Rumors that the U.S. government planned to stop admitting immigrants into the country through its CBP One app fueled illegal crossings at the border in December and the dramatic decline in illegal immigrant arrests last month, according to one immigration analyst.
Border Patrol agents nationwide apprehended approximately 125,000 illegal immigrants last month compared to more than 251,000 in December 2023, according to statistics that the Washington Examiner obtained Wednesday. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has not yet released the January numbers.
The drop is significant, as it is the third-lowest number of arrests in a month across the 36 months President Joe Biden has been in office.
Policy experts in Washington named a plethora of conditions related to the human smuggling trends at the southern border, including the Biden administration’s increasing pressure on Mexico to do more, it being normal for numbers to decline over winter months, and Texas’s tougher approach to border security for how it may be prompting some to cross into other U.S. states.
However, one key factor has gone largely overlooked in the United States but had a major impact in Mexico.
In early December, the Border Patrol began to see a sharp rise in the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally between the ports of entry. By mid-December, agents were arresting more than 10,000 people per day.
Adam Isacson, defense oversight director for the nonprofit human rights group Washington Office on Latin America, travels frequently throughout the Western Hemisphere and learned firsthand from organizations on the scene that the December surge and January decline were affected by fears about the border closing.
In December, rumors began to circulate by word of mouth and on social media among immigrants traveling through Mexico that the U.S. was to shut down its CBP One app at the end of the month. The government-run app allows immigrants who make it into Mexico to request an appointment with U.S. customs officers to see if they meet the criteria to be released into the U.S.
“People really did believe that the border was closed or that CBP One was going to end by the end of December. So a lot of people tried to get in by the end of December, which left fewer people coming in January,” Isacson said in a phone call Thursday. “You had a smaller reservoir of people coming after that wave because the numbers in Panama and Honduras have been dropping since October, November.”
Rumors about the CBP One app got so out of hand that the U.S. Embassy in Mexico began posting messages on X to dissuade immigrants from entering illegally on the basis that the app was still functioning.
“CBP One will continue operating next year. Don’t listen to the traffickers’ lies. The application is free and is compatible with Andriod and iOS,” the embassy wrote in a post on Dec. 19, 2023.
Luis Miranda, a Biden administration appointee at the Department of Homeland Security, posted a video on X on Christmas Eve to convince immigrants in Mexico that the app was still up and running.
Simultaneously, the Biden administration stepped up diplomatic relations with Mexico. CBP shut down railroad crossings in Texas border towns and ports of entry in Arizona and California, moves that cut off trade from Mexico and encouraged them to come to the table for talks.
Biden spoke with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in mid-December and sent senior administration officials down days after Christmas, which immigration experts said played some role in the January downturn in crossings.
“Clearly they were trying to get Mexico’s cooperation and at least better control the flow,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, which advocates reduced immigration. “That shows that the administration can take actions if they want to, and certainly they can cooperate with Mexico if that’s the goal, and clearly, it was bad for them, the PR, having the border being out of control.”
Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow at the conservative nonprofit group Heritage Foundation’s border security and immigration center, proposed both countries work out an understanding of how to move forward.
“I would imagine there’s a lot of political pressure on Biden right now from his right flank,” Hankinson said. “The old hands in the party who want to get elected again in November are probably putting some pressure on the administration to reduce numbers, so it’s possible that they made some kind of deal with AMLO to slow things down for a little bit, split the convoys up, temporarily reduced the numbers, but I doubt it will last very long.”
The impact of Mexico’s and Texas’s actions on the January numbers is unclear.
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“Mexico started near the end of the month to step up its crackdown, near the end of December to start stepping up its crackdown, and there have been some areas where they’ve been pulling people off trains,” Isacson said.
“I think you can kind of overstate what Mexico has done because it still pretty seems pretty easy with the right amount of corruption to just bring several hundred people across the border,” Isacson said. “But there does seem to be more patrols and checkpoints.”
