Most Migrants Cross At The Texas Border. Here’s How The Flow Of People Intersects With Trump’s Policies.

By Mandi Cai and Connie Hanzhang Jin

Since President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration has tried to curb migration at the Southwest border with controversial policies like “zero tolerance” and the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as “remain in Mexico.” Initially, migrant apprehensions at the border dipped — then began rising again, followed by a large spike in the first few months of 2019. A steep decline began in May 2019 as new policies took hold.

On March 21, 2020, in light of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Trump issued an executive order that immediately returns individuals apprehended or deemed inadmissible to the countries they arrived from. This order was reflected in April’s numbers, which showed a slowdown in people encountered at the border. But numbers released for May to October suggested that the order’s deterrent effects wore off — in the border sectors located in Texas, apprehensions for the month of October were more than four times what they were in April.

To continue its crackdown on immigration, the Trump administration is rushing to finalize several immigration policy changes before Trump leaves office, including an order taking effect in January that limits the circumstances under which people can qualify for asylum. Overall, the number of people apprehended by or surrendered to federal immigration officials on the U.S.-Mexico border this year has dropped by more than 40% compared with the same period in 2019.

Texas has five of the nine Southwest border sectors, which are regions that CBP uses to count apprehensions. (Texas’ El Paso sector also covers all of New Mexico.) And most apprehensions occur at the Texas-Mexico border. Here’s how many migrants were apprehended there in November.

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Here’s where people were apprehended after crossing into Texas

In November, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 43,800 migrants in Texas sectors, accounting for 65.3% of all apprehensions at the Southwest border.

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Of those, 17,225 apprehensions were in the Rio Grande sector, an increase of 101.3% in this area from November 2019. CBP apprehended 67,101 migrants across the entire Southwest border in November — that means about one out of every four migrants entering the U.S. at the border comes through the Rio Grande sector.

These totals count those who try to cross the border between ports of entry and are detained by the U.S. Border Patrol. Officials don’t measure people who crossed but were not caught.

CBP has records of apprehensions by month since 1999. Here’s how November’s apprehension levels compare with those of earlier administrations.

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Apprehensions soared during the Clinton and Bush administrations but fell under Obama

Since 1999, the highest number of apprehensions recorded was in March 2000 during Bill Clinton’s presidency, when 220,063 migrants were apprehended. The surge in apprehensions in the summer of 2019 was much smaller, but it came close to spikes during George W. Bush’s presidency.

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In 2008, Bush signed a trafficking victims protection law that prevents unaccompanied minors who are not from Mexico or Canada from being sent back to their countries of origin. This law played a role during the surges of children and families in 2014 under Obama by preventing them from being immediately deported.

During Obama’s presidency, crop failure, drought, and soaring murder rates drove thousands of people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to seek asylum in the U.S.

“There are certain things that do seem to be linked. For example, droughts — especially when they are recurring and cause widespread food insecurity or spikes in violence,” said Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. “Some of those things are going to have pretty dramatic effects quickly.”

Metering, which limits the number of migrants allowed to enter the U.S. through official ports of entry each day, was also implemented for the first time under Obama in 2016. It was institutionalized in the summer of 2018 under Trump.

The same factors still push migrants north today. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, 539,500 Central Americans are expected to be displaced by the end of 2019, in large part due to gang violence.

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Families crossed at unprecedented levels during Trump’s presidency

Historically, most migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border have been single adults. But in May 2019, crossings by families that say they were driven north by gang violence reached record levels.

There has also been a small but steady increase in apprehensions of unaccompanied minors. Thousands of these children end up in shelters; in December 2018, more than 8,000 children were held in Texas’ state-licensed shelters.

Human smugglers have contributed to the rise in families and children by offering discounted fees to adults who travel with children. Smugglers can drop them at the border and instruct them to claim asylum rather than guiding them across and trying to evade Border Patrol.

CBP reports asylum seekers who present themselves at ports of entry as inadmissibles, a category separate from apprehensions. Due to metering, they can wait for months in Mexico, and some choose to cross the border illegally to claim asylum.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has attempted to slow the flow of migrants with a flurry of new policies that have often created confusion and chaos at the border — and sparked multiple lawsuits.

“What you have is an inability in Congress to agree on a broader vision of what immigration should look like in the United States,” Leutert said. “And so you have presidents like Obama, or like Trump right now, creating policies that are executive actions or regulations, that are piecemeal.”

By focusing exclusively on the border, she added, “you’re addressing symptoms because all of the challenges at the border are coming from much broader, structural issues.”

The Texas Tribune is tracking the fluctuations in migration at the Southwest border as these policies evolve under the Trump administration. This chart will be updated as new numbers are released each month.