It was another day of President Trump’s declared national emergency at the southwestern border, and there was not a migrant in sight outside Nogales, Ariz. Teresa Fast, a Border Patrol agent, bumped her truck over dirt roads, past other agents posted up in the desert. Their radios were silent.
“Right now in the field, we really don’t have anything going on,” she said.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump turned on the sirens and asserted that only an emergency declaration could halt the “invasion” along the border. He then dispatched troops to help turn back migrants, sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to “sanctuary cities,” and opened a tent city at the military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that houses the accused masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack — all in the name of defending a border that feels quieter than it has in years.
A record-breaking swell of migration during the Biden administration had largely receded by the time Mr. Trump took office last month. Crossings fell even further during his first weeks in office, officials and aid groups say, as he closed the door to asylum seekers and ordered deportations and a sweeping crackdown inside the country.
In South Texas, shelters that held dozens of migrants just before Mr. Trump took office are now down to a few families. A shelter in McAllen said its population had fallen to about nine by the end of January, from 97 on Jan. 20. In San Antonio, a shelter run by Catholic Charities plans to shut its doors entirely because of a lack of new arrivals.
Along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, about 150 miles west of San Antonio, Texas National Guard troops stood guard along the border near a stray dog on Inauguration Day. As the dog lazed in the dirt in Shelby Park, one guardsman ruminated about new missions to alleviate the boredom.
The numbers do show a steep decline. Last week, the new Border Patrol chief said that apprehensions in one seven-day period were down by 91 percent from the same time a year ago.
In Tucson, Ariz., which was once the busiest section of the entire border, apprehensions and other encounters with immigrants have fallen to about 450 per week from 1,200 per week in late January, officials said. One day last week, just 22 people were being held in custody in the Tucson sector, compared with 500 a month ago.
“That’s the lowest I’ve seen it in I can’t even tell you how long,” said Sean McGoffin, the chief Border Patrol agent in Tucson. “The certainty of arrest and return is a huge changing point.”
Border officials in Arizona said migrants had largely stopped surrendering en masse, with the hopes of claiming asylum or being released into the country. Instead, they said, a majority of those crossing illegally now try to avoid detection by threading through canyons and up treacherous mountain paths.
Many migrants who try to navigate the vast unmarked deserts north of the border end up getting lost and dying of heat exhaustion, dehydration or exposure, or are rescued by Border Patrol agents.
It is unclear whether the lower numbers will continue. Border crossings often dip seasonally into January, and they also fell during the first months of Mr. Trump’s first term before rising in 2018 and 2019. Some migrants may also be waiting out legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s executive order that halted asylum.
Still, the president’s supporters credited his immigration policies for the recent decline, saying that his orders to round up and deport migrants, shut down an app that provided asylum interviews and strip protections from Venezuelan migrants were dissuading others from crossing.
“Under the Biden administration, the Border Patrol was too busy babysitting migrants who were being processed to enter the country,” Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said during a visit to troops stationed along the border near Sunland Park, N.M. “Now, because crossing the border is illegal and will get you deported, less people are crossing.”
Some rank-and-file Border Patrol agents said that morale had improved with Mr. Trump back in office. They were happy to be searching for smugglers or criminals, rather than processing hundreds of asylum seekers.
“It feels good to be an agent now,” said Ms. Fast, the Border Patrol agent in Arizona. “To go out there and put bad people away. That’s what we signed up to do.”
The lower numbers have not stopped the Trump administration from sending more than 1,500 additional troops to the border in California, Texas and Arizona. The soldiers and Marines are arriving to help fortify the border fence, work with the Border Patrol and reinforce the 2,500 troops already stationed along the border.
On a recent day around Sunland Park, just outside El Paso, some of the newly arrived federal troops spent their time standing around in camouflage uniforms or sitting in rented pickup trucks along the wall. Illegal crossings do still occur in the area, when smugglers cut through aging barriers or concertina wire, but one of the new troops said she had yet to spot a migrant.
A spokesman for the Defense Department said some troops were assisting the Border Patrol by driving and monitoring border surveillance equipment.
Crossings in Texas have been down since early last year. Shelby Park, a municipal park along the border in Eagle Pass that had been a top crossing spot and ground zero for conflicts over immigration enforcement between the Biden administration and Gov. Greg Abbott, has seen few if any migrants try to cross on most days. The park was taken over by state law enforcement early last year.
Mr. Abbott announced that Texas would now be partnering with the Trump administration and that under an agreement with the Border Patrol, its National Guard troops could now make immigration arrests.
But it was not clear if any had done so. The Texas Military Department did not respond to requests for data.
Still, the troops keep coming. The Army recently announced that 500 soldiers from Fort Drum, N.Y., would soon be arriving at Fort Huachuca, in the southeastern corner of Arizona “to take operational control of the southern border.”
The need for troops was unfathomable to a cluster of humanitarian volunteers from southern Arizona at a tiny aid camp east of Sasabe, Ariz., where miles of border wall abruptly come to an end at an outcropping in the Sonoran Desert.
For months, dozens of migrants would walk through gaps in the wall near their camp every morning, rest and have granola bars and instant soup, and wait for Border Patrol agents to pick them up. Their numbers began to drop precipitously after Mr. Biden restricted asylum at the border last June. They dwindled further after Mr. Trump took office, and for several days this month, nobody showed up at all.
“This is a picture of a nation under siege?” asked Charles Cameron, 74, a volunteer who helps run the aid camp.
Last Thursday, he and a 73-year-old fellow volunteer climbed to a high point near the wall to survey the Mexican side.
“If this gap in the wall was such a threat,” he said, “you’d think there’d be something other than a couple of old men standing on this hill right now.”
Before dawn on Saturday, Jane Storey, a volunteer, was driving back out to the wall when she came upon about 30 migrants. It was freezing out, and they crowded around Ms. Storey’s car when she popped the trunk to give them water.
Most were South Asian men, and said they had been traveling for about six months. Some did not realize how sharply America’s immigration policies had changed while they were on the road. Others said crossing was still worth the risk.
Farouk, 38, who said he had fled political persecution in Bangladesh, hoped he would be allowed to stay because he believed Mr. Trump was deporting only criminals. Ankit, 21, who fled India, said he faced the threat of death as a Christian, and hoped God would bless his attempt to cross into the United States. Both agreed to share only their first names because they were undocumented.
Santos Paxtor Pelicó, 15, left Guatemala on Inauguration Day, with the hope of reaching his grandfather in Los Angeles and getting a job to support his four younger siblings back home. He knew that Mr. Trump was now the president. But as he waited on Saturday for Border Patrol agents to pick him up, he said he was not sure what that meant for his American dreams.
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