Trump exposed Biden’s biggest lie: That the border crisis was ‘unsolvable’

Last year around this time, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and liberal commentators insisted the only thing that would fix the greatest border crisis in American history was a special Senate bill, or “comprehensive immigration reform,” or fixing the “root causes.”

There was nothing else that could stop the 10 million illegal immigrants that Biden allowed into the country.

It took President Trump approximately one hour to prove them wrong.

The signature achievement of Trump’s first 100 days in office — fixing the border — was achieved by dusting off a few old tools that were always in the back shed.

Trump first ended Biden’s ­legally dubious temporary “parole” admissions programs that let aspiring illegal immigrants “legally” fly or walk over the border and stay with work authorization for two-year periods.

He replaced Biden’s policies of mass releases of illegal border crossers with 100% detention, expedited deportations, sizable interior deportations and a lot of federal illegal-entry prosecutions.

He staffed the new hunt-and-capture mission with thousands of military personnel deputized to make immigration arrests.

‘Going to be too hard’

Word that detention, deportation and federal prosecution, put in place on Inauguration Day — plus a Trump tariff-induced Mexican military operation to hunt and deport migrants on its side — spread like wildfire across the world.

And lo-and-behold, aspiring border-crossers didn’t want to pay the smuggling money on a lost cause.

“I’m just going to give up and go back to Venezuela,” one woman in a squalid Mexico City encampment told me in December. “I have children to take care of. I’ll just go back because, with Donald Trump, it’s going to be too hard.”

Many others told me the same during another reporting trip to Juarez in April, where I found a vast empty silence hanging over a border region that, in my previous visits over the past four years, had the look and feel of a kicked ant hill.

One million foreign nationals crossed into the United States through Juarez from 2021-2024.

“The Americans would just grab us and deport us,” a Venezuelan father told me in Juarez when I asked why he would not attempt an illegal crossing with his wife and young twin daughters, whom I found eating a free lunch inside a Catholic Church in Juarez. “Now, your president is very tough.”

The numbers and my direct observations on both sides of the border since inauguration bear out that Trump’s layered deterrence policies immediately dropped the number of illegal crossings over the southern border land ports to the lowest in a generation — a 95% drop.

Party propaganda

Everything the Democrats told America about the expensive, time-consuming complexity necessary to fix a “broken immigration system” stands exposed as propaganda devoid of even the smallest nugget of truth.

At its December 2023 peak during Biden’s term, 10,000-14,000 illegal migrants per day were crossing the southern border.

That figure did not decline significantly until Biden’s campaign managers cut a deal with Mexico to help reduce the flow — the first hint that the crisis was political, not inevitable.

Consider this: In December 2024, the number of aliens allowed to stay after crossing the border or registering on Biden’s illegal CBP One app was 96,037. That’s 3,201 a day, almost all ­allowed to stay in the US.

In January, a month split between the Biden and Trump administrations, that number dropped to 61,448 — 2,048 a day.

But in Trump’s first full month, the number plummeted to 8,326 border apprehensions, or about 300 a day. And they were almost all deported.

The figures just keep dropping. The nation is on track for the lowest recorded year of illegal border-crossing apprehensions since the United States began keeping records in 1960.

What Trump did is expose the only dynamic that has ever mattered, which is: If you let illegal immigrants into your country to stay long enough to earn back their smuggling-fee investments many times over, they’ll gladly lay down their money and come.

If you block and repel illegal immigrants, they’ll stay home.

Rippled deterrence

How do immigrants know what their odds are? Easy: selfies. Everyone down-trail or still at home has cellphones fully connected to social media and can see, in live time, what those at our border are experiencing.

That’s why Trump’s policies in action have rippled deterrence across the world, not just in Mexico. We know this by looking at the Colombia-Panama Darien Gap passage, through which non-Mexican and non-Central American immigrants from 170 nations began surging in record-breaking numbers after Biden took office.

Whereas rarely more than 7,000 or 8,000 ever came through the gap in any given year, 250,000 surged through in 2022 to follow the selfies of those upstream, then 500,000 in 2023 and another 300,000 in 2024, when I visited both the Colombia and Panama sides of the gap.

Today? Traffic through the Darien Gap is down by 99%. Why, I recently asked Director General Jorge Gobea, head of Panama’s National Border Service?

“Trump,” he answered simply.

The moral of this story is that closing the border was always that doable and simple. It was never the complex, years-long ordeal of repairing a border security system that is perfectly fine as is, although always in need of a couple of tweaks.

It was a lie that Democrats told the American people for four years.

Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.