WASHINGTON (AP) — In an evening announcement, President-elect Donald Trump railed against Mexico and Canada, accusing them of allowing thousands of people to enter the U.S.
Hitting a familiar theme from the campaign trail and his first term, Trump portrayed the country’s borders as insecure and immigrants as contributing to crime and the fentanyl crisis. In an announcement that could have major consequences, he threatened to impose 25% tariffs on everything entering the country from these two countries.
Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric has resonated with voters concerned about immigration and crime. Yet there is more to the story than Trump’s brief statement suggested.
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A look at what the numbers and research say about border crossings, fentanyl smuggling, and whether there is a link between immigration and crime:
Border crossings
The number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is a key metric that both Republicans and Democrats are watching closely.
Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, publishes monthly statistics that track everything from drug seizures to cross-border trafficking. One of the statistics tracked is the number of border guard arrests or encounters per month with people entering the country between official border crossings – known as ports of entry.
The vast majority of those arrests occur at the southern border.
These numbers have actually fallen this year under the Biden administration. Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests in October, about the lowest number in four years.
That has not always been the case. The Biden administration has struggled to reduce the growing number of migrants coming to the southern border. Just under a year ago, in December 2023, Border Patrol made about a quarter of a million arrests along the southern border — an all-time high. Cross-border trade was damaged when border agents were reassigned to help process migrants and rail traffic was temporarily halted.
Since then, the number of people encountered at the southern border has fallen and remained low due to a combination of stricter enforcement on the Mexican side and asylum restrictions announced by the Biden administration earlier this year.
The Republicans have a reservation about these figures.
They have often accused the Biden administration of using an app called CBP One to allow hundreds of thousands of people into the country who would otherwise not be admitted. They have described the program that allows 1,450 people per day to schedule an appointment to come to the U.S. as essentially a way to keep the number of border encounters artificially low.
The numbers are much smaller on the northern border. Border Police made 23,721 arrests between October 2023 and September 2024, compared to 10,021 in the previous 12 months.
Trump also struggled to get a handle on illegal border crossings. Arrests topped 850,000 in 2019, nearly triple the number two years earlier, but still far below the 2 million-plus figure during two different years under Biden.
Drug smuggling
Trump and many Republicans have often portrayed the U.S. southern border as wide open to drug smuggling. They have also linked immigrants to drug trafficking and accused Mexico of doing little to stop it.
Much of America’s fentanyl is smuggled from Mexico.
The fentanyl scourge started long before Biden took office. Seizures at the border have risen sharply under Biden, which may partly reflect improved detection. About 27,000 pounds (12,247 kilograms) of fentanyl were seized by U.S. authorities in fiscal 2023, compared to 2,545 pounds (1,154 kilograms) in 2019, when Trump was president.
Cooperation between the Mexican and US governments in combating drug trafficking has undoubtedly suffered under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office at the end of September.
Before López Obrador came to power in December 2018, the US worked closely with the Mexican military to take down drug capos.
But López Obrador, a nationalist and popular populist, denounced the violence caused by the drug war waged by his predecessors and the Americans. He proposed tackling the root social causes of violence in poverty and a lack of opportunity for youth, in what he called “hugs, not bullets.”
López Obrador denied for years that Mexico was making fentanyl, despite evidence to the contrary, including statements from his own security officials. He blamed American society, where he said families push children out of their homes too early, for cultivating addicts.
It is only two months into President Claudia Sheinbaum’s term.
But while most of the fentanyl comes from Mexico, statistics show that it is Americans who are smuggling it across the border. According to the US Sentencing Commission, 86.4% of people convicted of fentanyl trafficking crimes in the 12-month period ending in September 2023 were US citizens.
Crime and immigration
Trump has also argued that the influx of immigrants is causing a crime wave in the US, even though statistics show violent crime is declining.
Texas is the only state that tracks crime based on immigration status. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences, based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2012 to 2016, found that people in the U.S. illegally had “substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of misdemeanor offenses.” ”
Although FBI statistics do not break down crimes by the immigration status of the attacker, there is no evidence of a spike in crime committed by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the largest influx of migrants, such as New York. Research has shown that people living illegally in the US are less likely than native Americans to be arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.
Some crime is unavoidable given the large immigrant population. There were an estimated 11 million people in the country illegally as of January 2022, according to the latest estimate from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2022, the Census Bureau estimated the foreign-born population at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the total, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases over the past twelve years.
Republicans have highlighted high-profile crimes by immigrants, such as the killing of 22-year-old Laken Riley in Georgia in February, and argued that any crime someone commits in the country illegally is a crime that should not have happened.
A Venezuelan man who entered the country illegally was sentenced this month to life in prison for Riley’s murder.
