The U.S. Border Patrol is touting a new statistic that defines the difference in immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump: zero.
“The United States Border Patrol has released zero illegal aliens into our community in the last four months,” USBP Chief Michael Banks told the One America News Network last week. “That is a record we’re proud of, it’s a record we don’t intend to stop.
The United States Border Patrol has released ZERO illegal aliens into our community in the last 4 months. That is a record we're proud of, it's a record we don't intend to stop. We're going to continue month after month. Catch and release is over. We are getting our agents back… pic.twitter.com/GPpj1BBF7g
— Chief Michael W. Banks (@USBPChief) September 17, 2025
“We’re going to continue month after month,” Banks said. “Catch and release is over. We’re getting our agents back out into the field, and listen, we’re not done.
“Seeing record low numbers is great for us,” he continued, “but that’s not the end game. The end game is to stop all illegal traffic between the ports of entry.”
Banks explained how “our resources were depleted under the last four years of the previous administration” and what the increased focus on enforcement has meant for places like Michigan along the northern border.
“When the overwhelming majority of your northern border agents were temporarily assigned to the southern border in order to process millions of illegal migrants a year under the Biden administration, they weren’t there on the northern border to conduct their law enforcement duties,” he said. “Now that they’ve been returned, and we’ve been upsizing our force and getting our agents back to their law enforcement jobs on the northern border, they’re making more interdictions.”
“We know for a fact that we have significantly lowered the cross-border illegal activity, which means we have significantly lowered not just the narcotics smuggling, but the alien smuggling, the illegal immigrant smuggling, the sex trafficking, we’ve significantly lowered that.
“But yet our narcotics seizures continue to rise, so the message that should send to the American people is that’s the amount of narcotics that were being freely brought into this country because there were no border patrol agents actually on the border doing enforcement, they were stuck inside processing illegal immigrants for catch and release,” Banks said.
U.S. Border Patrol encounters of illegal immigrants nationwide have declined drastically since Trump took office in January, when the figure stood at 81,483 for the month. In August, total encounters were down to 26,191, or about a sixth of the 158,893 during the same month in 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
With just one month left in fiscal year 2025, CBP reports 665,985 encounters nationwide, compared to 2.9 million in FY2024.
“President Trump has been so extremely successful in the policies he’s put in place and the laws that his team has enforced to make sure that we stop that invasion that was coming over our border, and that we’ve made sure we put Americans first and their safety and their families first,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently told the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, where she also noted zero released into the U.S. “for the last several months.”
“In fat, we’ve deported almost 400,000 people, but because of our messaging campaign in other countries and here in the United States, we’ve had 1.6 million people voluntarily say, ‘I’m going to go home,’” Noem said.
The former governor of South Dakota noted 70% of illegal immigrants detained by federal agents in the largest deportation operation in U.S. history “have criminal charges against them.”
“So these are murderers and rapists, human traffickers and drug traffickers, dangerous people who were in our communities violating our kids and our family members, killing them with poison,” she said. “All of the communities are so incredibly grateful to have a president who cares about them, and their safety.”
Recent arrests posted to X by Banks involve numerous sex offenders, including child sex offenders, in Texas and California, major meth busts in Texas and Florida, a massive California fentanyl shipment, $2.2 million worth of cocaine seized in Rio Grande City, child pornographers, and numerous gang members across multiple states.
“We share one mission: Defend our Homeland and our citizens,” Banks posted to X on Friday. “It all starts with a secure border.”
