The Trump administration has announced that fiscal year 2025 ended with the lowest number of U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions since 1970, reporting 237,565 encounters. This figure, shared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), highlights a dramatic drop compared to the 201,780 apprehensions recorded in 1970. The achievement, however, comes despite the fact that 72% of these apprehensions occurred during the last 111 days of the Biden administration. The administration has attributed the significant decline to measures such as ending catch-and-release policies and repurposing the CBP One app to encourage self-deportation. The numbers also indicate an 87% decrease from the average of the previous four fiscal years, which was 1.86 million, with DHS touting the result as a testament to the Trump administration’s success in restoring border control.
September also marked the fifth consecutive month with zero illegal immigrant releases by the Border Patrol along the southwest border, compared to 9,144 releases in September 2024. The numbers show that most encounters occurred under the previous administration, with 172,026 apprehensions occurring under the Biden administration. Over the next 254 days, the Trump administration recorded 65,539 apprehensions, accounting for just 27% of the year’s total. In September, Border Patrol agents averaged roughly 279 apprehensions per day along the Southwest border — about 8,300 for the month — marking a 95% drop from the previous administration’s daily average of about 5,110 between February 2021 and December 2024, according to CBP figures. CBP recorded about 26,000 encounters across all modes of entry in September, essentially unchanged from 26,191 in August, and approximately 89% lower than the prior administration’s monthly average.
President Donald Trump made securing the nation’s borders a cornerstone of his 2024 re-election campaign. On his first day in office, Trump deployed additional personnel to the southern border and instructed agents to enforce federal immigration laws. He ended ‘catch-and-release,’ the practice of releasing migrants while they wait for hearings. He also ended the use of the CBP One app to parole migrants and later repurposed it to be used by migrants to self-deport. The app, which was rolled out under the Biden administration, was initially used by nearly 1 million migrants to schedule appointments at official ports of entry before they were paroled into the U.S. The migrants were permitted to seek asylum and given temporary work authorization for two years while they waited for the outcomes of their respective proceedings. His administration also paused applications for parole programs and allowed ICE to cancel parole statuses of migrants. The reduction in numbers has come despite then-President Joe Biden repeatedly insisting last year that new congressional legislation was essential to controlling border crossings.