The Mexico-United States border crisis is a migrant crisis occurring along the Mexico-United States border, first declared a crisis in 2014 due to a flood of female and unaccompanied minor migrants into the United States.
The border crisis began in 2014 as the result of the Mexican Drug War and high amounts of political instability, violent crime, and poverty in Mexico and its Central American neighbors to the south. While President Barack Obama established Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 to protect 750,000 child migrants from deportation, the presidency of Donald Trump saw the US Supreme Court curtail most asylum applications in 2019, while Trump pledged to build a border wall to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants into the United States and reduce transnational crime. During COVID-19, Trump implemented Title 42 to deport 2.7 million immigrants, ostensibly with the purpose of mitigating infections within migrant detention facilities. 2020 saw 1.73 million migrant encounters, while 2022 would see 2.76 million and 2023 2.8 million. Most migrants fled economic hardship, gang violence, and environmental disaster in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and drug and human trafficking organizations like the Mexican cartels, MS-13, and Tren de Aragua took advantage of migrants' desperation to extort, abuse, and even utilize them (as drug mules).
In February 2021, the discovery of a massacre of migrants in northern Mexico revealed that cartels and coyotes distributed differently colored bracelets to migrants to indicate if they had paid for protection from death, kidnapping, and for the right to be in cartel-controlled territory or cross the American border. In September 2021, over 30,000 Haitian migrants crossed the border into Texas, leading to mounted US Border Patrol agents dispersing them with whips. Republican critics of President Joe Biden's administration blamed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for the border crisis, voting to impeach him in February 2024. On 4 July 2024, Biden temporarily shut down asylum requests, closed the largest immigrant detention center in the country, and allowed the removal of migrants who did not have a credible reason for requesting asylum. Bipartisan efforts to pass a strict border control bill were stymied by opposition from former president Trump, whose 2024 presidential campaign sought to portray the Biden administration as soft on immigration and crime, and whose allies prevented the bill from passing. By July 2024, however, increased enforcement between the USA and Mexico led to a drop in daily apprehensions from 3,800 to 2,000, while border arrests dropped by 33%.
The border crisis occurred at the same time as the fourth wave America's opioid epidemic, which started in 2016 as the widespread availability and use of illicit fentanyl caused a rise in fatalities. In 2017, 70,200 Americans died from drug overdose; 2021 saw 106,000 deaths. In 2023, the Biden administration cracked down on Mexican cartels smuggling fentanyl into the United States, while also targeting Chinese companies importing chemicals used to make fentanyl. On 16 April 2024, a US House of Representatives panel found that China was fueling the fentanyl crisis in America by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of materials that are used by traffickers to make the drug outside the country. During Trump's presidency, he considered ordering precision airstrikes on Mexican drug labs and going to war with the cartels, a proposal which continued to circulate in Republican political circles even during his 2024 presidential bid.
On 20 January 2025, after Trump was inaugurated for a second time, he signed executive orders designating the Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and declaring a national emergency at the southern border.