Arizona border mayor credits President Trump for ‘close to overnight’ improvements

PHOENIX – The border situation improved quickly after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, according to the longtime mayor of Arizona’s largest border city.

Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos on Monday that significant enforcement efforts are usually required to curtail cartels’ human smuggling activity.

However, Nicholls believes Trump’s attitude and track record have been enough to make a difference since he returned to the White House on Jan. 20.

“I think they tried to get as much business done as they could before the 20th, but knew that after the 20th it was going to get a lot more difficult,” said Nicholls, who wrote an op-ed about the border situation for Newsweek on Saturday.

How has border situation improved under Trump?

Nicholls said that while the frequency of border encounters declined significantly during the final months of the Biden administration, the numbers fell further, to about 40 a day, within days of Trump’s inauguration.

“It’s pretty close to overnight in the world along the border,” Nicholls said. “Usually, it takes a lot of enforcement to kind of push the issues to make sure that their cartels are pulling back and that people aren’t willingly signing up to try to come across the border.”

Nicholls, who has been Yuma’s mayor since 2014, said the rhetoric from the White House is the biggest change from the Biden administration to this point.

“What people say, and particularly our national leaders, what they say has a dramatic impact on what happens along on the border. So, that’s what we have rhetoric-wise different now than we’ve had in the previous four years,” he said.

The activity is now “almost back to what we would consider normal” in the Yuma Sector, Nicholls said. In addition, neighboring sectors have slowed to the point where they are no longer sending detainees to Yuma for processing.

Yuma mayor expects cartels to change human smuggling strategies

Regardless of the current situation, Nicholls said the cartels aren’t about to walk away from the billion-dollar human smuggling industry they’ve built.

But first, they have to figure how much the Mexican government will be involved and adjust to whatever policies U.S. officials enact.

“And then, like every good businessman, they’re going to try to find a way to work within the new system,” Nicholls said.

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