The number of migrant arrests at the US-Mexico border in December 2024 was lower than those recorded when former U.S. President Donald Trump completed his term in 2020, according to the news agency Reuters.
About 47,000 migrants were caught illegally crossing into the United States from Mexico in December, a senior U.S. border official told Reuters. That figure is well below the 250,000 apprehended in December 2023 and is also notably lower than the 71,000 migrant arrests made in December 2020 as Trump concluded his 2017—2021 presidency, Reuters reported.
This drop in migrant apprehensions is part of a broader shift in border dynamics that includes a new migrant policy in Mexico — although immigration remains a subject of debate and concern as Trump prepares to begin his second term as the U.S. president on Jan. 20.
However, this relative calm could be upended, Reuters reports, if a Trump administration decides to carry out its threat of mass deportation in the coming months.
The number of migrants caught illegally crossing into the United States rose to record highs during President Joe Biden’s time in office, but it began to fall last year, especially after Mexico and Panama stepped up border enforcement.
A new migrant policy referred to as “dispersion and exhaustion” has become the center of the Mexican government’s immigration strategy, according to the Associated Press (AP). Last year, the policy significantly reduced the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border.
The Mexican government permits migrants to gather and organize in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala. The authorities then allow them to walk for several weeks, whereupon immigration officials move in and offer the exhausted travelers bus tickets to cities further north.
The migrants are then dispersed at various cities not located along the traditional migrant route, told that they will be able to continue their journey north once their immigration status has been reviewed.
Instead, they find themselves in a no-man’s land, ignored by immigration authorities and without papers to legally depart the area.
“Immigration [officials] told us they were going to give us a permit to transit the country freely for 10, 15 days, and it wasn’t like that,” a 28-year-old Venezuelan migrant told the AP. “They left us dumped here [in the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco] without any way to get out. ”
Migrants have complained about the false promises to supply free transit permits, while others have discovered that the permits authorities gave them only allow them to travel within the state in which they were deposited. The migrants are further restricted by federal policy that prohibits bus companies from selling tickets to anyone without a visa or Mexican citizenship documents.
Two weeks ahead of Trump’s second inauguration, the AP reported, “Mexico continues dissolving attention-getting migrant caravans and dispersing migrants throughout the country to keep them far from the U.S. border while simultaneously limiting how many accumulate in any one place.”
More than a half dozen caravans of about 1,500 migrants each have set out from Chiapas in recent weeks, but none have made it very far.
With reports from Reuters, The Associated Press and Jobaaj Stories
