Since Trump’s ‘Emergency,’ What Is Actually Happening on the Border? Since Trump’s ‘Emergency,’ What Is Actually Happening on the Border?
The New York Times
Bored troops are standing watch, shelters have emptied from McAllen, Texas, to Tucson, Ariz., and border patrols speed through miles of frontier, finding no one in sight.
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.
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