Adam Isacson

I mashed together data from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security Statistics and from Customs and Border Protection to make this chart of the past 11 years’ Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants, by country.

Here’s the underlying data table, with statistics from 101 countries (note that OHSS does some rounding to the nearest 10).

A few things about what you see here:

• This is just Border Patrol apprehensions: migrants caught out in the open areas between the official border crossings (ports of entry). I only have CBP port of entry data by country (which is smaller until very recently), for just 21 countries and a big “other” category, going back to October 2019.
• Note how 10 months of the Trump administration (2017-2020) saw more migration than October 2024 (56,530 migrant apprehensions).
• Note how the migrant population was almost completely Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran before the pandemic, and far more diverse after it.
• You can see the early 2024 drop resulting from Mexico’s ongoing crackdown on migrants trying to transit its territory, and then a further mid-2024 drop resulting from the Biden administration’s ban on nearly all asylum access for people who cross between the border’s ports of entry.

“U.S. authorities made about 46,700 arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico in November, down about 17% from October to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency,” reported the Associated Press’s Elliot Spagat.

That is the fewest people crossing unauthorized between border ports of entry since July 2020, early in the pandemic. Here’s what it looks like:

Data table

The chart shows:

• Migration rising in the final months of the Trump administration, as the “Title 42” pandemic expulsions policy ceased to deter people from coming to the border.
• A big jump in migration in early 2021, after Trump left office and the world’s borders reopened several months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
• A drop in January 2024 as Mexico’s government, at the Biden administration’s behest, started cracking down harder on migrants transiting the country.
• A further drop in June 2024 as the Biden administration, in a questionably legal move, banned most asylum access between border ports of entry.
• Many observers, including me, expected more migrants stranded in Mexico to rush to the border after Donald Trump won the November 5 election, seeking to get to U.S. soil before Inauguration Day on January 20. That is not happening, at least not yet. It may still happen, and activity is increasing in southern Mexico. Still, as the end-of-year holidays usually bring a lull in migration, it might not happen at all.

Weekly data from the three busiest Border Patrol sectors show migrant apprehensions dropping sharply for two or three weeks after June 5, when the Biden administration imposed a strict new asylum restriction rule.

After that, the reductions have stopped and apprehensions have plateaued through July and August.

Sources are the Tucson and San Diego sectors’ chiefs’ Twitter accounts, and the city of El Paso’s online “migrant crisis” dashboard. Here is a data table.

Here are Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants, by U.S. border state, since the record-setting month of December 2023.

Since December, unauthorized migration has declined by two thirds. Since January—after Mexico started cracking down hard on migrants crossing its territory—migration declined by one third. From May to June, after the Biden administration issued a rule severely limiting asylum access between ports of entry, migration dropped by 29 percent. (This effect is likely to be short-term, but may keep numbers down through Election Day—even as it sends many would-be asylum seekers back to danger.)

Texas’s hardline governor, Greg Abbott (R), likes to claim that his state government’s “Operation Lone Star,” a $10 billion-plus series of security-force deployments, imprisonments, and wall-building, is responsible for the drop in migrants coming to Texas. Abbott even alleges that Texas has pushed migrants to other states.

But did Texas see the largest drop in migration?

• Since December, the answer is “yes, though not dramatically more.” Migrant apprehensions in Texas declined by 82 percent from December to June. But in Arizona, where Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has not implemented any “Operation Lone Star”-like policies, apprehensions dropped by 70 percent. Both states, with their very different approaches, experienced declines greater than the border-wide average.
• If one takes January—after Mexico’s crackdown began—as the baseline date, Arizona in fact declined more sharply than Texas. (52 percent to 40 percent.)
• From May to June, Texas dropped 36 percent and Arizona 33 percent, a near tie.

From this, It’s really hard to conclude that Greg Abbott’s policies made a big difference. Arizona experienced similar declines without the hardline policies. The 2024 migration decline is a border-wide trend, not a Texas phenomenon.

We should be relieved that cruelty hasn’t paid any dividends.

During the first five months of the 2024 fiscal year (October 2023-February 2024), people from Asia, Africa, or Europe were one out of every eight migrants whom Border Patrol apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.

That’s never come close to happening before. Non-Americas countries are non-blue in this chart:

Data table

Here are the countries they came from (click to expand):

Late this afternoon—right around the time House Republicans were impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas—CBP released data showing that Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped by 50 percent from December to January.

I’ve got monthly Border Patrol data going back to October 1999, and 50 percent is the steepest one-month drop of all of those 24+ years. Steeper than the first full month of the pandemic (April 2020). Steeper than the first full month after Title 42 ended (June 2023).

It’s peculiar that migration dropped so much over two months during which no policy changes were announced. I’ll repeat the most probable reasons, as laid out in WOLA’s January 26 Border Update.

• According to a few accounts, numerous people sought to cross the U.S. border before the end of 2023 because they were misled by rumors indicating that the border would “close,” or that the CBP One app would no longer work, by year’s end.
• Seasonal patterns are a factor: migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen from December to January every year since 2014 (except for a 6 percent increase in January 2021). Rainy conditions in the Darién Gap corridor straddling Colombia and Panama, and a tendency not to migrate during Christmas, may also explain some of the reduction.
• U.S. officials are crediting Mexico with reducing migrant arrivals by stepping up patrols, checkpoints, transfers, and deportations.

Also, while there were no policy changes, there was one under heavy discussion: the Senate “border deal” that died a quick death on February 7. The spread of vague, confusing news about impending asylum restrictions could have cooled migration more than usual last month.

Anyway, here are two charts.

Here is all migration at the border, combining people apprehended by Border Patrol and people who, mainly with appointments, showed up at land ports of entry. This is what it looks like when the heaviest month for migration on record at the U.S.-Mexico border is followed by the third-lightest month of the Biden administration’s 36 months.

Data table since FY2020

And here is just Border Patrol’s apprehensions of migrants between ports of entry. Look at Venezuela: apprehensions of Venezuelan citizens fell by 91 percent from December to January. This does seem to point to everyone feeling like they needed to cross to the United States before 2023 ended, leaving few on the Mexican side after the new year.

Data table

Update January 29, 2024: CBP has released final December 2023 data. Read an updated post with nine charts illustrating migration trends.

Border Patrol shares monthly data about its apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border since October 1999. As this chart shows, during that time, the number of migrant apprehensions in a single month has never exceeded 225,000. (224,370 in May 2022, 222,018 in December 2022, 220,063 in March 2000.)

Data table

That threshold has now been passed. CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez reported yesterday, “U.S. Border Patrol agents took into custody more than 225,000 migrants who crossed the southern border—in between official crossings—during the first 27 days of December, according to the preliminary Department of Homeland Security [DHS] statistics.”

(This number does not include approximately 50,000 more migrants who come each month to ports of entry—official border crossings—usually with appointments.)

Montoya-Galvez shared Border Patrol’s daily averages, showing modest decline in migrant arrivals over the past week:

The current spike in migration peaked before Christmas, during the week starting on Dec. 14 and ending on Dec. 20, when Border Patrol averaged 9,773 daily apprehensions, according to the data. On several days that week, the agency processed more than 10,000 migrants in 24 hours.

Unlawful crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border have decreased this week, but remain at historically high levels. On Wednesday, Border Patrol processed 7,759 migrants, the statistics show.

In his morning press conference yesterday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shared this slide of data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP, Border Patrol’s parent agency), depicting CBP’s monthly migrant encounters through the first 17 days of December. This slide appears to combine Border Patrol apprehensions with CBP’s port-of-entry encounters, so the numbers are a bit higher.

Combining encounters with migrants at the ports of entry and between them, the chart shows a daily average of 9,787 people per day over December 1-17, increasing to 10,187 per day over December 1-21.

The chart shows a sharp increase in daily arrivals of Venezuelan citizens, whose numbers dropped in October and November after the Biden administration’s October 5 announcement that it was resuming deportation flights to Caracas.

There have since been 11 such flights, DHS reported on December 27. It appears that despite the (not huge) risk of being on one of these roughly one-per-week flights, Venezuelan asylum seekers are again coming in greater numbers.