Last year, Joe Biden tried to blame the border crisis on Republicans and their refusal to pass a bipartisan border bill. He needed the legislation to “give me, as President, the emergency authority to shut down the border until it can get back under control,” Biden declared. “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.”

Well, Congress didn’t pass the bill. And yet in his first month in office, Donald Trump has somehow managed to shut down the border without it.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the southern border has suddenly become quiet. On Feb. 16, just 229 people were encountered by Border Patrol agents trying to illegally cross the southern border. “I’ve been doing this job since 1984 as a Border Patrol agent,” White House border czar Tom Homan declared on X. “I’ve NEVER seen numbers that low.” A week later, they got even lower. On Feb. 22, encounters fell to just 200, the lowest single day total in over 15 years, a Department of Homeland Security official tells me. Contrast that with the all-time high of 11,000 encounters on Dec. 18, 2023, under Biden. That’s a 98 percent drop.

Indeed, DHS officials tell me that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered only about 15,700 migrants on the southwest border in the entire 30 days since Trump’s inauguration. This represents the lowest 30-day number of southwest border encounters since April 2017. Southwest border encounters are down 94 percent from their high point of 263,900 in December 2023 under Biden, 91 percent from their 166,900 monthly average during the four calendar years of the Biden administration and down 80 percent from their average of 78,200 from 2000 to 2024.

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