The US border town that’s undergone a dramatic transformation after Trump’s immigration crackdown
A year ago, San Diego trauma surgeon Dr. Vishal Bansal was likely to see dozens of migrants each month who had fallen from the towering wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Leg and ankle fractures were common, and he also treated spine, pelvic and traumatic brain injuries.
On a recent visit, the trauma bay beds at his hospital were empty, a more common scene since President Donald Trump took office in January and cracked down on immigration, rescinding rights of asylum-seekers, pursuing a record number of deportations, and seeking an unprecedented $170 billion for immigration enforcement.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show apprehensions at the southwest border, an indicator of the number of migrants trying to cross, are down nearly 90% to their lowest level since 1970.
As a result, the corridor between San Diego and Tijuana, one of the busiest international crossings in the world, has dramatically transformed in less than a year.
Major concentrations of migrants in squalid conditions have largely disappeared. A San Diego transit center that once served as a makeshift migrant depot has returned to normal. A dusty gathering spot hemmed in by 30-foot (9.1-meter) border walls, where asylum-seeking migrants amassed to turn themselves in to U.S. officials, is once again nothing more than a vacant outpost. Across the border in Tijuana, migrant shelters suddenly have empty space.
The decline in border injuries is but one small window on the past 10 months. On Trump’s first day in office on January 20, he issued a sweeping proclamation barring migrants crossing the southern border from seeking asylum.
Federal immigration raids around the country have also generated panic, anguish and protests. Migration clampdowns in transit countries such as Mexico and Panama may also play a role in reducing illegal border crossings in San Diego.
Scripps Mercy, where Bansal is the chief of trauma surgery, and the other San Diego hospital handling migrants, UCSD Medical Center, have reported treating 44 trauma patients who fell off the wall in the first 10 months of 2025. In all of 2024, that number was 1,210. Scripps Mercy had one border wall patient in the six months from May through October.
“When we were at the height of the border wall crisis, receiving so many patients, I must admit, it was hard for all of us. When we have fewer patients that are injured in this manner, we are able to do more elective or emergency operations in the operating room,” said Bansal, whose observations were limited to the hospital.
Tracy Crowley, an attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center in the San Diego area, said it is now more difficult to advise her clients to seek asylum, so many opt for voluntary departure. While awaiting asylum processing they complain of overcrowding in detention centers, where they are forced to sleep on the floor next to the toilet, while enduring poor food and a lack of access to medical care.
“It’s really hard to find a silver lining for me as an immigrant advocate,” Crowley said. “Is human trafficking down? Maybe it’s just not being detected. The market’s still there and vulnerable people still exist.”
The Trump administration has also sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador and built a detention center in Florida in an inhospitable wetland that is home to alligators.
In Chicago, federal agents dragged a teacher from Colombia from a daycare center past crying children and in New York separated a child from his father while detaining the man at a U.S. immigration court. Helmeted and masked officers lobbed tear gas at protesters during a raid on a California cannabis nursery in which a farmworker died after falling from a building.
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