President Donald J. Trump was sworn into office a mere 10 weeks ago and his efforts to seal up the U.S. border have succeeded under nearly any criteria imaginable.
Cost Savings:
ABC News reported over the weekend that the mission to secure the Southwest border cost taxpayers $330 million through mid-March, including more than $40 million for Guantanamo Bay alone.
That sounds a bit alarming — until you factor in the cost of illegal immigration.
A year ago Newsweek — hardly a conservative-leaning publication — reported that annual federal, state, and local expenditures on illegal immigration came to $150.7 billion.
That sum included welfare benefits, emergency medical care, and incarceration costs in local jails.
It also accounted for an estimated $32 billion of tax contributions made by illegal immigrants. Except for those contributions the total cost would have been $182 billion.
So we’ve paid $330 million within the first two months of the year in order to save $150.7 billion per year.
Stated differently, instead of spending $150.7 billion annually to support illegal immigration, we’re spending just 0.22% of that sum to eliminate it.
Meanwhile, as immigrants continue to leave, we can expect those costs to go down.
But even assuming they hold at $330 million every two months that would amount to $1.98 billion annually, in order to save $150.7 billion per year — a great investment by any definition.
'Self-Deportation':
A large part of the cost of securing the border and eliminating illegal immigration is incurred in locating the immigrants, rounding them up, and removing them from the United States — in some cases by air.
But a growing number are "self-deporting."
What’s even more interesting is the way how many are choosing to self-deport.
Many immigrants used human traffickers, referred to as "coyotes," to smuggle themselves north over the border.
Now some are using those same coyotes to smuggle across the same border, this time heading south into Mexico.
"I’ve been a journalist for more than 25 years, but I never thought I would see this — 'paquetes de retorno' (return packages)" said Alfredo Corchado, a U.S. journalist and an executive editor at the Puente News Collaborative.
"[Coyotes] are now offering packages where [migrant] people can go back home . . . . [If] you want to go home, or you want to go back to Honduras, or maybe you don’t want to go back to Honduras because it’s too dangerous," Corchado told a Council on Foreign Relations gathering.
"[Or] you don’t want to go to Guatemala, but maybe you want to go to Costa Rica, and so they’re offering these [smuggling] packages where you can just go back home. Not all of them are taking it, I mean, many [are]."
By being smuggled across the border they avoid U.S. immigration officials, who can ban them from re-entering the United States for 10 years or more.
Cleaning Up the Records:
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Director Elon Musk reported this week that his agency discovered that 2.1 million illegal aliens were given Social Security Numbers in 2024.
This, in turn, allowed them to sign up for Medicare and register to vote.
"If you create a massive financial incentive for people to come to the United States illegally, then that’s what they will do," Musk said. "There’s still actually a lot of people out there. . . that somehow think this is made up by the right or it’s like some fiction — it is absolutely true."
And this is all happening with the approval of the American voter.
The results of a Rasmussen Reports poll released over the weekend revealed that 64% of likely voters support the deportation of gang members from the United States, including 47% who strongly support it.
Moreover, A CBS News/YouGov survey released the same day revealed that 58% of respondents support Trump’s deportation program overall.
It’s morning again in America. The Trump White House dubbed today "Liberation Day" because it’s the day reciprocal tariffs with our trading partners go into effect.
We can also call 2025 "Liberation Year" — the year the United States finally won the war on the border and took America back.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and is a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He's also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and a Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
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