Policy choices triggered the greatest and most prolonged mass migration event in U.S. history starting at noon on January 20, 2021.
On New Year’s Eve 2020, as President-elect Joe Biden was at home in Delaware celebrating his imminent move into the White House, a mob of some 300 Cubans stormed out of Juárez, Mexico, in a mad banzai charge over one of the international bridges toward El Paso, Texas.
They swept past Mexican border guards, leapt pell-mell the wrong way over Mexican pay turnstiles, and sprinted for America in a crisscrossing stampede through traffic over the bridge lanes.
But alas, the outgoing Donald Trump was still in office, and his U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mobile Field Force, already riot-ready and waiting behind heavy concrete blocks tipped by concertina wire, stopped the migrant charge cold. Bunched up behind the barricades, the foiled mob loosed a telling chant:
“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”
“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter.
“There is an expectation. There is hope and there is enthusiasm in those who believe that, with the change of administration, will come new measures and that they will immediately enter and there will be new conditions that will allow them to request asylum,” Enrique Valenzuela, head of the Chihuahua State Council for Population and Migration, told a Mexican newspaper that night.
They were right in their interpretation of Biden’s campaign promises, if a tad early. An estimated 10-12 million foreign nationals would more successfully answer the call starting on Biden’s inauguration day a few weeks later, in record-smashing populations of between 200,000 and 350,000, ushered straight into America every month for the next four years.
And all of that is now at an end. With frankly shocking speed, the Trump Administration has cut off the flood tide of illegal immigration that raged for all of Biden’s term. By the second full month of Donald Trump’s new term, just 8,300 had attempted a crossing, and every one of them was detained and deported—a record-breaking nadir.
The catastrophe at the U.S. southwestern border is over. I declare its end not as a government official anointed with some special authority, but as the author of a 432-page book on the subject, someone who accurately foretold in 2020 that it was imminent and then, for the ensuing four years, covered the predicted flood of foreign humanity in seven countries.
One of my favorite of the nine Border Patrol sectors to visit was the “El Paso Sector,” covering the western tip of Texas and all of New Mexico. It has always been emblematic of what was happening everywhere, and it remains so now.
Well over a million illegals crossed from Mexico’s megalopolis of Juárez into El Paso and nearby New Mexico in the four years after that first foiled charge over the bridge. By 2022’s end, 307,844 (of 2.4 million total) had hurried into the El Paso Sector. During 2023, another 427,471 (of 2.5 million) passed through. In 2024, another 256,102 (of 2.1 million) crossed. Biden and Harris’s fantastical promises—of a bill that would grant coveted citizenship to aspiring illegal (mainly economic) migrants, a moratorium on all deportations, sharp curbs on ICE detentions, free health insurance, an end to prosecutions for illegal border crossing, an immediate halt to border wall construction, and, most irresistibly, mass releases into the nation on unverifiable asylum claims—hit the migration system like an adrenaline rush. Once the administration followed through, the mania spread far and wide thanks to social media selfies sent from the American side of the journey.
In Juárez, thousands of arrivals from 170 different countries would flock daily by plane, bus, and freight train, then make their way directly to the Rio Grande, which is usually no more than a shallow creek at that part of the border. I was often present in Juárez among these thousands as they’d hop over the mud puddles and over to waiting Border Patrol and National Guard crowd controllers, who would arrange them into neat but massive lines on the U.
