10,000 Migrant Crossings a Day Upend the US Presidential Election
How the surge in border crossings bolstered Trump, put Biden on the defensive and exposed an outdated immigration system that no one likes.
The coils of barbed wire at the edge of Poncho Nevarez’s ranch on the Rio Grande were meant as a deterrent. Instead, they just tore at the bodies and clothes of desperate migrants who clambered through to Eagle Pass, Texas.
The fence installed by the National Guard was, in Nevarez’s view, both horribly barbaric and largely ineffective, like so much of the border-enforcement push that’s popped up around his 500 acres—the state police, the helicopters, the drones and river buoys.
“None of this stuff solves the problem,” said Nevarez, a former Democratic state lawmaker, as he stood next to a mound of discarded clothes, diapers and other detritus left behind by migrants on his land.
Immigration has erupted into a defining issue of the 2024 ballot, with a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll finding it second only to the economy as voters’ top concern. Courts are bogged down by unprecedented levels of cases—federal agents encountered 10,000 people a day crossing the southern border in December—and the tumult has exposed the US system as underfunded, opaque and bursting at the seams.
“This is gonna decide who becomes the president, how it’s handled,” Nevarez said.
Donald Trump has again made the border his signature issue as he seeks a return to the White House, telling agents they’re “in a war” and sometimes borrowing rhetoric from White nationalist groups that warn about a “poisoning” of the nation’s blood.
President Joe Biden has been put on the defensive, claiming his hands are tied without action from Congress to change laws. But it wasn’t Trump who most effectively boxed in Biden over migrants in the first place. It was a fellow Republican, Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
In early 2022, with migration rebounding as pandemic restrictions faded, Abbott heard from Texas mayors, county judges and police chiefs about communities overrun with migrants dropped off by the Border Patrol.
“They said they could not handle it anymore,” Abbott said in an interview. “I said I would help them out.”
So Abbott and his aides came up with a plan—which critics called politically motivated—to bus migrants to Democratic “sanctuary cities.” The first bus dropped migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua near the Capitol. After that, others went to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver and Los Angeles.
Other border hawks, including the governors of Florida and Arizona, followed suit with similar moves. As of early March, Texas had bused out more than 105,000 people.
“Every state is now a border state, every town is now a border town,” Trump said Tuesday during a campaign speech in Michigan.
Leaving the migrants—many poor, unauthorized to work and unprepared for cold winters—on Democrats’ doorsteps all of a sudden made it their problem to fix. City officials from New York and Chicago begged the Biden administration for help. With little aid forthcoming, even Democratic-led cities such as Denver ultimately paid to bus migrants to other destinations.
Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, a Democrat, criticized Abbott’s busing as inhumane but said it worked to drive a wedge between local and federal officials. “From a political perspective, you have to look at his move as his genius,” she said.
New Migrants Made Up More Than 2% of People in Some Counties
Number of migrants with new immigration court cases in 2023
The buses also, paradoxically, appealed to some migrants as they arrived in Texas. While many arranged their own transportation to other parts of the country, others heard they could get a free ride, according to Valeria Wheeler, executive director of the Mission: Border Hope in Eagle Pass, which provides temporary shelter for migrants before they move on.
“Right when they enter our place, they’re like, ‘We want to go in the free buses,’” she said. They “help a lot of asylum seekers to move forward and go to their final destination or other places.”
Where people try to enter the US is influenced by a number of factors such as cartel activity in Mexico, enforcement in the US, water levels in the Rio Grande and tips shared on social media. But one place stood out last year as a hot spot for crossings—Eagle Pass, a city of 30,000 in Maverick County, previously best known outside Texas as a setting for Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men.
City council member Monica Cruz, who is also a real estate agent, laments that the city is so strongly linked with illegal migration.
“We’ve been dreaming of people knowing where Eagle Pass was,” Cruz said. “We don’t want the wrong idea, or the bad attention.”
Abbott responded to the surge by sending in state troopers and the National Guard, and they’ve put on a show of force. A city park along the Rio Grande is surrounded by barbed wire and shipping containers. Troops in camouflage patrol the area with rifles. Helicopters and humvees are parked nearby.
The spectacle is part of Abbott’s $11 billion Operation Lone Star border security initiative, which officials say has led to 500,000 apprehensions statewide and more than 40,000 criminal arrests.
The crackdown is having an impact, according to Lieutenant Christopher Olivarez, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, who points out that arrivals in Eagle Pass fell to an average of a few hundred a day this year, from 2,000 at the end of last year. But he acknowledges that there’s a whack-a-mole aspect to the effort, with more enforcement in one part of the border often pushing migrants a few miles downriver, or as far away as places like El Paso, Arizona or California.
“By having these barriers, we’re able to secure one area,” he said. The goal “is trying to prevent people from even stepping foot in that river.”
In Washington, pressure to stem the tide of new arrivals has grown before November’s vote. Biden’s stance has hardened over the past few months, while Trump, who swept to the presidency in 2016 in part on a pledge to build a border wall, is now running his third campaign focused on immigration.
“This is a Joe Biden invasion,” Trump said while visiting Eagle Pass in February to shine a spotlight on the issue.
Trump dealt with migration surges during his presidency too. There were about 850,000 southwest border “encounters” of migrants—some are caught more than once—in the 2019 fiscal year. That was almost twice as much as 2018. It has more than doubled since, with 2.5 million encounters in the 2023 fiscal year.
Migrant encounters across the Mexican border hit a record in December, topping 300,000 for the first time, before falling to about 175,000 in January and 190,000 in February. They’re typically lower in winter months and higher in the fall, right around the election.
Republicans have warned that bad actors can easily get in, and often try to link rising immigration to crime despite research that shows migrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.
The GOP has been particularly focused on the case of Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student who police say was killed in February by a Venezuelan man who entered the country illegally but was released on parole.
While most narcotics come into the country through official ports of entry, a porous border also makes it easier for drug smuggling. Texas border operations have seized 469 million lethal doses of fentanyl, according to the governor’s office.
Many migrants are also victims of crimes themselves, often extorted along their journey and frequently compelled to pay gangs for safe passage to the border.
Olivarez said Texas enforcement is focused on illegal activity, though it’s difficult to completely separate that from the broader issue of crossings. Gangs take advantage of diversions caused by migrants to smuggle drugs, money or weapons across.
“When you do have an influx of people coming across, it’s gonna tie up every resource that we have along the border,” he said. So the cartels will “exploit more areas.”
Immigration has exploded globally due to a confluence of factors, including the pandemic’s economic fallout and political turmoil in countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador. The arrivals to the US once came overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America, but now hail from all over the world. Analysts say the numbers have been boosted by a belief that it’s now fairly easy to get across the US border and secure papers to start a tenuous new life while awaiting immigration court proceedings.
Those migrants who turn themselves in to Border Patrol are mostly asylum seekers, and part of the challenge is evaluating who meets the criteria – standards Biden wants tightened. Sorting out claims is often a question of shades of gray of despair.
Angel Feliz, 41, said he left the Dominican Republic in mid-February with his wife and 5-year-old son. After arriving in Mexico, they crossed the Rio Grande on March 9 and surrendered to US authorities in Eagle Pass. He said he made an appointment to request asylum and hoped to join relatives in Florida after a short stay at Mission: Border Hope.
“I’m getting older and I don’t want my son to have to do what I did, which was to work really hard for not much money,” said the former parking attendant. “We think we can find a better future here, especially for our son.”
Biden began his presidency by proposing an immigration bill that called for a path to citizenship for young adults who were brought to the US as children. It also would have laid the groundwork for more legal immigration, as well as some border restrictions sought by Republicans. It went nowhere, just as efforts before it did.
During his presidency, the powers to expel people have changed. Title 42, a pandemic-related health power that both Biden and Trump used widely to remove people, expired in May 2023. In the 11 months since, with border crossings at or near record levels, Biden has sent away 630,000 people, more than any pre-pandemic year under Trump.
The crisis led to frenzied talks among lawmakers in late 2023, ultimately yielding a bipartisan Senate deal. It was a breakthrough after years of false starts and included billions in new funding for enforcement.
But the bill swiftly collapsed under pressure from Trump, who said he didn’t want to hand Biden a win in an election year. Biden is now campaigning on the idea that he had a plan to shore up the border, but was thwarted by Republicans.
“We can fight about fixing the border, or we can fix it,” he said in the State of the Union. “Send me the border bill now.”
That tactic seemed to be effective for Tom Suozzi, who won a special election for a US House seat in suburban New York in February as he blamed the GOP for “political game-playing.”
But immigration advocates have warned that Biden’s sudden willingness to enact harsher border measures—while designed to address a political weakness—could cost him votes, too.
Cruz, the Eagle Pass city council member, says the border region needs sustained help, not political grandstanding. She’s sick of national politicians coming to Eagle Pass to make speeches, but not actually helping.
“They come take a picture and they leave,” she said. “It is a humanitarian crisis—I mean, there’s no other way to explain it.”
She’s hopeful that the crisis will eventually lead to an overhaul in US immigration laws that will bring things under control. “I honestly and truly believe that it’s an open door to change things that haven’t been changed for years,” she said.
Nevarez, the ranch owner, knows all about the politics. A former Democratic lawmaker in the Texas House who is now sober after being caught with cocaine in 2019, he’s dismayed by hardline Republican tactics and disillusioned by his own party’s inability to offer an alternative.
On March 19, National Guard troops returned to his ranch and, at his request, cut away the barbed wire.
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