Border Patrol agents made 98,708 apprehensions along the southwest border in the 2026 fiscal year, according to preliminary figures from the Department of Homeland Security, a total the department put 95% below the more than 1.8 million a year recorded under the Biden administration. The pace came to about 270 a day, Fox News reported.

The fiscal year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2025, through Sept. 30, was the first full one of President Trump's second term. It was also the first in which the Border Patrol released no migrants into the country, the department said, and September marked the 17th straight month without a release.

Total encounters nationwide came to 379,243. The department called that the lowest in its history and said it was 88% below fiscal 2023, which it described as the highest year ever. By its count, the full year of southwest border apprehensions was 60% smaller than the single busiest month of the previous administration, when agents recorded 249,740.

The new total is less than half the nearly 238,000 apprehensions of fiscal 2025, a year that CBS News reported at the time was already the lowest since 1970. More than 60% of that year's apprehensions came in the last three full months of the Biden administration, according to that report.

"President Trump promised the American people a secure border, and the data proves he delivered," Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in the release. "The results could not be clearer: strong enforcement works." Rodney S. Scott, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the year showed what "focused enforcement, strong partnerships, and the commitment of our frontline personnel" can achieve.

The department pointed to other measures as well. It said 250 miles of new barrier had been completed along the southwest border since Jan. 20, 2025, and that $34.3 billion was obligated for what it calls Smart Wall projects from September 2025 through September 2026. Preliminary data put the year's drug seizures at nearly 1 million pounds, 63% above the 600,000-pound annual average of the previous four years, and showed deaths of migrants identified by the Border Patrol down nearly 80% from the Biden years.

Chris Clem, a retired chief of the Border Patrol's Yuma Sector in Arizona, told Fox News that stronger enforcement and the prospect of deportation helped bring the numbers down. He warned that a Congress bent on overturning the president's policies could complicate enforcement through funding decisions and policy restrictions.

The slide began before the current administration took office. Ariel Ruiz Soto, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told CBS News last year that illegal crossings started falling sharply in the summer of 2024, after the Biden administration imposed strict limits on asylum, while adding that the Trump administration had set "a new normal" for migration flows within a few months. The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged the administration's border policies in federal court, and courts have curtailed parts of its asylum ban and declared them illegal, the network reported.

The department described the figures as preliminary. Apprehensions count events rather than people, so a migrant caught trying to cross more than once can be counted more than once, CBS News noted.