The number of illegal immigrants apprehended attempting to enter the United States from Mexico in January dropped off sharply as the second Trump administration implements a crackdown at the southern border, according to new government data released Monday.
“From Jan. 21 through Jan. 31, 2025, the number of U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border dropped 85% from the same period in 2024,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a press release Monday morning, pointing to the days since President Donald Trump‘s inauguration.
CBP attributed the decline to its “no longer catching and releasing illegal aliens into the U.S.”
“CBP is leveraging legal authorities to take every reasonable step to ensure illegal aliens are placed in detention and expediently removed from the country,” CBP said in a statement. “In simple terms, illegal aliens are being arrested, detained, and then rapidly removed.”
In total, federal Border Patrol agents stationed at the southern border intercepted 29,116 illegal immigrants in January, down from more than 47,000 in December 2024 and upward of 124,000 in January 2024.
The last time arrests at the southern border fell below last month’s 29,116 figure was in May 2020, at the height of coronavirus shutdown measures when just 21,593 illegal immigrants were encountered.
The number of illegal immigrants arrested at the nation’s borders has decreased since November 2024 and plummetted further after Trump took office. The president ran a campaign that promised to crack down on illegal immigration and carry out the “largest-ever” deportation operation in national history.
The more than 2,000 arrests made per day in much of the fall has dropped to less than 500 per day borderwide, according to border czar Tom Homan, who spoke with reporters in Washington two weeks ago.
Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks announced earlier this month that the number of apprehensions at the northern, southern, and coastal borders was down 91% compared to the same time last year.
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Homan said as recently as Monday that as few as 226 illegal immigrants were arrested in the previous 24-hour period.
Arrests peaked at 250,000 nationwide in December 2023. By June 2024, the numbers had been cut nearly in half as the Biden administration attempted to get a handle on the border crisis, three and a half years after it rolled back policies of the first Trump administration.