The Department of Homeland Security last year reported more than 70,000 “got-aways,” or illegal immigrants it believes managed to evade capture, according to new government data that offers a dark spot on an otherwise strong border record under the second Trump administration.
The data provides a detailed look at what is happening at the border. According to indications, although the total number of illegal crossers on the southwest border is down dramatically, only about 60% were caught in fiscal year 2025.
Another 22% turned back before arrest, and the remaining 18% were considered got-aways who managed to evade agents.
Customs and Border Protection, which sent the data to Congress as part of this year’s budget, said illegal immigrants are becoming “more evasive” as they deal with the far stricter border under President Trump.
Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner at CBP in the first Trump administration, said it’s a sign that the border has not been sealed.
“This represents the reality that while the Trump administration has successfully reversed the disastrous Biden open border policies, there is a lot more that needs to be done,” he told The Washington Times. “Republicans need to stop saying the ’border is secure’ simply because it’s politically advantageous. The numbers don’t lie; significant vulnerabilities still remain.”
Experts said part of the explanation is that illegal immigrants are more likely to run now than they were before.
In the Biden years, surrender was often a way to get a quick catch-and-release. That has become a bad bet under Mr. Trump, with no catch-and-release at the border for nearly a year.
The other factor is that so many fewer people are arriving at the U.S. border, so the raw number of got-aways is down, even if the rate is up.
For example, CBP recorded more than 250,000 got-aways in 2024, or more than three times the total last year. Although less than a third of fiscal year 2025 happened on President Biden’s watch, 73% of the got-aways were recorded during that period.
The rate continues to fall, down 83% over the first half of the current fiscal year compared with 2025.
“You are cherry picking a mathematical variance — that only exists because our border numbers are so low,” the agency said in a statement. “The bottom line is simple: far fewer people are attempting to cross, and far fewer are getting through. We now have the most secure border in American history.”
Got-aways are worrying because they represent the unknown: people who made it into the U.S. without any review by a federal agent or officer.
The Border Patrol calculates got-aways by tallying the number of known incursions, subtracting the people it arrests, and adding the number of “turnbacks,” or people detected returning across the border without being captured.
Arrests and turnbacks are combined to determine the Border Patrol’s interdiction rate. In 2025, the agency caught or turned back 323,555 out of 394,009 migrants detected, for an interdiction rate of 82.1%.
That was better than 2022 and 2023, when it hovered around 76%, but was worse than 2024, when it was 86.2%.
The data also shows a higher share of the arrests that agents are making are coming at the checkpoints inside the U.S., meaning migrants got by the first line of defenses and got snared only by the backup.
Nearly 2.5% of Border Patrol arrests occurred at checkpoints in fiscal year 2025, quadruple the rates in 2023 and 2024. In its budget justification document, CBP said it “supports the premise that subjects are becoming more evasive and engaging assistance of transnational criminal organizations to reach the inner layers of U.S. Border Patrol enforcement efforts.”
Some are trying to bypass the land border altogether.
Federal authorities discovered a boat with 29 illegal immigrants from Mexico near the Channel Islands in California over the weekend.
The recidivism rate at the southern border — migrants who were caught more than once in a 12-month period — also rose, to 9.2%, up from 5.7% the year before.
“This means that, even though fewer aliens tried to cross, a slightly higher proportion of those who did were repeat crossers,” CBP said. “The increase in the recidivism rate will continue to be monitored as enforcement policies and migration patterns evolve.”
Many of the yardsticks that seemed to deteriorate last year look worse, largely because the overall border is so much better.
Agents along the southern border nabbed nearly 250,000 illegal immigrants in December 2023, which is by far the worst month on record.
Agents caught fewer than that — just 237,438 — in all of fiscal year 2025, which stretched from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025. Six months into fiscal year 2026, the Border Patrol is on pace for fewer than 90,000 arrests.
Joint operations with Mexico more than doubled, from 29 in 2024 to 64 in 2025. That included cooperating on rescues and working together to discover and shut down cross-border tunnels.
Joint operations with Canada reached 35, up from 26 in the previous two years.
