See Todd Bensman’s: Front Line Field Reports, 2021-2025, from the Greatest Mass Migration Event in American History
The Greatest Mass Migration Crisis in US History is Over
I declare its end not as a government official empowered with any special authority to do so, but as someone who accurately foretold the coming crisis before it began in 2020 and 2021 and then, for the ensuing four years, covered this dramatic story’s beginning, middle and — now — its end intensely on the ground in seven countries. I also offer the declaration as author of a 432-page book, Overrun, which documented why President Joe Biden started this crisis on his inauguration day, what happened as it unfolded, and why the same simple steps in reverse were always available to just as quickly end it.
Then and Now at the Southern Border: What happened to one Texas segment when the White House changed hands
One of my favorite of the nine Border Patrol sectors to visit was the “El Paso Sector,” covering the western tip of Texas and all of New Mexico. It has always been emblematic of what was happening everywhere, and it remains so now.The first thing I saw was a vast, trackless emptiness for miles along the Juárez side of the Rio Grande. In the same places where I had so often swum in a sea of immigrants facing Texas troops and their cutting fences and pepper-ball guns, it felt as though a peace treaty had ended a war.
First Good Battlefield News From Trump’s Global War on Fentanyl
A key indicator of broader total smuggling at and between the southern border’s ports – U.S. law enforcement seizures of fentanyl — has dropped 50 percent since the November election, indicating a greater decline in total fentanyl smuggling. That decline is attributable to Trump’s reset of U.S. Customs and Border Protection orders to aggressively hunt the drug as they and thousands of active-duty soldiers are now free of the distracting duty of processing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border every month throughout the Joe Biden term.
What’s Happening in Mexico?
Mexico is in chaos as its government struggles to manage a swollen population of restive foreign nationals blocked by the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s high-deterrence border closure policies, a content analysis of recent Mexican media reporting reveals. Border Patrol sources say less than 500 foreign nationals a day – down 95 percent from Inauguration Day and compared to 10,000-14,000 a day in fall 2023 — now dare even try the border since Trump’s new administration abruptly replaced the prior administration’s mass-release policies with rapid expulsions.It also ended the irresistible phone CPB-One phone app-based “lawful” parole entry programs that escorted in thousands by appointment, leaving them inside Mexico. Untold tens of thousands are now blocked in Mexico behind the Trump dam, which will soon be double walled as 10,000 Mexican troops move up to reinforce against crossings, a move Trump forced upon Mexico by threatening a 25 percent export tariff on Mexican exports.
Even the “Got-aways” – the Most Dangerous Immigrants – Sharply Down at New Trump Border
A year later, just this month, I went back to the Highway 174 wall to contrast what has happened on that stretch since President Trump policies reduced illegal immigration border-length to historic lows. Apparently, very much. After scouting both the US and Mexican sides of this wall and highway over four days, I found only trackless emptiness. I found no open cuts in the wall this time. There were no halcones with binoculars standing along out in the desert. The sand was windblown rather than churned with the footprints of immigrant runners. The got-away traffic has dropped like a rock on this infamous stretch of border.
Prison First, Deportation Later: Trump Revives Criminal Penalties For Border Jumpers
Criminal hearings for illegal border crossings like this are taking place every day with increasing frequency in the Del Rio courthouse now, as well as in many other federal courtrooms across the country.The prosecutions, featuring progressive prison sentences, are part of fast-spreading nationwide prosecution policy that forms an important prong in the Trump administration’s broader effort to end the historic levels of mass illegal crossings the past four years and, the hard part, to keep them low.
How Trump’s Suddenly Secure Border Forever Debunks Dem Immigration Theories
Before anyone moves on from this funeral, however, a different ceremony is necessary, an autopsy for the high purpose of serious national reflection. One for the pantheon of border security ideas and theories the Democratic Party and its academic, pro-migration think tank allies relentlessly sold the American public for years on end as the only means to save the Republic from the unmitigated mass border migration it started as soon as Joe Biden took office.
A Border ‘Peace Dividend’: Texas ‘Operation Lone Star’ Shifts Forces Off the Rio Grande
After four years and more than $11 billion spent battling the worst mass migration border crisis in U.S. history, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” has repositioned most state troopers and police personnel from a southern border riverfront that quickly fell quiet once President Donald Trump entered office and ended the crisis with new policies.
VIDEO REPORT: With Border Crisis Over, Texas Redeploys Forces From Rio Grande
The Center for Immigration Studies’ national security fellow, Todd Bensman, documents that Texas has shifted troopers and other state police personnel from its $11 billion “Operation Lone Star” off of the 1,254 miles of the Rio Grande River for the first time in four years. This move comes as illegal border crossings reach historic lows under President Donald Trump’s new policies. Texas officers will now be free to expend more resources on targeting Mexico’s drug cartels and disrupting their human and drug smuggling operations. Read more: A Border ‘Peace Dividend’: Texas Shifts Some Police Forces Off the Rio Grande
VIDEO: Bulldozer Trail: Border Patrol’s New Anti-smuggling Road
A new Center for Immigration Studies video report provides exclusive footage from the El Paso sector of the U.S. southern border, highlighting a newly constructed road that is enhancing border security. Todd Bensman, the Center’s national security fellow, joins Border Patrol agents to examine Bulldozer Trail, a critical new road cutting through previously inaccessible, rugged terrain.
U.S.-Mexico Border Transformed Under Trump’s Policies, Bensman discusses recent border trip on Parsing Immigration Policy podcast
Fieldwork undertaken by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals a border now under control, offering clear evidence that the border crisis was never an unstoppable force but rather the result of policy decisions. Last week the Center sent analysts to the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector and across the border to Tijuana, and to the El Paso Sector and across the border to Juarez. These two border sectors had some of the heaviest migrant traffic over the last few years, but now the numbers have plummeted. Center researchers Andrew Arthur and Todd Bensman join Parsing Immigration Policy to discuss what they saw and what policies are making the difference
The Daily Wire: Will Mexico Face A Hot Shooting War With The Cartels?
Odds are that lead will fly as Mexico positions 10,000 troops between cartels and their drug money – and watch for triggering US-supported raids on drug labs and narcotics depots. This deployment of Mexican troops is different than past ones, in which the main mission was to slow illegal immigration only, including during Trump’s first term and throughout the Biden term. For this one, the Trump mission demand is, as State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce put it recently, that Mexico “dismantle transnational criminal organizations…and stem the flow of fentanyl.
Trump Doesn’t Need Maduro’s Cooperation To Deport Venezuelan Migrants
The agreement that President Donald Trump in January foisted on leftist Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro to accept thousands of Venezuelan air deportees is teetering. Maduro is mad because the Trump administration canceled a license allowing Chevron to operate in the South American country, citing the fact that Maduro has only accepted a few hundred criminal alien Venezuelans.Most of the nearly 1 million Venezuelans who illegally crossed the U.S. southern border were living contentedly in more than 20 other peaceful countries for years before they realized the Biden administration would grant them an American lifestyle upgrade.
NY Post: Riots and Hijackings — why ICE cuffs and shackles some deportees
The best way for Americans to understand the case for cuffing and shackling is by retelling the recent true story that isn’t far from the minds of career Department of Homeland Security officials. It happened when President Joe Biden used mass air deportations to belatedly handle a massive camp of 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants that suddenly formed under the Del Rio, Texas, international bridge in September 2021.
‘Injustice Porn’: Get Ready for the Next Big Thing on the Immigration Front
Injustice porn is “news” coverage and commentary that emphasizes hyperbolic, emotionally triggering government abuse allegations or migrant sobbing to generate headlines, spin up public outrage, and force government counteraction –before they can be proven false when no one cares much later. Injustice porn propaganda is likely afoot when human rights and migrant advocates, UN agencies, and the news media put forth visuals and arguments that favor their agendas, without evidence.
BOOKMARK FOR NEW ADDITIONS TO COME SHORTLY
Related Media
Fox Business News Mornings with Maria: The ‘whole dynamic’ has ‘changed’ on the southern border, immigration expert says
On Charlie Kirk Show Discussing Transformation at the Border After One Month of Trump 2.0
War Room: Bensman Claims US Tariffs Force Mexico Raids on Fentanyl, Sharp Smuggling Slowdown
On Protecting America with Rita Cosby: How Trump Closed the Border
Bensman on Blaze TV Declares the Historic Biden Border Crisis OVER and much more
Bensman in War Room Studio: “That Border Was Shut Down In One Hour On Inauguration Day.”
‘Runners and Got-Aways’ Down Sharply at Border, Too! The Michael Patrick Leahy Show
The Greatest Mass Migration in American History is Over
By Todd Bensman as published March 3, 2025 by the Center for Immigration Studies
We know enough now to justify a declaration about the greatest mass migration border crisis ever to have stricken the United States and probably any other country in the world: It is now, finally, at its end.
A fitting tombstone might read RIP, Mass Migration Crisis: January 2021 to January 2024.
I declare its end not as a government official empowered with any special authority to do so but as someone who accurately foretold the coming crisis before it began in 2020 and 2021 and then, for the ensuing four years, covered this dramatic story’s beginning, middle and – now – its end intensely on the ground in seven countries. I also offer the declaration as author of a 432-page book OVERRUN, which documented why President Joe Biden started this crisis on his inauguration day, what happened as it unfolded, and why the same simple steps in reverse were always available to just as quickly end it.
President Donald Trump ordered up those few simple steps required in existing immigration law – detention, border expulsion, and interior deportation – on his first day in office. Bam: as quickly as Biden had opened the border on his 2021 Inauguration Day, Donald Trump closed it before the sun set on his own in 2025. As I’ll explain shortly, I believe the new state-of-affairs will stick for at least the full length of Trump’s term, so long as the administration physically follows through on all policies that it has rolled out to date and maintains them at full throttle.
For starters, Trump’s November 5 election triggered a precipitous decline in illegal border crossings and parole program entries allowed at land and air ports from 106,333 in Biden’s October 2024 (about 3,544 per day) to 61,465 (about 2,048 per day) for the month of January – and free-fell to 300 a day, border-length for much of Trump’s February 2025, bringing Trump’s first full month in office to 8,326 apprehensions, “the lowest month in recorded history“, according to Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks. That portends a 2025 of the lowest numbers ever illegally crossing the southern border if they remain at at this incredible nadir level. And, as I said, they most likely will.
Meanwhile, what does that look like on the ground and in major US cities that had been forced to take on these millions? There are no more needy foreign newcomers showing up with hands outstretched. The raging northward torrent of foreign nationals of 200,000-350,000 per month that Biden’s policies launched on is inauguration day is now raging back southward as hundreds of thousands caught in Mexico and other countries on Trump’s Inauguration Day settle in place – and self-deport.
Almost unbelievable scenes of flight are unfolding on the trails as thousands indeed self-deport backwards to home countries just as many told me they would right after Trump’s election, when I was reporting in Tapachula and Mexico City, Mexico. Some are even self-deporting to Canada, a flow expected to spike exponentially in the coming months.
Closer to ‘operational control’ than ever
Because of the multi-layered policy architecture Trump has already put in place, the border has moved closer than ever to the probably unattainable goal of “operational control” required of the Department of Homeland Security and defined by the U.S. Secure Fence Act of 2006 as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States…”
Even if the Secure Fence Act’s zero-entries bellwether serves as a somewhat unachievable guiding goal, Democratic Party President Barack Obama’s former Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson’s benchmark of below 1,000 entries per day – all of them promptly detained and expelled – may serve well as a realistic goal in its stead.
“I’d look at [the border crossing numbers] every morning – and my staff will tell you if it was under 1,000 apprehensions the day before that was a relatively good number. And if it was above 1,000 that was a relatively bad number and I was going to be in a bad mood the whole day,” Johnson famously told MSNBC in 2019.
With well under 500 a day trying Trump’s new system – and none of them being released – the United States is beyond there now and did it faster than migration advocates constantly told America could possibly happen.
Exposure of mass migration narratives as false leaves only one standing
Trump’s quick border closure now requires that the American public, lawmakers, students of immigration policy and policy practitioners finally and forever regard as “disproved” and “debunked” the many enabling and deflecting theories that pro-immigration advocates offer about what causes mass migration events and how to stop them.
There is no intellectual choice left now but to finally accept that starting and stopping these events was always a simple matter and never the complex undertaking that, for instance, Democrats constantly asserted during the recent presidential campaign.
No major “bipartisan Lankford senate bill” was ever required to shut it all down as Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris relentlessly insisted during the recent campaign and promised, as her central border and immigration policy plank, that she would restore if elected.
Also never necessary was “comprehensive immigration reform,” or billions sent to reduce the “root causes” of emigration by rebuilding troubled origin countries. Not needed were the complicated and time-consuming unproven programs to fix “the broken border” and “the broken immigration system” that Democrats, migrant advocates and partisan immigration theorists have constantly demanded as pretext to let millions to pour over in the meantime.
No, instead, it was always something far simpler available to any president: To open or close the border gate with the push of a couple of policy buttons. What these buttons do is turn on or off the only real “root cause” of mass migration, an almost too-obvious one that I elaborately reported in my book OVERRUN and more quickly explained last year in this five-minute 2024 PragerU video: The buttons raise or lower the odds for aspiring immigrants to successfully enter the United States and stay long enough to pay back their smuggling fee investments.
High odds guarantee the recouping of smuggling fee costs many times over; they’re all coming for this. Low odds guarantee debt for all their trouble and expense; no one’s coming for that.
That’s why they stopped coming when Trump on his Day One returned to following existing laws requiring detention, expulsion and deportation while releasing none into the nation’s interior and moved to cut off public welfare. After the election, dozens in Mexico told me they were going to abandon plans to enter because the odds of successful entry and long-term stays had fallen to unacceptable lows.
No guarantee of border closure longevity
But caveats are in order here. These simple policy prescriptions alone will work their magic only so long as the Trump administration keeps a heavy foot on the pedal and systematically executes them with very little exception.
We know this from the first Trump administration’s experience when tough border talk about a “big beautiful border wall” and first policy rollouts in 2017 initially halted most illegal immigration because aspiring border crossers felt the odds of successful entry had fallen. That first six or seven months of hesitancy became known as “the Trump Effect.” But litigation delayed the wall and temporarily shut down policies that were going to detain and expel.
Starting in the Spring of 2018, a major surge of illegal immigration happened that the first Trump administration was able to eventually wrestle down with other policies and some court victories.
But those in the second Trump administration learned from that experience and layered up multiple different policies to ensure that this second “Trump Effect” enjoys a longer life expectancy.
For example, the first Trump administration hadn’t yet thought of Invoking a powerful instant expulsion policy that was always on the books, even if litigated in recent years. It’s section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act and reads like this in the lawbook:
“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”
Trump 2.0 issued that proclamation and began using it on Day One to catch and expel almost everyone they can lay hands on. The number of those who can be caught – and therefore the odds of getting caught after a dodging border run necessary now — are higher than at any time during the Biden administration due to the deployment of thousands of US military personnel to help spot them for a Border Patrol force no longer required to process thousands a day for interior releases.
But should opponents litigate 212 (f)’s use, the administration put in a backup plan already litigated and good to go that allows almost the same thing, colloquially called “Remain in Mexico.” That policy also allows the president to immediately expel all border crossers to pursue asylum claims for years inside Mexico.
One way or another, the increased expulsions and odds of capture that make the vast majority of aspiring border-crossers want to save their smuggling money are visibly happening for all to see along the US-Mexico border.
Trump layered up in two other highly consequential ways that increase the longevity of the border’s near-operational-control state, as well. The new administration immediately put in place a 25 percent trade tariff on Mexico to coerce a 10,000-troop military deployment that turns around all immigrants they can catch at their side of the US-Mexico border and to contain them to southern provinces. By all accounts, the Mexican troops are actually doing that work in very visible ways.
Finally, there is Trump’s interior deportations plan. No one has been able to miss these as Border Czar Tom Homan noisily shows and tells. These growing interior deportations message that, even if you manage to break through the Mexican and American border cordon, illegal immigrant “got-aways” still face growing odds that federal immigration officers will eventually find and deport them by air to a growing list of nations like India, Colombia, China, and Africa, all newly agreeable to accept the flights.
All this layered architecture has dramatically lowered the odds that many foreign national gamblers are going to lay down their smuggling money on the green felt.
And that’s why I feel comfortable declaring that the greatest mass migration crisis in U.S. history is over, and the southern border is closed. At least for the next four years.
