It Didn’t Take a Border Bill After All, Early Results Show

After his first full month in office, President Donald Trump can point to at least one key statistic to show he’s already delivering on a core campaign promise: attempted, illegal crossings of the United States’ southern border are down over 70 percent for the month of February, initial figures show. In light of such a dramatic drop — coming in tandem with substantially increased enforcement — if securing America’s borders has always been a priority, why hasn’t this happened sooner?

Among the first executive orders President Trump signed on inauguration day, January 20, was a twelve-point policy directive stepping up enforcement along the border, increasing detentions and prosecutions of those illegally entering the U.S. and restoring the effort pledged in his first administration eight years ago to build a physical barrier along the southern border.

Last week, Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks said the Trump administration’s results to date have been even more striking still, pegging the decrease in attempted illegal crossings at 94 percent. Other early statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security late last week showed 20,000 arrests of illegal immigrants who were at large and wanted for a crime, and 50,000 deportations in one month alone.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed emergency legislation known as Title 42 to expel those coming the U.S. illegally on public health grounds. When Title 42 expired in May 2023, some — including Maine’s Second District Congressman Jared Golden (D) — called for a new border bill to curb the influx of immigrant at the border.

Soon after former vice-president Kamala Harris became her party’s de factor presidential nominee last July, Rep. Golden joined five other House Democrats in voting for a GOP resolution that sharply criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the border and immigration crisis.

Facing a challenging re-election campaign last fall, Golden was mindful that his district had voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and was primed to do so again last November in part because of his border policies. Still, he maintained congressional action was necessary, which ultimately hewed to the Biden administration’s feint.

Already, the Biden administration showed signals it understood the impact of its inaction, but remained stubbornly to shifting the blame as opposed to its own priorities. Just over a year ago, then-president Joe Biden begged Congress to pass a bill that would allow him to take action on border enforcement.

“I’ve done all that I can do (absent a bill),” Biden decried at the time. But results of executive action over the past month show that wasn’t necessarily true.

“Let’s be clear,” Maine’s First District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D) wrote in a statement last fall, “The bipartisan border bill was killed on Donald Trump’s orders because he cares more about campaigning on chaos than supporting solutions that help America.”

In retrospect, however, Trump appears to have shown in the space of several weeks alone that such a bill, which at the time he said would have just been a gift to Biden, wasn’t actually necessary after all.

Last March, Rep. Pingree introduced her own legislation that would make it easier for asylum seekers to enter the U.S., not requiring them to go through designated points of entry. Unlike Golden, whose district includes over 600 miles of border with America’s northern neighbor Canada, Pingree has evidently felt less compelled to take on even the appearance of concern about border security.

Earlier this year, Pingree bristled at cricticim directed at her for voting against the Laken Riley Act, which Golden supported.

But as now Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) pointed out at the time of last year’s showdown on a border security bill, Democrats were coming late to the party because they’d suddenly read the polling that shows Americans were tired of lax enforcement leading to porous borders.

As Congress and the White House face off on spending issues in the wake of a widening span of cuts recommended by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the focus of tensions surrounding the separation of powers is likely to shift. Aside from limited court actions for now, border security, for the moment anyhow, is looking like the exclusive domain of the executive.