Recent Sky-High Levels of Illegal Migration Are Dropping Fast — and Here’s Why

Hint: Biden and Mexico’s Obrador have arranged an out-of-view crackdown that could endure through the U.S. presidential election and serve them both politically

Nothing in the American experience has ever compared to the 10,000-14,000 illegal crossings every day the last several months that afflicted major American cities or those poor federal government souls who must manage the U.S. southern border.

But November’s and December’s latest “newest” record-smashing crossings, which exacerbated an already significant political liability to President Biden’s November reelection bid, were falling fast by New Year’s Day. And they’re still dropping.

Daily Border Patrol encounters of illegally crossing foreign nationals in the first weeks of January, in fact, were down by up to 70 percent from the 12,000 and 14,000 per day of recent weeks, to a still managerially catastrophic 4,000 and 5,000, according to government data shared confidentially with me.

What led to those numbers dropping from ionospheric heights the national media had no choice but to cover in a presidential election year? Will it last? Is this one real?

It helps to know that the falling numbers neatly coincide with recent shuttle diplomacy to Mexico City about the (political) crisis by Biden personally and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken on December 22 and then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Blinken on December 27. The second meeting produced a joint communique lacking any useful details about the horse-trading, as my colleague Andrew R. Arthur has still managed to expertly analyze.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Arthur told me. “There’s a deal. We just don’t know what the deal is.”

But the hardly reported or analyzed on-the-ground fruits of all this cannot go ignored for much longer because media visuals of the chaos have loomed so very large in Republican political campaigning — as in ongoing negotiations with Republican senators holding up Ukraine war funding and in House negotiations over raising the debt ceiling.

The fact that the camera-loving high numbers at the heart of all this are dropping so precipitously now warrants some discussion.

Mexico Is Cracking Down in Old and New Ways to Slow the Flow
Migrants board a freight train near Monterrey Mexico in the spring of 2023

In a nutshell summary of Mexico’s doings, according to my own content analysis of Mexican media, forces under control of Mexico’s central government are rounding up immigrants in the country’s north and shipping them by bus and airplane to southern cities like Tapachula in Chiapas State (on the border with Guatemala) and Villahermosa in Tabasco State. They are all expected to go home or stay put alongside those continuing to enter from Guatemala.

They’ll be held back to wait for a molasses-slow bureaucracy to approve individual travel papers. Tens of thousands are filling those southern provinces now.

Meanwhile, federal forces are installing new road checks to hem them in, a la the Gaza Strip, and in the northern provinces to catch, return, and deter runners still getting through.

Probably to instill an enforcement vibe, Mexico also appears to be ramping up air deportations from its rapidly filling southern provinces that may send increasing numbers of uncooperative, rebellious, or repeat attempting immigrants caught in this southern bureaucracy back to distant home countries.

The bottle-necking strategy is actually nothing new and easily undone; I’ve been reporting on it since 2019 (See “Video Report: How Trump’s Policies Ended the Mass Migration Crisis on Mexico’s Southern Border – For Now”). But the Biden administration has long let Mexico slide on it so long as Mexico did it in a way that American TV cameras couldn’t see (See “Mexico’s Duplicitous ‘Ant Operation’ Moved Tens of Thousands of the U.S. Border Sight Unseen — and Will Again Through 2022”).

To eliminate another obvious draw, Mexican authorities have emptied and then bulldozed at least one longstanding migrant camp, the sprawling one in Matamoros across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and reportedly dug deep anti-pedestrian trenches to deny further easy access to popular crossings there. Other ad hoc camps also are probably scraped away by now, too, or soon will be if this continues.

Perhaps one of Mexico’s most impactful slow-down measures is that, finally, it is doing something about “La Bestia”, the system of cargo trains that have super-powered the Biden border crisis for three years running by transporting hundreds of thousands of migrants from deep southern Mexico to its northern border cities.

More here:

https://cis.org/Bensman/Recent-SkyHigh-Levels-Illegal-Migration-Are-Dropping-Fast-and-Heres-Why

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