“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”
“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter.
“There is an expectation. There is hope and there is enthusiasm in those who believe that, with the change of administration, will come new measures and that they will immediately enter and there will be new conditions that will allow them to request asylum,” Enrique Valenzuela, head of the Chihuahua State Council for Population and Migration, told a Mexican newspaper that night.
They were right in their interpretation of Biden’s campaign promises, if a tad early. An estimated 10-12 million foreign nationals would more successfully answer the call starting on Biden’s inauguration day a few weeks later, in record-smashing populations of between 200,000 and 350,000, ushered straight into America every month for the next four years.
And all of that is now at an end. With frankly shocking speed, the Trump Administration has cut off the flood tide of illegal immigration that raged for all of Biden’s term. By the second full month of Donald Trump’s new term, just 8,300 had attempted a crossing, and every one of them was detained and deported—a record-breaking nadir.