The Department of Homeland Security says not a single illegal immigrant apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border has been released into the country for thirteen straight months, a streak that, if verified, would mark a complete reversal of the catch-and-release policies that defined the Biden era.
CBP statistics provided to Breitbart Texas show total southwest border apprehensions in May hit 9,998, a figure DHS says is 94 percent below the monthly average during the Biden administration and 96 percent below peak months under the prior president. The average daily apprehension count along the southwest border in May stood at 323.
To grasp the scale of the change, consider what those numbers looked like just two and a half years ago. In December 2023, roughly 17,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in a single five-day stretch in one Texas border sector alone. During peak months of the Biden administration, estimates cited in the reporting placed the release rate at 85 percent or higher, meaning the vast majority of those apprehended were set free into the American interior.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin framed the milestone in blunt terms. In a statement reported by Breitbart Texas, Mullin said:
"Thirteen straight months of ZERO releases at the border. Under President Donald Trump's leadership, we are delivering the most secure border in American history."
Mullin added that the administration is "enforcing the nation's laws and quickly sending illegal aliens back to their home countries, ensuring the safety and sovereignty of our nation." He declared flatly: "The days of catch and release are over."
The zero-release streak has been building in public view for months, even if the milestone has drawn limited attention from legacy media outlets. As far back as February, DHS reported ten consecutive months without a single release of illegal immigrants into the U.S. interior, with nationwide CBP encounters that month down 88 percent from the Biden-era monthly average, Fox News reported. At that point, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stated: "We have the most secure border in American history. Our borders are CLOSED to lawbreakers."
By March, the Washington Examiner reported eleven consecutive months of zero releases, with southwest border apprehensions at 8,268, a 97 percent decrease from the Biden-era December 2023 peak. Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis put a fine point on it: "It turns out we didn't need new laws to secure our border. We just needed a new President."
That observation deserves to sit with anyone who spent the Biden years listening to administration officials insist that only new legislation from Congress could fix the border.
The progression from ten months to eleven to twelve and now thirteen tells a consistent story. In April, average daily border apprehensions fell to 298, fewer people per day than were being apprehended in a single hour during the December 2023 surge under Biden, the New York Post noted. CBP Commissioner Rodney S. Scott said at the time that "every minute of every day President Trump's border security policies are making every American safer."
The twelve-month milestone last month drew its own share of attention in outlets willing to cover it, though major network broadcasts and leading newspapers treated it as background noise. That pattern, a historic border achievement met with media silence, has become its own recurring story.
May's figure of 9,998 apprehensions keeps the monthly total below 10,000 for yet another month. DHS describes the current apprehension levels as the lowest in more than three decades. A year-end review of 2025 border enforcement by Just The News documented a 93 percent drop in illegal border crossings from the prior year, more than 2.5 million removals of illegal foreign nationals, including 1.9 million who self-deported and over 622,000 deported by ICE, and illegal entries at the southwest border reaching their lowest level since 1970 by October 2025. DHS characterized those numbers as "a level of sustained deterrence unmatched in modern border history."
CBP says the sharp decline in border crossings has freed agents to focus on counter-drug enforcement, and the seizure numbers reflect it. Nationwide seizures of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl, and marijuana combined by weight rose 32 percent from May 2024. Fentanyl seizures in May 2026 climbed 72 percent from April alone.
Marijuana seizures jumped 61 percent compared to the monthly average during fiscal year 2024. Overall, CBP reported seizing 56 percent more illicit narcotics compared to the same period in fiscal year 2024.
The administration ties these gains directly to the reduced human-smuggling workload. When agents are not processing and releasing tens of thousands of illegal immigrants every week, they can patrol, interdict, and investigate. That straightforward logic was dismissed for years by critics who argued that more processing capacity, not fewer crossings, was the answer.
Some of the cartels targeted by these operations have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations, though the specific groups and the timeline of those designations were not detailed in the CBP data. The administration describes the increased seizures as cutting directly into cartel profits and operational capital.
The comparison between the current numbers and the Biden-era baseline is not subtle. During peak months under Biden, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants were released into the country each month. The 94 percent reduction in monthly apprehensions, and the complete elimination of releases, represents a policy reversal so total that it raises an obvious question: why was the prior administration unable or unwilling to achieve similar results?
Former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spent years insisting the border was "secure" even as apprehension and release figures shattered records. He has since acknowledged that the Biden administration should have acted sooner, a concession that arrived only after the political cost of the crisis had been paid by communities across the country.
The specific Trump administration border security measures responsible for the turnaround are not enumerated in the CBP data. But the results speak in a language that does not require a policy briefing to understand: fewer crossings, zero releases, more drugs intercepted.
Open questions remain. The methodology behind CBP's "zero releases" claim, specifically which categories of release are included or excluded, has not been publicly detailed. The 85 percent release-rate estimate attributed to the Biden era lacks a named source. And the precise Biden-era monthly averages used to calculate the 94 and 96 percent reductions have not been published alongside the May figures.
These are fair questions. But they do not change the direction of the trend line, which has moved in one direction for over a year.
Meanwhile, the policy conversation inside the administration itself is not monolithic. Reports have surfaced that some cabinet members have lobbied the president to offer legal status to certain illegal immigrants, a sign that enforcement-first does not mean the debate over long-term immigration policy is settled, even within Trump's own team.
The downstream effects of a porous border extend well beyond the crossing points themselves. Investigations in multiple states have uncovered noncitizens on voter rolls, raising questions about how years of mass illegal immigration have rippled into civic institutions that depend on lawful participation.
Thirteen months is not a fluke. It is not a seasonal dip. It is a policy outcome sustained across more than a full year, through shifting weather, changing cartel tactics, and ongoing legal challenges. The administration's critics predicted chaos, cruelty, and failure. The CBP data shows the opposite.
Whether or not the major networks choose to cover it, the numbers are the numbers. And the Americans who spent years watching their border towns, emergency rooms, and school systems absorb the consequences of catch-and-release already know what changed, and when.
Enforcing the law was never impossible. It just required leaders willing to do it.