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On an average day at the U.S.-Mexico border in March, each armed, uniformed soldier or agent encountered 0.007 migrants.
Sources: Border Patrol and CBP Officers: DHS OIG https://bit.ly/dhsoig-2324; Active-duty military: Stars and Stripes https://bit.ly/43Hnstd; Texas and federal National Guard: CNN https://cnn.it/3DDFh10; March apprehensions: CBP https://bit.ly/cbp-2503.
“The month of March recorded the lowest southwest border crossings in history,” reads a release put out by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) yesterday, adding, “In March, the Border Patrol data shows that around 7,180 southwest border crossings were recorded.”
7,180 Border Patrol apprehensions is very few. It is the fewest since Border Patrol (part of CBP) started reporting monthly data. But Border Patrol only started doing that in 2000.
If you look back further, to Border Patrol’s founding in 1925, you have to get monthly numbers by taking annual totals and dividing them by 12. Those averages show that March 2025 was not, in fact, the “lowest in history.”
There were fewer migrants in the 1950s-1960s and before World War II. And those low numbers were sustained over 12 months.
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408 people migrated northward through the Darién Gap in February, the fewest in a month since November 2020. An expected result of the disappearance of the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. (data table / source / chart)
Panama reported 4,849 people migrating through the Darién Gap in December 2024, the fewest since March 2022. It is a likely sign that people have begun delaying their migration plans, for now, after Trump’s election.
Though the number of people transiting the jungle region dropped 42 percent from 2023’s record levels (from 520,085 to 302,203), 2024 was the second heaviest year ever for Darién Gap migration.
Note that the chart above shows that an important increase in Darién Gap migration happened from 2018 to 2019, when Donald Trump was in the White House. This migration flow, mostly citizens of Haiti and Cuba, was curtailed by the pandemic in 2020—but it shows that Trump’s first-administration policies didn’t deter people from trying to migrate after an initial “wait and see” phase.
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Panama’s government published data on Friday about migration through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle region straddling the country’s border with Colombia that until recently was considered too dangerous to walk through. People who attempt the 70-mile route frequently perish of drownings and attacks by animals and—more often—by criminals. Robberies and sexual violence are terribly common.
Despite that, the Darién Gap has become a heavily transited migration route since the COVID-19 pandemic began to ease. 1.2 million people have migrated through the Darién Gap between 2021 and 2024, more than 10 times the 115,758 people who made the journey in the 11 years between 2010 and 2020.
During the first 11 months of 2024, 277,354 people, 70 percent of them citizens of Venezuela, traversed the Darién route. That is down 44 percent from the 495,459 people who crossed the Darién Gap in 2023, the record year.
The most intense months of Darién Gap migration were August and September of 2023, when more than 2,500 people per day crossed the jungle. Migration dropped with the heaviest months of the rainy season (note October and especially November dropping every year on the chart below), and recovered only modestly at the beginning of 2024.
It’s not clear why Darién Gap migration didn’t climb all the way back up to August-September levels in early January 2024. Likely explanations could be word getting out about Mexico’s stepped-up efforts to block migrants, which began in January, and perhaps some Venezuelans postponing plans pending the outcome of July’s presidential elections, whose result the Nicolás Maduro regime ended up ignoring.
Migration fell further in July, after Panama inaugurated a president, Raúl Mulino, who took office promising to crack down on Darién Gap migration. Some migrants may have paused their plans amid news of stepped-up, U.S.-backed deportation flights from Panama. Panama’s government operated 34 deportation flights between August and November, removing about 1,370 people who had migrated through the region. While that is equal to about 1.8 percent of the total Darién Gap migration, the flights may have deterred some, at least for now.
Panama’s data show that November 2024 saw the fewest Darién Gap migrants of any month since April 2022. That is somewhat surprising, since one would expect the waves of repression following Venezuela’s failed election to have spurred more people to abandon Venezuela and head north. That appeared to be happening in September and October, when Venezuelan migration increased.
A key reason for November’s drop may be the weather. November is the height of the rainy season in southern Central America: the Darién paths are especially treacherous, and maritime routes can be dangerous. A report published Friday by Colombia’s migration agency shows that on at least three days last month, the boats leading to the Darién route’s starting point from the ports of Necoclí and Turbo, Colombia, were shut down completely by climate conditions.
There could also be a “Trump effect.” The November 5 election of a virulently anti-immigrant president in the United States may also be causing would-be migrants to change their plans, for now, until they have better information about what may await them.
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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:
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“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:
The chart shows:
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<Edit, November 27:> It was great talking to Greg Sargent yesterday for an excellent New Republic piece that embeds the below graphic.
All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them and he’ll start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.
…[W]e may not be prepared for the gale-force agitprop that’s about to hit us.
</Edit>
Yesterday the President-Elect promised to levy tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to stop migration to the U.S. border.
However, Mexico’s security and migration forces (green in the chart) are already encountering and impeding, in their territory, about as many migrants as U.S. forces do at the border. In July, they stopped more people than their U.S. counterparts did.
(Mexico hasn’t yet updated its September and October numbers. Underlying numbers are in the image’s alt text.)
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Panama’s government posted updated data about the number of migrants encountered migrating through the Darién Gap jungles. While the number of people making the dangerous journey declined a bit (to 22,914 in October 2024, from 25,111 in September), the number of citizens of Venezuela barely budged (from 19,800 in September to 19,522 in October).
In fact, citizens of Venezuela (blue in the chart) made up 85 percent of all people who migrated through the Darién Gap in October. That’s Venezuela’s largest-ever monthly share of the Darién migrant population (it was 80% in September 2022).
Migration through the Darién Gap has declined from 2023, when Panama counted 520,085 people all year. 2024 is in second place, though, with 286,210 migrants during the year’s first 10 months.
Since 2022, an incredible 676,981 citizens of Venezuela have migrated through the Darién Gap. If there are about 30-32 million Venezuelan people, that is 1 out of every 47 of them.
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Here’s 2,000 words and 12 charts that I wrote and drafted before the Election Day cataclysm. In late October, the U.S. government published final fiscal year 2024 data about border and migration topics. I waded through all that and distilled it into five key trends:
Read the whole thing, with text explaining these graphics, at WOLA’s website.
This chart shows the number of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol each week in the three geographic sectors at the U.S.-Mexico border where the agency apprehends the most people right now. (Border Patrol has nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.)
Numbers have been remarkably flat since late June, following the Biden administration’s June 4 declaration of a near-total ban on asylum access for migrants arriving at the border between ports of entry. I don’t have a big archive of weekly apprehensions data, but looking at months, it is unusual to see migration remain at a low level following a decline for more than six months or so. We’re at four months now.
The source for the San Diego (California) and Tucson (Arizona) sectors is weekly tweets from the sectors’ chiefs. The source for the El Paso (far west Texas plus New Mexico) sector is the city of El Paso.
In July, absolutely for the first time ever, Mexico reported “encountering” (apprehending, blocking, turning back, detaining) more migrants in its territory than U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which includes Border Patrol) reported encountering at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Citing a “restructuring process,” Mexico’s authorities say their reporting of September data will be delayed, but at least through August, the two countries’ migrant encounters remain nearly equal for the first time in history. And, of course, the U.S. figure includes Mexican citizens, and Mexico’s does not.
Much has been written about Mexico’s undeclared but vigorous policy of redirecting other nations’ migrants to the country’s south and cutting way back on humanitarian visas, even as detention and deportation have grown less frequent. It’s been called the “chutes and ladders” or “merry-go-round” policy, shipping people south when they try to come north.
A few sources:
One way to work through electoral anxiety is by doing useless math.
Here’s a sheet generating predictions from the latest early vote numbers from some key states that report party affiliation.
This is meaningless—early vote may not reflect anything—and is based on gut assumptions (the orange numbers). But maybe it can distract you for a while? And either way, it shows how critical it will be to keep knocking doors and getting voters off of their sofas over the next nine days.
Here’s the Google sheet: click on “USE TEMPLATE” at the top, and change the orange numbers yourself.
Of the 9 U.S.-Mexico Border Patrol sectors, the chiefs of 2 of the 3 busiest, San Diego and Tucson, post weekly updates to Twitter showing apprehensions of migrants.
In both, there has been little up-or-down change since late June, after the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions began.
Donald Trump and others are pushing a completely false story that response to Hurricane Helene has been hobbled because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has had funds “stolen” to help shelter migrants recently released from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody at the border.
As many have pointed out, there is exactly zero truth to this. But even if that happened, it wouldn’t have amounted to much. In 2024, appropriations to FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which prevents migrants from being dumped on U.S. streets upon release, totaled less than 2 percent of appropriations to FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.
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.
Well… here’s the purity and inflation-adjusted price of a gram of cocaine on U.S. streets since 1990, so… probably not.
(Source is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Table 8.3 here.)
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?
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.
I know I’m doing my work sabbatical wrong, but I’ve updated every one of our border and migration charts, a collection of more than 90. View them:
Here, by month and by country, are appointments that CBP has granted to asylum seekers, using its “CBP One” mobile phone app, to approach U.S.-Mexico land border ports of entry.
Chart – Data Table – Source
The app’s use for this purpose began in January 2023, and today it is very hard to request asylum at the border without an app-scheduled appointment.
It is especially hard since June 5, when the Biden administration imposed a rule banning asylum for most people who cross the border between ports of entry, even though the law specifies that people have the right to ask for asylum on U.S. soil regardless of how they crossed.
Though it is the only pathway for most, appointments are scarce. CBP hasn’t increased the allotment of appointments—currently about 1,450 per day—in a year. Asylum seekers now routinely spend months in Mexico seeking, then awaiting, appointments.
Chart – Data Table – Sources (1) (2)
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:
Here are the countries they came from (click to expand):
Of Joe Biden’s 39 full months in office, 2024 so far has seen the months with the third, fourth, eighth, and ninth fewest migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. April was fourth-fewest.
This was unexpected, since it immediately followed some of the Biden administration’s heaviest months for migration, including the record-setting December 2023. The drop appears to owe to a sustained crackdown carried out by Mexico’s government, with migration agents, national guardsmen, and other security forces blocking migrants’ northward progress.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott (R), has been claiming that his state government’s border crackdown reduced migration there and pushed it to states further west. That’s not what the data show.
Since record-setting December, and also since migration dropped in January, Arizona—not Texas—has seen the sharpest percentage drop in migration. Arizona has a Democratic governor, and its state government is not carrying out a severe deterrent policy like Abbott’s $10 billion-plus “Operation Lone Star.” Yet Arizona’s migration reduction is similar. So Texas doesn’t get the credit.
We can zoom in further to look at what has happened to migration in each of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors.
Viewed this way, one of Texas’s five sectors did see the sharpest drop in migration: Del Rio, in mid-Texas, fell 86 percent from December to April; 39 percent from January to April. It is the only Texas sector to have decreased more sharply than the border-wide average.
But Tucson, Arizona—Border Patrol’s busiest sector between July 2023 and March 2024—fell almost as steeply as Del Rio (61% since December and 38% since January).
And after a December-January drop, all other Texas sectors are increasing.
Del Rio’s migration decline was led by super-sharp drops in arrivals from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, three nationalities (along with Haiti) whose citizens the Mexican government allows the Biden administration to deport into Mexico under its May 2023 post-Title 42 “asylum ban” rule.
Deportation into Mexico without allowing a chance to seek asylum is almost certainly illegal: a federal judge already struck this part of the rule down (it remains in place pending appeal). It’s possible that this practice—more than Texas’s concertina wire, buoys, and soldiers—may have affected the choices these nationalities’ migrants made in Del Rio since January.
Border-wide between January and April, for every Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan migrant who crossed the border irregularly (43,040), more than five instead arrived via legal channels: either the “CBP One” app (about 120,000) to make appointments at ports of entry, or the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program (about 108,000) for these nationalities.
In Tucson, no nationalities declined as steeply as did Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in Del Rio. But the drop has happened across the board, with only modest increases in apprehensions of Colombians and Peruvians.
From what we know of the month of May so far, migration along the border could be declining even further. Twitter reports from the San Diego and Tucson Border Patrol sector chiefs have showed both regions declining over the past two weeks. The El Paso municipal government’s “migrant crisis” dashboard is also showing flat, even slightly reduced, numbers of encounters there.
See also:
Mexico just posted its February migration numbers… there must be a huge number of people from Venezuela bottled up in Mexico right now.
2024 numbers from Panama – Honduras (change the dates in search) – Mexico (click on “Personas en situación migratoria irregular” then Table 3.1.1) – U.S. (CBP / my search of CBP numbers for 2024)
Sector chiefs’ weekly Twitter updates point to a mid-March drop in migration in Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California, the two Border Patrol U.S.-Mexico border sectors that have been encountering the most migrants so far this year.
This is not the usual trend. March—and spring in general—is usually a time of steadily increasing migration, until temperatures get too high. In recent years, though, this has become less predictable, as policy changes, internet-driven rumors, and smuggling patterns have had more effect on the numbers of arriving people.
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.
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.
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.
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The latest data from Panama show that 36,001 people migrated through the treacherous Darién Gap region in January. That’s an increase from December, reversing four months of declines. But it is still the fourth-smallest monthly total of the last twelve months.
At some point last month, the 500,000th Venezuelan migrant of the 2020s crossed the Darién Gap. 61 percent of everyone who has migrated through this region in this decade has been a citizen of Venezuela.
Actually, to be precise: the 500,000th Venezuelan migrant since 2022 crossed the Darién Gap last month. Out of 503,805 Venezuelan migrants between January 2000 and January 2024, 500,917 came in the last 25 months. There were about 30 million people living in Venezuela: so 1 out of every 60 has walked this nightmare jungle route. In 25 months.
The 30,000th Chinese citizen of the 2020s crossed the Darién last month. A year ago (after January 2023), the decade’s total migration from China was just 2,998 people.
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After dipping sharply after the holidays, the number of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border appears to be increasing again.
That, at least, is the trend that we can discern from the weekly updates that the Border Patrol chiefs in Tucson and San Diego, two of the busiest of the agency’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors, have been posting to their Twitter accounts.
A Senate deal on Ukraine, Israel, and border funding might include new restrictions on the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, satisfying Republican legislators’ demand. Of what we know, the most radical of these would be a new legal authority shutting the border to asylum seekers when the daily average of migrant apprehensions exceeds 5,000.
That would trigger a new “Title 42” authority expelling people out of the United States (if Mexico agrees to take them), regardless of protection needs.
On January 27, President Biden described this as an “emergency authority to shut down the border until it can get back under control.” He added, “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.“
We keep hearing this notion that more expelled asylum seekers equals fewer migrants at the border. But that’s not what happened during the Title 42 period (March 2020 to May 2023).
True, there was a decline in arrivals of would-be asylum-seekers from nationalities whose expulsions Mexico would accept. But the number of people from other countries, and of all people seeking to evade Border Patrol, grew sharply.
Migration ballooned during the Title 42 “expulsions” period. Title 42 was in place:
This was not a time when the border was “fixed.”
If the Senate deal results in a new expulsion authority, it might bring the numbers down at the border for a few months, as all “get-tough” strategies against migration tend to do. But as we saw in 2020-2023, migration will recover despite the expulsions, after a period of adjustment—perhaps by Election Day.
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As we noted in a June report, Honduras keeps a reasonably accurate count of migrants transiting its territory, because it requires people to register with the government in order to have permission to board a bus. A minority travel with smugglers and don’t register, but most do.
Honduras also reports the nationalities of “irregular” migrants in something close to real time, so here’s what in-transit migration looked like through December.
The top 15 nationalities transiting Honduras during December were:
The top 15 nationalities during all of 2023 were:
A few things are notable about this data:
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