Nearly two years after the end of Biden’s presidency, the U.S. southern border has undergone a complete reversal. The millions of arrivals, the Central American caravans, and the unaccompanied children that the Trump administration used daily as proof that Biden had failed at border security have given way to an administration that now measures its success in absences. The figure it repeats is zero, a streak of 14 consecutive months through June 2026 in which the Border Patrol released no one into the interior, while crossings themselves have not stopped so much as collapsed, with 26,963 nationwide encounters in February 2026, some 88 percent below the monthly average of the Biden administration.

The drop in numbers has several causes, most of them enforcement decisions that came before the courts weighed in, and in a recent June 2026 case the Supreme Court removed the last legal obstacle to that approach when it held that a person standing on the Mexican side of a port of entry has not “arrived in the United States,” which means that the immigration laws do not require officials to conduct an inspection or accept an asylum application until that person crosses. CBP One appointments, the way the Biden administration let migrants schedule a time to present an asylum claim at a port of entry, were canceled outright and are no longer offered. Metering , where officers posted at ports of entry stop asylum seekers before they can set foot on American soil and tell them to wait in Mexico or come back later with no clear end date, now operates without that obstacle.

Biden’s border surge was notable less for its raw size than for its composition, because Mexico, which had for decades been the most commonly encountered nationality at the southern border, gave way to the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador), and then more recently to Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba, whose arrivals were enormous relative to their populations. What accounts for that shift?

Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti all faced grave catastrophes within the same few years, and each of those catastrophes created a push toward the U.S. southern border. In Nicaragua, the April 2018 crackdown on antigovernment protests killed more than three hundred people. Three years later, Ortega held an election only after seven would-be challengers had already been arrested , then stripped the citizenship of 222 released political prisoners in February 2023, a punishment unusual and cruel even by the standards of the region. In Cuba, the protests of July 2021 were the largest the island had seen since 1959. What followed was mass prosecution, rolling blackouts, and, most damaging for ordinary people, food shortages. Meanwhile, Washington had already drawn down the Havana embassy in 2017, which took consular access away from Cubans who wanted to pursue a lawful route and pushed immigrant visa processing to Georgetown , Guyana. In Haiti, an earthquake struck in August 2021, one month after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and gangs took the capital of Port au Prince. Both Nicaragua and Cuba were under American sanctions pressure throughout. These migrants were responding primarily to conditions in their own countries, not simply to the arrival of a more favorable administration in Washington, and to devastation which American intervention and American sanctions in the region had in part helped produce.

Removal created a second problem, and in some ways a larger one. Cuba accepted roughly one deportation flight a month, while Venezuela and Nicaragua accepted none, and Cuba had been refusing American deportations since the 1960s . When a nation refuses to accept the return of its own nationals, the United States is left either to attempt third-country removal or to allow those nationals to remain here, which any crafty immigrant may know, and which produces the optics of more people inside the country without any change in who was admitted. Venezuela cut ties with Washington in 2019, and although it allowed deportation flights in October 2023, it withdrew permission four months later.

Title 42, the public health mechanism used by Trump and continued by Biden to turn people away from the border during COVID 19, ran its expulsions through Mexico, and Mexico would not take the nationalities mentioned above until October 2022 for Venezuelans and January 2023 for the rest. So, for a stretch of time, they could be neither expelled nor removed. A deportation that has made its way through the adjudicative process, or an expedited removal, carries administrative penalties and a bar on returning to the United States. But what the government learned was that a Title 42 expulsion was easy and carried no legal consequence at all, so repeated attempts were consistent and common, and each attempt was counted again. That combination helped keep encounter totals high because removal was difficult while repeated attempts to cross remained possible.

In 2024, Biden faced a different obstacle on the Hill. Senator James Lankford (R-OK), Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) , produced what was the most restrictive immigration bill the Senate had taken up in decades, giving the Department of Homeland Security authority to shut down the border at a 4,000 per day average and raising the standard for asylum screening. The bill failed a procedural vote 49 to 50 after Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson came out against it, with Lankford voting for his own bill and telling the floor that his colleagues were opposing it on political rather than policy grounds. Democrats brought the bill back in May of that year, and it failed again 43 to 50, this time with Lankford himself voting no and calling it a prop . The numbers and the socioeconomic conditions in the region had produced the surge, but Republicans had written the bill that would have let Joe Biden shut the border, and then killed it themselves once Trump told them to, because he was running for president and the border was his best issue.

Biden therefore bears some responsibility for the surge, but not all of it. Countries falling apart, governments refusing to take their people back, and long-standing sanctions pressure were not Biden’s doing, but how he responded was. He kept Title 42 running until May 2023, probably by choice, but also in part because the courts blocked him from ending it sooner. He built legal pathways rather than relying on enforcement alone, opening CBP One appointments to claim asylum at ports of entry and allowing special parole for nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela at 30,000 a month for those who could find a sponsor and a flight, in order to tamp down the incentive toward unlawful entry at the southern border. He also raised the bar at the “credible fear” interview, which is the initial screening arriving applicants must pass before their asylum claims can be heard at all rather than be removed at once. The share of applicants clearing that screening fell from 83 percent in the years before the pandemic to 52 percent under the rule he issued in 2023.

Biden also deported aggressively, with more than 740,000 removals in a single year. And in June 2024 he invoked section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the provision that allows a president to suspend the entry of any class of foreign nationals whose entry is deemed detrimental to the interests of the United States, using it to suspend entry whenever the seven day average reached 2,500, after which Border Patrol arrests fell more than 40 percent within three weeks. This worked almost immediately, and he did it five months before an election, which supports the fair criticism that he didn’t lack the tools, but that he waited three-and-a-half years to reach for the ones he already had.

Trump now points to the zero-release figure as evidence of success, but that figure says nothing about the conditions producing migration. It does not establish that conditions in the region have improved or that the underlying pressure to migrate has declined, and there is no reason to believe that the nations whose downfall we helped along are doing any better, because our regional neighbors are still suffering. The same political, economic, and security problems remain.

The United States now stands nearly alone among Western democracies in its ability to renege completely on the duty to hear those who arrive at its border fleeing harm. After the Mullin decision, a person who has not physically crossed the line has no claim to make and no officer is obligated to receive it. Justice Sotomayor , in dissent, wrote that the ruling “regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.” The broader restriction of asylum access began well before the decision, but the Court gave those restrictions a much firmer legal basis. That result sits uneasily with the United States’ longstanding conception of itself as a refuge for people fleeing persecution.

The 532,000 people who came into this country lawfully under the parole program were then shown the door by Donald Trump, and they now occupy the most difficult position of anyone in this account, removable from the United States but facing return to governments that will not accept them and to conditions they had every reason to flee.

Biden may not be fully responsible for what happened at the U.S. southern border during his administration. But Trump is indeed fully responsible for what is—and is not—happening today.

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