Securing the Border is a National Security and Regional Foreign Policy Imperative

By Connor Pfeiffer

The current humanitarian and security crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border is without precedent in American history. Millions of migrants are making a dangerous trek to the border from as far away as South America, passing through as many as nine or 10 countries before entering the United States illegally. This crisis has been a boon to transnational criminal organizations that profit from human smuggling, exploit and enlist migrants to advance their illicit activities, and strain the resources of the United States and other governments in the region while trafficking people and drugs.

Policy decisions by the Biden-Harris Administration have created significant pull factors driving an out-of-control crisis that is bringing millions of people into the country for an indefinite period. And, unlike past surges to the U.S. border, the current crisis has ballooned into a problem affecting the entire Western Hemisphere, with migrants coming from around the world to make their way to the United States.

The next administration must make border security and addressing the associated regional crisis a top priority. Summits and joint statements without concrete results will no longer suffice. According to the 2024 Reagan Institute Summer Survey, 90 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Independents say that illegal immigration matters somewhat or a great deal for U.S. security and prosperity.¹ A failure to address both push and pull factors will not only perpetuate the unsustainable crisis at the border, but also continue to undermine U.S. influence and credibility in our own hemisphere and threaten political support for other national security priorities.

A Migrant and Fentanyl Surge

Three factors make the current crisis unique from past surges of illegal immigration—the rapid pace at which migrants have entered the country, the sheer number of migrants able to stay because of a broken asylum process and immigration system, and the expansion of the crisis beyond Mexico and Central America. Below is an overview of key elements of the border crisis and the accompanying fentanyl epidemic.

• Record Border Encounters: Since President Biden and Vice President Harris took office in January 2021, there have been nearly 10 million known illegal border crossings at the southwest border, including 8.1 million migrant encounters and at least 1.8 million known “gotaways”, or migrants who are known to have crossed the border illegally but evaded apprehension by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).² CBP is on track to have its third consecutive fiscal year with more than two million migrant encounters at the southwest border.³ For context, there had never been a year surpassing two million migrant encounters before fiscal year 2022.

• Catch and Release: This crisis stands out from the surge in border crossings during the 1990s and early 2000s. Over the 17-year period between 1990 and 2007, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States increased by 8.7 million, a majority of which were Mexican nationals.⁴ Meanwhile, the first 38 months of the Biden- Harris Administration saw at least 5.1 million migrants who crossed the border illegally reach the interior of the United States—3.3 million migrants who were released from CBP custody with a Notice to Appear (NTA) in immigration court or temporary status under another program, and 1.8 million known “gotaways.”⁵ In the first six months of fiscal year 2024, CBP released an average of 158,000 migrants into the country each month.⁶ On the current trajectory, in only four years, the Biden-Harris Administration will have apprehended and released five million migrants into the country by Inauguration Day 2025, 15 times more than under the Trump Administration.⁷

• Broken Asylum Process: Nearly 90 percent of illegal border crossers now turn themselves in or are apprehended by CBP.⁸ That is because many migrants arriving at the border are doing so to make an asylum claim. This phenomenon is not driven by a raft of refugees reaching the United States to avoid persecution but, rather, by incentives created by U.S. asylum law and Biden-Harris Administration policies that allow migrants to enter the country despite asylum claims that are unlikely to succeed. Under U.S. law, a refugee is someone who is unable or unwilling to return to or seek the protection of their country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”⁹ For example, a member of the opposition in Nicaragua fleeing the Ortega regime would likely qualify, while a farmer who left Guatemala because of a drought would not. The Biden-Harris Administration ended the Trump Administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were considered, and has significantly expanded the use of NTAs instead of detention and expedited removal.¹⁰ Consequently, migrants know that if they claim asylum, there is a significant chance that they will be released with a court notice instead of being deported or repatriated to their home country. The possibility of staying in the United States despite apprehension by CBP has encouraged migrants who are unlikely to qualify for refugee status to make the long and difficult journey to the border.

• Overwhelmed Immigration Courts: The current backlog in the U.S. immigration court system is 3.7 million cases, including nearly 1.4 million asylum cases.¹¹ The average wait time for an asylum hearing is almost four years.¹² This backlog and the corresponding delays provide even more incentive for migrants to come to the border because NTAs effectively function as a four-plus year entry pass to the United States.

• Regional Problem: Historically, most migrants arriving at the southwest border were Mexican nationals. In the 2010s, the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) was the epicenter of the migration crisis. Fiscal year 2023 was the first time ever that most encounters were migrants from outside of Mexico and the Northern Triangle. With growing numbers of Colombians, Cubans, Ecuadorians, Haitians, and Venezuelans making the journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, this has become a hemisphere-wide crisis.

• National Security Vulnerabilities: In fiscal year 2024, U.S. Border Patrol has encountered migrants from at least 99 different countries around the world.¹³ Given the proliferation of NTAs that release migrants into the interior of the United States and the difficulty of vetting millions of migrants from so many different countries, this is a serious national security vulnerability. On June 11, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested eight Tajik nationals with alleged ties to ISIS-K.¹⁴ The eight migrants had crossed the border illegally in 2023 and were released by CBP after being “fully vetted” during processing.¹⁵ The arrival in the past two years of more than 50,000 Chinese nationals has also raised questions as to what extent an insecure land border is a liability in the strategic competition with Beijing.¹⁶

• Fentanyl Epidemic: In addition to migration, the southwest border has been the epicenter for fentanyl trafficking. This has been a major contributor to the synthetic opioid overdose crisis that has killed at least 222,000 Americans since 2021.¹⁷ Seizures of fentanyl at the southwest border have skyrocketed since 2019. In fiscal year 2023, CBP seized 26,700 pounds of fentanyl at the border, which is the equivalent of six billion potentially lethal doses.¹⁸ This is also an underestimate of the true amount of fentanyl flowing across the border—a CBP official told Congress in 2023 that around 25 percent of the fentanyl coming across the border likely avoids seizure.¹⁹

Growing Foreign Policy Challenge

The failure of U.S. leaders to secure the border and disincentivize illegal immigration is creating a growing foreign policy challenge in the Western Hemisphere. The path of disruption caused by the border crisis stretches nearly 6,000 miles by land from Peru to the U.S. border. Migrants are journeying through as many as 10 countries, and for many, this journey includes crossing the dangerous jungle in the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.

Most of the countries affected by the flow of migrants are important U.S. partners. Every country on the land route except Ecuador has a free trade agreement with the United States.²⁰ Since 2014, these 10 countries have received more than $20 billion in U.S. foreign assistance to address security challenges, strengthen institutions, and support development and economic investments.²¹ The chaos and resource burden created by migrant flows undermine those investments by American taxpayers in their Latin American neighbors.

The region has also seen growing Chinese activity and investment, creating competition where U.S. influence and economic ties have traditionally been strong. In Mexico, the recent surge in Chinese investment and influence risks creating a political and economic crisis with Washington ahead of the 2026 sunset review of the U.S.- Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA).²² With the exception of Guatemala, which continues to recognize Taiwan, countries such as Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama have expanded their ties with China in recent years, shifting their diplomatic recognition to Beijing, signing memoranda of understanding on infrastructure projects, and undertaking negotiations for free trade agreements.²³

Additionally, the situation in Mexico is a critical piece of the regional puzzle. The worsening security situation there facilitates both the flow of migrants to the border and fentanyl trafficking. A former commander of U.S. Northern Command has stated that 30 to 35 percent of Mexico is controlled by transnational criminal organizations, such as the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación and Cártel de Sinaloa.²⁴ The country has also seen significant violence during President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) sexenio, with more than 170,000 murders in the last six years and at least 112,000 Mexicans missing.²⁵ Under the Biden Administration, migration has dominated the bilateral agenda without significant results while security ties with AMLO’s government have deteriorated.²⁶ President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who is a protégé of AMLO, will take office on October 1. While Sheinbaum has not indicated that her security policy will significantly differ from that of her predecessor, the next U.S. administration should put pressure on Mexico to make demonstrable gains against the cartels with U.S. assistance.²⁷

Agenda Items for the Next Administration

Our country will be an attractive destination for immigrants so long as America remains an economic powerhouse and a beacon for freedom. The situation at the border, however, is a humanitarian crisis that encourages migrants to take significant risks and put themselves in danger because of a belief that reaching the border will mean they can stay in the United States. This is neither sustainable nor tenable.

While President Biden has taken several actions this year that attempt to address the border crisis before the presidential election, they will not solve these problems. The new “emergency border circumstances” authority, which allows DHS to restrict asylum claims and remove illegal immigrants apprehended between ports of entry if daily encounters exceed 2,500, still maintains 1,450 appointments per day (529,250 annualized) for migrants to make claims for asylum and the Administration’s parole programs through the CBP One app.²⁸ More than 95 percent of migrants with CBP One appointments are reportedly let into the country with NTAs.²⁹ The emergency authority also ends if encounters fall below an average of 1,500 per day (547,500 annualized), normalizing more than one million border encounters per year when combined with the CBP One appointments.

Tackling the problems described will require a executive action and diplomacy in the near term combined with legislation to surge additional resources to the border and update the U.S. asylum process. The agenda items below should be top priorities for the next administration.

• Operational Control of the Southwest Border: Congress must give CBP the resources it needs to establish operational control of the border. This will require more manpower, building hundreds of miles of new border wall, and technology deployment to monitor more remote areas, in addition to upgrading screening infrastructure at ports of entry. These steps will not only reduce the number of successful “gotaways,” but will also increase drug interdictions and disrupt smuggling routes.

• Restore Remain in Mexico: Remain in Mexico is an important tool to make the difficult journey to the U.S. border less attractive by no longer making a verbal asylum claim after an illegal border crossing a ticket to enter the interior of the United States. The next administration can restore this policy through executive action.

• Secure Closer Cooperation with Mexico on Migration: Mexico can reduce pressure on the U.S. border by strengthening enforcement on its border with Guatemala and improving its asylum and work permit system. Mexico is an attractive destination for economic migrants because many parts of the country have a labor shortage driven by growing nearshoring investment by U.S. and Western companies.³⁰ While AMLO has used migration enforcement as a tool to pressure the United States, reaching a wide-ranging agreement with his successor could have significant short-term benefits for border security and U.S. economic interests in Mexico.³¹

• Provide Additional Resources to DHS and EOIR: In tandem with securing the border and restoring Remain in Mexico, DHS and the Executive Office for Immigration Review need additional resources to expand detention capacity and reduce the immigration court backlog.³² More detention capacity means DHS can prioritize removal of inadmissible migrants instead of issuing NTAs, while hiring more immigration judges to reduce the immigration court backlog and establish expedited asylum proceedings will reduce pull factors driving the current crisis.

• Reform the Asylum Process: Asylum is a status granted based on persecution of a protected class and an inability or unwillingness of someone’s government to protect them—not based on a desire to come to the United States for a better life. Congress should elevate the standard in the initial asylum screening interview to ensure only asylum claims that are likely to succeed and could not have been addressed in other countries of transit move forward. There should also be an expedited process for interviewing and adjudicating the claims of asylum applicants and removing those who are not eligible. Our asylum system was never intended to become a gateway for so many migrants to enter the country while waiting for an interview or hearing. Fixing the asylum system will ensure that refugees in need of protection can access these protections while more quickly rejecting ineligible claims.

• Negotiate New Asylum Cooperation Agreements: During the Trump Administration, the United States signed asylum cooperative agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that would have required migrants traveling through those countries to claim asylum there or face potential removal once they reached the U.S. border.³³ During the first month of the Biden-Harris administration, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken terminated those agreements.³⁴ The next administration should negotiate new asylum cooperative agreements with U.S. partners in the Western Hemisphere.

• Restrict Presidential Parole Authority: President Biden has abused a discretionary parole authority in U.S. immigration law to release more than 1.6 million migrants into the interior of the country in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 alone.³⁵ The authority is meant to be used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” ³⁶ Congress should change the law to prevent further abuses of this authority.

• Focus More Foreign Policy Resources and Attention on the Western Hemisphere: Over the long term, reducing illegal immigration to the southwest border will require improving the security, political, and economic situation in the Western Hemisphere. Past efforts have failed because U.S. attention and resources are drawn elsewhere in the world. The next administration has an opportunity to work with Congress to break that cycle and forge stronger partnerships in the hemisphere amid strategic competition with China through a regional strategy that:

• utilizes our influence and economic leverage in Central and South America to cut off the flow of migrants north, giving partners in places like Mexico and Panama the resources and tools they need to process and deport migrants before they reach our border;

• ends the Pentagon’s perennial neglect of U.S. Southern Command to enhance U.S. presence in the region;

• trains, equips, and supports partner forces to degrade the cartels in a sustained way;

• reclaims American economic leadership in Latin America by offering competitive alternatives to Chinese investment, improving existing trade agreements as President Trump did with USMCA, and developing the conditions for more American investment that creates jobs at home.³⁷