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Sunland Park, New Mexico – Border Patrol Agent Claudio Herrera piloted a green and white suburb into a rocky hillside, heading towards an outcrop where immigrant smugglers once hid.
It was 6:15am on a weekday in mid-May. This is the peak time that was supposed to be the peak season due to illegal immigration in southern New Mexico.
However, there were no signs of smugglers or immigration on the US-Mexican border that morning. Only two American soldiers doing pickups, looking at the downslope to Mexico, seeing water bottles and clothes scattered around, are huge wave fragments of movement, almost all depleted.
“We averaged 2,700 people a day,” Herrera told USA Today, recalling the height of anxiety in 2023.
President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal migration is particularly evident throughout the US-Mexican border of the current El Paso sector, a 264-mile border patrol from West Texas to New Mexico.
This was once one of the busiest sections.
Two years ago, at this time, Herrera’s radio surrounded the radio at Inter as agents tracked the immigrants through the desert around Sunland Park, New Mexico, just outside El Paso, Texas.
The group scaled 30 feet of steel boundary fences with rope ladders and raw gaps surrounded by old steel mesh fencing. Hundreds of people a day are hundreds of people a day in 20 miles of stretches starting from the sturdy mountainside of Mount Christray.
But Trump’s policy combination — deploying troops to borders, limiting asylum and publicizing deportation — is all made for a strong message. So far, it has moved in the bay.
Herrera stopped to investigate the landscape beside the old obelisk monument marking the boundary line.
Currently, there are 6,800 soldiers working with 17,000 Border Patrol agents on the tropical border. In the El Paso Sector, soldier staff have half a dozen striker vehicles on staff. Even the land itself belongs to the military after President Trump declared about 110,000 acres of New Mexico’s borderland as “a defense region.”
A sudden decrease in boundary intersections
At 6:49am, a voice came through Herrera’s radio. He returned to the driver’s seat.
Seconds later, the voice identified the suspect as a local resident.
Agents said President Joe Biden has no longer handled asylum seekers since June 2024 restricted access to asylum at the border.
That’s when the intersections at the border first began their sharp decline. This is a trend that accelerated after Trump took office. Since then, illegal intersections have plummeted to the lowest levels since record-keeping began.
The US Border Patrol reported about the encounters of around 8,400 immigrants at the US-Mexico border in April, the latest month in which data is available. A year ago, agents roughly arrested many people every two days, but in April 2024, the encounter reached nearly 129,000.
In Herrera’s patrol, El Paso Sector, immigrant encounters fell 93% in April, down from over 30,000 the previous year to less than 2,000, he said.
“We were looking at a group of 20 or 30 individuals on the other side of the border,” Herrera said.
Everything on the south front is quiet
At the time, he said that smugglers standing in highlands could “no matter what the border patrols are doing, they can illegally push immigrants into the country just by looking where our vehicles were deployed.”
Now, some agents are complaining of boredom, Herrera jokingly said – a quiet radio made his point.
He drove west along the boundary and hugged a 30-foot fence that began at the foot of the mountain. In Mexico, south of Steel Bollard, it is supported by a black chicken in the vicinity of Ciudad Juarez, where several homes are built of plywood and pallets. An elaborate altar to the skeletal icon Santa Muerte headed north.
Looking west, the fence climbed onto the mesa, with soldiers from the striker’s vehicle watching the border. In good condition, the vehicle’s thermo-optics are strong enough to find mice a mile away.
Military deployments at the tropical borders will cost around $525 million, according to the New York Times, since Trump took office on January 20th.
Herrera pulled the suburbs to a west stop of Santa Teresa Port, all across the desert, far from the city’s footsteps of Sunland Park. Soldiers posted red and white warning signs roughly the size of English and Spanish notebook papers, pasted on sandy metal pillars about 30 yards north of the boundary fence.
“This Department of Defense real estate has been declared a restricted area,” the signs read in small print.
Immigrants who cross illegally here could be charged with trespassing what is now a military facility.
In the area of the nearby boundary, a rebar and rope ladder hung over a 30-foot steel barrier.
It’s too early to know if it’s held
Smugglers and immigrants often respond to important policy changes by adopting a waiting approach. Immigrant traffic also fell early in the first Trump administration, but not dramatically before climbing again.
“It’s definitely very early to know what’s going to happen,” Herrera said.
“But the fact is that this perfect balance must always be achieved between infrastructure, technology and personnel in order to address various challenges related to illegal immigration and other illegal activities occurring at the border,” he said.
His radio was making another fuss after 9am, with signs that a group of eight immigrants had entered illegal the night before. Thirteen hours later, they had not yet been arrested.
“We’ve seen a significant decrease compared to the accounting years before our meeting,” Herrera said. “However, we have not gained 100% control of El Paso Sector’s business here.”
Herrera passed a stretch in southern New Mexico, where a 30-foot steel bollard gave way to an 18-foot steel mesh. The cutout made the short fence look like a patchwork quilt.
The criminal organization was hurt by border crackdowns, he said. The transition “has become a multi-billion dollar company for the cartel,” he said. “They can’t cross individuals illegally, and they’re affecting them every day.”
South of the fence, a man with a ski mask and a hoodie quietly gathered a square of steel mesh. Herrera said the Border Patrol has a contractor.
Meanwhile, the man loaded a square into the bike seat. He said he would sell them for scraps.
Lauren Villagran can be accessed at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
