Residents of border towns relieved by quiet amid record-low migrant crossings

As he looked out over the murky waters of the Rio Grande one day last week, Mike Banks, the head of U.S. Border Patrol, mused on the difference nine months can make.

“We’re watching cranes take off as the boats pass. We’re watching ducks fly,” Banks told NBC News aboard an airboat in Eagle Pass, Texas.

The quiet, Banks said, is a stark contrast to what he saw more than two years ago, in fall 2023, when border crossings were at a peak and the border sector where Eagle Pass is located would encounter 2,000 migrants a day.

That number is now just about 20 a day. Across the border, Customs and Border Protection apprehended the lowest number of immigrants crossing the border in the past year than at any point since 1970, DHS said in a statement on Tuesday.

Two years ago, Banks was working for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as Texas’ border czar, building one mile of buoys in the river to deter migrants from crossing. Today, he’s planning to extend the buoys 500 miles along the Rio Grande. His goal, he said, is full “operational control” of the border, with no one passing through undetected. He refers to those people as “gotaways.”

“If we have a gotaway, we don’t have operational control of the border,” he said.

As tensions rise over the presence of immigration agents in cities like Chicago and Portland, Oregon, the contrasting quiet at the southern border is emblematic of the second Trump administration’s approach to immigration.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, much of the administration’s focus was on stopping border crossings through physical barriers like the border wall. But now the idea is to use deportation operations to deter people from even trying to cross.

“The biggest key to this is when Border Patrol is in the interior, assisting ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and making apprehensions, we send a clear message,” Banks said.

“And the message we want to send is, even if you make it past us down here, you should fear that you’re still going to be apprehended in this country if you’re here illegally and then deported.”

Another big reason for the drop is Trump’s stringent asylum policy. Under a special provision of immigration law that allows the president to temporarily suspend immigration into the U.S. under certain circumstances, Trump signed an executive order to block entry even for asylum-seekers and those crossing at legal ports of entry.

That order is being challenged in court, but for now the Trump administration is allowed to deny asylum at the border and send migrants back rather than releasing them into the U.S. with pending court dates, as previous administrations had done.

Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the ACLU, which is challenging the policy, said he believes that “just how extreme this policy is” has been “underappreciated.”

“It doesn’t simply streamline the asylum system but eliminates it completely, even if there’s overwhelming evidence a family will be sent back to grave danger,” Gelernt said.

But in Del Rio, Texas, a border town that was once the epicenter of Haitian migrant crossings in September 2021 under the Biden administration, the drastic drop in crossings has made some aspects of day-to-day life easier, residents said.

“There was a time when they shut the bridge down here because the population of immigrants was so big, they were afraid that there may be a rush to the border,” said Leo Martinez, a longtime Del Rio resident who runs an import-export company. “It really slowed our business down.”

Inside Martinez’s warehouse in Del Rio, the family business runs like an engine, with employees working to quickly fill orders for saddles, stools and other finished leather goods his company manufactures in Mexico. When border crossings were higher, there could be logistical nightmares for his company, Martinez said.

“Coming home was difficult,” he said. “There was times I’d spend as much as eight hours trying to get home from my workplace in Mexico.”

Now, Martinez said, he can go in and out of Mexico in 20 minutes each way.

“Even 60 days ago, that was not a possibility,” he said.

Martinez, a Democrat, is one of several people in Del Rio who told NBC News that immigration played a role in their decision to vote for Trump last November.

Unlike Eagle Pass, which went for Joe Biden in 2020 before flipping to Trump in 2024, Trump won Del Rio in both 2020 and 2024 after a string of presidential elections in which the city voted Democratic. Still, the unprecedented amount of border crossings over the past four years was enough to move the needle further toward Trump, local Democrats said.

Del Rio is the county seat of Texas’ Val Verde County. And there, County Judge Lewis Owens said, “I can tell you when it came to everything but local races and you look, and Republicans took it … and here the border issue had a lot to do with it.”

Leo Martinez’s brother, Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Martinez, who won his fifth term in the job in a tight re-election race against a Republican in November, said he has witnessed his community’s rightward move.

“It’s been shifting red at the federal level,” Martinez said. “I think that this last election, it definitely was the immigration issue.”

When Del Rio resident Jimmy Murdoch voted for Trump last November, he said he was voting for “normalcy” in his community. Murdoch’s home sits at the edge of the U.S.-Mexico border, meaning he’s seen his fair share of migrant arrivals walking in and around his neighborhood.

“You always paid attention when I’d go out back to feed animals, you know, make sure there’s nobody. I paid a lot of attention to my animals. They’ll tell you, you know, if there’s somebody around that’s not normally there because of the way they act.”

But what he saw in 2021, he says, was something he’d never witnessed before.

“It was just mass numbers,” he said. “And at first it was chaotic, just because the numbers were so overwhelming to the border patrol and everybody else.”

Like many residents in Del Rio, Murdoch acknowledges the complicated relationship border towns have with immigration, saying there has always been a “status quo” that entails people illegally crossing the border but says there’s now a much more manageable flow coming in — a fact he attributes to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“I mean, there’s always going to be illegal immigration,” he said. “There’s always going to be a problem, but it’s back to what I would call normal.”

The quiet isn’t just on the U.S. side of the border. Five operators of migrant shelters in Mexico tell NBC News they’ve also seen their populations dwindle after Trump took office again this year. These shelters have become a staple across border cities in recent years, typically serving as temporary housing for migrants looking to eventually cross into the U.S. and those who’ve recently been deported from the country.

In Reynosa, Mexico, Hector Silva is director of one of the busiest migrant shelters on the Mexican side of the border, though “busiest” is a relative term now — just over 100 people were staying there last week. The shelter has a capacity of 5,500, and at one point last year, Silva said, it held more than 11,000 migrants.

“[It’s] a huge difference,” he said. “We already have a month without a migrant family coming from Central America.”

Many of the people currently at his shelter, Silva said, are unable to go back to their home countries.

“This percentage that we have here are families that really cannot return to their countries because they had a very difficult situation,” he said. “So those families are still here and they are scared. The first thing they say is, ‘But what am I going to do now?’”

One person in that kind of situation inside Silva’s shelter is Johana Romero, a Honduran mother who said she left her country due to gang violence and threats from the father of her 6-month-old son.

“It was a very, very strong threat,” she said, adding that it was like the father was going to take their baby’s life, too, "so that neither I nor he would have him.”

“It is not easy to be a migrant,” she said, holding her son in her arms. “I can’t go back to my country from here, because of my baby.”

After Trump won the election last year and into the early days of his new term, uncertainty bled into panic as migrants who’d heard he was going to “seal the border on Day 1” made one last-ditch effort to enter the United States.

“It was immediate,” said David Chairez, a migrant shelter operator in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. “When Donald Trump came in, a lot of them threw themselves into the river. They crossed the Rio Bravo. We told them no and they said, ‘We’re gonna try.’”

Eddy Gomez, 17, and his mother are staying at the shelter in Reynosa and have been in Mexico for more than nine months. They missed their shot at entering the U.S. by a mere two days. They had appointments on Jan. 22 to seek asylum at a U.S. port of entry, they said, but those appointments were abruptly canceled after Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20.

“We were upset because it was the only opportunity we had and, unfortunately, they took it away,” Gomez said of the day DHS did away with CBP One app appointments. “We had hope that something would happen for those of us who already had our appointment, but we waited and nothing ever happened.”

In place of many of the people who have been at the shelters in recent years, a different kind of population has been arriving: people who have spent years living and working in the U.S. before being deported in recent months.

Gustavo Banda, a migrant shelter operator in Tijuana, says he’s seen this population of deportees, all from Mexico, struggle with being apart from the life and family they had built in the U.S. At another shelter nearby, the Rev. Pat Murphy, a now-retired director of the shelter who still volunteers there, said that “a lot more English” can now be heard inside the facility and that the “psychological” toll of these types of deportations is evident.

“They are usually coming with a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress in their lives,” Murphy said.