EAGLE PASS, Texas (AP) — Vice President JD Vance participated in an aerial tour of the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday and met with law enforcement officials as part of a trip meant to highlight tougher immigration policies that the White House says has led to dramatically fewer arrests for illegal crossings since Donald Trump began his second term.
Joined by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vance is highest-ranking members of the Republican administration to visit the southern border. After viewing the Eagle Pass area, around 150 miles southwest of San Antonio, by helicopter, the trio visited a Border Patrol detention facility before participating in a roundtable discussion with local and national participants.
State authorities say Vance’s itinerary also likely includes a visit to Shelby Park, a municipal greenspace along the Rio Grande that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott seized from federal authorities last year in a feud with the Biden administration. Abbott accused that administration of not doing enough to curb illegal crossings.
“Border security is national security,” Hegseth told Fox News before the trip. He added, “We’re sending those folks home, and we’re not letting more in. And you’re seeing that right now.”
Trump made a crackdown on immigration a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, pledging to halt the tide of migrants entering the U.S. and stop the flow of fentanyl crossing the border. As part of that effort, he imposed 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, saying neither is doing enough to address drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
“They are now strongly embedded in our country. But we are getting them out and getting them out fast,” Trump said of migrants living in the U.S. illegally as he delivered an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.
Although Trump has not made a trip to the border since Inauguration Day, the visit of three of his top officials is evidence of the scope of his administration’s focus on the issue. He has tasked agencies across the federal government with working to overhaul border and immigration policy, moving well beyond the Department of Homeland Security, the traditional home of most such functions.
Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico plummeted 39% in January from a month earlier, though they’ve been falling sharply since well before Trump took office on Jan. 20 from an all-time high of 250,000 in December 2023. Since then, Mexican authorities increased enforcement within their own borders and President Joe Biden, a Democrat, introduced severe asylum restrictions early last summer.
The Trump administration has showcased its new initiatives, including putting shackled immigrants on U.S. military planes for deportation fights and sending some to the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It has also expanded federal agents’ arrests of people in the U.S. illegally and abandoned programs that gave some permission to stay.
Trump border czar Tom Homan said migrants with criminal records have been prioritized in early efforts to round up and deport people in the U.S. illegally, but he added of other migrants, “If you’re in the county illegally, you’re not off the table.”
“When we find the bad guy, many times they’re with others, others who aren’t a criminal priority, but were in the country illegally,” Homan told reporters outside the White House on Tuesday. “They’re coming, too.”
Since Trump’s second term began, about 6,500 new active duty forces have been ordered to deploy to the southern border. Before that, there were about 2,500 troops already there, largely National Guard troops on active duty orders, along with a couple of hundred active duty aviation forces.
Of those being mobilized, many are still only preparing to go. Last weekend, Hegseth approved orders to send a large portion of an Army Stryker brigade and a general support aviation battalion to the border. Totaling about 3,000 troops, they are expected to deploy in the coming weeks.
Troops are responsible for detection and monitoring along the border but don’t interact with migrants attempting to illegally cross. Instead, they alert border agents, who then take the migrants into custody.
Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with tackling the root causes of immigration during his administration, seeking to zero in on why so many migrants, particularly from Central America, were leaving their homelands and coming to the U.S. seeking asylum or trying to make it into the county illegally.
Harris made her first visit to the border in June 2021, about 3 1/2 months deeper into Biden’s term than Vance’s trip in the opening weeks of Trump’s second term. Trump has routinely joked that Harris was in charge of immigration policy but didn’t visit the border or even maintain close phone contact with federal officials.
Vance’s trip also comes as the Trump administration is considering the use of the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 to detain and deport Venezuelans based on a proclamation labeling the gang Tren de Aragua an invasion force that could be acting at the behest of that country’s government. That’s according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.
It is unclear how close the decisions are to being finalized. Some officials have questioned whether the gang is acting as a tool for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the U.S. has not recognized as that country’s legitimate leader. There are some concerns that invoking the law would require the U.S. to more formally recognize Maduro.
Still, the 1798 law allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country with which the U.S. is at war, and it has been mentioned by Trump as a possible tool to speed up his mass deportations.
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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Lolita Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
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