At San Diego fence, U.S. officials tout decreased border crossings, promise bigger crackdown in the country’s interior

In a visit to San Diego designed to showcase the U.S.-Mexico boundary fence, two of the Trump administration’s top border officials touted declining numbers of border crossings, discussed a new maneuver to increase military presence at the border and promised to intensify the immigration crackdown that has already drawn protest and legal critique nationwide. 

White House border czar Tom Homan and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney S. Scott held a media event Saturday atop a mesa above the Tijuana River, the same week as the Interior Department announced it would transfer 760 acres of territory at the border in California to the U.S. Navy. 

“When they [members of the military] are on their own property, they have increased authorities and responsibilities to actually arrest for trespassing just like they would on any other military base. We’ve been doing this in Texas for a while. We’re bringing it over here now,” Scott said to reporters who had assembled at the event. 

Border Patrol Public Affairs Officer Gerardo Gutierrez, also at the media event, said the Navy would not be making arrests of migrants along the border, but would be “helping in other ways.”

The Trump administration has stationed 7,000 military troops at the border and transferred over 110,000 acres of federal land to the military, sparking questions about jurisdiction and legality. 

Scott, at the event, said border security as a concept was more important than the legal details of the methods. “It doesn’t matter whose authority we’re using that day or how we’re doing it,” he said. 

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Homan and Scott spoke at a podium flanked by black SUVs, next to the border wall lined with razor wire. As they described the importance of border security, armored vehicles and agents armed with rifles formed a perimeter, while a sniper watched the news conference from a nearby hill. Fog cloaked the mountains, and the neighboring city of Tijuana, from view. 

Migrant encounters plummet

The four years of President Joe Biden’s administration saw hundreds of thousands of people, the majority from Latin America, traveling to the border wall to turn themselves in, asserting to Customs and Border Protection officers that they were in danger in their home countries and in need of legal asylum. 

Scott touted policies under Donald Trump that he said have put agents’ “encounters” with migrants crossing the border at “92% lower than the peak during the Biden administration.” 

On his first day in office, Trump canceled the CBPOne program, the only remaining method to seek asylum in the United States. Critics argue this is illegal, as the U.S. is obligated by international law to consider asylum claims. The disbanding of the CBPOne app left tens of thousands of asylum-seekers stranded in Mexico with no means of entering the United States and no path to return to their home countries, at risk of kidnapping for ransom by criminal groups in Mexican border cities. 

But Homan said millions of these asylum claims were “fraudulent,” despite also referring to migrants as “the most vulnerable people in the world.”

Shutting off pathways to enter the United States, and imposing mandatory detention on undocumented people, Homan said, has resulted in “thousands of lives saved,” because migrants are no longer putting themselves in danger to cross the border as frequently. Barriers like the border wall, he said, save lives because women and children are not able to climb them. 

The non-profit No More Deaths, which tracks migrant remains found at the southern border, said in a report published in August 2025 that deaths related to border security measures, like people falling from the border wall, have increased dramatically since Trump’s first term. “We show that CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has failed to record the vast majority of BP-related deaths (including deaths in custody, by pursuit, falls from the border barrier, use of force, and medical distress).”

Border agents in U.S. cities

With fewer migrants to catch at the border, Homan and Scott acknowledged that Customs and Border Protection officials are turning their attention inwards, to patrol American cities. The intention, Scott said, is to send a “message to the world… just because you made it across this little line, just because you snuck through in the fog, maybe one day in San Diego, you’re not home free. We will come find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you.”

Homan and Scott did not offer detailed answers on what happens to American citizens caught in the middle of these enforcement efforts. While much protest has been directed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE — traditionally responsible for finding people in the country illegally — Border Patrol under the Trump administration has led many public raids, including in cities such as Chicago, distant from any foreign border. 

The administration, through the passage of the July budget bill that it dubbed the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” has allocated billions towards new technology aimed at border enforcement, some of which Scott said will be “embedded” within the wall. Customs and Border Protection also received $2.7 billion to further expand license plate readers installed across the country that use artificial intelligence to look for “suspicious behavior.” Activists have raised questions about how the technology, some of which will be installed hundreds of miles from the border, surveils U.S. citizens as well as immigrants. 

“United States Customs and Border Protection is focused on knowing and controlling who and what enters the United States. We’re not in the business of surveilling U.S. citizens. That’s it,” Scott said.

In the interior, the Trump administration has launched a barrage of strategies to remove undocumented immigrants this year, including violent arrest techniques by federal agents and deputizing local police departments to detain undocumented people.

Federal authorities have detained migrants who were already in asylum proceedings and some who have already been granted a path to asylum by a judge. The administration canceled temporary protective status for hundreds of thousands of people, effectively granting them legal presence in the U.S. then taking it away under threat of arrest. It deported people to a variety of countries that were not their countries of origin, where some have now been imprisoned and alleged they were tortured.

Reports show the overwhelming majority of migrants arrested in the crackdown had minor or no criminal records. The efforts have led to deportation of more than 500,000 people, the administration has said.  

All of these actions are predicated on the idea that crossing the border without the necessary paperwork marks a migrant as a criminal, who is therefore a threat to public safety, Homan said. “Everybody arrested and sent for deportation in the country illegally was in violation of federal law… Most of them don’t have a criminal history because their whole game is to lay low waiting here to do the dirty deed,” Homan said. 

“We are prosecuting people for illegally entering the United States today at an unprecedented level. We are prosecuting everything we can,” Scott said. 

The administration has also attempted to end the concept of citizenship for all people born in the United States, despite the right being constitutionally protected since 1868; the Supreme Court earlier this month agreed to hear a case challenging the legality of that executive order. Federal officials also recently announced that many tourists will have to submit five years’ worth of their social media history for review by Customs and Border Protection.  

Homan hinted that the commitment to immigration enforcement could go beyond the undocumented population in 2026. “If you’re in the country legally, you’re not off the table,” he said.  

Lillian Perlmutter covers immigration for Times of San Diego and NEWSWELL.