by Frank Holmes, reporter
President Donald Trump vowed when he took office that he would govern by a simple motto: “Promises made, promises kept.”
One of his most significant campaign pledges held that he would reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policies and bring true border security to the United States.
He made that promise in 2016 with a vow to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the U.S. border with Mexico, but it didn’t quite get completed before he left office, and the broken promise hurt him… and us.
But Trump 2.0 isn’t that same as Trump 1.0, and that fact is nowhere more evident than at the southern border.
Cumulative illegal alien crossings haven’t just dropped since Trump’s hand came off the Bible on January 20.
They’ve practically disappeared. Let’s look at the data we’ve got so far.
The number of daily illegal border crossings without the alien being removed or repatriated to Mexico hit 2,516 on January 19, the day before Donald Trump took office.
The first full day of the second Trump administration, January 21, the number fell to 43.
It dropped to an incredible low of 34 on January 24—a stunning 98.65 percent fall!
Anyone can have a good day or two—even a liberal Democrat—but the long-term average shows the same cliff fall.
This category of illegal entry to the United States average 2,087 over the last 19 days of the Biden administration.
The exact same metric bottomed out at 148 over the first week of President Trump’s return to office.
That’s a 93 percent reduction…and this isn’t the only place border security is tightening.
Border encounters under Trump are PLUMMETING pic.twitter.com/9gJ65lguRa
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 29, 2025
Things are so good the Department of Homeland Security has leaked some of the numbers to the media, including NewsNation reporter Ali Bradley.
According to those figures, there were 8,940 illegal border encounters during Biden’s last full week in office: The Border Patrol encountered 4,000 illegal crossings, and the rest came through OFO, an office in U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, mostly through the CBP1 App.
That was 2,800 on Trump’s first day in office.
And on January 22, it fell to just 485.
“This is what it is supposed to look like,” said one employee at the Department of Homeland Security.
“Welcome to the Trump effect,” said another DHS employee.
#EXCLUSIVE Border Patrol has less than 500 encounters today 🤯
Encounter numbers at the southern border plummet in @realDonaldTrump first days back in office according to data obtained through DHS sources—Who say, “This is what it is supposed to look like…”
“Welcome to the…— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) January 23, 2025
The border security revolution is evident in every part of the American south.
“The Del Rio sector – which is the same sector that would sustain over 4,000 crossings per day during the height of the border crisis in December 2023 – only recorded 60 crossings,” reports Bill Melugin at Fox News. “For comparison, the daily number of border encounters during the final days of the Biden White House teetered between 1,200 to 1,400 per day.”
Not a single one of the nine sectors of the U.S.-Mexico border had more than 200 people illegally cross the border last Sunday.
Of course, part of that comes as Mexico and Canada promise to send their own armed forces to patrol the border, along with U.S. soldiers.
The progress has been so startling that even CNN had to admit the southern border under the Trump-Vance administration has been “sealed off.”
“Now, the border is relatively quiet,” said CNN reporter Priscilla Alvarez just three days into the 47th president’s administration. “The administration has essentially sealed off the border to asylum seekers.”
CNN is forced to admit that President Trump has “sealed off” the southern border to illegal immigrants.
‘Now, the border is relatively quiet. I'm told that there are just between 1,100 to 1,300 crossings a day. That is far below when it was 6,000, 8,000, 12,000 before.”
“So… pic.twitter.com/EkrtgHND6U
— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) January 23, 2025
But not every media outlet can be that honest. Some parts of the Fake News media never let Trump take a victory lap.
“Illegal crossings at the southern border were lower in December 2024 than in December 2020, Border Patrol data showed” Newsweek “Trump Inherits Better Southern Border Situation Than He Left Biden.”
The brightest lights at Newsweek couldn’t figure out illegal aliens started flooding into the United States in December 2020, because they knew Joe Biden had been elected and promised to give them amnesty. Some of them even wore Biden campaign shirts! And they stopped swimming the Rio Grande this last December, because they didn’t want to meet Donald Trump’s mass deportation forces.
The “mainstream” press won’t tell you that—but readers of The Horn have common sense. We’ll always respect that, and so will our coverage.