It’s a rare day during this administration when we get to report any sort of good news from the southern border, but a report showed up yesterday that almost qualified for that category. Sort of. One week after Title 42 ended, the Border Patrol is “encountering” roughly 4,000 illegal migrants crossing the Mexican border between the official ports of entry per day. That’s still far too many people, but it’s less than half of the number they were seeing in the previous weeks. One reason for this is that Mexico has been loading migrants up in buses and onto planes and sending them further south to shelters. Similarly, they have been rounding up migrants close to their southern border and shipping them to facilities further north near the center of the country. So where did this surge of good will and cooperation by the Mexican government come from? And are they doing anything about the cartels near the border? (Associated Press)

Mexico is flying migrants south away from the U.S. border and busing new arrivals away from its boundary with Guatemala to relieve pressure on its border cities.

In the week since Washington dropped pandemic-era restrictions on seeking asylum at its border, U.S. authorities report a dramatic drop in illegal crossing attempts. In Mexico, officials are generally trying to keep migrants south away from that border, a strategy that could reduce crossing temporarily, but experts say is not sustainable.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that in the week since the policy change, Border Patrol averaged 4,000 encounters a day with people crossing between ports of entry.

Predictably, the AP fails to mention one of the real reasons that the number of illegal crossings has decreased significantly. Under Operation Lone Star, the Texas National Guard has installed many miles of new razor wire fencing and stationed armed troops along our side of the border. That means there are fewer places for the cartels and random migrants to easily cross over. Unfortunately, that can’t be a permanent solution.

It’s also at least somewhat encouraging that the number of deportations taking place has risen significantly. In the past week, 11,000 were deported, but even the Washington Post admits that nearly twice as many (21,000) were released into the interior. So while any improvements are encouraging, we’re still unleashing tens of thousands of people to spread across the country with either no court appointments at all or court dates that are years in the future.

There is still clearly more that Mexico could be doing. A number of its largest migrant detention centers, including the Siglo XXI center in Tapachula, Chiapas state, are either sparsely used or entirely empty. But finding places to house migrants is never going to address the underlying problem. The two main challenges that Mexico is either unable or unwilling to handle remain. They need to seal their own southern border and clamp down on the cartels that are engaging in all of the human and drug trafficking on the American border. Sadly, AMLO has shown very little interest in the latter.

Here’s one quirk in the trends being claimed in this story. While the number of crossings at the southern border may be down, at least for now, the number of migrants arriving in New York City actually spiked significantly according to the New York Daily News.

Mayor Adams’ administration has since last week reported a steady increase in migrant arrivals — even as volunteers welcoming the desperate travelers to New York City say they’re not seeing a massive influx amid a drop in U.S. southern border crossings.

Molly Schaeffer, Adams’ director of asylum seekers operations, said in a private phone briefing Thursday with local lawmakers that more than 900 migrants arrived this past Monday alone, according to a recording of the call obtained by the Daily News. That came on top of roughly 4,300 migrants Schaeffer said arrived last week.

Mayor Adams still has a serious problem on his hands. His efforts to ship illegal aliens out to suburban and upstate counties have been met with fierce resistance. Meanwhile, half of the hotel rooms in the city are now occupied by migrants, with taxpayers footing the bill for all of those rooms. As if the Big Apple wasn’t already having enough trouble attracting tourists to its crime-ridden streets, this certainly won’t help matters any. This is an unsustainable situation and sooner or later, New York officials are going to be forced to realize that a lot of these unwelcome guests need to be deported.