Society · Immigration · The Border · June 1, 2026

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The Border Crossings Collapsed. Now the CBO Has Put a Number on It.

In December 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection logged 302,034 encounters at the southern border — the highest single month ever recorded. Two years later, in December 2025, the figure was 30,698. That is a 90% collapse, and it is not an estimate from a campaign: it is CBP’s own monthly count.

The decline is the central claim of the Trump administration’s domestic record, and for most of 2025 it rested on agency press releases that critics could dismiss as spin. On May 29, 2026, that changed: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published revised figures that independently confirmed the scale of the drop — and attached a fiscal price tag to it.

This is, by the site’s standards, an accountability story in reverse: a quantifiable outcome, named officials, and a clean before-and-after. The figures below come from CBP, DHS, and the CBO — not from anyone’s talking points. Where the official claims are contested, we say so.

• 90%drop in monthly border encounters — from 302,034 (Dec. 2023) to 30,698 (Dec. 2025) — CBP Nationwide Encounters
• 83%fewer migrants evaded capture — ~300,000 in 2024 vs. ~50,000 in 2025 — CBO, via City Journal · May 29, 2026
• 1.5Mdownward revision in CBO’s 2025 net-illegal-immigration estimate — from +1.1M to −360,000 — CBO · City Journal
• 237,538FY2025 Southwest Border Patrol apprehensions — the lowest since 1970 — CBP · House Homeland Security · Nov. 13, 2025
• 12consecutive months of zero releases at the border as of May 2026 — DHS · May 15, 2026

302,034 to 30,698 in two Decembers. The chart is the argument.

The cleanest way to see what happened is to line up the same month across years, because border traffic is seasonal and December-to-December comparisons strip the seasonality out. In December 2023, near the peak of the Biden-era surge, CBP recorded a record 302,034 total encounters nationwide, of which 249,740 were U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry — the highest monthly total ever logged.

In December 2025, the total was 30,698, with just 6,478 Border Patrol apprehensions on the Southwest border. DHS put that at roughly 92% below the December 2023 peak. October 2025 — at 30,561 — was the lowest start to any fiscal year CBP has on record, and the October–December 2025 quarter, at 91,603, came in about 25% under the prior all-time low (FY2012).

Read President Donald Trump (R)back into the timeline and the inflection is unambiguous. The numbers began falling after the Biden administration’s June 2024 asylum restrictions, then fell much further after the January 20, 2025 change in administration and the policy actions that followed. The CBO would later attribute the 2025 portion of the decline largely to those post-inauguration administrative steps.

A nonpartisan scorekeeper revised the books — by 1.5 million people. That is the part that is hard to spin.

The Congressional Budget Office is the closest thing Washington has to a neutral referee on numbers. As City Journal’s Jeffrey H. Anderson detailed on May 29, 2026, the CBO revised its estimate of net illegal immigration for 2025 downward by 1.5 million people — from a previously projected increase of about 1.1 million to a net decrease of roughly 360,000. In plain terms: the agency had expected the illegal-immigrant population to keep growing, and instead concluded it shrank.

The components are just as striking. The CBO estimated that the number of migrants who evaded capture fell from about 300,000 in 2024 to roughly 50,000 in 2025 — an 83% reduction. Releases between ports of entry fell from about 540,000 to 20,000; releases at ports of entry fell from about 960,000 to 60,000. The agency credited the 2025 decline largely to administrative actions taken after January 20, 2025, including the reinstatement of the Migrant Protection Protocols and the end of categorical parole programs and the CBP One app.

“The CBO estimates that about 300,000 people escaped across the border in 2024 but only about 50,000 did so in 2025 — an 83 percent reduction.”

Jeffrey H. Anderson, City Journal · May 29, 2026

The before and the after both have names attached. Credit and accountability cut both ways.

This site’s rule is to name the officials whose decisions the numbers describe — with office and party — whether the outcome reflects well on them or not. The collapse in crossings is, by the CBO’s own attribution, a policy result, which means it has authors on both sides of the January 2025 line.

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Fewer arrivals reshape the budget — and not entirely in one direction. The honest version includes the trade-off.

Border numbers eventually become budget numbers. In its early-2026 outlook, the CBO cut its net-immigration projection for 2025 by about 1.6 million people, and by roughly 960,000 for 2026, relative to its January 2025 baseline — a direct statistical consequence of the enforcement shift. Population growth, the agency notes, increasingly depends on net immigration; cut the inflow and you change the long-run trajectory of the workforce and the federal ledger alike.

Here is where intellectual honesty matters. The CBO’s analysis of the 2021–2026 immigration surge concluded that the wave, on net, expanded the labor force and reduced federal deficits over a ten-year window. By the same logic, sharply lower immigration removes some of that effect: the agency estimated that lower immigration would increase deficits by roughly $500,000,000,000— about half a trillion dollars — over the 2026–2035 period relative to its January 2025 baseline. A border policy can be a clear enforcement success and still carry fiscal costs that show up elsewhere. Both are in the CBO’s own books.

“Zero” is a strong word. The trend is real; the absolutes are where critics push back.

Accuracy first means flagging where the official framing outruns the data. DHS has advertised a full year of “zero releases” at the border, and Border Czar Tom Homan has at times described crossings as effectively nonexistent. Independent reporting complicates the strongest version of those claims: Axios reported in May 2026 that monitoring groups still track a few hundred crossers a month, with a meaningful share never apprehended — far below the surge years, but not literally zero.

That distinction does not undercut the core finding. “Zero releases” is a specific, auditable claim about CBP’s catch-and-release practice, and it is separate from the broader claim that no one crosses at all. The CBP encounter data and the CBO’s revised estimates both point the same direction regardless: a historically large, sustained drop. Where we differ from the press releases is on the word “zero” as an absolute — the honest figure is “the lowest in decades,” not “none.”

An accountability site documents outcomes — including the favorable ones. The contrast is the point.

For three years this beat documented a border policy that, in the CBO’s own telling, added an estimated 5.7 million people to the illegal-immigrant population and produced the single highest-traffic month in CBP history. Documenting the reversal with the same rigor is not a partisan turn — it is the same standard applied to the same data set. The numbers fell; we report that they fell, and we show the official sources that say so.

The discipline that matters is the one the data forces: lead with CBP’s monthly counts and the CBO’s revisions, name the officials on both sides of the line, note the fiscal trade-off the CBO itself books, and flag the “zero” framing where it outruns the evidence. Do that, and the story holds up to the reader most likely to challenge it — which is the only test that counts.

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