In fiscal year 2026, Border Patrol agents on the southern border arrested 98,701 illegal immigrants. The entire year. That's the lowest annual total in at least 59 years — a number so small it fits inside one NFL stadium.
In fiscal year 2022, Biden's first full year, that number was 2.2 million.
Data from Customs and Border Protection shows the full scope of what happens when a president actually enforces immigration law. The 98,701 figure represents a 95% drop from the Biden-era peak. Not a marginal improvement. Not a trend line moving in the right direction. A collapse in illegal crossings so dramatic that CBP officials are still processing the math.
The broader numbers are worse for anyone who spent four years insisting the border was under control. Fiscal year 2023 — Biden's record — saw 2,475,669 apprehensions. Fiscal year 2024 brought 2,135,005. Then Trump took office, and fiscal year 2025 dropped to 443,671. By fiscal year 2026, it was 137,000. That's a 94.47% decrease from peak to present — 2,338,969 fewer crossings.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin put it plainly: "Sixteen straight months of zero releases at the border proves that President Trump's policies are working. Catch and release is over."
Sixteen months. Not a single illegal immigrant released into the interior from the border. The policy that every Democratic strategist called "cruel" and every cable news anchor called "unworkable" has now produced sixteen consecutive months of zero releases. The average monthly encounter rate cratered from 183,000 under Biden to 8,225 under Trump.
CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott confirmed the trajectory, "It's not out officially yet, but we're going to report soon: a full year with no releases from the border." He added the detail that demolishes the left's favorite talking point about desperate families just seeking a better life: "People miss this sometimes: The cartels need the illegal [migrants]... they need them to overwhelm law enforcement."
The cartel business model required volume. Flood the zones with so many crossers that Border Patrol couldn't process them, couldn't detain them, had to release them. That's not a humanitarian crisis — it's a logistics strategy, and it worked beautifully under Biden. Under Trump, the volume dried up, and the cartels lost their primary tool for overwhelming the system.
The unaccompanied minor numbers tell the same story. In fiscal year 2023, CBP processed 137,235 unaccompanied alien children. In fiscal year 2026, that number fell to 7,600. Every one of those 129,635 kids who didn't make the journey is a child who wasn't handed to a cartel smuggler, wasn't trafficked across a desert, wasn't deposited at the border as a policy prop.
Every Democrat who stood behind a podium between 2021 and 2024 and said the border was "secure" now has a number to answer for. Two million fewer. That's not a talking point crafted by a campaign strategist. It's a leaked government data set that CBP plans to release publicly in the coming weeks.
The data will be official soon enough. The 2.2 million who crossed in Biden's first year versus the 98,701 who crossed in Trump's — that gap has a name. It's called enforcement.