Bad News for Republicans: Trump Fixed the Border - Newsweek

Last November, Uncommon Knowledge made a tentative prediction about Venezuela. We worried that the then-rumored American intervention that did eventually remove President Nicolás Maduro could produce another refugee crisis. The article envisioned a version of Syria in America's backyard, sending Venezuelans north toward a border already transformed by years of mass migration. We were wrong.

The most startling fact about migration in the Americas this year is not the existence of a new caravan, but that the old ones disappeared. In the first four months, which includes President Donald Trump’s capture of Maduro in January, a mere 135 migrants were recorded making irregular transits through Panama's key Darién Gap, according to the International Organization for Migration. That was down 95 percent from the same period in 2025. Honduras, from where the latest migrant caravan originates, was down 79 percent.

By June, IOM concluded that movement through the Darién was 97 percent lower than in the first half of 2024.

Something has changed. The inconvenient possibility—for critics of Trump, but also for Republicans when the midterms come around—is that deterrence may have changed it, and Americans therefore stopped noticing.

On the right, the explanation is simple. The border was open and the government shut it, and should be rewarded for carrying out that promise.

Trump returned to office after migration had already fallen substantially, but his administration then eliminated CBP One appointments, further restricted asylum access and dramatically increased the probability that someone caught crossing illegally would be detained or removed. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute found that from February through September 2025 more than 94 percent of Border Patrol encounters resulted in expedited removal, reinstatement of removal, voluntary return or transfer to ICE detention.

The opposing case begins with an equally important fact: Trump did not inherit the border of December 2023.

Migration had already begun falling sharply in 2024 as Mexico intensified enforcement and the Biden administration restricted asylum for people crossing between official ports of entry. The Migration Policy Institute calculates that irregular crossings fell from about 84,000 in June 2024 to 47,000 that December.

Critics also point to the costs, including humanitarian costs in transit countries, and overly aggressive, and sometimes lethal, enforcement in America itself.

Enforcement is only part of the equation. Deterrence also has an effect, and when those two parts of the equation work together, the issue loses its salience. Like the old joke, the treatment may be unpopular because the patient no longer looks sick.

Migration has not vanished from Latin America. IOM's assessment of the first half of 2026 describes the region as moving away from the huge, linear northbound flows of 2023 and 2024 toward “fragmented, multidirectional, and intraregional movements.” Venezuelans are now the majority of migrants observed moving south along some monitored routes, but nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said Venezuela itself was their intended destination.

Voters in the U.S. have intuitively noticed, but not in the way you might expect.

Gallup asked precisely the same question about immigration levels in June 2024, June 2025 and June 2026. In 2024, when the border was politically explosive, 55 percent of Americans wanted immigration decreased. In 2025 it was 30 percent. This June it was 29 percent.

The same thing happened to support for enforcement. In 2024, 76 percent favored hiring significantly more Border Patrol agents. That fell to 59 percent in 2025 and 49 percent in 2026.

This is not evidence that America suddenly became massively more pro-immigration, because it was already pro-immigration, but with sharp divisions over how it should be controlled. Seventy-three percent now say immigration is good for the country, but that is slightly below last year's 79 percent. Rather, Gallup itself suggests that once Republicans saw their party exercising aggressive enforcement and illegal immigration declining, some may have concluded that the problem was being addressed and consequently softened their demands.

The best evidence for deterrence is not Trump's rhetoric. During the pandemic, the United States used Title 42 to expel migrants across the Mexican border. It sounded tough. In practice, it often imposed almost no lasting consequence on another crossing attempt. Border Patrol's recidivism rate consequently jumped from 7 percent in 2019 to 27 percent in 2021. For Mexicans and northern Central Americans, it reached 49 percent in May 2022.

That is a lesson in what deterrence means and doesn’t mean. It is about what migrants believe will happen if they try.

The academic evidence points that way too. A 2026 World Development study testing prospective migrants' reactions to German asylum policies found that offshore asylum processing substantially reduced intentions to migrate irregularly, while more modest internal changes such as delaying access to benefits did little.

And look at recent events across the Atlantic.

At the end of July, more than 70,000 people entered Ceuta, Spain's tiny North African territory, from Morocco over roughly two days, according to the Spanish government. Spain says it returned more than 90 percent within 72 hours after rushing police, soldiers, boats, drones and helicopters to the border. That’s not deterrence, it’s enforcement.

A single European border incident therefore involved hundreds of times as many irregular arrivals as the Darién recorded in the first four months of 2026.

Perhaps that also explains one of the features of this year’s midterms. Before the 2024 election, 61 percent of registered voters told Pew that immigration was very important to their vote. When Pew asked registered voters in July 2026 what single issue they most wanted congressional candidates to discuss, 29 percent named economic issues, on which Democrats now have an advantage during the affordability crisis. Just 7 percent said immigration.

One interpretation is that voters changed their minds. Another is more paradoxical: they got what they asked for, and stopped asking.