A retired Border Patrol chief says Trump's crackdown ended the Biden-era release-and-surge cycle at the southwest border, and warns politics could still reverse the gains.
Border Patrol logged just 98,708 southwest border apprehensions in fiscal year 2026, according to preliminary figures from the Department of Homeland Security, roughly 95% below the more than 1.8 million annual average during the Biden years.
Fox News reported the drop lands near 270 encounters a day, compared with about 5,000 under the department's Biden-era average. The entire fiscal year also came in below half the 249,740 encounters recorded in the prior administration's single busiest month.
September marked the 17th straight month without Border Patrol releasing migrants into the country. DHS called it the agency's first full fiscal year of zero releases.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin framed the numbers as a promise kept.
"President Trump promised the American people a secure border, and the data proves he delivered,"
Mullin said, adding that the results could not be clearer: strong enforcement works.
Retired Yuma Sector Border Patrol Chief Chris Clem lived the opposite reality under Joe Biden. In December 2020, he recalled, daily arrivals in his Arizona sector sat near 25. By December 2021, they had climbed past 1,000. Over one rough three-day stretch that month, they approached 1,500 a day.
The spillover hit towns and farms hard.
"They just started walking through the agriculture fields. They started running through town,"
Clem said. He added that migrants went to the food bank and knocked on people's doors at all hours of the night.
That period, he said, showed the true community cost of a failed border policy out of Washington. Agents kept their heads in the right place. The math did not.
"But when you're outnumbered, literally 100 to one, it's very difficult."
Clem said the old message was simple and deadly for deterrence: get to the border, get processed, get released. Smuggling groups sold that pitch. Unclear rules became free advertising.
Under President Donald Trump, that expectation flipped. Clem said migrants now know they will not be processed and released, the status quo under the Biden-Harris administration. Pair a hard line at the line with interior enforcement, he argued, and the result is obvious.
"They know that they're not gonna be processed and released, which was the status quo under the Biden-Harris administration,"
he said. Strong border posture plus interior pressure, in his words, is a recipe for success.
White House border czar Tom Homan pointed to that interior piece on the same Thursday DHS put out the apprehension figures. He said ICE posted its highest single-day deportation total since Trump returned to office and conducted more removals in September than in any other month. Fiscal 2026 ICE totals were still being finalized.
Homan said he visited ICE Air Operations in Alexandria, Louisiana, and watched a flight returning Haitians he said carried criminal records involving aggravated assault, sexual assault, kidnapping, battery, and other offenses. On social media he put the posture in blunt terms.
"We are deportation-maxxing, firing on all cylinders while still expanding our capabilities to ramp up removals beyond current record-breaking levels,"
Homan wrote.
Clem did not treat the turnaround as permanent. He warned that a Congress eager to overturn what this president has done can stall enforcement through funding fights and policy limits. A later administration could go further.
"There are a lot of policy decisions that can be really jammed up by a Congress that's gung-ho to overturn what this president has done," he said.
Someone will still slip through, he noted. The question is who. When rules are muddy and leaders duck accountability, cartels gain a sales pitch. America has a broader immigration system to fix, including how to retain foreign nationals who want to contribute lawfully. None of that, Clem said, excuses an open border.
"But none of that should matter when it comes down to securing the border," he said. "We should always be looking at keeping America safe."
The Biden years proved what happens when release becomes the default and agents face thousand-person days. The new numbers show what happens when consequences return. Voters who wanted a secure line got measurable results, and a clear warning that those results only last as long as the will to keep them.
