Illegal border crossings at record lows as crackdown spreads

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SUNLAND PARK, New Mexico ‒ The U.S.-Mexico border used to buzz with illegal migration at a scale President Donald Trump called an "invasion."
Now soldiers surveil the desert from military vehicles, Border Patrol radios are silent and illegal crossings have fallen to record lows.
Reaching far beyond the border, deep into the country's heartland, Trump insists America is under "invasion" and has continued to invoke wartime powers to stop it. He has transformed the borderland into a military base, made arrests by masked agents a common sight in America and packed detention centers with immigrants, the vast majority without criminal records.
Trump's aggressive actions – and protestors' increasingly violent opposition – have touched off a furious national debate about civil rights, the rule of law and what the word "invasion" really means.
Trump is known for his verbal flourishes, but declaring an "invasion" in numerous executive actions is one way to unlock extraordinary federal authorities, often reserved for wartime, said Jessica Vaughan, of the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies.
"It was not just meant to rile people up, or to just be used as a melodramatic description, but it was meant to trigger a certain response under certain authorities," she said.
The word "invasion" appears in at least 12 of Trump's executive orders, proclamations and memoranda since he took office Jan. 20, according to a USA TODAY review. He has ramped up military rhetoric in official orders, even as his administration touts its success in stopping border crossings.
In a May 9 proclamation, after months of increased border security, Trump declared that he wants to "end this invasion, remove the illegal-alien invaders from the United States, and protect the American people."
The mass arrival of migrants under President Joe Biden pushed the United States to its highest percentage of foreign-born people in a century. Trump's moves to reverse it by deporting millions is transforming the country again, redefining what it means for the United States to be a nation of immigrants.
From immigration raids at construction sites in Florida, dairy farms in Vermont and restaurants in California; to the detentions of college students in Massachusetts and targeting of alleged gang members in Colorado apartment complexes, the Trump administration is sending a firm message to millions of immigrants: You aren't welcome here.
The president's most vocal supporters see a chief executive delivering rapid results.
Craig Johnson, 67, rallied for Trump at a campaign stop in Las Vegas last year. The Navy vet supports the ramp-up in deportations – especially after the VA recently cut back his benefits, he said. He is appealing the cutback, but he also believes immigrants have drained resources.
"There are so many people that were here illegally that were getting food stamps or medical," he said. "The impact it's had on citizens is just horrendous."
But other Americans are growing increasingly concerned as the president's agents adopt aggressive, fear-inducing arrest tactics and widen their net to target otherwise law-abiding immigrants alongside murderers, rapists, and drug dealers.
"They've created a war zone in our community for a war that's imagined," said Laura Lunn, director of advocacy and litigation for the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. "It's making us all feel less safe. People are losing trust in law enforcement."
Some migrant advocates are becoming militant in their opposition to Trump's agenda, in some cases adopting tactics commonly associated with resistance fighters, mapping the movement of ICE agents and increasingly engaging in physical confrontations.
On June 6 and 7, hundreds of protestors clashed violently with federal agents in Los Angeles, after dozens of immigrant arrests were carried out by masked agents riding in armored vehicles. The Trump administration dispatched U.S. Border Patrol tactical agents to the city in response and deployed 2,000 members of the National Guard.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass condemned how agents carried out the detentions.
"These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of public safety in our city," she said in a statement. "We will not stand for this."
Some former immigration agents and military personnel also have concerns about the new enforcement tactics.
In California, retired Homeland Security Investigations special agent Patrick Comey dedicated three decades of his life to enforcing U.S. immigration laws. But the Trump administration's tactics – splashy arrests by agents in heavy tactical gear – are "becoming more and more distressing every day."
"This is not the America that I was trained to serve," he told USA TODAY.
Army veteran Jose Diaz was outside the Buona Forchetta Italian restaurant in San Diego on May 30, when immigration agents tried to drive their vehicles through an angry crowd and deployed two flash-bang grenades, one of which went off by his foot.
Diaz said he had never seen soldiers overseas use such tactics on a crowd of unarmed civilians. 'We had much stricter rules of engagement than these agents had,' he said.
On a morning in mid-May, near the rusted steel U.S.-Mexico border fence in southern New Mexico, soldiers surveilled the desert from inside an eight-wheeled Stryker vehicle.
Hours went by without a single illegal crossing.
Trump's aggressive new policies helped drive down illegal migration at the Mexican border, accelerating a sharp decline that began in the last year of the Biden administration.
Citing the "invasion," Trump deployed troops to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California and declared a strip of land along the border a "National Defense Area." Migrants who enter that territory can be charged with illegal entry and trespassing on a military installation.
The administration is already shifting its focus from the border to the country's interior.
"The prior administration allowed unchecked millions of aliens to illegally enter the United States," Trump said in an April 28 executive order. "This invasion at the southern border requires the federal government to take measures to fulfill its obligation to the states."
Stephen Miller, Trump's top immigration advisor, has long argued that vast government powers and the military should be deployed to combat the migrant "invasion."
Miller, who as White House deputy chief of staff has helped shape Trump's muscular new approach to immigration enforcement, argues liberal Americans are more interested in sob stories about law-breaking immigrants than they are about protecting their country.
On social media, he called the protests in Los Angeles "an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States," adding in a comment directed to Bass, the mayor: "You have no say in this at all. Federal law is supreme and federal law will be enforced."
But Trump's reliance on the military to combat the "invasion" has some critics worried that a president who grows accustomed to using the military in one arena may be increasingly willing to deploy soldiers elsewhere inside the country.
The border military build-up "is part of an effort to take on internal missions," said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America.
"The authoritarian needs an enemy to start, to galvanize the population," he said. "You use the word invasion; it's immigrants for now."
Courts around the country have put the brakes on some of Trump's efforts to reverse or combat the "invasion."
Federal judges have been quick to thwart his more controversial efforts, from his invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport certain immigrants without due process; to his targeting of pro-Palestinian protesters because the White House didn't like what they said.
Prof. Michael Kagan, who runs the Immigration Clinic at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas law school, said Trump's use of wartime language reflects the administration's deliberate effort to sway both the courts and public opinion by invoking national security.
During war, he said, the courts and the general public have given the president broad deference to exercise powers that could never be justified during peacetime. Kagan cited the preemptive incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II as an example of a presidential action that was at the time endorsed by the courts but later widely deemed both unconstitutional and morally wrong.
"They're hoping to tap into a broader norm in America, where the courts allow the executive to get away with a lot more during a war," he said.
Kagan said current efforts targeting immigrants are akin to to the military testing new weapons systems: a small number of agents trying different tactics against a relatively small number of people to find the most effective path forward to meeting Trump's 1-million-per-year deportation goal.
"They're seeing what can we get away with," said Kagan, adding the courts should block any effort to curb due process before the practice becomes widespread.
Congress appears poised to pour $150 billion in new funding to back Trump's efforts, according to an analysis of a reconciliation budget bill by the American Immigration Council. That's more than double the current Department of Homeland Security budget and would represent a dramatic expansion of the department's reach.
"If you think bad things are happening now, wait till they get tons more money," said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization.
The organization has argued against deporting people who benefitted from Biden-era immigration programs and followed the rules at the time. Soerens says what happened wasn't an "invasion."
"We want DHS to have enough money to deport violent criminals and ensure secure borders," Soerens said. "We don't want them to have enough money to deport people who came here under the rules we gave them."
Contributed: Eduardo Cuevas
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump claims new wartime powers to step up immigration crackdown