This year, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded its lowest number of annual apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border since 1970, federal officials announced on Tuesday, one of the most visible signs yet of how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is influencing the country.
During the 2025 fiscal year, which began October 2024 and ended in September, the Border Patrol made 237,565 apprehensions at the southwest border, 72 percent of which occurred during the final months of the Biden administration, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
“We have had the most secure border in American history and our end of year numbers prove it,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a statement.
While apprehensions were already declining in 2024, the 2025 figures are still a striking contrast to the record-breaking migration that occurred at the border during the Biden administration. During fiscal year 2022, the Border Patrol made 2.2 million apprehensions and sometimes encountered as many people in a day as the Trump administration Border Patrol now apprehends in a month.
Ariel Ruiz Soto, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told CBS News the administration has created a “new normal” of drastically reduced immigration across the border in the span of a few months with White House policies that have “had a significant effect on people being deterred from coming illegally to the United States.”
The Trump administration has made shutting down illegal immigration and arresting undocumented people its central priority.
Immediately after taking office, the president ended the use of the CBP One app, which allowed nearly 1 million people to enter the country legally since 2023 as their immigration claims were being processed.
He also declared that migration at the border constituted a national “invasion” and sought to shut down all U.S. asylum claims made outside official U.S. ports of entry.
A federal court in July found that the order was unlawful because the president sought to “adopt an alternative immigration system” outside of congressionally passed immigration statutes, though the following month an appeals court allowed parts of the program to continue.
The administration has also revoked humanitarian protections for migrants from unstable nations that had allowed 500,000 people to remain in the U.S. temporarily.
Outside of these legal changes, the White House has also surged military assets to the border, including thousands of troops drawn from every branch of the armed forces.
Alongside these deployments, the administration has seized parts of border land as military zones to allow for arrests of migrants that then cross unwittingly into them.
Such operations are only set to expand in the coming years, following a massive $170 billion infusion of funds to the Border Patrol’s parent agency the Department of Homeland Security this summer.
In recent years, Republican states like Texas have launched their own sprawling military border defense missions, sending thousands of state troops to the border and building Trump-like wall barriers along the frontier.
While activity at the border has dramatically fallen, ICE is reportedly struggling to build enough detention space to keep pace with the administration’s massive domestic immigration enforcement crackdown, thanks to DHS’s fondness for using relatively small state-run facilities and the agency’s reported policy of requiring Noem to sign off personally on expenses over $100,000.
