EL PASO, Texas—Since the start of 2025, border security measures have cost the Mexican cartels more than $1 billion, according to estimates by the El Paso Sector of the Border Patrol in Texas.
“We’re hurting them in the pocketbook,” interim Border Patrol Chief for the El Paso Sector Walter Slosar tells The Daily Signal.
In recent years, Slosar says he can recall days when as many as 2,700 illegal aliens were arriving at the border daily, but now, Border Patrol is encountering about 40 illegal aliens a day in the El Paso Sector, which includes the two westernmost counties in Texas—Hudspeth and El Paso—and all of New Mexico.
The criminal cartels control much of the Mexican side of the southern border and force illegal aliens to pay them to either be guided to the border or smuggled across. In 2021, a House Homeland Security Committee report found that the cartels made an estimated $13 billion on human smuggling alone.
The cartels charge migrants varying amounts, based upon factors such as where they are from, if they have family in the U.S. with financial means, or if they have a criminal record.
With the change in border policies under the Trump administration, “smuggling fees are going through the roof,” Slosar says. “They used to get two or three attempts per smuggling payments. Now they’re getting one. If they get returned, they’ve got to pay again, so it’s really slowing down that volume.”
In fiscal year 2021, Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 1.5 million illegal aliens at the southern border, compared with fewer than 450,000 so far in fiscal year 2025, which ends Sept. 30.
Because Border Patrol only has so many agents, the volume of illegal aliens arriving at the border is “always our Achilles heel,” Slosar said.
In recent years, criminal organizations used mass migration numbers as a tool to occupy agents and keep them away from areas of the border where cartels might be smuggling people or drugs.
“But the policies that take illegal immigration, illegal border crossing … seriously as a crime [have] been what’s really supported us,” he said of the recent changes.
The illegal aliens who are still crossing the border into the El Paso Sector are largely single adults from Mexico, Guatemala, and Ecuador, Slosar says, and are “attempting to enter with a nefarious purpose.”
The difference at the border now compared with what it was in recent years, Slosar explained, is that illegal aliens “are running from the Border Patrol” and agents are “chasing them down, whereas [during] the previous three, four years, they were looking for us. They knew they were going to be able to come in. They knew they were going to be able to stay. The criminal organizations made sure that they were able to come across, use the asylum laws as a way to stay here, [and] have a court date years in advance. But right now, catch-and-release—it’s over.”
The current border is the “most secure border we’ve ever had,” Slosar says.
There are hundreds of ports of entry across the U.S. and opportunity to come to country the legal way, Slosar says, adding that criminal organizations and foreign terrorist organizations continue “to solicit and entice persons to attempt to enter the country illegally.”
The Trump administration has made border security one of its top priorities. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump acted to stop the flow of illegal immigration through ending “catch and release,” designating some criminal cartels as terrorist organizations and declaring a national emergency at the southern border.
In July, Trump signed into law the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill, which allocates $165 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, including $46.5 billion to complete border wall construction, $3.2 billion for “new technology,” and $2.7 billion for “new cutting-edge border surveillance,” according to the DHS.
Slosar says his goal for his agents is “to be able to come in, do their job every day with the right equipment, with the right technology, and be able to put bad people in jail and protect the American public.”
