The transformation along a once-chaotic stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas underscores how swiftly border security can improve when federal leadership is committed to enforcing the law.
According to RedState, even CBS Newshardly a conservative outlethas now been forced to acknowledge the dramatic shift. On Tuesday, CBS News correspondent Camilo Montoya-Galvez revisited a notorious crossing area near Eagle Pass, Texas, a location that had become emblematic of the Biden administrations border failures, and found it virtually deserted. During the Biden years, this same sector was overwhelmed by illegal crossings, with images of mass encampments and exhausted Border Patrol agents becoming routine. Now, as Montoya-Galvez reported, not a single migrant was in sight.
Mr. Montoya-Galvez laid out the contrast in stark terms for CBS viewers. This is the U.S.-Mexico border near Eagle Pass, Texas. You can see Mexico just a few yards away across the Rio Grande. And this is what it looked like in December of 2023 under the Biden administration, he said, before the segment cut to archived footage of chaos and overcrowding. Behind me is a makeshift staging ground where hundreds of migrants from Latin America have been sleeping and waiting to be processed by overtaxed Border Patrol agents here at Eagle Pass, Texas.
Returning to his current report, Montoya-Galvez continued, At that time, we saw hundreds of people, including families with young children and babies, trying to cross into the U.S. illegally in large numbers. Some of them had to get past the Rio Grande, get past the razor wire; in fact, some of them, we saw ourselves, cut themselves in the process of entering the country illegally. He then delivered the key update that undercuts the lefts narrative that enforcement is futile or cruel: But during this entire trip, we have not seen a single migrant. The change is not merely visual; it is measurable in lives saved.
Montoya-Galvez noted that the Eagle Pass fire chief reported a staggering reduction in drownings since the change in administration. And the fire chief of Eagle Pass told us that during the Biden administration, at the peak of the border crisis, his team was responding to about three reports of migrants drowning every single day. Now they're responding to one drowning every three months. So the situation here has changed dramatically. That is what real border enforcement looks like: fewer illegal crossings, fewer tragedies, and less strain on local communities and first responders.
The shift did not require a new law from Congress or another empty task force in Washington; it required a president willing to use existing authority. While the CBS report repeatedly used the sanitized term migrant, the legal reality is clear: these are illegal aliens the moment they set foot on U.S. soil without authorization. The choice of language reflects media and corporate editorial preferences, not the statute books, and it conveniently softens the perception of lawbreaking for a domestic audience.
Even so, the footage and data speak louder than the euphemisms. The Biden-era scenes of hundreds of migrants camping out and surging across the Rio Grande have given way to a quiet riverbank and a manageable situation for Border Patrol. It also highlights the reckless decisions of adults who chose to drag children and infants through dangerous waters and razor wire, a risk that open-borders rhetoric from the left has only encouraged by signaling that illegal entry would be rewarded, not deterred.
The border is not yet problem-free, and no serious conservative would claim otherwise. Earlier this month, again near Eagle Pass, Border Patrol officers intercepted smugglers attempting to move $2.8 million in narcotics through the port of entry, a reminder that cartels and traffickers will exploit any weakness. These two significant hard narcotics seizures with a combined street value of more than $2.8 million reflect the continued vigilance and alertness our CBP officers put forth on a daily basis, said Port Director Pete Beattie, Eagle Pass Port of Entry. These narcotics will not enter U.S. streets thanks to their dedication to CBPs border security mission.
The difference now is that Customs and Border Protection can focus more of its manpower and resources on stopping drugs and criminal activity instead of acting as a processing agency for mass illegal migration. Under the previous administration, agents were routinely diverted from enforcement to paperwork and crowd control, all while political leaders in Washington signaled that the border was effectively open. With a president now intent on restoring order, the same stretch of river that once symbolized federal abdication of duty has become a case study in what happens when the law is actually enforced.
What an extraordinary reversal in less than two years, and what a rebuke to those who insisted that serious border security was either impossible or immoral. The Eagle Pass experience demonstrates that policy choices at the top matter, that deterrence works, and that a president who takes sovereignty seriously can turn hundreds of illegal border-crossers into none.
Login