A year at the border

The stage is set for 2025 to look a lot like 2017.

The year in border news began with videos of families huddled against the border wall in Southern Arizona, while reporters pointed to charts that showed huge numbers of people from all over the world crossing the border to claim asylum.

As the year comes to a close, President-elect Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat of border news.

Just last week, he took over a news cycle with a quick post on social media about putting tariffs on Mexican goods to stop an “invasion of our Country!”

National news outlets ate it up. They’re now writing pretty much the same stories they wrote in the early days of the first Trump administration seven years ago, like a diplomatic call with Mexico’s president turning into a “he said, she said” debate.

Given how the reporting is playing out right now, we’re probably going to look back on 2024 as a relatively calm year for border news.

But that doesn’t mean nothing happened. Far from it.

While people in Ohio and Idaho watched those huge numbers of asylum seekers in late 2023 and early 2024, Pima County officials were pulling out their hair as the federal funds they depended on to support asylum seekers started to dry up.

That would have left local officials with difficult choices: They could come up with several million dollars a month to house and feed asylum seekers for the few days they were in Tucson. Or they could cross their arms and watch thousands of people get released onto the streets, which was already happening in Nogales.

Behind the scenes, the longstanding network of nonprofits and religious groups pulled off the “chaotic miracle,” as Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller put it, of caring for asylum seekers.

That effort wasn’t without its own controversy. A laundry contract went to the mother of a top employee at a charity, who apparently had overcharged the charity by $200,000. U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani asked the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security to look into it.

Everybody from the Bishop of Tucson to the Southern Arizona Leadership Council joined the chorus calling for federal dollars, while conservative politicians from across the country clamored for closing the border.

The tension led a congressman from Wisconsin to show up unannounced at a hotel that was doubling as a shelter in Tucson. When he wasn’t let inside, he raised a ruckus on social media. (The video he posted was seen more than 2 million times)

Eventually, the Biden administration came through with millions of dollars for Pima County, and a whole lot more for cities and counties across the country that were dealing with asylum seekers for the first time.

The Biden administration also struck a deal with the Mexican government in late 2023 to crack down on migrants in southern Mexico, leading to a strategy of never-ending hassles to wear people down before they reach the U.S.-Mexico border.

In an election-year move, Biden signed an executive order this summer that made it harder to claim asylum at the border. Crossings at the border dropped dramatically.

But it was too late politically. Politicians from North Carolina, Minnesota and other states already capitalized on the chaotic scenes at the border. They pushed ads slamming their opponents for anything less than a full closure of the border.

Not only did Trump run on border issues and win the election, his campaign managed to sway more voters in Arizona’s border towns than they did last time around. The biggest shift toward Trump was in Yuma County, but Rio Rico also was near the top of the list, with a 10-point swing.

Out in the desert

The longstanding humanitarian crisis in the desert continued to unfold this year.

Local officials recovered the remains of 136 people who died while trying to cross the border in Southern Arizona. That included three migrants who were found too late in June. They activated one of the rescue beacons the Border Patrol installed in the desert near Ajo, but agents couldn’t arrive in time.

The humanitarian effort to lessen those deaths also continued, as did the clash between migrant-aid volunteers and right-wing vigilantes, including the son of then-Senate candidate Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who used his son’s videos of hassling aid volunteers as fodder for campaign fundraising.

The spike in border crossings also heightened tensions between humanitarian volunteers and the Border Patrol. Agents threatened to arrest them for driving migrants from the border to the Border Patrol station in Sasabe as freezing temperatures descended on the area.

The highest-profile incident occurred near Nogales, where a rancher faced murder charges after he was accused of shooting a migrant who was crossing his ranch. The trial ended with a hung jury and prosecutors said they wouldn’t try the rancher for a second time.

Business and baseball

But the border isn’t just a place for immigration and conflict.

Federal officials pumped money into ports of entry, the legal crossing points for billions of dollars worth of goods and millions of people who cross to work, shop, or visit family on either side of the border.

The biggest cash infusion was a $275 million contract for a new port in Douglas, meant to divert big commercial tractor-trailers away from the busy downtown area.

One of those ports, in Lukeville, was closed for a month as federal officials scrambled to deal with a sharp increase in crossings in the desert. By the time it was re-opened in early January, the nearby tourist town in Mexico, Puerto Peñasco, had lost so much business it was being called “Muerto Peñasco.”

If you’ve been following Nogales news for a decade or two, you might recognize the importance of this one: The pipe that carries huge amounts of wastewater from Nogales, Sonora across the border to a treatment plant near Rio Rico was finally fixed. The pipe was old and local officials worried it would break and spill millions of gallons of wastewater onto the streets of Nogales, Arizona.

Nogales is a railroad town and officials are trying to move the train tracks that run through the middle of the cross-border sister cities out of downtown. That will be tricky. But it could get even more importance now that newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she wants to re-establish passenger train service between Mexico City and Nogales.

And the Mexican Baseball Fiesta returned to Tucson for its 13th year. Tucsonans got to watch teams from the Mexican Pacific League, alongside the University of Arizona baseball team.

No big legislation

While aid workers hustled in Southern Arizona and voters in places like Michigan and Nebraska watched the crisis from their couches, a brief glimmer of hope came out of Washington, D.C.

The Senate put out a bipartisan bill that would address some of the problems at the border, thanks in part to Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. It was a longshot, and it didn’t end well.

Both Ciscomani and Rep. Raúl Grijalva said they would vote against the bill, although for drastically different reasons. Ciscomani, a Republican, called for a “much tougher approach,” while Grijalva, a Democrat, said the bill was a missed opportunity to “create thoughtful and lasting immigration reform.“

Regardless, the bill was dead on arrival after Trump pressured Republican lawmakers to kill it.

Instead of a sweeping set of changes to immigration and border policy, lawmakers were left to nibble at the edges, like Ciscomani pushing a bill that would up the penalties for drivers fleeing law enforcement in the borderlands.

At the state level, Arizona voters approved a ballot measure by a wide margin last month that would task local police with arresting people for immigration violations. Most of the measure, known as the Secure the Border Act, won’t take effect until the Supreme Court rules on a similar Texas law.

Without any grand-scale legislation, the stage is set for a crackdown on immigration.

The Biden administration already was ramping up criminal prosecutions for crossing the border illegally, which was a go-to tactic for the first Trump administration. Next month, Trump will take office and likely start to set in motion the mass deportation program he promised on the campaign trail.

As the year ends, Tucson families with undocumented members are gearing up to deal with the threat of mass deportations, high-level officials in the U.S. and Mexico have new deals to make, and officials in Tucson and Pima County are sorting through how to handle it all.