In Starr County, Texas, Marcus Canales told The Epoch Times that the past 100 days under President Donald Trump have made him wonder if he is living in “the matrix,” the fictional, computer-generated world made famous in the 1999 Hollywood science fiction movie of the same name.

That is because of the night-and-day difference in the number of illegal immigrants he has seen in the county since Trump took back the White House. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump scored historic gains in this heavily Hispanic county, and it went red for the first time in 130 years.

“Oh, the man gets an A-plus,” Canales, a retired teacher, said. “I mean, compared to where we were—at an F-minus.”

He said he no longer sees illegal immigrants sitting along the side of the road waiting to be picked up by Border Patrol agents, who now seem less busy.

In the past, he said, he would see agents speed past him, but now they drive through town a lot more slowly.

“I would go from now until doomsday voting for the man,” Canales, a local GOP chairman, said. “Sometimes you just need these hard-hitting individuals who don’t play cutesy.”

Canales said the country needed someone as tough as Trump to secure the border and deport illegal immigrants. Some 11 million people came into the United States unlawfully under the Biden administration, with most crossing along the southwest border.

“We, the voters, wanted this,” Canales said. “Trump is just following our mandate.”

Closing the U.S. southern border and deporting those who are in the country unlawfully was a top campaign promise that helped Trump win the White House for a second term.

At an April 28 White House news conference, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said that during the president’s first 100 days, only nine illegal immigrants have been released into the United States.

In 2024, from Jan. 20 to April 1, during President Joe Biden’s term, 184,000 illegal immigrants were released, he said.

Trump’s whole-of-government approach to securing the border involves executive orders, the military, and the enforcement of existing immigration laws, some of which have seldom been used since the founding.

“All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” Trump said during his inaugural address.

The administration rebranded the app as CBP Home. It now allows illegal immigrants to self-deport.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 times to 100 times more potent than morphine, making it one of the most deadly drugs available. Other analogs of fentanyl, such as carfentanil—often used by cartels as a cheap way to increase the potency of other illicit drugs—can be 100 times more potent than fentanyl. Even a microgram is fatal to humans.

The designations of Mexico-based cartels include the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the United Cartels, the La Nueva Familia Michoacana organization, and the Cartel of the Northeast.

In addition, Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang and La Mara Salvatrucha transnational gang (commonly known as MS-13), were designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

China was also slapped with a 10 percent tariff for its role in supplying precursor chemicals needed for fentanyl production to criminal cartels. This was later increased to 20 percent.

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Since then, tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which went into effect in April, have been modified for some products. Still, they have prompted Mexico and Canada to bolster efforts at their borders to stop fentanyl trafficking.

The drop in illegal immigration has also helped lower crime and save lives, according to Homan.

“We had a quarter million Americans dead from fentanyl that came across an open border,“ he said. ”President Trump’s policy saves lives every day.”

Marquita Berry’s son was one of those killed in 2023.

James Stafford, 30, had been struggling with an addiction to pain pills when Berry found him in his bedroom, dead from fentanyl poisoning.

She said she believes that her son went looking for pain relief in the small town of Richburg, South Carolina, only to find death in a fentanyl-laced pill.

So far, she approves of Trump’s efforts to secure the border and stop fentanyl from killing more Americans.

“By putting the tariffs on—that shows he’s trying even harder,” she said, noting that Trump appears to be doing everything in his power to stop the drug trafficking.

“I think it’s working,” she said. “I think it’s going to take him a little while.”

The directive aims to seal national borders by ordering the military to repel “forms of invasion, including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling, and other criminal activities.”

While the president’s efforts cannot bring back her son, Berry said they could save the children and grandchildren of countless others across the country.

Berry said she does not hear about as many fentanyl deaths in the community as she used to.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not have the manpower to round up and deport millions of illegal immigrants.

The agreements allow state law enforcement, such as sheriff’s departments, “to perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States under the direction and the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

All but a dozen states already have at least one 287(g) agreement in place, according to ICE. As of mid-April, ICE had another 64 applications pending for the program.

Law enforcement in red states such as Florida and Texas are leading the way.

Trump’s deportation efforts, including his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, have been met with a raft of legal challenges. Nonprofits bringing the lawsuits have contended, among other arguments, that the government has overstepped its authority and denied deportees due process.

Some of the deportation cases have made it to the Supreme Court via emergency motions.

Felix Cano, a retired veteran who was part of the red wave along the Texas border that voted Trump in for a second term, said he gives Trump high marks for his handling of the border so far.

He said that in his town of Weslaco, which is about seven miles from the Texas–Mexico border, he has noticed fewer migrant tents set up on the Mexico side of the nearby international bridge.

Instead, Trump used existing laws and executive orders to turn things around, he said.

“Boom, it just went down,” he said. “It’s unbelievable—with a stroke of a pen.”

Cano said he is in favor of deporting criminal illegal immigrants to El Salvador and that he does not understand why Democrats and activists are trying to keep them in the country.

Tren de Aragua, a violent gang tied to drug and human trafficking, had been taking over hotels in Texas and apartments in Colorado, he noted.

“We don’t need that type of crime here,” he said.

They pointed to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an MS-13 gang member and illegal immigrant living in Maryland who was deported back to his native El Salvador, as an example of what could go wrong.