Despite Election Rhetoric, Illegal Border Crossings Sit at 4-Year Low

I

n the final days of the presidential campaign, immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border remains one of the most heated topics of the election. Former President Donald Trump calls it an “invasion,” crudely disparages immigrants and threatens mass deportations. Vice President Kamala Harris, in tacit recognition of the Biden administration’s border challenges, also vows tougher enforcement.

Yet illegal border crossings have plunged to the lowest level in four years, according to new data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. To understand how that fact squares with the fraught political rhetoric, KQED looked at the current dynamics of migration at California’s border with Mexico.

As the Pacific Ocean crashed against the beach nearby, Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Michael Scappechio stood on a well-maintained road flanked by a pair of formidable fences — 18-feet and 30-feet high — dividing the streets of Tijuana from a deserted state park in San Diego.

“Just in the last two months, this region has seen an approximate 50% decline in illegal entries,” Scappechio said. “Nationwide numbers have declined as well.”

The U.S. government first began erecting a metal fence along the border here 30 years ago this fall. Today, it’s more fortified than ever, with lighting, motion detectors, cameras, drones and other technology — as well as manpower — augmenting the fence. It’s all been reinforced under both Trump and President Joe Biden.

Yet, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, as a global migration crisis grew, the Biden administration confronted rising numbers of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Monthly Border Patrol migrant encounters hit a record high of nearly 250,000 last December.

In response, the administration ramped up a set of tough measures meant to deter unauthorized border crossings, reversing course from the more compassionate approach of the early years of Biden’s presidency. 

The results have been striking. In September, Border Patrol encounters fell to 54,000 nationally, just 22% of December’s peak. The San Diego sector had the largest share of those encounters, with 13,000, but that too was down from a peak of 37,000 in April.

Several factors are contributing to the turnaround. For one, since the beginning of the year, Mexico has cracked down on migrants heading for the U.S. border. And in June, Biden issued an executive order barring access to the asylum process for those who enter illegally when crossings are high.

And, Scappechio said, a sharp increase in expedited removals and repatriation flights — or flying people to their home country — is sending a message to would-be migrants before they make the journey “that the borders are, in fact, not open.”

“Partnerships with Mexico have enhanced. Policies have changed,” he said. “Messaging, I think, plays a key role because a lot of migration is oftentimes fueled by misinformation.”

Smartphone app aids in vetting migrants

In addition to preventing unauthorized border crossings, the Biden administration has also created a process for migrants without a visa to come in lawfully. They can make an appointment using a smartphone app called CBP One, get vetted at a port of entry and then enter with a temporary humanitarian parole. 

Immigrant advocates strongly criticize the CBP One app as unreliable, and they’ve sued to block its use, saying asylum seekers who lack appointments have wrongly been turned away from ports of entry.

However, since it began in January 2023, the process has provided more than 850,000 migrants a way to reach the U.S. legally. The parole status lasts just two years, but parolees are eligible for a work permit and can apply for asylum or another form of legal status once on U.S. soil. 

But the appointments are scarce — 1,450 per day nationwide — compared to the number of migrants who want them. And advocates say people often spend months of insecurity in Mexican shelters, trying daily to schedule a slot.

At the San Diego airport one recent afternoon, about a dozen families who entered through the CBP One process — most from Haiti, Venezuela and Honduras — sat quietly in a designated area near the baggage claim. Volunteers from the Haitian Bridge Alliance handed out snacks and helped people make travel arrangements. 

Gabriel Herrera and his wife, Josie Mejía, entertained their two small children, ages 6 and 3, with markers and cell phone video games. They’d spent the night in the airport after they were granted permission to enter the U.S. the day before. 

Herrera, 33, said they’d waited seven months, mostly in Mexico City, for their turn.

“Thank God we’ve arrived, and this country is giving us an opportunity. We should all appreciate the effort they’re making to receive us,” he said in a voice that expressed strain as well as relief. “We’re here because we really, really need it — not to make money, but to live where there’s safety and justice.”

Mejía, 28, said they were going to Charleston, South Carolina, where her sister lives. They have an appointment to appear in immigration court next March, she said.

Her husband said the odyssey that led them here began more than two years earlier, when his business partner’s wife was murdered after their auto repair shop in Tegucigalpa failed to pay the monthly extortion fee demanded by a criminal group.

They took off for Spain with people who promised them jobs, said Herrera, but found themselves in the hands of labor traffickers who threatened them and took their pay. It took a year to escape, he said, but as soon as they made it back to Honduras, they faced threats again.

“Our only hope was to get to the U.S.,” Herrera said. 

But on the journey north through Guatemala and Mexico, Herrera said they were repeatedly robbed and mistreated — by both criminals and law enforcement. In one Guatemalan town, police stripped his 6-year-old daughter naked and touched her body, he said, leaving the girl traumatized.

“I came here so we could live without fear,” he said. “I want my daughter to finally be able to go to school and make friends. To have a normal life.”

Then Herrera and Mejía packed up the markers and helped the children into their small jackets. It was time for their flight to Charleston. Carrying their belongings in one daypack each, they took their kids by the hand and headed up the escalator to the security line.

San Diego as a national model: ‘It’s about dignity’

Stories like Herrera’s are common, said Dana Toppel, the CEO of Jewish Family Service of San Diego, which runs a shelter serving about 1,200 migrants a week — mostly families who entered using the CBP One app.

“To us, it’s about dignity. It’s really about centering the individual and being very trauma-informed,” she said, as a bus pulled up at the shelter with dozens of migrants that JFS staff had met at the San Ysidro port of entry. “They’ve gone through a lot on their journey. So anything we can do to make it easy, to make it understandable and calm, is our focus.”

Inside, everyone received meals, a warm bed and a place for the children to play. The shelter also provided a medical screening and help refilling prescriptions, a legal orientation about the asylum process and help applying for a work permit, and assistance making travel plans.

The vast majority of migrants don’t stay in San Diego long, most spending no more than a night or two at the JFS shelter before traveling on to other parts of the country to reunite with family members, Toppel said.

Groups like JFS and the Haitian Bridge Alliance are part of a robust network of local nonprofits responding to the needs of immigrants in the border region. Though they’re always looking for more resources, they say the San Diego community has stepped up and the region is not facing a migrant crisis.

San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas said the county has become a national model for reducing Border Patrol releases of migrants onto the streets and treating asylum seekers with dignity. The county recently won nearly $20 million from the federal Shelter and Services Program for a migrant transition center, she said.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done, but we’ve been able to allocate resources from the federal government specifically for this,” she said. “The partnership with Governor Newsom and the Biden administration has really been one that we have not had before from previous administrations.” 

Toppel added that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature have been stalwart in providing funds for her group and others, including backfilling with state dollars when federal grants have gotten tied up in red tape.

“We are so lucky to be in the state of California,” she said.

But the humanitarian work of welcoming asylum seekers is at risk, Toppel said, as Trump has centered his campaign on the message that immigrants are criminal “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

“With the election coming up and the narrative that’s out there, it’s all getting mixed up,” she said. “As we head up towards November, I would say that it has created an opportunity to tell the stories of the people that we’re serving, to try to change hearts and minds around who’s actually coming and that these folks are not dangerous.”

‘It’s more difficult to travel across Mexico’

Across the border in Tijuana, the number of migrants waiting for their CBP One appointments or preparing to cross the border illegally has also diminished. Roughly 2,000 of the city’s shelter beds were available in September, according to Enrique Lucero, who recently stepped down as Tijuana’s head of migrant affairs.

That’s partly because migrants can now access the CBP One app from central and southern Mexico. Appointments are set 21 days in advance, giving people time to reach the U.S. border. And the Mexican government will issue a 20-day transit permit to those with proof of a CBP One appointment, Lucero said.

“It’s harder and harder to get to the north if you don’t have an appointment or a visa,” he said. “Tijuana’s not getting the foreign migrants we used to because it’s more difficult to travel across Mexico.”

That difficulty is largely due to the fact that Mexican authorities are transporting non-Mexican migrants south to the state of Tabasco and containing them in southern Mexico, said Lucero.

“There’s pressure, or at least a request, from the United States to help put the brakes on the number of migrants reaching the border. It’s a political question, with an election underway,” Lucero said. “We need migration controls because we can’t turn a blind eye to the smuggling operations. And also it affects the binational relationship.” 

Fewer people navigate the harsh terrain to reach the U.S.

Alejandro Salinas, the head of the Baja California office of Grupo Beta, the Mexican immigration agency’s search and rescue arm, said that when his teams go out to locate migrants in distress, they encounter fewer people trying to sneak into the U.S.

“We’re seeing fewer migrants trying to cross the mountains or the desert,” he said. “But, unfortunately, we’ve had four deaths this year from heat stroke, just in Baja California.”

Driving east from Tijuana along Highway 2 with the border fence in sight, Salinas said he’s seen more policing underway by his counterparts in the enforcement arm of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, or INM. Though they’re both part of the same agency, he emphasized that Grupo Beta’s work is strictly humanitarian.

Salinas and his team stopped at one of several bases that the INM established in rural stretches along the border earlier this year. With soldiers from the Mexican Armed Forces to protect against criminal smuggling organizations, INM agents patrol the remote rural areas to intercept non-Mexicans.

INM enforcement agent Abraham Basurto said they had been out before dawn and encountered an Uzbek man with a broken ankle.

“We provided first aid and transferred him to Tijuana,” Basurto said. “We make sure migrants are okay. After that, the most important thing is to check whether they’re in the country legally.”

He said the patrols commonly encounter groups of 10 to 20 migrants. And they’re coming from countries outside the hemisphere. Those migrants often cross the border illegally and turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents to request asylum, but in recent months, the number of people from those nationalities reaching the U.S. has dropped dramatically.

“We see people out here from many countries — Uzbekistan, Mauritania, China, Cameroon, Tajikistan — but not from Latin America,” he said. “With groups like this, we obviously have to check what they’re doing out here.”

Then the Grupo Beta team drove on to La Rumorosa, a forbidding mountainous region at 4,000 feet elevation, studded with boulders and cactus and known for its howling winds. 

Salinas and his three colleagues, in their trademark orange jackets, left their trucks on a highway turnout and started down through the rocks. It’s a common smuggling route, so they typically hike through there every couple of days on the lookout for stranded migrants. They’ve even marked certain boulders with large numerals to help navigate the bleak terrain where migrants are often abandoned.

“The smuggler just points north — toward a U.S. wind farm or the border fence — and they say, ‘Just walk and you’ll reach the United States,’” he said. “But they don’t say that you have to descend this mountain and climb the next one. They don’t say how dangerous it is or how easily a person can get lost out here.”

To emphasize the point, one of the other agents, Perla Godínez, pulled out her phone and opened up a video of a recent rescue. In it, a man is sobbing.

“It took a long time to find this group. There were five of them, including a child,” she said. “The rescue took 18 hours because we had no cell phone signal, so we went from one place to another, looking. They were really weak when we found them, and one guy was crying because he thought they were going to die.”

Godínez said she first learned about Grupo Beta when she worked as a 911 dispatcher.

“I took the calls from migrants who were lost, and I passed the reports to Grupo Beta,” she said. “I decided to change jobs because I wanted to know that the migrants who called for help were being found.”

All the fencing and the policing by both countries, the asylum restrictions and the lawful pathways to humanitarian parole have vastly reduced the number of people entering the U.S. illegally. But they don’t get at the root causes of why people migrate, so some will keep trying, said Lucero, the former Tijuana migrant affairs director.

“It’s not as if things are all better in Venezuela, or the war in Ukraine is over, or there’s no more poverty in southern Africa,” he said. “This calm that we’re seeing may be temporary. We don’t know how long it’s going to last.”