A general view shows the U.S.- Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Mexico May 9, 2023. REUTERS/Jorge Duenes

By Daniel Trotta

SAN DIEGO/TIJUANA (Reuters) -A year ago, San Diego trauma surgeon Dr. Vishal Bansal was likely to see dozens of migrants each month who had fallen from the towering wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Leg and ankle fractures were common, and he also treated spine, pelvic and traumatic brain injuries.

On a recent visit, the trauma bay beds at his hospital were empty, a more common scene since President Donald Trump took office in January and cracked down on immigration, rescinding rights of asylum-seekers, pursuing a record number of deportations, and seeking an unprecedented $170 billion for immigration enforcement.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show apprehensions at the southwest border, an indicator of the number of migrants trying to cross, are down nearly 90% to their lowest level since 1970.

As a result, the corridor between San Diego and Tijuana, one of the busiest international crossings in the world, has dramatically transformed in less than a year. Major concentrations of migrants in squalid conditions have largely disappeared. A San Diego transit center that once served as a makeshift migrant depot has returned to normal. A dusty gathering spot hemmed in by 30-foot (9.1-meter) border walls, where asylum-seeking migrants amassed to turn themselves in to U.S. officials, is once again nothing more than a vacant outpost. Across the border in Tijuana, migrant shelters suddenly have empty space.

The decline in border injuries is but one small window on the past 10 months. On Trump's first day in office on January 20, he issued a sweeping proclamation barring migrants crossing the southern border from seeking asylum. Federal immigration raids around the country have also generated panic, anguish and protests. Migration clampdowns in transit countries such as Mexico and Panama may also play a role in reducing illegal border crossings in San Diego.

Scripps Mercy, where Bansal is the chief of trauma surgery, and the other San Diego hospital handling migrants, UCSD Medical Center, have reported treating 44 trauma patients who fell off the wall in the first 10 months of 2025. In all of 2024, that number was 1,210. Scripps Mercy had one border wall patient in the six months from May through October.

"When we were at the height of the border wall crisis, receiving so many patients, I must admit, it was hard for all of us. When we have fewer patients that are injured in this manner, we are able to do more elective or emergency operations in the operating room," said Bansal, whose observations were limited to the hospital.

Tracy Crowley, an attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center in the San Diego area, said it is now more difficult to advise her clients to seek asylum, so many opt for voluntary departure. While awaiting asylum processing they complain of overcrowding in detention centers, where they are forced to sleep on the floor next to the toilet, while enduring poor food and a lack of access to medical care.

"It's really hard to find a silver lining for me as an immigrant advocate," Crowley said. "Is human trafficking down? Maybe it's just not being detected. The market's still there and vulnerable people still exist."

The Trump administration has also sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador and built a detention center in Florida in an inhospitable wetland that is home to alligators.

In Chicago, federal agents dragged a teacher from Colombia from a daycare center past crying children and in New York separated a child from his father while detaining the man at a U.S. immigration court. Helmeted and masked officers lobbed tear gas at protesters during a raid on a California cannabis nursery in which a farmworker died after falling from a building.

Nationwide, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows public approval of Trump’s immigration policy has fallen from 50% in March to 41% in a four-day survey completed on Monday.

In San Diego, activists have protested, gathering outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center, where immigration detainees are held, and staged volunteer "community patrols" that seek out federal immigration operations in the pre-dawn darkness, hoping to warn people of raids.

U.S. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin touted the Trump administration's focus on increasing immigration arrests and deportations in response to a request for comment.

Trump administration officials have frequently highlighted the drop in illegal border crossings since the Republican president took office, a sharp contrast to the high levels of illegal immigration under Democratic former President Joe Biden.

In the U.S. Border Patrol's San Diego Sector, which covers 60 miles (100 km) of border from the Pacific Ocean inland, October 2025 apprehensions totaled 960, down from 14,165 in the same month a year ago, spokesperson Eric Lavergne said, allowing the sector's 2,000 agents to spend less time processing detainees and more time patrolling remote desert and mountain passages.

"It's already historic," Lavergne said, meaning the San Diego Sector was on pace to set an annual low this century. "I guess we could continue to break the record for the low number of crossings."

ACROSS THE BORDER

In Tijuana, once as many as 3,500 people camped out in a plaza leading to the port of entry to the U.S., according to a survey taken by migrant advocates. Today, the area known as El Chaparral is largely devoid of pedestrians. The only queue is of taxi drivers awaiting fares.

Some migrants have integrated into the city of some 2.3 million people.

"Those who don't return are people who were in a highly vulnerable situation, who could not return because they were threatened, because their relatives were murdered," said Luis Gomez, director of the Baja California chapter of Psychologists Without Borders, which provides mental health services to migrants.

Tijuana opened a number of shelters to accommodate migrants before their final border crossing. Ambassadors of Jesus, a hilltop shelter that includes dormitories, a church and a school, has 450 or 500 guests, down from 1,200 a year ago. Other shelters report even more drastic reductions.

Many of those who remain "are just waiting for Donald Trump to finish his term to see what will happen," Ambassadors director Gustavo Banda said.

Assabil, a Tijuana shelter with a mosque that receives migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, has about 150 people, down roughly half from a year ago.

Abubakar Adam Isshaq, 27, Assabil's imam, said he fled political persecution in Ghana and arrived in Tijuana two weeks before Trump was inaugurated. When asked if he had a message for Americans who have cut off migrants like himself, Adam paused before answering.

"They need to have compassion," Adam said. "Not everyone is a bad person."

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta in San Diego and Tijuana; Editing by Donna Bryson)