By Todd Bensman as published March 20, 2025 by The Daily Wire
JUAREZ, Mexico – “Hit the gas!” I barked at my translator behind the wheel of our rental car. “Let’s get the f*** out of here!” We tore off, leaving the reflections of two cartel gunmen, a shiny handgun in the waistband on one, shrinking in our rearview mirror.
The confrontation happened one year ago on the Juarez, Mexico side of the US border along a locally notorious, several-mile long stretch of steel mesh border wall that closely parallelled Mexican Highway 174 and made it a natural human smuggling corridor tightly controlled by the ultra-violent La Linea Cartel.
It was April 2024, and I’d gone to the dangerous stretch to observe a phenomenon that few Americans ever saw during the worst mass migration event in US history that was then in its fourth straight year: hundreds of immigrants the U.S. Border Patrol calls “runners” who become “got-aways” were crossing every day here by cutting holes in an old border wall along Mexico Highway 174. In official government jargon (Title 6 U.S. Code 223) a “got-away” is defined as an immigrant who clandestinely crossed the border to evade capture, got noticed in some way but still went uncaptured and didn’t turn back.
When President Biden entered office, he set off the worst mass migration crisis in US history by ordering Border Patrol to admit most illegal border crossers; some eight to ten million came from all over the world. Most gave themselves up voluntarily to Border Patrol knowing they’d be quickly processed into America. Border Patrol agents call this crowd “give-ups.”
But the got-away crowd was of greatest public safety concern to American society because experts said the majority were criminal aliens who had something to hide like convictions for murder, rape and gang violence. Indeed, an analysis of Customs and Border Protection press releases about captured criminal aliens at the border over the last four years shows hundreds were hard-core criminals.
“I would say a lot of them are undesirable,” Border Patrol Agent Ron Boren of the agency’s union local 2554 in southern California told me a couple of years ago. “The criminal aliens who have been convicted in the United States, the guys convicted of rape, theft, multiple DUIs and Lord knows what else. They’re the ones coming the most often.”
A great place to observe and check the pulse of got-away traffic, then and now, is here along Highway 174 where, when I visited the Mexican side in 2023 and 2024, hundreds of counted got-aways a day were surging into the uninhabited New Mexico desert through large square holes the cartel liked to cut or put the immigrants over it on rope ladders. I counted seven open ones there one day, the garbage-strewn sand on both sides churned by tracks.
On the April 2024 trip, I’d been filming and interviewing five immigrants as they climbed a rope ladder over to the New Mexico State side when two cartel “halcones,” or falcons, cartel field spy enforcers in charge of ensuring payment, suddenly appeared and accused me of putting them over without paying, as though I’d brought them there. The halcones, who station themselves at several-hundred-yard increments in the Mexican desert with binoculars and guns, were demanding I cough up the cartel’s money as the immigrants hurried up and over.
Eventually, after a tense translated discussion, the pair accepted my explanation that I was just a working immigration field researcher. When they commanded that I not film what they had planned for the migrants still climbing, we blasted out of there in the rental. Something similar happened during the 2023 trip. On my knees, I was inspecting one of the holes they’d cut, just poking my head out on the American side, when a cartel suburban rolled up with a load of immigrants and two cartel gunmen strapped with AR-15 rifles. They demanded to know what I was doing in their hole, that they had a load of migrants in the back seats they intended to put through the very cut I was occupying.
When I tried to disarmingly explained I was doing some journalism about immigration, they drove 50 yards up and put them all through a different open hole, which I still had the presence of mind to film.
Then and now, day and night
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 put policies in place 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. A government-contracted welder I encountered slow-cruising the American side of the fence line told me the repairs had fallen from 10-12 every day during the Biden years to just three or four, and sometimes none.
The got-away traffic has dropped like a rock on this infamous stretch of border.
One senior Border Patrol official who worked in the El Paso Sector told me his men might catch only “onesies and twosies” crossing the Highway 175 fence line since Trump took office, while line agents out there told me many days go by where no one crosses it at all, including got-aways.
“We are having zero days now,” an almost incredulous Landon Hutchens, an El Paso Sector Border Patrol spokesman told me during my recent field trip.
This isn’t happening just in the once-manic El Paso Sector but in all eight of the other sectors that line the southern border, according to interviews with officials and recently leaked got-away data.
After my return from Highway 175, Fox News reported that border agents are spotting an average of just 77 got-aways per day border-length, down from 1,800 at the recent height of the crisis.
If those numbers remain anywhere near this historically low level, the new state of national affairs can only be counted as a good news story for public security in the United States that was almost unfathomable just months ago – and a major policy victory for the second Trump administration.
The new status, however, is hardly assured as Mexican cartels are notorious at adapting to adversity in surprisingly innovative ways. But for now, their business is dried up.
By the numbers: from 700,000 to a 36,000 in 2025?
The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t publicly release got-away numbers. But the numbers that have leaked out in various government, court and media reports reveal the historic scale of got-away catastrophe that ensued after Biden entered office in January 2021 and let his DHS appointees order Border Patrol agents off the front line to process in the hundreds of thousands of “give-ups.”
The new catch-and-admit left large swaths of border wide open to those who didn’t want to give themselves up because many no doubt had disqualifying criminal history problems.
Between 2013 and 2020, the pre-Biden monthly range of got-aways” ranged between 10,000 and 14,000 per month, according to research by colleague Andrew “Art” Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies.
But when Biden’s Border Patrol were ordered to abandon the line for give-up processing duty, the got-away numbers in FY2021 more than doubled to an average of 25,000 per month, then doubled again in FY2022 to an average of more than 50,000 per month. It got much worse in FY 2023 ranging to 60,000 and 70,000 per month, with Border Patrol logging 79,829 in October of that year.
By the middle of 2024 as Biden’s term was coming to an end, a record-smashing two million+plus got-aways were logged for the four-year period, according to official testimony before Congress.
If the new 100 or less per day holds for the rest of 2025 – and that’s hardly assured – the United States will be on track for got-away lows it has not experienced in decades: 36,000.
Reasons for the plummet
The Trump administration ordered Border Patrol to unburden itself of processing center duty and instead hunt, detain, prosecute and deport 100 percent of all illegal border-crossers. The first to go were the massive familiar crowds of “give-ups,” leaving cartel-assisted smuggling runs through places like the Highway 174 fence the only option. But the Americans were ready for that.
For instance, aspiring got-aways thinking of hiring a cartel human smuggler to put them through the cut fence along Mexican Highway 174 now face not just a reverted Border Patrol but an army of at least 7,500 active-duty troops to help them spot, hunt, and even arrest, with sophisticated surveillance equipment. Trump deputized thousands of already deployed Texas National Guard soldiers to fan out with authority to make their own immigration arrests.
Immigrants and cartel smugglers contemplating a run through this gauntlet soon learned that was the least of it.
They found out on social media that the Americans would detain and deport everyone they caught, often by air to other countries or to deep southern Mexico so they could not easily cross again. And that Trump’s DHS is referring hundreds more to federal prosecution for illegal entry, real prison time, and bans on legal entry.
“The Americans will put us in jail for two years,” Angel of Venezuela told me while working at his $100-a-week job as a parking lot attendant in Juarez.
And that’s just what awaits immigrants who can even get themselves as far as the American border to attempt to lose their money in a failed smuggling event.
Trump coerced Mexico with a threatened a 25 percent trade tariff to deploy 10,000 troops on their side with orders to turn around anyone they could catch moving toward the US border and ship them down to Mexico’s most southern provinces and often all the way to home countries, a half dozen immigrants stuck in Juarez told me. That’s thinned the numbers of potential cartel customers.
Cartel smuggling business drying up?
Fewer holes are being cut through the Highway 174 fence because fewer immigrants want to lose spiking smuggling fees for such outcomes. The local cartel’s smuggling business seems to be dying on the vine right now, although time will tell.
That’s because fewer can get to the border and even fewer can afford to risk the rising prices for a tough gauntlet run.
Because of the risk of their own captures and prosecutions, cartel smugglers have spiked their fees since inauguration day to as high as $10,000 per head for Mexicans, as high as $17,000 for Central Americans, and $45,000 for Chinese, Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times reports.
Only the richest can afford to gamble and lose, thinning the customer base to a tiny elite demographic.
In Juarez, the Venezuelan father and mother of two young girls said the cartel wanted to charge $16,000 for the whole family. They wouldn’t gamble the money even if they had it for fear of being deported, the couple said during a free meal at a Catholic Church.
Other immigrants in Juarez told me the local cartel smugglers won’t even go across to guide their customers through the gauntlet; they just drop you on the Texas side, left to face Border Patrol and military hunters on their own, then flee back.
The result, according to one young man who washed car windows at red lights in Juarez, “the mafia isn’t smuggling anyone right now.”
Because there’s not enough business, Highway 174 may not hum like it once did for years to come.
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