Since Trump’s ‘emergency,’ what is actually happening on the border? | Bored troops are standing watch, shelters have emptied from McAllen, Texas, to Tucson, Ariz., and border patrols speed through miles of frontier, finding no one in sight

> The numbers do show a steep decline. Last week, the new Border Patrol chief said that apprehensions in one seven-day period were down by 91 percent from the same time a year ago.

> In Tucson, Ariz., which was once the busiest section of the entire border, apprehensions and other encounters with immigrants have fallen to about 450 per week from 1,200 per week in late January, officials said. One day last week, just 22 people were being held in custody in the Tucson sector, compared with 500 a month ago.
“That’s the lowest I’ve seen it in I can’t even tell you how long,” said Sean McGoffin, the chief Border Patrol agent in Tucson. “The certainty of arrest and return is a huge changing point.”

> Border officials in Arizona said migrants had largely stopped surrendering en masse, with the hopes of claiming asylum or being released into the country. Instead, they said, a majority of those crossing illegally now try to avoid detection by threading through canyons and up treacherous mountain paths.

> Many migrants who try to navigate the vast unmarked deserts north of the border end up getting lost and dying of heat exhaustion, dehydration or exposure, or are rescued by Border Patrol agents.

> It is unclear whether the lower numbers will continue. Border crossings often dip seasonally into January, and they also fell during the first months of Mr. Trump’s first term before rising in 2018 and 2019. Some migrants may also be waiting out legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s executive order that halted asylum.

> Still, the president’s supporters credited his immigration policies for the recent decline, saying that his orders to round up and deport migrants, shut down an app that provided asylum interviews and strip protections from Venezuelan migrants were dissuading others from crossing.

congratulations to MAGA for making America less brown for the low, low price of reduced prosperity and would-be immigrants’ continued suffering

Yeah it’s almost like the current state of the immigrant issue/”issue” wasn’t a result of people walking across the border. You could build a titanium wall 99 miles tall, with a 99 mile wide gator moat around the US and people could still walk up to a port of entry and say, “I’m an asylum seeker, let me in,” and that would be kosher. They’d get a court date and told to come back, but it would take so long to get to it that date that the asylum seeker could just fall through the cracks and the vast volume of similar people would overwhelm the system. It’s my understanding that the Lankford border bill actually would have addressed some of these issues by shorting the time between entry and their court date, approve more judges to hear the cases, and allocate more resources to vetting asylum seekers as they came in.

I thought Trump cucked conservative Senators and killed the bill because he understood that that would alleviate the issue, but I guess he doesn’t understand that? Either that or this is strictly a performance for the chuds who want to see ICE round up brown people.