The border region was a coherent economic and cultural zone for centuries before it was a political line. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 drew that line through an existing population, and the legal protections promised to Mexican citizens were systematically dismantled. That foundational rupture set the pattern for everything that followed. Fast forward to the present: the unauthorized immigrant population sits at roughly eleven million, a number that has remained stable for over a decade even as its composition shifted away from Mexico. Under Trump’s second term, border encounters have collapsed from over two hundred thousand a month to around eight to ten thousand, driven largely by deterrence and stricter policies. But the total stock of unauthorized residents has changed only at the margins, with ICE removals touching about 3.5% of that population annually. The episode then explores three categories of rupture that enforcement creates but never fixes. Economically, sectors like agriculture and construction don’t see native workers step in after raids — output simply declines. Socially, the children of unauthorized parents face instability, and communities develop a chilling effect where people stop reporting crimes or seeking medical care. Institutionally, local governments are left holding the bag, caught between federal enforcement and their own public health obligations. The wall itself, the episode argues, was always more symbol than infrastructure.
#2809: What Enforcement Leaves Behind
How border enforcement fractures economies, families, and institutions in ways the headlines miss.
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New to the show? Start here#2809: What Enforcement Leaves Behind
Daniel sent us this one — three questions wrapped together, and they're all about the border. First, how have the histories of Mexico and the U.border states actually been intertwined, not just politically but on the ground. Second, what's the actual estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country right now, and how has that changed during Trump's second term. And third — this is the one I keep turning over — when you build walls and launch enforcement campaigns, what are the ruptures that get left behind? Not the policy outcomes, but the human and structural fractures. There's a lot to unpack here.
The third question is the one most coverage skips entirely. Everyone wants to argue about whether the wall worked or whether deportations are up or down, but the secondary fractures — in communities, in cross-border families, in local economies that were built on a certain equilibrium — those don't make the headlines.
They don't fit in a chyron. "Local supply chain quietly disintegrates" is not cable news material.
So let me start with the history piece, because it sets up everything else. Most people think of the U.-Mexico border as this line that got drawn and then things happened on either side of it. But the reality is that the border region was a coherent economic and cultural zone for centuries before it was a border at all.
The line moved, not the people.
The line moved. In eighteen forty-eight, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and the United States acquired roughly fifty-five percent of Mexico's territory — what's now California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, parts of Colorado and Wyoming. And here's the detail that gets glossed over: the treaty guaranteed that Mexican citizens living in those territories could stay and become U.citizens, retaining their property rights. About eighty thousand people.
Which sounds generous on paper.
In practice, those property guarantees were systematically undermined. Land grants that had been recognized under Mexican law got challenged in U.courts, and many Mexican landowners lost their holdings over the following decades. So you have this foundational moment where the border crosses people, not the other way around, and the legal framework that was supposed to protect them essentially dissolved.
The rupture was built in from the start. The border didn't separate two distinct populations — it carved through an existing one and then the legal system spent decades pretending the carve was clean.
That's the through-line. And then you layer on the twentieth century. The Bracero Program, nineteen forty-two to nineteen sixty-four, brought millions of Mexican laborers into the U.legally for agricultural work. It was a bilateral agreement — the U.needed labor during the war, Mexico negotiated protections for workers. But enforcement was spotty, wages got skimmed, conditions were often terrible. And when the program ended, the labor demand didn't end — the legal pathways just closed.
Which is the classic pattern. Create a legal channel because the economy demands it, then close the legal channel while the economic demand stays exactly the same, and act surprised when the flow continues through other means.
The border states absorbed that reality differently. Texas had been its own republic, then a state — its border identity is tied up with independence mythology. Arizona was territory until nineteen twelve, and its southern border region, particularly around Tucson, had deep mercantile ties to Sonora. New Mexico has the highest percentage of Hispanic population of any state, and its identity is fundamentally bicultural in ways that predate both countries. California's border economy — San Diego-Tijuana — is essentially a single metropolitan region with a line through it.
The San Ysidro port of entry alone processes something like fifty thousand vehicles and twenty-five thousand pedestrians daily. That's not a border checkpoint in the normal sense — that's a membrane between two halves of one economic organism.
That's the frame for understanding the current situation. The border is not, and has never been, a clean demarcation between separate worlds. It's a political line drawn across an integrated region. Every enforcement action happens on top of that reality.
Let's get to the numbers. What's the actual prevalence of illegal immigration right now, and what's happened during Trump's second term?
The most recent solid estimates — and I'm drawing from Pew and the Migration Policy Institute here — put the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States at around eleven million as of early twenty twenty-four. That number had been relatively stable for over a decade. It peaked around twelve point two million in two thousand seven, declined during the Great Recession, and then hovered in that ten and a half to eleven and a half million range.
Stable total, but the composition changed.
The number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico actually declined — from about six point nine million in two thousand seven to around four million by twenty twenty-four. Meanwhile, unauthorized immigration from Central America, Asia, and other regions increased. So the popular image of the border crosser as exclusively Mexican is about fifteen years out of date.
Then the border encounters spike in twenty twenty-three and early twenty twenty-four under the previous administration.
CBP recorded roughly two point four million encounters at the southwest border in fiscal year twenty twenty-three, which was a record. Then in fiscal year twenty twenty-four, the numbers started coming down, partly due to policy changes from the outgoing administration and partly due to Mexican enforcement efforts.
Then Trump's second term begins.
January twenty twenty-five. And what we've seen since then is a dramatic drop in border encounters. CBP data shows that encounters at the southwest border fell to levels not seen in years — we're talking about monthly numbers dropping from over two hundred thousand at the peak to somewhere in the range of eight to ten thousand by early twenty twenty-six.
That's not a decline, that's a collapse. What drove it?
The administration implemented a suite of policies — reinstated Remain in Mexico, expanded expedited removal, deployed National Guard to the border, and negotiated agreements with Mexico to increase their own enforcement on the southern side. But the single biggest factor was probably deterrence. When the administration made clear that the era of catch-and-release was over and that people would actually be detained and removed, the calculus for potential migrants changed.
The signal traveled fast.
Faster than policy papers. Word of mouth through migrant networks is incredibly efficient. When people in sending communities start hearing that the journey isn't worth it because you'll just get sent back, the flow dries up quickly.
Encounters are down. But what about the total stock of unauthorized immigrants in the country? That's a different number.
That's harder to measure in real time. The eleven million figure from Pew is based on census data and survey data that lags. But the administration has been conducting what they call targeted enforcement operations — workplace raids, deportations of people with final removal orders, and expanded use of expedited removal. ICE removals increased substantially. The Department of Homeland Security reported something in the range of four hundred thousand removals in the first year of the second term.
Which is a big number in absolute terms, but relative to a population of eleven million, it's about three and a half percent.
And that's the central tension. You can have aggressive enforcement that makes headlines and changes behavior at the border, while the actual number of people living in the country without authorization shifts only at the margins. Most unauthorized immigrants have been here for more than a decade. They have U.-born children, they have jobs, they have homes. Removing them isn't a simple logistics problem.
This is where the third question comes in.
Let me talk about three categories of rupture. The first is economic. There are entire sectors of the border-state economy that were built on a cross-border labor market. Agriculture is the obvious one — the San Luis Valley in Arizona, the Imperial Valley in California, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. But it's also construction, hospitality, food processing, home health care. When enforcement intensifies, those labor markets don't adjust smoothly.
They don't adjust at all, in some cases. The workers don't get replaced by legal workers at higher wages — the work just doesn't get done, or it gets mechanized, or the operation moves.
There was a study out of the University of California that looked at what happened after large-scale workplace raids in the late two thousands. In the counties where raids occurred, employment didn't rise for native-born workers. Wages didn't rise. Economic output declined. The hole in the labor market just stayed a hole.
That's the thing that never fits in the political messaging. The enforcement narrative assumes a frictionless substitution — remove the unauthorized workers, legal workers step in, everyone's better off. But labor markets aren't that simple.
The second rupture is familial and community-level. There are roughly four million U.-born children who have at least one unauthorized parent. When enforcement operations target communities, those kids don't stop being U.They end up in foster care, or with relatives, or their families go underground. School districts in heavily affected areas see attendance drop. People stop reporting crimes because they're afraid of interacting with any authority.
The chilling effect extends way beyond the actual targets of enforcement. If you're a legal permanent resident with an undocumented spouse, you stop going to the doctor. You stop calling the police when something happens. Every institution becomes a potential trap.
That's not hypothetical. The El Paso sector saw exactly this pattern during earlier enforcement surges. Domestic violence reporting dropped. Emergency room visits dropped. Not because those things stopped happening — because people calculated that the risk of exposure was greater than the risk of not seeking help.
The enforcement produces a kind of shadow citizenship — people who are physically present but functionally invisible to institutions. And the institutions themselves become weaker because they're serving a smaller fraction of the actual population.
That's exactly the third rupture — institutional. Local governments in border counties end up caught between federal enforcement priorities and their own public health and safety obligations. Hospital emergency rooms are required by federal law to treat anyone who shows up, regardless of status. Public schools are required to educate all children. But when federal agents are conducting operations nearby, those institutions become sites of fear rather than trust.
The border counties themselves are often the poorest in their respective states. Hidalgo County in Texas, Doña Ana County in New Mexico, Yuma County in Arizona — these are not places with deep fiscal cushions to absorb disruption.
Let me tie this back to the wall specifically, because the prompt raises it. The physical wall was always more symbol than infrastructure. The administration built or upgraded something like four hundred fifty miles of barrier during the first term. During the second term, they've continued construction in certain sectors. But the total border is nearly two thousand miles long. The wall covers a fraction.
The parts it covers are mostly in areas where crossing was already difficult. The wall doesn't go through the most remote desert terrain because you can't get construction equipment there.
So the wall functions as a political monument. It says "this is a hard boundary." But the actual enforcement that changed the numbers was policy and personnel, not concrete. The ruptures from the wall specifically are different — they're ecological and property-rights ruptures. The border cuts through national parks, wildlife refuges, tribal lands. The Tohono O'odham Nation spans the Arizona-Sonora border. The wall bisects their territory.
Private landowners in Texas had their property seized through eminent domain for wall construction. People who had ranching operations that straddled the border for generations suddenly had a thirty-foot barrier through their land.
There's an irony there. The administration that champions property rights used eminent domain aggressively along the border. Landowners in the Rio Grande Valley fought it in court for years, and some cases are still unresolved.
"The government that governs least governs best, unless we need your ranch for our wall.
That is the tension. But I want to make sure we're not just cataloguing disruptions without acknowledging the other side of this. The communities that live along the border have also borne the costs of uncontrolled crossings. Ranchers in Arizona and Texas have dealt with property damage, trash, security concerns, and in some tragic cases, human remains on their land. Border Patrol agents have had to manage humanitarian crises — people crossing in extreme heat, children separated from smugglers, deaths in the desert.
The death toll is worth sitting with for a second. Customs and Border Protection recorded something like eight thousand five hundred migrant deaths along the southwest border between nineteen ninety-eight and twenty twenty-four, and those are just the ones that were found. The actual number is certainly higher. When enforcement hardens the easiest crossing points, people get pushed into more dangerous terrain.
That's a rupture too. It's just a quieter one, because the people who die in the desert don't show up in communities. They disappear into the landscape.
We've got economic ruptures, familial ruptures, institutional ruptures, ecological ruptures, and a humanitarian toll that's largely invisible. And the question becomes: what does the equilibrium look like going forward?
This is where I think the most interesting analysis is happening. The administration's position is that enforcement will drive the unauthorized population down through attrition — people will self-deport, or they'll be removed, and the deterrent effect will prevent new arrivals. And on the flow side, that's clearly working. The border encounter numbers are genuinely down.
The stock question is different. Eleven million people is a lot of attrition.
Historically, mass legalization has been part of how the U.has handled large unauthorized populations. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of nineteen eighty-six legalized about two point seven million people. There's no appetite for that in the current administration.
Which means the policy is essentially: maintain the pressure indefinitely, and wait.
Waiting has consequences. The longer someone lives in a country without legal status, the deeper their ties become. They're not going to self-deport after twenty years because enforcement got tougher. They're going to go further underground.
This is the point where I start thinking about Mexico's perspective, because they're not a passive actor in this. The Mexican government has its own interests, and they've been surprisingly cooperative on enforcement during both Trump terms.
Mexico's cooperation is pragmatic. Remittances from Mexicans in the U.— both legal and unauthorized — are one of Mexico's largest sources of foreign income. We're talking about over sixty billion dollars annually in recent years. The Mexican government wants to maintain good relations with Washington to protect that flow, and they also have their own security concerns about migration corridors through their territory.
They enforce on their southern border, they accept returnees, and in exchange they get to keep the remittance pipeline open and avoid a trade war.
That's the deal, unspoken but understood. And it's worked reasonably well from a diplomatic standpoint. But it creates its own ruptures inside Mexico — border cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez absorb large numbers of deportees and people waiting in limbo, and those cities are not equipped to handle the population pressure.
The rupture just moves south. It doesn't disappear.
That's the nature of enforcement-only approaches. The pressure has to go somewhere.
Let me ask you something that's been in the back of my mind through this whole discussion. When we talk about "illegal immigration" as a category, we're lumping together people who overstayed visas, people who crossed the border without inspection, people who came as children, people who had legal status that expired. Are the enforcement approaches actually calibrated to those differences, or is it a blunt instrument?
It's increasingly blunt. Visa overstays historically accounted for a larger share of the unauthorized population than border crossings — some estimates say forty percent or more. But the enforcement focus, both in policy and in public attention, is overwhelmingly on the border. The administration has increased worksite enforcement, which does catch visa overstays, but the optics and the political energy are at the line itself.
The wall doesn't do anything about someone who flew into JFK and never left.
It does nothing. And that's the fundamental mismatch between the symbolic policy and the actual composition of the problem. But symbols matter in politics, and the wall is an incredibly effective symbol.
It's a monument to seriousness. "We are so serious about this that we built a thirty-foot steel barrier." Whether the steel barrier addresses forty percent of the problem or sixty percent of the problem is secondary to the monument function.
Monuments create their own reality. Once you've built the wall, you can't un-build it. It's there, physically, ecologically, symbolically, for decades. Future administrations can change enforcement policies — they can end Remain in Mexico, they can reduce deportations — but the wall stays.
Which brings us back to the original question about intertwined histories. The wall is a physical assertion that the border is a clean line between two separate things. But the history says otherwise. The history says this region has been integrated economically, culturally, and demographically for centuries, and the border is a political layer on top of that integration, not a replacement for it.
That tension — between the reality of integration and the assertion of separation — is the engine of the whole debate. It's been running since eighteen forty-eight, and it's not going to stop.
Where does this leave us on the prevalence question? What's the best estimate for where the unauthorized population stands right now, mid-twenty twenty-six?
The honest answer is we don't have a precise number yet. The eleven million figure from Pew is the most recent rigorous estimate, but it's based on data that's now a couple of years old. Given the dramatic drop in border encounters and the increase in removals, it's plausible that the total has declined somewhat — maybe to the ten to ten and a half million range. But the uncertainty is significant, and anyone who claims to have an exact current number is either guessing or has access to data that isn't public.
The composition continues to shift.
Fewer recent border crossers, a higher proportion of long-term residents, and a growing share of people from countries other than Mexico. The unauthorized population is aging, settling, and putting down deeper roots even as the enforcement apparatus tries to dislodge it.
The rupture there is almost existential. You have people who have lived most of their lives in the United States, whose children are American citizens, who are integrated into their communities in every functional sense — and they're legally deportable. That's not a policy tension, it's a human one.
It's not going to resolve itself. The enforcement approach can reduce future flows, but it can't easily unwind the existing population without measures that would create ruptures far larger than anything we've discussed.
Let me pivot slightly, because I think there's a rupture we haven't named yet. The psychological one. What does it do to a community when a significant fraction of its population is perpetually afraid? Not just of deportation, but of any interaction with authority? That's a form of civic erosion that doesn't show up in economic statistics.
There's research on this. Sociologists have documented what they call "legal violence" — the cumulative harm that comes not from deportation itself but from the constant threat of it. Chronic stress, deferred medical care, children with anxiety disorders, reduced civic participation. These are measurable outcomes.
They spill over. If you're a legal resident in a mixed-status neighborhood, the fear is contagious. You don't have to be deportable to feel the chill. The whole community's relationship with institutions changes.
That's the point I made earlier about domestic violence reporting and emergency room visits. It's not just the unauthorized population that goes underground — it's everyone around them.
We've got an enforcement regime that's changed the flow numbers at the border, which is a real accomplishment by its own terms. But it's also producing a cascade of secondary effects that are harder to measure and easier to ignore. Economic disruption, family separation, institutional erosion, psychological harm, ecological damage, property rights conflicts, and a humanitarian toll in the desert.
I want to be careful here not to sound like I'm dismissing the enforcement perspective entirely. The people who live in border communities have legitimate concerns about security, about the rule of law, about the strain on local services. The previous situation — with record border encounters in twenty twenty-three — was not sustainable either. There were real costs to that.
No, that's fair. The question isn't whether enforcement is legitimate — it's what kind of enforcement, at what scale, and with what acknowledgment of the trade-offs. The problem with the current approach isn't that it's enforcement, it's that it's enforcement as theater, where the visible symbols matter more than the actual outcomes.
The theater works politically. The wall is popular with a significant portion of the electorate. The raids make headlines. The message is clear. Whether the long-term outcomes match the messaging is a different question, but the short-term political incentives are all aligned toward visibility over precision.
There's a line I keep thinking about. Someone — I think it was a Border Patrol veteran — said something like, "The border doesn't need a wall, it needs a valve." The idea being that a healthy border is permeable in controlled ways, not sealed. It lets through what the economy needs and keeps out what threatens security, and the mechanism for that is policy, not concrete.
That's a good frame. The Bracero Program, for all its flaws, was essentially a valve. The current system doesn't have a valve — it has a monument and a set of enforcement tools, and the gap between the two is where all the ruptures live.
Mexico, for its part, is not just a passive neighbor. The two economies are deeply integrated. -Mexico trade is over seven hundred billion dollars annually. Mexico is the United States' largest trading partner, or close to it depending on the quarter. The idea that you can treat the border as a hard break when the economic relationship is that deep is just not realistic.
The maquiladora industry alone — factories in Mexican border cities that produce goods for export to the U.— employs over two million people. Those factories depend on components that cross the border multiple times during production. A hard border breaks supply chains.
The wall is built across an economic circulatory system. It's like putting a tourniquet on an artery and being surprised when the limb goes numb.
That's a vivid image.
I have my moments.
Let me pull on one more thread before we start wrapping up. The prompt asks about "witch hunts," and I think that's worth addressing directly. The term implies a kind of enforcement that goes beyond targeted, evidence-based action into something more indiscriminate. And there have been credible reports of enforcement operations that swept up people who were not the intended targets — legal residents, even U.citizens, caught in the net.
That's not a bug, in some views. That's deterrence working as designed. If the message is "no one is safe," the chilling effect is maximized.
The cost is due process. And due process isn't just a legal nicety — it's the mechanism that distinguishes law enforcement from arbitrary power. When enforcement operations become indiscriminate, they undermine the legitimacy of the entire system.
That's a rupture that goes beyond immigration. It affects how everyone views law enforcement. If agents can detain you based on suspicion rather than evidence, the boundary between policing and harassment dissolves.
There have been lawsuits. The ACLU and other organizations have challenged the scope of enforcement operations, particularly worksite raids and so-called "collateral arrests" where people not named in warrants get swept up. Some of those cases are still working through the courts.
The legal system moves slowly, and enforcement moves fast. By the time a court rules on the legality of a particular operation, the operation is long over and the people affected have been deported or dispersed.
Which is another asymmetry. The government can act in days; the legal response takes years.
To pull this together — the histories are deeply intertwined, the border is a political line drawn across an integrated region, the unauthorized population is probably somewhere in the ten to eleven million range and may be declining modestly due to enforcement, and the ruptures are economic, familial, institutional, psychological, ecological, and legal. And the fundamental tension between integration and separation is not going anywhere.
That's a fair summary. I'd add one thing: the policy conversation tends to treat the border as a problem to be solved, but it might be more accurate to think of it as a condition to be managed. It's not going to be "solved" in any final sense, because the forces that drive migration — economic disparity, violence, family reunification, labor demand — aren't going away.
The wall is an answer to a question that keeps changing. And the question changes faster than concrete can be poured.
That's the whole thing in one sentence.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early fifteen hundreds, dyers in the Namib Desert were convinced that the deep red pigment extracted from crushed welwitschia cones could permanently stain camel leather, a theory that collapsed when it was discovered the dye faded completely within three days of sun exposure.
Hilbert: In the early fifteen hundreds, dyers in the Namib Desert were convinced that the deep red pigment extracted from crushed welwitschia cones could permanently stain camel leather, a theory that collapsed when it was discovered the dye faded completely within three days of sun exposure.
Three days of sun and your premium red camel saddle is just beige.
The Namib Desert, of all places, and they didn't test for sun fastness.
Truly a fact. This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps.
We're at myweirdprompts.Until next time.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.