America's Talking - Southwest Border Apprehensions Drop By 85%, at Ports of Entry by 93%

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

(The Center Square) – In the first 10 days of the Trump administration, apprehensions dropped by 85% between ports of entry at the southwest border, according to new data published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. From Jan. 21 through Jan. 31, 2025, the number of U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border dropped by 85% compared to the same period in 2024. The number of inadmissible illegal border crossers using a CBP One phone app arriving at ports of entry at the southwest border dropped 93% in 11 days compared to the same time period one year prior.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxx  Full story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_f8084f54-eef3-11ef-b021-8b3a654452eb.html  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire service. Illegal crossings at both the southern and northern U.S. borders have plummeted since President Donald Trump took office. Mass deportations are well underway, and the federal government has declared multiple cartels and other transnational criminal organizations as Ford terrorist organizations. joining me to discuss this today is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, though not all Americans support the president's policies related to the border, a majority do. And it's remarkable how a change in the administration can completely flip something that's been known as the border crisis the past four years on its head. What has the Trump administration been able to accomplish in its first month in office?

I mean, so much to say here, Dan, it's a remarkable change at the southern border. There's so much we can go back and forth and what's happened over the past few years. But we'll just say border crossings, border counters down 95%. I mean, and this is in one month, the 95% down. Trump sent 1,500 troops to the southern border. He started a massive nationwide deportation program. He has really unhandcuffed these border patrol agents and allowed them to focus on catching people and turning them away instead of what they were doing before, which is doing

paperwork for the illegal immigrants they're letting into the U.S. I don't think people realize that many times the majority of Border Patrol agents were just processing immigrants, illegal immigrants, to come into the country instead of out there catching them and turning them away out of the country. He, you know, ended, he reinstated remain in Mexico, which is basically if you're seeking asylum, you have to wait. you can't come into the country and wait for asylum approval. You have to wait to you're approved. Then you can come in. And during the Biden administration, all these people would just apply for asylum. And he said, yeah, come on in. We'll process your paperwork later. And they hardly ever got to it.

And if they did and denied your asylum claim, it's like, well, you're already in the country. And no one's going to come looking for you, really, because ICE was hardly doing any deportations, just only on like the worst criminals and not even that at times. And so it was a policy, a program set up to allow illegal immigrants to come into the country in mass. And they did over, you know, it's over 12 million illegal immigrants came into the U.S. under Biden. Just a massive number. 12 million is more people than, you know, every large city in the U.S., basically. More New York, Chicago, Houston, all that. So it's a massive number of people that came in.

And now, Dan, the word has gotten out because there's many, MIDI reports, Telemundo, other, you know, Spanish, language media that is reporting that just huge droves of people are turning around and heading back south and giving up, not trying to come in anymore because they've heard how hard it is, that if you do get in, you're going to get deported. And so now all these Central American countries in particular are dealing with this huge influx of people coming from Mexico back south to their country of origin because they've basically given up on coming into the U.S. illegally. Casey, President Trump this week also directed third. agencies to stop funding public benefits for for those foreign nationals living illegally in the U.S.

That's got to be a deterrent, too, you would think, huh? Yeah, I mean, it sends a message. And Trump has, you know, his reputation precedes him. That's why these migrants are turning around. On this federal funding issue, I think this is really going to be, this is not so simple as this order maybe makes it seem. The states and Democratic governors really, I think they're going to give Trump a hard time on this.

It's going to be hard to enforce this, you know. There are Democrat states like California that are probably looking for a reason to pick a fight with Trump legally. He's already facing other legal challenges. And so I think enforcing this order is going to be hard. There's many Democratic states that spend a lot of money on illegal immigrants and is probably going to be hashed out in the court. Now, some of those states will say, no, we don't spend money on illegal immigrants. But what they do is they do not check someone. They basically don't check if someone's an illegal immigrant or not.

and that's their way of paying for illegal immigrants, even though with like for certain programs where they're supposed to check if you're, you know, an illegal immigrant or not, they just don't check. And so they say, well, we don't do that. We don't, you know, fund illegal immigrants. It's like, well, but you don't make sure that you don't. And that's your purposeful policy to make sure that you do. And so it's kind of disingenuous among some of these Democrat-led states. But, you know, and of course, these federal programs are sometimes interlinked and intermingled with the state program. So if Trump really wants to enforce this order, he's going to have to follow up and be consistent because we've seen with his other orders that, you know, he releases them, but people don't actually obey them. So he's going to have to go, you know, program by program, like, and that's really what Doge is doing. And that's really the power of Doge is just to go program by program line by line to make sure that these federal bureaucrats who run these programs, who send out this money, are actually following the executive order. Because even already, Dan, we've seen that they haven't yet. I'll give you another example of the way this is happening.

You know, Trump banned DEI, and his Department of Education, released a letter saying schools and school districts that have DEI policies could lose federal funding. But I just wrote about a report yesterday that from parents to Phenna Education that showed that there are thousands of school districts that have DEI policies on their websites. And right now there's, you know, many of them still have them up. And so who's going to go and actually look into this to make sure these schools do change their policies that they actually do and not in name only, that the federal funding actually is pulled? So there's a lot of, you know, the devil's kind of in the details and all this funding battles. Returning back to the border, Casey, Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week said that the Trump administration was formally designating these transnational criminal organizations such as cartels from Mexico and other Latin in South America.

countries as foreign terrorist organizations, just very briefly. What does that mean? Well, it really gives President Trump the opportunity and a choice to make where he could really unleash the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence capacity, you know, possibly SEALs teams, Army Ranger teams against the cartels to do real lethal damage. I mean, it would really kick off a war because the cartels are heavily armed. They're pretty organized. They have a lot of money. Of course, they don't have the same technology that we do as far as, like, surveillance and aircraft, but they're heavily armed. So it's no small thing to come against these cartel guys.

They're also infiltrated inside the U.S. as well. It's not like they're just in Mexico. So it's really like starting a war, but given all the, I think it's 100,000 overdose deaths a year, most of them from fentanyl and much of that fentanyl coming from the cartels, maybe it's worth it to go after these guys. I guess time will tell. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecenter square.com.