DHS: Border Encounters Down 91% From 2023 Peak in April

EL PASO — Customs and Border Protection encountered roughly 14,300 migrants at the southwest border in April, the lowest monthly figure in nearly nine years and a 91% drop from the December 2023 peak, the Department of Homeland Security said in a release Wednesday.

The collapse in numbers — once a policy aspiration mocked as impossible by the administration's critics — has now held for six consecutive months.

What's driving the drop

Acting CBP Commissioner Pete Flores credited a combination of aggressive prosecution under the revived "consequence delivery" framework, expanded biometric screening at consular posts, and a posture of close cooperation with the Sheinbaum government on Mexico's southern border.

"The deterrent effect is not a side benefit. The deterrent effect is the policy," Flores said in remarks to reporters at the El Paso sector. "When you tell someone the decision they're about to make has consequences, most people make a different decision."

Smuggler chatter monitored by federal investigators has shifted from advertising specific U.S. crossing strategies to actively warning would-be clients off the route. Two senior officials told Idiocracy News that intercepted communications reflect a market in which the cartels themselves are openly conceding the corridor has closed.

The criticism

Civil-liberties groups call the numbers cause for alarm rather than celebration. The American Immigration Council and ACLU released a joint statement Wednesday arguing that expedited removal at scale, combined with the post-Title 42 regulations, amounts to a "humanitarian shutdown" that violates U.S. asylum-law obligations.

Administration officials say the asylum law was never written to accommodate ten thousand crossings a day and that orderly processing at consular posts abroad is — in fact — the legal pathway Congress wrote into the statute.

What it means politically

The political consequences are already showing up in polling. Border security, which polled at the top of voter concerns through 2023 and most of 2024, has dropped to fourth place in the latest Gallup tracker. The administration's approval rating on immigration is the highest single-issue number it posts.

The harder question is whether the discipline lasts. Every previous administration — including Trump's first — saw initial drops followed by rebounds when smuggling networks adapted. The next test is the May–June seasonal surge that historically pushed encounters back up.