Border crossings decline, Trump still pushes for wall What's Your Point? December 10, 2017

This week's panel: Bob Price - Associate Editor Breitbart Texas, Nyanza Moore - progressive commentator and Houston attorney, Tony Diaz- Chicano educator and activist, Marcus Davis - host of "Sunday Morning Live",  Jared Woodfill, conservative attorney, and Jessica Colon - Republican strategist. discuss securing the U.S. border.



Even as border crossings decline, however, Trump continues to push for his promised wall along the border - a wall that critics say is unnecessary and a waste of cash.



Officials have credited that drop to Trump's harsh anti-immigration rhetoric and policies, including widely publicized arrests of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

"There's a new recognition by would-be immigrants that the U.S. is not hanging up a welcome sign," said Michelle Mittelstadt, of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute think tank. She pointed to Trump's rhetoric, as well as his policies. "I think there's a sense that the U.S. is less hospitable."

But Mittelstadt also stressed that the numbers are part of a larger trend that began well before Trump's inauguration: Mexico's improving economy and more opportunities at home have stemmed the tide of people flowing across the border for work.

"You've really had a realignment in migration from Mexico," she said, noting that the numbers of Mexicans apprehended in 2017 fell by 34 percent from the previous year.


Overall, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said, deportations over the last year dropped about 6 percent from the previous year - a number tied to the sharp decline in border crossings as well as a backlog in the immigration courts that process deportations.


ICE said the number of "interior removals" - people who are apprehended away from the border - jumped 25 percent this year to 81,603. And the increase is 37 percent after Trump's inauguration compared to the same period the year before.

"The president made it clear in his executive orders: There's no population off the table," Thomas Homan, ICE's acting director, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday. "If you're in this country illegally, we're looking for you and we're going to look to apprehend you."

In February, former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who now serves as Trump's chief of staff, scrapped the Obama administration's policy of limiting deportations to people who pose a public safety threat, convicted criminals and those who have crossed the border recently, effectively making anyone in the country illegally vulnerable to apprehension.

Trump campaigned as an immigration hard-liner, accusing Mexico of sending rapists and other criminals to the U.S. and promising to build "a great wall on our southern border." As president, he has signed a series of travel bans aimed at curtailing who can enter the country, pushed to overhaul the legal immigration system and tried to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to share information about illegal immigrants with federal authorities. He has also pushed for funding for his border wall.


"Yeah, the traffic is down. That's a good thing," said Ronald Vitiello, the acting deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. But, "to take the 1,000 arrests a day to say that we're finished, it's not stating what the facts are. We're still arresting nearly 1,000 people a day coming across the border," he said.

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi saw it differently.

"The administration can try to twist these numbers into whatever they please," he said. "But the fact remains that after unprecedented investments in border security over the last decade, the border has become harder to cross and fewer people are trying."


The actual number of illegal borders crossings isn't known because many people slip in undetected. Immigration authorities caught just over half of the people who illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico in 2015, according to a report commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security. That's much lower than the success rate DHS had cited publicly.


"We are seeing a lot of people now who have long established ties in the United States," said Joanna Foote Williams, the Kino Border Initiative's director of education and advocacy, as about 40 men and a few women ate eggs, refried beans and tortillas.

