As of 1:01 a.m. Wednesday, the U.S. border with Mexico was closed to nearly all migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
The drastic action, the result of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden, was intended to keep the border closed at least through Election Day and defuse one of the president’s biggest vulnerabilities in his campaign against former President Donald Trump to make.
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The question is how broadly this can be enforced, especially along a 2,000-mile border that has nowhere near the capacity to control the number of people seeking to enter the United States.
From Wednesday morning through Thursday, the order seemed to work, although it was still too early to make a real estimate. Migrants in the border cities of Mexicali and Ciudad Juárez were turned away and word spread.
In Mexicali, Guadalupe Olmos, a 33-year-old mother, said she cried when she heard about the new policy and said it was now pointless to try to enter the United States. Last year, she said, gunmen shot her car, killing her husband. She and her three children survived and are trying to leave Mexico.
“It won’t happen again,” Olmos said. “Yesterday they told us this is over.”
Before the new restrictions took effect, migrants sought out border agents and surrendered, knowing that anyone who stepped foot on U.S. soil could seek asylum. They were often released to the United States to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to be heard.
Biden’s new order prevents that. But there are plenty of ways for people to enter the country along the border — from California to Texas — especially without new resources to help police the border.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection office releases the number of crossings every month, so it will be weeks before the effects of Biden’s directive begin to become apparent.
But the biggest problem for the White House is that Republicans have blocked billions in funding that would have helped enforce the order, raising questions about how transformative it will be at a time of mass migration around the world.
“None of this will solve the problems in the long term,” said John Sandweg, who was a top official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. “Until Congress acts, we will still have major problems at the border.”
Biden, under enormous political pressure to crack down on illegal immigration, issued the executive action this week after Republicans in Congress torpedoed a bipartisan bill in February that would also have closed the border.
The main difference between that legislation and Biden’s executive order is money. Biden cannot use his executive authority to send billions of dollars in resources to the border; he needs Congress to do that.
But Trump, who has made a crackdown on immigration a hallmark of his political brand, had called on Republicans to end the legislation even though it included some of the most restrictive measures Congress has considered in years.
On Tuesday, Biden blamed Republicans for forcing his hand but said the “simple truth” was that he had to secure the border.
He will have to do that without the money that was in the bill, including more than $7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation flights and other expenses; $4 billion in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for asylum officers; and more than $6 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection for more border agents and other resources.
The legislation also would have paid for more immigration judges to try to clear the backlog of two million asylum cases.
The new restrictions will only be lifted if the number of illegal crossings falls to fewer than 1,500 for seven days in a row and remains that way for two weeks. The numbers have not been this low in years; in December there were around 10,000 illegal crossings every day.
Recently the figures have fluctuated around 3,000 crossings per day.
If the numbers fall below the threshold, they will occur again once the seven-day average for daily illegal crossings reaches 2,500 – which is now a regular occurrence.
Assuming the executive order survives expected legal challenges, it could be in effect for months or longer.
“The threshold they set is incredibly, unrealistically low for a moment of historic global migration,” said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization. “That is not a mathematical coincidence: it is low enough to guarantee that the right to asylum between ports of entry will not return anytime soon.”
The new policy changed the plans of Ibeth María del Villar San Juan, who arrived in Ciudad Juárez from Venezuela on Monday with her husband and 8-year-old daughter.
The family planned to cross the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to U.S. border agents. But after learning that if they crossed the border illegally they could lose their chance at asylum, they decided to stay in Mexico to plan their next move.
“You cross expectations that you will get asylum,” she said, “but if we can pass up this opportunity now, we might as well wait.”
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