How Border Patrol’s mission is shifting in the Trump age: ‘There are consequences now’

Agents were pulled from the border to drive vans full of immigrants back and forth to stations for processing, watch over rooms of people in holding cells, and make baby formula for unaccompanied infants, one rank-and-file agent recounted to the Washington Examiner. The border surge resulted in historically low morale.

“I was processing for over a year continuously. We had a quota,” the agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity, wrote in a text message Friday. “You have to process so many people and then you have to stop to either provide them with a snack or provide them with diapers or their kids’ milk. It was very, very, very frustrating.”

In the 60 days since President Donald Trump took office, agents have found themselves back in the jobs they signed up to do, rather than stuck with menial tasks, and finally getting a breather, even as they take on serious national security operations that went by the wayside.

“We are in the field and are enforcing laws, and there are consequences now,” the same agent said.

Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks detailed to the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview how the agents’ mission has shifted with the decline in illegal border crossings.

“We’re taking a total approach on this. We’re enforcing the law, we’re increasing the consequences. So what you see now is the probability of detection, apprehension, and then a consequence being delivered,” Banks said in a Zoom interview from the agency’s Washington headquarters.

With thousands more agents at the border than migrants apprehended per day, the Border Patrol is prioritizing taking down “stash houses,” thwarting drug traffickers between the ports of entry, and achieving a 100% acceptance rate of criminal cases referred to the Justice Department — all of which serve as consequences intended to deter future crime.

National Border Patrol Council President Paul Perez said the Trump effect is a Border Patrol that has been “empowered … to actually do the job it was meant to do.”

“We’re now, once again, deployed to actually patrol the border and fully staff our checkpoints,” Perez wrote in a text message. “Our manpower has been reallocated to deterrence and detection and the apprehension of those who are actively attempting to avoid detection, and who, under the previous administration, would have been classified as ‘getaways.’”

A change in mission

Last February, agents on the U.S.-Mexico border were still deep in the Biden-era border crisis, in which, for 3 1/2 years, the majority of agents were taken off the border to transport, process, and make sandwiches for thousands of illegal immigrants arrested daily.

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), whose district encompasses the largest percentage of the southern border, said agents’ morale tanked under Biden.

“It’s no secret that our Border Patrol Agents suffered under the Biden administration. Instead of guarding the line, they were shifted almost entirely to processing and transfer duties,” Gonzales said in a statement. “Failed border policies tied the hands of our Agents, causing morale to plummet in an environment that’s already strenuous.”

Melissa Lucio, who retired in 2020 as the patrol agent in charge of the McAllen Station in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, said the changes reversed the crisis.

“Prior to this, there was so much chaos it was difficult to cull out the threat in the mix of the thousands and thousands of people swarming the border and bogging down the agents with processing duties,” Lucio wrote in a text message Friday.  

By February this year, Trump’s first month in office, the tide had turned. Just 8,300 migrants were encountered last month, compared to 140,000 a year earlier, following Trump’s executive actions aimed at getting control of the border and unauthorized immigration.

That drop has changed how Border Patrol agents are doing their jobs.

“This has allowed Border Patrol agents to focus on their true mission of securing the nation by protecting the border. Agents are back on the line patrolling,” Lucio said. “Agents are able to focus on interviewing those who are caught to gain good intelligence and information leading to the dismantling of smuggling organizations. The information can lead them to stash houses and smugglers, resulting in increased prosecution cases.”

Busting ‘stash houses’

Immigrants who do cross the border illegally are largely seeking to evade agents and not get caught, Banks said, because it means being removed as a result of Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that ended “catch and release.”

Under Biden, roughly 11 million illegal immigrants were arrested at the nation’s border, and half of those immigrants were allowed to remain in the United States. Immigrants quickly learned that they should not fear arrest, which prompted many to walk up to agents and surrender, knowing that their chances of being removed on the spot were slim.

Immigrants who cross today are fearful of being caught. They rely on cartel smuggling networks to get them over the border without being detected and to what is known as a stash house, where smugglers will house dozens of people until a car or tractor-trailer is available to move them to destinations across the country.

On Monday, USBP agents in Las Cruces, NM, discovered 19 illegal aliens in a stash house. Now, the smugglers face felony prosecution for Conspiracy to Transport (8USC1324), others will be prosecuted for felony illegal re-entry (8USC1326).

We are working around the clock to shut… pic.twitter.com/azjULW7VWN

— Chief Michael W. Banks (@USBPChief) March 4, 2025

“If you come, there’s going to be a consequence. And so again, we start seeing more people that are trying to elude apprehension,” Banks said. “You’re going to see more people that are going to try to flee.”

Thwarting drug smuggling

Banks expects narcotics seizures to increase in the coming months because more agents have been assigned to the field, where they can interdict drug traffickers moving narcotics across the border.

“We didn’t have the resources available to do mass processing under the open border policies of Biden, while still going out and doing our law enforcement duties,” Banks said. “Having most of our agents back to patrol, it’s allowing us to encounter those narcotics that we’ve already, that we knew were coming across.”

In February, Border Patrol nationwide seized 45 pounds of heroin, the most interdicted in a month since May 2022.

But south of the border in Mexico, roughly 10,000 Mexican soldiers have been deployed to the northern part of the country to prevent illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Their addition could lead to fewer drug smuggling schemes between the ports of entry.

Referring more criminals for prosecution

The Justice Department and Border Patrol are working together at a greater rate to prosecute illegal immigrants, smugglers, and drug traffickers.

“We’re prosecuting for anything, any law they violate that they’re amenable to. … We’re seeing prosecutions at a rate we’ve never seen before,” Banks said. “Referrals are up, but also the acceptance of referrals are up.”

The Justice Department told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that it has charged 7,000 people with federal immigration violations since Jan. 20, a significant uptick from the most recently available public data in April 2022, which showed that just 2,000 cases were prosecuted that month.

In February 2024, the DOJ accepted 89% of cases that the Border Patrol referred, compared to 96% in February 2025. Banks said that percentage is nearly 100% thus far in March.

“We’re going to keep pushing hard,” Banks said. “We will gain operational control of the border.”