U.S. southern border illegally dropped to its lowest level in decades in February.
Since Trump started enforcing and talking about his broad crackdown on immigration, the numbers have dropped sharply.
“The Invasion of our Country is OVER,” Trump wrote in a Saturday Truth Social post celebrating the decline.
The drop represents an overlap of Trump’s sweeping changes in policy and rhetoric with trends that began months before he returned to the White House, said the Migration Policy Institute’s Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, who closely tracks border data.
In February, the Border Patrol caught about 8,300 people who crossed the border illegally between ports of entry.
According to CBP data, the Border Patrol had about 29,100 encounters in January, which is less than the 47,300 they had the month before.
The numbers for February are the lowest they’ve been since FY2000, which is the first year that monthly data was made public.
Around 130,000 people met each other in February 2023 and 2024.
There was a “really key” reason for the downward trend “that often goes a bit under the radar,” according to Putzel-Kavanaugh.
The Trump administration initiated its long-promised crackdown on the first day of his term, causing significant disruptions throughout the immigration system.
Officials shut down an app that helped some migrants legally cross the border, used military planes to deport people, and made a big deal out of a plan to deport a lot of people.
Thousands of people were stuck in Mexico when the CBP One mobile app stopped working. Their appointments for asylum screenings had to be canceled.
“The calculus was really starting to shift [prior to the app being shut down] where people were waiting in Mexico to get those appointments and be able to be processed that way, because there would still be access to humanitarian protection,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said.
And since Mexico is a big part of keeping the number of people crossing the border low, it’s not clear how the tense cross-border diplomacy and the growing trade war will affect talks about immigration enforcement.