AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File FILE – A Marine stands front of newly-installed concertina wire lining one of two border walls separating Mexico from the United States during a news conference, March 21, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File) Eleven straight months. Zero illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior. Not one.
The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol have just confirmed what the Biden-Harris administration spent four years insisting could never happen. We have just lived through the eleventh consecutive month of zero releases at the border.
That is the number that dismantles every argument from the open-border crowd from the last several decades. They said enforcement was racist. They said a secure border was structurally impossible. They said consequences were a form of cruelty.
The numbers above say otherwise.
Long ago, I worked in private security and bodyguard detail through years of urban chaos. I guarded VIP motorcades through the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The lesson that every threat environment teaches is the same one every Marine officer learns in training: Predators make their moves when authority blinks.
Biden-Harris didn’t just blink — they threw the doors open and left the porch light on. They sabotaged immigration enforcement. The cartels got the message instantly, as did every smuggling operation, human trafficking network, and fentanyl distributor with logistics on the U.S. side.
Here is the damage report from the reversal: Southwest border apprehensions in March 2026: 8,268, a fall of 97 percent fom the Biden peak. Daily average encounters: only 267. At the height of the Biden disaster in December 2023, Border Patrol was logging 336 encounters per hour.
What used to happen in sixty minutes doesn’t even happen now in an entire day. That gap is the difference between a government that is doing its job and one that pretends.
The drug numbers tell the other half of the story. Customs and Border Protection seized more than 65,000 lbs. of drugs in March alone, including 613 pounds of fentanyl — 27 percent more than the same month last year. This is the right priority — fentanyl killed more than 70,000 Americans in the most recent full reporting year. Drug seizures are up 24 percent for the fiscal year.
The cartels didn’t disappear when the enforcement posture changed. They ran into a wall they hadn’t encountered before, and Customs and Border Protection was waiting on the other side of it. That’s why they started racking up seizure totals that reflect how much product was moving through the gaps President Biden had left wide open.
I have watched California collapse over 35 years, from a functioning state with real opportunity into a single-party experiment where working families no longer afford to live near the jobs they hold. Open borders was never an act of compassion. It was a wealth-transfer from taxpayers to the worst actors on the planet. The bill landed in overdoses, trafficked children, overwhelmed emergency rooms, and communities that had no vote in the federal government’s release decisions.
Every catch-and-release cycle the previous administration ran was a proven business model for every cartel logistics network with U.S. distribution. Every humanitarian parole slot opened was an entry point validated. Every sanctuary policy adopted was a signal that consequences had been suspended. Biden-Harris didn’t merely fail to stop illegal immigration — they built the regulatory and institutional architecture that made it scale. The fentanyl death toll, more than 70,000 Americans in a single year, is what their architecture produced.
Soft signals invite hard consequences. Hard enforcement, however, deters at scale. The Biden years proved the first half of that statement. The past eleven months have proven the second.
Now Congress needs to make this permanent. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Lance Gooden’s (R-Texas) End Sanctuary Cities Act of 2026 would impose criminal penalties on local officials who refuse ICE detainer requests. Sanctuary jurisdictions blocked more than 26,000 such requests between October 2022 and February 2025, and people died as a result.
Rep. Tom McClintock’s (R-Calif.) End Sanctuary Policies Act would defund noncompliant jurisdictions. It cleared the House Judiciary Committee.
Congress should pass both. It should tie every federal law-enforcement grant to full cooperation with ICE. Sanctuary cities that want to play politics with public safety should explain to their own constituents why the federal money stopped.
This isn’t about hating immigrants. It is about the rule of law, sovereignty, and a government that finally means what it says. Eleven straight months in, we are getting the country we voted for. The question is whether Congress locks it in.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.
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