President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said Sunday that the United States’ southern border has had an enormous drop in border encounters and crossings in recent days.
Homan attributed the drop in crossings to Trump’s policies, describing him as a “game-changer” and saying that “no one has had the success he’s had in securing the border.”
“He clearly understands we can’t have strong national security if we don’t have border security,” he said. “We need to know who’s coming in, what’s coming in, where, and why.”
Before Trump returned to the White House, about 2,500 National Guard and reserve forces were consistently deployed to the border. An additional 1,100 Army soldiers and 500 Marines were ordered to deploy to the border last month.
The U.S. military is also providing military aircraft for Department of Homeland Security deportation flights for more than 5,000 detained illegal immigrants.
A Pew Research Center analysis shows that U.S. border crossings reached “a record high” in 2023 under the Biden administration but dropped throughout much of 2024.
The GOP members of Congress also accused the previous administration of releasing “millions of inadmissible aliens into the country without adequate vetting or screening, to say nothing of the roughly two million more who have entered as known gotaways.”
They noted that former Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said that “the total number of gotaways could be underreported by as much as 20 percent.”
Venezuela also will pay for transporting its nationals back to their home country, including members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, Trump said.
The president also said he would impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexico beginning this week for what he said was the country’s failure to curb illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking.
Mexico so far has said that it will impose retaliatory tariffs, without mentioning any rate or products.
