Joe Biden can claim one last success for his administration before Donald Trump enters the White House. Illegal immigration numbers at the U.S.-Mexico border have seen a historic drop: the lowest since July 2020, when crossings from one state to another were at their lowest due to the pandemic—the statistics so vaunted by the Republican candidate during his last campaign.
At the end of the first week of 2025, Associated Press data report about 44,000 arrests as the total number for December, down from 46,612 in November and the last six months. An agent of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that oversees customs also confirmed this data to USA Today, saying that between Monday, Dec. 30, and Sunday, Jan. 5, about 1,000 illegal migrants a day were tracked down. And January may confirm this trend.
Adam Isacson, a border security expert at the Washington Office for Latin America, commented to the New York Times that for the first few months of his presidency, Trump may continue to record such low statistics, even if the merits of these results are to be attributed to Biden.
It is thanks to the measures implemented by Biden and the relationships he has developed with former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the current one, Claudia Sheinbaum, that fewer migrants are trying to cross the border without legal documents and that there are more arrests. As of December 2023, about 250,000 people have been arrested and, in 2024, there was a new record for deportations: 271,484 to 192 different countries, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, surpassing even the percentage reached by the first Trump administration.
To support the legal entry of as many people as possible, Biden promoted an app, CBP One, to allow 1,450 daily appointments to apply for asylum. Under a measure passed in September 2024, the Biden administration suspended asylum applications if more than 1,500 arrests were reported for 28 consecutive days. This legislation complemented another, effective June 2024, under which border closures were imposed whenever the daily average of arrests exceeded 2,500 for seven consecutive days.
