The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
One of President Trump’s top advisers, Stephen Miller, made a surprising admission this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, Miller privately worried about imposing overly aggressive tariffs on Mexico because it could imperil the work that Mexico is doing to apprehend migrants traveling north to our southern border. That’s pretty striking. Understood correctly, it’s actually an acknowledgment that Mexico already is cracking down on migration due to an arrangement secured by, you guessed it, President Biden. That badly undermines some of Trump’s biggest claims about immigration, tariffs, Mexico, and a lot more. Today, we’re going to look at what Mexico has actually been doing on immigration, and why it undercuts Trump’s scams on tariffs and on his supposed huge recent victory over Mexico. We have a great guest to do that with: Adam Isacson, a very sharp expert at the Washington Office on Latin America and advocacy group. Thanks for coming on, Adam.
Adam Isacson: Thank you, Greg, it’s great to be on with you.
Sargent: Trump appeared ready to go forward with 25 percent tariffs on Mexico, but he’s temporarily held back. I want to read from this Wall Street Journal piece. The key thing is buried in there, but it’s highly significant. The journal reports that Miller pushed for more limited measures against Mexico. The piece says this, “Miller expressed concern that excessively antagonizing Mexico could jeopardize the country’s ongoing cooperation to interdict migrants attempting to reach the U.S. border.” Adam, that sounds like Miller is admitting that Mexico was already stopping migrants from coming north to the border, no?
Isacson: Miller must know this. The U.S.–Mexico border right now, if you measure by the number of migrants coming, is the quietest it’s been since the early months of the pandemic in mid-2020. Part of the reason is because Joe Biden made it harder to get asylum. But a big part of the reason is that starting in January of 2024, Mexico started cracking down very much on migration and actually realized a one-month reduction of about 50 percent into the number of migrants coming. So yeah, they have been doing a lot. We can talk about the human rights impact of that, but they have been doing a lot to block people now for 13 months.
Sargent: These are people who are coming from south of Mexico trying to travel through Mexico to get to the United States, correct?
Isacson: That’s right. Now, keep in mind that at the really high moments of the Biden administration when you had a lot of migrants coming, for every Mexican who made it to the U.S.–Mexico border, two people from other countries were making it to the U.S.–Mexico border. So they were crossing Mexican territory to get there.
Sargent: And Mexico was doing a whole lot during the months of 2024 to stop that from happening. I want to back up and point out that after Trump threatened tariffs, Mexico agreed to send 10,000 troops to the border. That was hailed as a huge victory by Trump’s propagandists who said he had forced Mexico to bend the knee and act and so forth. But now we hear that Miller admits that Mexico was already stopping migrants. Before we get to the specifics of what that means, doesn’t that undercut the big story Trump is telling about the tariffs?
Isacson: To say that Mexico is doing nothing to stop migrants from crossing its territory simply isn’t true. And it shows that even in his innermost circle, people like Stephen Miller already knew that Mexico was doing quite a bit. It’s a big admission and it’s also a recognition. I thought it was pretty significant that as much of a hardliner Stephen Miller is, he was recognizing that if you push them too hard, they might stop cooperating and start just waving people through again.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about what Mexico has actually been doing. You’ve looked at Mexican government data and you’ve showed that Mexico, throughout 2024, was stopping tens of thousands of migrants per month from getting to the U.S. border. That’s under an arrangement Biden secured, right? Can you walk us through the details of that?
Isacson: Yeah, absolutely. There was a record number of migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border in December of 2023. And there was a real crackdown moment between a lot of serious discussions between Biden administration officials and Mexican government officials, after which Mexico did increase the number of military. [They had] police and migration personnel all on main roads along the railroad routes; a lot of patrols; some more deployment on the borderline itself—although once you hit the borderline, most of the people are easier to find on the inside.
Mexico, during the Trump’s first term and the Biden years, was generally getting between 10,000 and 20,000 migrants apprehended every month. By the second half of 2023 and all through 2024, it was well over 90,000, a multiple of what it was before. And that’s because of these checkpoints and a very aggressive program of when they found migrants especially at the northern border with the U.S., [they] really systematically, by the tens of thousands a month, shipping them back down to the southern part of Mexico and trying to keep them there close to Guatemala and Central America.
Sargent: I want to clarify that you’re talking about 90,000 migrants per month intercepted by Mexico. I want to make a distinction here between Mexico putting troops along the border and Mexico doing a crackdown all through its territory. As you say, the key here is not for Mexico to necessarily put a whole bunch of troops on its side of the border. It’s more to stop the migration northward at many different choke points—roads, railroads, bridges. That’s what Biden actually secured from Mexico, right?
Isacson: Right. Mexico did increase its deployment to the northern border, but keep in mind, the border is 1,970 miles. It is the very opposite of a bottleneck. The bottlenecks are farther south, so Mexico wisely did choose to put more of its forces further south.
Sargent: You made a point earlier that I want to pick up on, which is that Miller knows that tariffs could antagonize Mexico and make Mexico’s cooperation in stopping migrants from going northward less likely. That’s the direct opposite of the story MAGA’s telling. It underscores the degree to which migration policy in the Americas is a bilateral or even a multilateral thing. Can you talk about that dimension of it? Miller essentially recognized internally, and he would never say this publicly, that overly aggressive tariffs risks making Mexico less likely to cooperate with us.
Isacson: This is Miller maybe sounding a little less ideological than usual and actually living in the world of reality with this statement. Think of it like what they say about comedy: to bend is funny, but to break is not funny. Mexico is one of the top 15 largest countries in the world by population. It’s one of the top 20 largest economies in the world. It’s a big country whose cooperation is necessary on things ranging from fentanyl to energy to the trillion dollars of trade between our countries. If you bend this for a while, bullying could get some more cooperation. But once tariffs hit something like 25 percent and throw a country into a deep recession, what more incentive is there to keep cooperating, not just on stopping migrants but on stopping fentanyl and all of the other things that our relationship depends on?
Sargent: Now, why don’t you talk to us a little bit about Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum? By all indications, she really seems to understand Trump’s psyche, doesn’t she? It seems like she’s going to understand very clearly that what she needs to do is to create the impression that she’s bending the knee to Trump, that she’s caving to Trump, that Trump is winning, that that’s the most important thing she can do as a way to avoid having to actually make concessions that wouldn’t even do anything for us anyway and would just hurt her country. Can you talk about that?
Isacson: Yeah, it’s fascinating. Sheinbaum and her predecessor from the same party, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador—Scheinbaum has been president since October—both had to deal with Donald Trump, and they both developed a working relationship that had its share of defiance. Sheinbaum does like to make points about Mexico’s sovereignty, and she had some very witty rejoinders when Trump talked about renaming the Gulf of Mexico and things like that. But ultimately, she knows that she does not want 25 percent tariffs and has found face-saving ways to avoid that so far.
One thing she and her predecessor found was that by doing the art of the deal and just agreeing to some things with Trump and giving Trump the impression of a win in quotes, they could get transactionally a lot of concessions on other things that Mexico wanted. The Biden administration scolded Mexico a lot more often about things like corruption and what they did with their judiciary or the quality of democracy. As long as they cooperate with Trump on this one thing that’s so important to him and Stephen Miller, they’re probably not going to get any pressure on a lot of other aspects of the relationship.
Sargent: So where does this end up going now? Obviously, the threat of tariffs is still in the air. Trump can’t just make that disappear; he’s going to have to follow through. I assume that they want all kinds of other concessions out of Mexico. What do you see happening here? Do you see tariffs coming? And do you see that actually doing the thing that Stephen Miller fears, which is upending a cooperative relationship that was already stopping migrants from going northward?
Isacson: I don’t think we’re going to see tariffs imposed during the first half or even most of 2025. And part of that is because of the history of what happened before. I think we are naturally going to see lower numbers of migrants at the border, regardless of what Mexico does, at least for the next several months. The first few months of 2017, after Trump’s first inauguration, were some of the historically lowest for migrant apprehensions of the U.S.–Mexico border of the entire twenty-first century, even though Trump hadn’t done anything yet. Just the mere fact that he was there caused migrants and their smugglers to take a pause. I think we’ll see a similar pause in 2025. And Donald Trump can point to that as progress and as a reason to put off tariffs.
Also, at least since the middle of 2023 or so, we have seen—finally—deaths in the U.S. from opioid overdoses declining. I would also note that in 2024, CBP measured about a quarter fewer seizures of fentanyl at the border compared to 2023. So there’s a downward trend already in fentanyl. As long as that continues, Trump can point to that also as evidence that his bullying is working, even though they are trends that were already working before.
Sargent: Right. I want to stress for people that how this would really work is that Trump can just say that the threat of tariffs is producing all these things that would have happened anyway. Things that are happening partly because of what Biden negotiated with Mexico, things that are happening because of structural factors involved with Trump taking office. It does discourage some migration, we should admit that. So essentially, the way that structural dynamics of this could work is that Trump might actually have an incentive to merely claim the threat of tariffs is working as opposed to actually going through with them.
Isacson: That’s right. Now, the question is: What happens after several months? If the history of 2017 repeats itself, numbers of people arriving at the U.S.–Mexico border eventually started to recover. And as everybody remembers, by the spring of 2018, there were caravans, and freak outs over caravans, and there was family separation. And the numbers kept going up for a whole other year after that. If that happens, the tariff threats will become more imminent. And if the tariffs happen, then you will see Mexico presented with this choice of, Well, geez, I mean, what more can we do? We might as well just start waving some of the migrants through because we’re going to get hit no matter what we do.
Sargent: Do you think that that could actually happen if Trump goes through with the tariffs? We’ll see not just a trade war, but something like an immigration war in which Mexico stops doing some of the stuff they’ve been doing?
Isacson: To some extent. I could see Mexico certainly easing their efforts. Why spend these resources when you are just driven into a recession by your partner to the north? So I could see some easing, but not a total free-for-all. Because if there’s a free-for-all, word gets out, and tens of thousands of people stream into southern Mexico. And actually, a lot of people in Mexico are not crazy about having migrants in their country either, so they would meter it somewhere in between.
Sargent: This raises a really fascinating set of issues, I think. We saw Trump during his first term aggressively and viciously chew out some of his top officials like DHS Chief Kirstjen Nielsen. When the border numbers went up, there was reporting on him raging internally over this. So in a funny way, Mexico holds Trump’s psyche in their hands. I don’t know exactly how much control, maybe you can explain this, they actually have over migration flows, but if they can let the numbers of border crossings go up a bit, that really needles Trump in a major way, no?
Isacson: Absolutely. Trump’s obsessiveness about this issue of migration seems to be greater than any other aspect of Western hemisphere policy by far. He’s absolutely obsessed with it. And yes, Mexico really can go straight to his psychological state by doing what they can to control or stop the flow northward. And we know that Mexico can do a lot.
Just look at what happened in December of 2023, which is the record-setting month for the most migrants ever reaching the U.S.–Mexico border. Mexico’s migration authority, their version of ICE or CBP, claimed that they were out of money for the year, and [that] they just weren’t going be able to do very much for that month of December. And they stopped a lot of their operations. The flow was just tremendous, to the point where the U.S. was closing ports of entry because they didn’t have the personnel even to deal with all the people coming. So that’s an example of what may happen if Mexico lets its guard down. I don’t think they let it get that high, but they can certainly show that this is a two-way street.
Sargent: And then Mexico’s crackdowns during 2024, which brought those crossings into the U.S. much lower, shows the flip side, which is that they have a lot of control to the degree that they can bring down the numbers as well.
Isacson: Yeah, they do have a lot of control. We’ve seen a lot of Mexican crackdowns over the years. Sometimes they dissipate and lose their force, in part because the politicians aren’t coming down on the security forces to do it, but also because corruption is a real thing. Those coyotes—those smugglers—charge tens of thousands of dollars sometimes because they’re spreading the money around. That does make a lot of the countermeasures weaker over time. But one remarkable thing about Mexico’s crackdown of 2024 is that it’s still happening despite that.
Sargent: I want to step back now. You have done great work in debunking some of the narratives that have been in the media, particularly in The New York Times about Biden and immigration. One of the raps on Biden has been that he “was permissive all the way up until his 2024 asylum crackdown.” And that permissiveness caused the explosion in asylum seeking and migration that we saw throughout his term. You’ve debunked that showing that there are much bigger factors at play [like] the opening of the Darién Gap. And you just give us the short version of the big story of what really happened under Biden.
Isacson: Yeah. The so-called migrant crisis of the Biden years was a crisis of asylum seekers, which means migrants who are actually trying to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities and then enter our clogged asylum system and be here for a while. I should point out, there were only about 12 months, maybe 13 months, of Joe Biden’s presidency when the right to asylum actually existed at the U.S.–Mexico border: May 2023 to June 2024. He was not open to asylum seekers. What was in place up till May of 2023 was this pandemic policy that Stephen Miller invented and Joe Biden happily continued called Title 42 that said, Sorry, there’s a pandemic. We can’t let you ask for asylum. We’re going to expel you. We’re going to pretend you never even got into the country and expel you.
Despite that....you think that would be tough and that would keep the asylum seekers from coming. But when Joe Biden took over, nine out of every 10 migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border was from Mexico or three Central American countries. By the middle of 2023, only less than half or just about half of migrants were from those countries. One in nine were from Europe, Asia, or Africa. There was this giant internationalization. So if somebody from one of those countries came, you couldn’t just expel them or deport them easily. The Trump administration could end up with the same issue.
There’s just not enough planes; it costs an incredible amount of money. Some countries governments don’t even take them back—people from Venezuela, Cuba. So you had this internationalization of the migrant population who you couldn’t really do much with and who often did have strong asylum cases because they were coming from some countries ruled by very bad governments. That’s the main reason why this exploded. Not because he wasn’t tough enough on asylum, they were just logistically left with very little to do.
Trump, during his first months, is going to scare away those migrants for a little while. But ultimately, if a whole bunch of people from China and India and Venezuela and all these countries start showing up standing on U.S. soil and there’s no place to remove them to, you’re going to have the same problem. I would just note that there was a flight yesterday, a military C-17, that went to India from Texas and dropped 104 people off in India. The cost of that flight, just judging by the per hour cost, was about $660,000. So we spent about $6,600 for migrant just to deport those people, and that’s obviously not something that will scale.
Sargent: His entire immigration crackdown is going to cost immense amounts of money, no?
Isacson: Yes. It’s going to cost incredible amounts of money, and we’re waiting to see what happens at the end of this month or early March [with] this congressional reconciliation package of special spending that the Republican majority in both houses is going to push through [and] what is in that. The amounts that we’re hearing are north of $80 billion that they’re going to be asking to pay for new border measures and, of course, for mass deportation. And a lot of that’s probably going to have to come out of the defense department because our civilian agencies don’t have that capacity.
Sargent: So it’s going to get a whole lot harder for them to cut taxes for the rich and corporations.
Isacson: Or just start borrowing more. That’s right.
Sargent: That’s what they’ll do. Adam Isacson, thanks for the great big picture look at all this. We really appreciate it, man.
Isacson: Happy to join you, and happy to come back anytime. Thank you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent.
The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.