Kris Grogan/CBP Office of Public Affairs

U.S. Border Patrol agents encounter a large group of migrants near Los Ebanos, Texas, in June.

The number of people arrested and detained at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped substantially in August.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained 64,000 people at the border in August. Three months earlier, arrests peaked in 2019 with 144,000 border crossers detained in May. Why the big drop?

Mark Morgan, interim director of CBP, credits Mexico’s deployment of military forces to its borders and the Trump administration’s policy changes.

“The President has made it very clear that he's going to use every tool available to him and this administration to address this unprecedented crisis at the southern border," he said.

Morgan said Mexico has detained 134,000 undocumented immigrants so far this year, 50,000 more than all of 2018.

Lisa Magaña is a professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, and she said all of this can only be understood in context.

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