Trump sees lowest border numbers in history, declares invasion 'is OVER'

The Border Patrol apprehended just 8,326 illegal immigrants at the southern border in February, President Trump announced Saturday, calling it the best month on record.

“The month of February, my first full month in Office, had the LOWEST number of Illegal Immigrants trying to enter our Country in History – BY FAR!” the president said on social media. “The Invasion of our Country is OVER.”

February’s figure tops the previous low of roughly 11,000 illegal immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents in April 2017, near the start of Mr. Trump’s previous term, when the president’s tough talk scared people into not making the journey.

It didn’t last that time, and Mr. Trump faced ups and downs for most of his first administration, although he turned a relatively calm border over to President Biden in 2021.

Mr. Biden then unlocked the doors and spurred the worst migrant crisis in U.S. history, with numbers topping out at nearly 250,000 illegal immigrants — an all-time record — caught by agents along the U.S.-Mexico border in December 2023.

The vast majority of those were caught and released, while Mr. Trump said the ones caught on his watch last month were “quickly ejected from our Nation or, when necessary, prosecuted for crimes.”

The border numbers had been calming in the final months of Mr. Biden’s tenure, with agents catching between 46,000 and 58,000 people a month for the last half of 2024. With Mr. Trump taking office in January, the number dropped below 30,000.

But to fall to about 8,000 is near miraculous.

Todd Bensman, a border expert at the Center for Immigration Studies, said Mr. Trump’s success “disproved and debunked” the claims of immigrant rights groups that external factors caused the migrant surge.

“There’s no intellectual choice left now but to just finally accept that starting and stopping events like this is so simple,” Mr. Bensman told The Washington Times. “You just detain, expel, deport. That’s it. That’s closing the border. It’s nothing complicated.”

He said it also challenged the claim of former Vice President Kamala Harris, who blamed “root causes” in other countries for spurring the wave of migrants, and congressional Democrats, who said Congress needed to pass legislation to stop the migrant surge.

“We didn’t need any Senate bill then, we don’t need any Senate bill now,” Mr. Bensman said. “We never needed comprehensive immigration reform to send billions of dollars to reduce root causes of immigration by rebuilding other countries. The immigration system was never broken and needed to be fixed. All of that stands as totally debunked now.”

Mr. Trump has made his success by vigorously flexing powers he already has — in some cases testing the limits of what Congress gave him — in order to shut down the border.

He declared a border emergency and cited an “invasion.”

It’s not clear whether his declaration that the invasion is over will undercut his legal justification for the emergency.