Known got-aways along the southwest border have fallen to fewer than 40 per day, a 98.5 percent drop from the daily peaks recorded during the Biden administration, as local law enforcement officials describe a transformed landscape on the ground.
Border Patrol records reviewed by Breitbart Texas show that during the first two weeks of September, fewer than 550 illegal immigrants evaded apprehension nationwide, a running daily average below 40. That figure stands against a backdrop that would have been unrecognizable just a few years ago: during the first six months of fiscal year 2023, more than 400,000 illegal immigrants slipped past agents, a daily average exceeding 2,200.
The numbers come from a CBP source who provided the data to Breitbart Texas reporter Randy Clark, a 32-year Border Patrol veteran who formerly directed operations for nine stations in the Del Rio, Texas, sector. The Department of Homeland Security has separately stated that zero illegal immigrants have been released to pursue asylum at the southwest border during the last 16 months.
Kinney County, Texas, sits just north of the border in a stretch of ranchland that became a smuggling highway during the surge. In December 2022, four illegal immigrants died in a rollover crash eight miles outside Brackettville after a police chase, ejected from the vehicle they were being transported in. The county's roads carried a steady flow of human cargo.
That traffic has all but stopped. Sheriff Brad Coe told Breitbart Texas that reports of illegal immigrants crossing private property have dropped sharply.
"Our deputies have only encountered two smuggling cases on our roadways since January. It's an unbelievable change, and one we're happy with."
Two smuggling cases in roughly eight months. During the peak, ranchers in Kinney County dealt with trespassers, cut fences, and the constant risk of high-speed chases on rural two-lane roads. The county's experience tracks with the broader got-away data: the daily flood has slowed to a trickle.
Eagle Pass, the small Texas border town that became the most visible flashpoint of illegal crossings in late 2023, has undergone what local officials describe as a major transformation. Assistant Chief of Police Beto Garza painted a picture of a border corridor saturated with officers.
"There are Border Patrol agents on patrol everywhere, and the Department of Public Safety Highway Patrol troopers are out in large numbers under Operation Lone Star as well."
Governor Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star has kept state troopers deployed along the border, and Garza said the visible law enforcement presence is hard to miss. "Practically everywhere you look, there are law enforcement officers on patrol," he said.
The staffing picture extends beyond state resources. CBP announced in late June that the Border Patrol had reached a historic milestone of 21,271 agents serving on the front lines, a number that reflects a recruiting push aimed at matching enforcement capacity to the scale of the border.
Fewer got-aways does not mean cartels have quit. A CBP source in Douglas, Arizona, described how smuggling organizations have shifted tactics as traditional crossing methods have become harder.
"They recently resorted to cutting a lock on a flood gate just one week ago and attempted to drive multiple vehicles into the United States fully loaded with illegal aliens. The entry was detected as it happened, and every vehicle that attempted to enter was disabled or turned back to Mexico by Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement partners."
The incident illustrates a pattern the source described: large groups of more than 100 that once crossed openly are no longer viable. Smugglers are resorting to more desperate, improvised methods, and getting caught. The Douglas source attributed the shift to border crossing becoming "more difficult" under the Trump administration's policy changes, though no specific executive orders or statutes were named in the report.
A "known got-away" is an illegal immigrant detected but not apprehended. Border Patrol tracks them through visual sightings by agents on patrol, stationary game cameras, manned and unmanned aerial assets, third-party reports, and sign-cutting, the old-school practice of reading footprints and ground disturbance to determine how many people crossed a given stretch.
By definition, the count represents a floor, not a ceiling. It captures only the crossers agents know about. During the 2023 peak, the sheer volume overwhelmed detection capacity, meaning the true number of people who evaded apprehension was almost certainly higher than the 2,200-per-day average recorded at the time.
That same caveat applies today. Fewer than 40 known got-aways per day is the detected figure. But the scale of the reduction, from thousands daily to dozens, is difficult to dismiss as a measurement artifact. When local sheriffs and police chiefs confirm the same trend from their own patrol logs, the data and the ground truth align.
Beyond got-aways, DHS has stated that no illegal immigrants have been released to pursue asylum at the southwest border during the last 16 months. The claim, as reported, covers the full scope of the southwest border and suggests a policy framework in which catch-and-release, the practice that defined the Biden-era surge, has been eliminated rather than merely reduced.
No DHS document or direct statement was provided to support the claim beyond the department's assertion. But if accurate, it represents a structural change in how the border operates. Under the previous administration, hundreds of thousands of migrants were processed and released into the interior with future court dates, many of which were never kept. The got-away crisis existed alongside, and was partly driven by, a system that incentivized crossing in the first place.
Remove the incentive, enforce the line, and staff the posts. The numbers suggest the border was never an unsolvable problem, it was an unaddressed one.
