(NewsNation) — Apprehensions of immigrants who entered the United States illegally reached what federal immigration officials claim is the lowest total in at least five decades, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data obtained exclusively by NewsNation.
CBP sources said that the number of arrests made by federal immigration enforcement agents working at the U.S.-Mexico border totaled 7,180 last month. The historic tally comes after Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, previously reported that illegal border crossings had dropped by 94% from last winter when former President Joe Biden was in office.
President Donald Trump made securing the U.S.-Mexico border one of the main priorities during his presidential campaign and promised to end the flow of migrants into the country as soon as he began his second stint in the White House.
“This is jaw-dropping,” Mark Hall, the White House deputy border czar, told NewsNation in regard to the March statistics. “I anticipated change, but I never thought that I would see the drastic, just unprecedented change so quickly.”
March apprehensions at the US-Mexico border
In March, CBP federal immigration agents made an average of 232 apprehensions per day across the entirety of the southern border, data obtained by NewsNation. The number of apprehensions last month represents a 95% drop from March, 2024, when CBP announced 137,473 arrests.
The 230 daily migrant arrests made in March are in stark comparison to the daily average of 5,100 apprehensions that were made between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2024, according to NewsNation’s analysis of CBP data.
The plunge in nationwide arrests comes just a month after CBP officials announced that the agency averaged 330 arrests of migrants per day in February. The 8,347 arrests in February signified a 71% decrease from January when U.S. Border Patrol agents made 29,101 arrests.
However, the number of apprehensions recorded during the month was down from the 140,641 arrests made during February 2024, CBP officials announced in March. A total of 301,981 encounters took place between migrants and border agents in December, 2023, according to CBP data.
Border apprehensions reach record low, per CBP
Hall said that the record low number of apprehensions is something he has never seen in 41 years of working in border enforcement. He said that the drop in arrests and encounters between border agents and migrants who entered the United States illegally is because CBP is getting operational control of the border.
He said in the 1980s, the agency was “nothing more than a speed bump” but that now the agency is a “problem” for those looking to enter the country illegally and for cartels seeking to smuggle immigrants and illicit drugs into the United States.
“(In 1984), operational control of the border wasn’t even a term we used,” said Hall, who began his career in the Yuma, Arizona, sector in 1984 when he said the agency was making 600 arrests per day in that area alone. “It was just ‘try to grab as many (migrants) as you could as they ran past you.”
Agents working the southern border previously told NewsNation that the lack of illegal crossings and apprehensions represented what border operations were supposed to resemble. Under the Biden administration, Hall said a border agent told him he felt like they were part of the largest human smuggling operation in the world.
Now, he believes morale is at an all-time high among agents because there is no longer a sense that they are being held back.
Changes at the US-Mexico border under Trump administration
Ron Vitiello, who previously served as the Border Patrol chief during his immigration enforcement career and now serves as a special advisor for CBP, said that after border agents struggled to find a sense of accomplishment under Biden, they feel free to do their jobs now under the new administration.
A once insurmountable mission, Vitiello said, with thousands of border encounters taking place each day, the mission would have been to release migrants as quickly as possible and move on to alleviate the stress being felt by border agents.
Now, under Trump, Vitiello said everything has changed.
“When the workload has fallen so precipitously, you have now the ability for these men and women out there to do a lot more now as it relates to securing, surveilling, being present and patrolling the border and solving the problems of human trafficking,” Vitiello told NewsNation.
