Trump's pressure on Mexico puts skids on asylum seekers at border

The U.S. had just witnessed the worst month on record for illegal immigrant parents and children streaming across the southern border in May 2019, and an irate President Trump took to Twitter demanding Mexico do something about it — or else face crippling tariffs. Top Mexican officials scurried to Washington to negotiate and emerged a year ago this week promising to deploy tens of thousands of national guard forces and expand the so-called Remain in Mexico policy by taking back more Central Americans who had used Mexico as a transit point. Results were nearly instantaneous. Mexico apprehended 81,000 migrants from June to September, up 46% compared with the year before. Farther north, the Border Patrol went from catching 84,000 illegal immigrants traveling as families in May to just 42,000 in July. By January, it was fewer than 5,000. Border Patrol holding facilities, designed to accommodate maybe 4,000 migrants, had been bursting with five times that number last May. By early this year, they were below 4,000. The coronavirus has only accelerated those trends, with the Trump administration using a powerful public health law to immediately expel most unauthorized border crossers. But officials say without the groundwork laid by last year’s negotiations with Mexico, COVID-19 could have been a border disaster...MORE