Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Adam Isacson: Thank you, Greg, it’s great to be on with you.
Isacson: Miller must know this. The U.S.–Mexico border right now, if you measure by the number of migrants coming, is the quietest it’s been since the early months of the pandemic in mid-2020. Part of the reason is because Joe Biden made it harder to get asylum. But a big part of the reason is that starting in January of 2024, Mexico started cracking down very much on migration and actually realized a one-month reduction of about 50 percent into the number of migrants coming. So yeah, they have been doing a lot. We can talk about the human rights impact of that, but they have been doing a lot to block people now for 13 months.
Isacson: That’s right. Now, keep in mind that at the really high moments of the Biden administration when you had a lot of migrants coming, for every Mexican who made it to the U.S.–Mexico border, two people from other countries were making it to the U.S.–Mexico border. So they were crossing Mexican territory to get there.
Isacson: To say that Mexico is doing nothing to stop migrants from crossing its territory simply isn’t true. And it shows that even in his innermost circle, people like Stephen Miller already knew that Mexico was doing quite a bit. It’s a big admission and it’s also a recognition. I thought it was pretty significant that as much of a hardliner Stephen Miller is, he was recognizing that if you push them too hard, they might stop cooperating and start just waving people through again.
Isacson: Yeah, absolutely. There was a record number of migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border in December of 2023. And there was a real crackdown moment between a lot of serious discussions between Biden administration officials and Mexican government officials, after which Mexico did increase the number of military. [They had] police and migration personnel all on main roads along the railroad routes; a lot of patrols; some more deployment on the borderline itself—although once you hit the borderline, most of the people are easier to find on the inside.
Sargent: I want to clarify that you’re talking about 90,000 migrants per month intercepted by Mexico. I want to make a distinction here between Mexico putting troops along the border and Mexico doing a crackdown all through its territory. As you say, the key here is not for Mexico to necessarily put a whole bunch of troops on its side of the border. It’s more to stop the migration northward at many different choke points—roads, railroads, bridges. That’s what Biden actually secured from Mexico, right?
Sargent: You made a point earlier that I want to pick up on, which is that Miller knows that tariffs could antagonize Mexico and make Mexico’s cooperation in stopping migrants from going northward less likely. That’s the direct opposite of the story MAGA’s telling. It underscores the degree to which migration policy in the Americas is a bilateral or even a multilateral thing. Can you talk about that dimension of it? Miller essentially recognized internally, and he would never say this publicly, that overly aggressive tariffs risks making Mexico less likely to cooperate with us.
Sargent: Now, why don’t you talk to us a little bit about Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum? By all indications, she really seems to understand Trump’s psyche, doesn’t she? It seems like she’s going to understand very clearly that what she needs to do is to create the impression that she’s bending the knee to Trump, that she’s caving to Trump, that Trump is winning, that that’s the most important thing she can do as a way to avoid having to actually make concessions that wouldn’t even do anything for us anyway and would just hurt her country. Can you talk about that?
One thing she and her predecessor found was that by doing the art of the deal and just agreeing to some things with Trump and giving Trump the impression of a win in quotes, they could get transactionally a lot of concessions on other things that Mexico wanted. The Biden administration scolded Mexico a lot more often about things like corruption and what they did with their judiciary or the quality of democracy. As long as they cooperate with Trump on this one thing that’s so important to him and Stephen Miller, they’re probably not going to get any pressure on a lot of other aspects of the relationship.
Isacson: I don’t think we’re going to see tariffs imposed during the first half or even most of 2025. And part of that is because of the history of what happened before. I think we are naturally going to see lower numbers of migrants at the border, regardless of what Mexico does, at least for the next several months. The first few months of 2017, after Trump’s first inauguration, were some of the historically lowest for migrant apprehensions of the U.S.–Mexico border of the entire twenty-first century, even though Trump hadn’t done anything yet. Just the mere fact that he was there caused migrants and their smugglers to take a pause. I think we’ll see a similar pause in 2025. And Donald Trump can point to that as progress and as a reason to put off tariffs.
Sargent: Right. I want to stress for people that how this would really work is that Trump can just say that the threat of tariffs is producing all these things that would have happened anyway. Things that are happening partly because of what Biden negotiated with Mexico, things that are happening because of structural factors involved with Trump taking office. It does discourage some migration, we should admit that. So essentially, the way that structural dynamics of this could work is that Trump might actually have an incentive to merely claim the threat of tariffs is working as opposed to actually going through with them.
Sargent: Do you think that that could actually happen if Trump goes through with the tariffs? We’ll see not just a trade war, but something like an immigration war in which Mexico stops doing some of the stuff they’ve been doing?
Sargent: This raises a really fascinating set of issues, I think. We saw Trump during his first term aggressively and viciously chew out some of his top officials like DHS Chief Kirstjen Nielsen. When the border numbers went up, there was reporting on him raging internally over this. So in a funny way, Mexico holds Trump’s psyche in their hands. I don’t know exactly how much control, maybe you can explain this, they actually have over migration flows, but if they can let the numbers of border crossings go up a bit, that really needles Trump in a major way, no?
Just look at what happened in December of 2023, which is the record-setting month for the most migrants ever reaching the U.S.–Mexico border. Mexico’s migration authority, their version of ICE or CBP, claimed that they were out of money for the year, and [that] they just weren’t going be able to do very much for that month of December. And they stopped a lot of their operations. The flow was just tremendous, to the point where the U.S. was closing ports of entry because they didn’t have the personnel even to deal with all the people coming. So that’s an example of what may happen if Mexico lets its guard down. I don’t think they let it get that high, but they can certainly show that this is a two-way street.
Isacson: Yeah, they do have a lot of control. We’ve seen a lot of Mexican crackdowns over the years. Sometimes they dissipate and lose their force, in part because the politicians aren’t coming down on the security forces to do it, but also because corruption is a real thing. Those coyotes—those smugglers—charge tens of thousands of dollars sometimes because they’re spreading the money around. That does make a lot of the countermeasures weaker over time. But one remarkable thing about Mexico’s crackdown of 2024 is that it’s still happening despite that.
Isacson: Yeah. The so-called migrant crisis of the Biden years was a crisis of asylum seekers, which means migrants who are actually trying to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities and then enter our clogged asylum system and be here for a while. I should point out, there were only about 12 months, maybe 13 months, of Joe Biden’s presidency when the right to asylum actually existed at the U.S.–Mexico border: May 2023 to June 2024. He was not open to asylum seekers. What was in place up till May of 2023 was this pandemic policy that Stephen Miller invented and Joe Biden happily continued called Title 42 that said, Sorry, there’s a pandemic. We can’t let you ask for asylum. We’re going to expel you. We’re going to pretend you never even got into the country and expel you.
There’s just not enough planes; it costs an incredible amount of money. Some countries governments don’t even take them back—people from Venezuela, Cuba. So you had this internationalization of the migrant population who you couldn’t really do much with and who often did have strong asylum cases because they were coming from some countries ruled by very bad governments. That’s the main reason why this exploded. Not because he wasn’t tough enough on asylum, they were just logistically left with very little to do.
Sargent: His entire immigration crackdown is going to cost immense amounts of money, no?
Sargent: So it’s going to get a whole lot harder for them to cut taxes for the rich and corporations.
Sargent: That’s what they’ll do. Adam Isacson, thanks for the great big picture look at all this. We really appreciate it, man.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent.The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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