Trump's illegal immigration crackdown welcomed by border town police strained by Biden policies

President-elect Trump's plans to curb illegal immigration will lighten the load of Border Patrol agents and local police across the southern U.S. border, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told Fox News Digital.

Trump won 14 out of 18 counties within 20 miles of the U.S. border, challenging Democrats' traditional hold there. Among Latino voters in those counties, 55% voted for the president-elect – a 55% increase from his numbers in 2020.

Trump has pledged to target noncitizens who have been convicted of crimes and the 1.4 million immigrants who are still in the U.S. despite receiving a formal order of removal from a judge.

Among his pledged policy changes, Trump has stated that he will declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to assist with deportations; eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, despite the fact that he was blocked from doing so by the Supreme Court in his first term; and end birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil.

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Trump has also said he will reinstate his "Remain in Mexico" policy, which requires migrants entering from the southern border and seeking asylum to remain on Mexican soil until their U.S. court date. President Biden's administration ended the policy in August 2022. 

Judd, a former Border Patrol agent, said the reinstatement of the policy would be a boon for police in border towns. 

"Once you have that drop in illegal border crossings, then local law enforcement in border towns, now they're free to actually do their job," Judd said. "Whereas right now, so much of their time is being taken up, having to deal with illegal immigration, having to deal with the drugs… you're freeing up local and state officials to actually do their job and protect their citizens."

Curbing border crossings would also hinder cartels, which make an estimated $13 billion per year smuggling people into the U.S., according to a New York Times report.

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There are fears that cartels are pushing in additional migrants ahead of Trump's inauguration, with Arizona's Cochise County seeing an increase in smuggling pursuits – up to 10 each day, per News Nation.

"They’re going to push hard right now. The cartels, they know they have to. They have a president coming in who’s made it very clear, and based on his track record, he will secure this border," Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels told the outlet. "He’ll declare it an emergency."

After working as a Border Patrol agent between 1997 and 2003, Judd was president of the NBPC, the union for border patrol officers, from 2012 until May this year. He told Fox News Digital that, although each president during his tenure was different, the Trump administration's border policies were the "most effective."

"When you look at the Bush administration, we had huge numbers of people, but they were the same people over and over and over again," Judd recalled. "Then under the Obama administration, we were dealing with less people, but we were releasing people into the United States at a level that was unprecedented and that's what caused what we saw, the huge spike during the second term of President Obama."

"What I can say is by far the more impressive administration was the Trump administration, and the numbers bear that out. Also, the [amount] of drugs that were coming in the United States… was a lot less," he continued. "We saw that on the streets. We saw that in our cities, in our communities. But [for] local law enforcement, [there are] a lot less drugs on the street under the Trump administration than what was in the previous administration."

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During Biden's presidency, there have been 8 million migrant encounters nationwide, 6.7 million of them at the southern border, according to the House Committee on Homeland Security.  

The foreign-born population hit a record high in March, in large part as a result of the flow of illegal migrants into the U.S. over the last few years. The population of foreign-born people living in the U.S. hit a new record high of 51.6 million in March, raising the percentage of foreign-born residents to 15.6% of the total U.S. population, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

"If you go back to the Clinton administration, [border crossings were] centered in San Diego and El Paso. Then the Bush administration, San Diego and El Paso became non factors. It was all the Tucson sector. Then after the Obama administration, we saw Texas, you know, the Rio Grande Valley. So there's always ebbs and flows," Judd said. "The difference with this administration is, is whereas under Obama, under Bush, under Clinton, we had two to three hot spots [along the border], with the Biden administration… it's basically across the entire southwest border."

"We've never seen anything like this," Judd continued. "And we went from two to three hot spots to seven to nine hot spots. And it was just completely undeniable because it was across the [entire] border. We were getting flooded everywhere."

Local law enforcement agencies nationwide are also planning to pair up with ICE officials using the 287(g) program. Added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996 under then-President Clinton, the program authorized ICE to delegate to state and local law enforcement officers and give them the ability to act as immigration officers. Trump has said that he intends to lean on local law enforcement in his effort to carry out the "largest deportation" in U.S. history.

Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told NBC News that "this isn't stopping people on the street saying 'show me your papers.'"

"If they’re brought in – they’re arrested for something that they have committed, an act they’ve committed against the citizens of our community. And at that point, they’re held accountable for the action of being in the country illegally," Gahler said. 

But it is not yet clear whether local police departments will receive additional funding to assist immigration authorities.