Trump Just Proved The Border Crisis Has A Simple Solution

Looking back on it, one of the most important moments from the last election had nothing to do with Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. In fact it had nothing to do with this country at all. It was the unilateral decision by the president of El Salvador to transform his country, virtually overnight, from a gang-controlled failed state into one of the safest places on the planet. This wasn’t an empty campaign promise or a slogan. He actually did it, despite the wailing from various civil liberties groups.

In 2015, El Salvador recorded more than 6,000 homicides.

Throughout all of last year, they recorded just over 100 homicides.

By all accounts, in just a few years, El Salvador managed to solve a crime problem that, according to all the experts, could not be solved.

To everyone living in America’s rotted-out urban centers, overrun border towns and poor communities in Appalachia, the transformation of El Salvador was meaningful. It wasn’t your typical foreign news story with no interest to everyday people. It wasn’t the equivalent of wall-to-wall coverage about the latest developments taking place 7,000 miles away in the Middle East.

What Bukele did to save El Salvador, very clearly, sent the message to every American that the same kind of revival is possible in this country. All of the barriers you hear about are fake. None of the roadblocks are real. Places like Seattle, New York and Los Angeles aren’t actually beyond saving, no matter how dire things look. All it takes is an executive who’s willing to punish criminals without any remorse whatsoever. Once a country has an executive like that, things can change. And they can change very quickly.

Less than six months into the second Trump administration, we’re seeing another illustration of this principle. Throughout the campaign, as you might remember, we were told repeatedly that the unrestricted flow of illegal aliens into this country was a very difficult problem to solve. We were told that, in order to even begin to address the issue, we’d need to pass a law that would send billions of dollars to federal government agencies and various NGOs. That was the claim every Democrat — and several Republicans — were making. As much as I understand that no human being ever wants to hear the words “Kamala Harris” ever again, this was also a big part of her platform. During the debate, it was her “big idea” for supposedly fixing the border. If you can bear it, here’s that moment again:

Less than a year later, let’s check in on this whole line of argument. How is the border doing, now that Donald Trump is the president of the United States? Without a multi-billion-dollar “border bill,” how much could his administration possibly have accomplished?

As it turns out — even with every federal judge in the country working in tandem to block his agenda, and even without an expensive border bill passed by Congress — the administration has accomplished quite a bit. They’ve done what we were told was impossible, many times over. The southern border, which until very recently was a completely unsalvageable mess, is now more secure than it’s been at any time in generations.

Here’s CBS News, of all places, reporting on the progress:

The number of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border unlawfully continued to be at a historically low level in April, three full months into President Trump’s aggressive efforts to curtail illegal immigration, according to internal federal data. … The number of illegal crossings during Mr. Trump’s first three full months in office represents a seismic change at the U.S.-Mexico border. The apprehensions reported in February, March and April are the lowest tallies recorded by the Border Patrol in its public monthly dataset, which stretches back to fiscal year 2000. The last time Border Patrol averaged fewer than 9,000 monthly apprehensions along the southern border over a year was in the late 1960s, according to historical agency figures.

In other words, according to arrest data stretching back 25 years — which is the extent of the data we have collected — a record-low number of illegal aliens are currently attempting to cross the border. Donald Trump, in his second term, has achieved a more secure border than Bush, Obama, and the first Trump administration did. And he’s still going. We’re on pace for the lowest number of illegal aliens being apprehended at the border since the 1960s, at which point the data becomes so imprecise that we have no real way of going further back.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

This didn’t take an act of Congress. It didn’t take hundreds of billions of dollars. All it took was an executive who authorized federal officers to enforce immigration law, both at the border and throughout the country. Once that happened, the inflow of illegal aliens stopped as quickly as it began.. Here’s a chart that CBS included in their story, which highlights just how drastic the decline in illegal migration has been:

CBS/U.S. Customs and Border Protection

You’ll notice there’s a massive, unprecedented spike in illegal migration right when Joe Biden takes over. And then, just as quickly, the Trump administration ends it. Look at that drop. It’s almost unbelievable. It demonstrates that, no, this was not a complicated or difficult issue to solve. And that makes the refusal to solve this problem, by every president until now, seem all the more nefarious.

To be clear, the only reason we’re seeing these reductions in apprehensions at the border is because the illegal aliens have gotten the message that the Trump administration is serious about immigration enforcement. Therefore they’ve stopped trying to enter this country. They understand that, when they’re caught, they won’t be allowed into the United States anymore, which is what the Biden administration did in virtually every case.

The New York Post just obtained data demonstrating just how common “catch and release” used to be, under the previous administration. These are some of the more extraordinary figures you’ll ever hear.

Border Patrol agents didn’t release a single migrant into the US last month — a staggering drop after the Biden administration allowed 62,000 illegal crossers in the country in May 2024. … Agents caught 8,725 migrants crossing illegally at the southern border last month. That’s a 93% decrease from May 2024, when 117,905 were nabbed. … One of the most monumental policy changes made by Trump was the reversal of President Joe Biden’s catch-and-release scheme, which resulted in millions of illegal border jumpers being allowed into the US.

To restate, in May of 2024, the Biden administration deliberately allowed 62,000 illegal aliens into the country. That’s 62,000 illegal aliens in just one month, meaning they were on pace to allow more illegal aliens into this country in one year than the entire population of San Francisco. By contrast, this past May, the Trump administration did not deliberately allow a single detained illegal immigrant into this country. They took the number from 62,000 all the way to zero, which of course is what the number should’ve been all along. There is no reason whatsoever to allow a criminal alien to enter the country, because once you do that, you’ll never see them again — at least, not until they commit some heinous act of violence against an American citizen. Of course, the Biden administration knew that. That’s why they did it. And now that policy is over, so we’re seeing immediate results.

This is obviously a major victory, on par with what Bukele did in El Salvador. But it’s not a total victory, even though the numbers make it look like one. That’s because, as we’ve discussed previously, illegal immigration isn’t the only immigration problem we have. Like other countries, including Canada, we’ve given legal status to a large number of foreign nationals who despise this country. Which means even legal immigration is a problem that needs to be fixed. In fact, legal immigration needs to be shut down entirely, at least for now.

More than pretty much anyone else, Ilhan Omar is a walking justification for this policy. As if to prove my point, Omar recently announced that America — the country that rescued her from life of certain poverty, despair and ultimately death in Somalia — is actually one of the worst countries on the planet. This is a woman who, because of the generosity of the United States and its immigration policy, is now a sitting member of Congress, living a life that’s unimaginable to many Americans, to say nothing of virtually everyone living in Somalia. But here she is, announcing that actually, America is just about as bad as where she came from:

She’s willing to say, as part of her sob story, that she lived under a brutal dictatorship in Somalia. But she conveniently leaves out the fact that her father was a colonel in that dictator’s army. This is a regime that committed genocide and various human rights abuses as part of a communist-Islamist agenda. But Ilhan Omar forgot to mention any of that. And it’s an interesting omission, to say the least. It’s the kind of thing that might make you suspect that Ilhan Omar is an inherently dishonest person, and her whole family — and many other “refugees” like her — should never have been granted legal status in the first place.

And that’s not the only deception that’s evident in that interview. Notice what she’s doing there. She says that “this should be a wakeup call” for all Americans to feel a variety of patriotic sentiments about “the country we were born in” and the “founding fathers.” She’s trying to use American values against Americans. But she doesn’t actually share any of these values. Pretty much every time this woman opens her mouth, she’s attacking America, praising Somalia, and vowing to work on behalf of Somali interests from within the United States.

We’ve played the clips many times before. There hasn’t been a single moment in her political career where she’s expressed an ounce of pride in this country. And she certainly has never praised “the founding fathers,” who she regards as white supremacists whose statues should be torn down, and whose memories should be erased from history forever. But now, suddenly, she’s pretending to invoke the “founding fathers” to appeal to her constituents.

And again, she’s been given legal status to come to this country and say all of this. She’s now a naturalized citizen. And through it all, she keeps talking about Somalia. In fact she seems to want to go back there. This is a rough translation that’s making the rounds from a trip that Omar reportedly took to Somalia back in 2022. We’ll only play a small bit of the clip because it’s not in English. Watch:

According to the translation in the subtitles, she says, “I am a Somali girl… a young child taken from her country that misses her country and wishes to live there.”

You can dispute whether Ilhan Omar obtained her citizenship lawfully, and whether she’s subject to deportation on those grounds. But it really doesn’t matter. Very obviously, based on what she’s saying publicly, it’s clear that Ilhan Omar should not have been allowed into this country for any reason. She certainly should not have been made a citizen. She doesn’t offer anything to this country. And she never has. She is a shining example for why legal immigration needs to be drastically curtailed, now that the border is relatively secure.

Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is yet another example. She came to this country from India as a teenager. And by her own admission, at no point did she have any interest in improving America for Americans. Instead, she immediately got to work opening the floodgates for the rest of the third-world to come here. Here’s what she just wrote on social media.

I came to this country when I was 16. I worked in immigration justice for 20 years before setting foot in Congress. I’ve spent my entire life defending immigrants – and I’m not backing down.

In other words, by allowing Pramila Jayapal to become a citizen, we didn’t get someone who was committed to a life of hard work that would improve the lives of American citizens in any way. She didn’t have any interest in contributing to her local community, or performing services for American citizens. Instead, she began working immediately on behalf of foreign nationals.

This is a self-perpetuating problem. It’s a death spiral. The more immigrants we allow into this country — even “legal” ones — the more immigrants we get. By and large, these people are not vetted. They openly despise this country from the second they arrive. And after they’ve used our resources for their benefit, their hatred doesn’t change. Instead, they work even harder to allow more of their countrymen into the United States, so that they, too, can reap the rewards. This system simply cannot last forever. It’s not simply immoral. It’s unsustainable. It only works as long as there are rewards to dish out. Once that happens — and this moment is rapidly approaching — the social safety net collapses for everyone, along with our economy.

The only way to prevent that outcome is for the Trump administration to follow-up on its success with illegal aliens by sharply reducing the number of lawful migrants into this country.

Democrats will claim it’s heartless to turn our back on “refugees” and so on. But all you really need to do is listen to most of these “refugees” and lawful immigrants speak for a few minutes, and you’ll see what’s necessary. They don’t typically sound like South Africans, who are grateful to be here. Instead they often sound like Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal. They tell us how awful the United States is, and how desperately they want to return to Somalia. And at this point, as decisively as Donald Trump closed the southern border, we have no choice but to give these loathsome, anti-American foreign operatives exactly what they’re asking for.