A Smarter, Stronger Border

What I want to accomplish

Republicans and Democrats both want a border that works, on land, at sea, and at our airports. My goal is a border that stays secure no matter which party is in charge, built on solutions both parties already support. Here’s what I’d do, and why.

Scan every vehicle and truck at the ports. Most fentanyl is driven through official crossings, and only a small share of vehicles get scanned. I’d fund the scanners and officers to inspect every one, with a deadline.
Put smart technology on every border. Towers, sensors, and drones let a few agents watch hundreds of miles, south and north. I’d keep building them, with independent testing so we pay only for what works, and use barriers where the agents on the ground say they help.
Cover the coasts. Tens of thousands of people have tried to reach Florida and Puerto Rico by boat. The Coast Guard needs the ships, aircraft, and surveillance to stop them.
Track who leaves. For years, more people became undocumented by overstaying a visa than by crossing the border. I’d finish the biometric exit system at airports and seaports.
Hire enough people to do the job. Technology only works with agents and officers to respond. I’d hire them and pay enough to keep experienced people.
Decide asylum cases in months, not years. Long backlogs are the smugglers’ best sales pitch. Quick, fair decisions with real consequences take it away.
Go after the cartels. Target the smuggling networks, their money, and the people who recruit Americans as drug couriers, working with Mexico and Canada.
Protect privacy. Millions of Americans live near the border. I’d set clear limits on how long surveillance data about them is kept and who can see it.
Pair security with reform. Border security lasts when it’s part of a deal that also fixes legal immigration, like the bipartisan Gang of Eight bill that passed the Senate in 2013. That’s the heart of my immigration plan.

What I won’t do

Treat the border as a talking point instead of a problem to solve.
Pretend one cause explains everything, or that a wall alone will fix it.
Fund technology without proof it works.
Blame immigrants for fentanyl when most of it is driven through ports by people the cartels recruit, many of them Americans.
Walk away from a good compromise because it gives the other side a win.

The background

The rest of this page lays out the facts behind that plan: where border crossings actually happen, why they rose and fell, what a fence can and can’t do, and the compromise that almost fixed it.

Both parties want a strong border

You’d never know it from cable news, but this isn’t a fight between people who want a border and people who don’t. In a Pew survey, 91% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats said increasing security along the southern border should be an important goal. They disagree on how much it matters and how to do it. But a country that controls who comes in is something most Americans, in both parties, want.

So the question isn’t whether to secure the border. It’s how to do it in a way that works, that lasts, and that both parties will keep funding no matter who’s in charge.

America has more than one border

When people say “the border,” they usually mean the line with Mexico. But the country has four kinds of border to protect:

The southern border, about 1,950 miles of desert, mountains, and river.
The northern border with Canada, the longest land border in the world at more than 5,500 miles counting Alaska. In fiscal 2024, CBP recorded nearly 199,000 encounters there, a record.
The coasts. From 2022 through 2024, almost 70,000 migrants tried to reach the U.S. across the Caribbean and the Florida Straits, the highest level in more than 30 years, often in overloaded boats.
Airports and seaports, where most visitors arrive legally, and where people who later overstay their visas come in.

Here’s where CBP’s encounters happened in fiscal 2024, the last full year of the surge.

Encounters include people stopped between ports and people found inadmissible at ports of entry. Source: CBP fiscal 2024 year-end data, via The Center Square.

An “encounter” isn’t always an illegal crossing. It includes people stopped between ports of entry and people turned away or processed at official crossings and airports. But it shows the shape of the job: the southern border is the biggest share, and it’s not the whole story.

Why crossings rose from 2020 to 2024

Sources: U.S. Customs and Border Protection data as reported by KSL, the Center for Immigration Studies, and DHS. Fiscal 2026 is approximate.

Border arrests climbed from about 400,000 in 2020 to more than 2 million in 2022 and 2023. People tend to blame one cause, depending on their party. The honest answer is that several things hit at once.

The pandemic ended. Travel had been frozen in 2020. When the U.S. economy reopened faster than most, employers were desperate for workers, and arrests rose and fell with that labor demand, according to a Cato Institute analysis.
Crises across the hemisphere. Millions fled collapse in Venezuela, and large numbers left Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Many Venezuelans had already settled in Colombia and Peru, where two-decade-high inflation pushed them to move again.
The same people counted again and again. Under the pandemic rule called Title 42, people were sent back to Mexico within hours, with no penalty for trying again. Nearly half of those processed under it in 2021 had already tried to cross before. Encounters went up faster than the number of people.
Policy signals. The new administration rolled back several earlier policies, and with immigration courts years behind, many people knew they could live and work here while their cases waited. Analysts note that migrants and smugglers watch U.S. policy closely and adjust. Smugglers sold that message hard.

Crossings began falling in 2024 as job demand cooled and asylum rules tightened, and in 2025 they fell to their lowest level since 1970. The lesson for both parties: border numbers respond to the economy, to events abroad, and to whether the rules have real consequences. Policy matters, and so does capacity.

Facts that get lost in the shouting

Most new illegal immigration has often come through airports, not the desert. In every year from 2007 through 2018, more people became undocumented by overstaying a visa than by crossing the border. That flipped during the recent surge, but even in 2023, overstays made up almost 40% of new undocumented arrivals. A border fence doesn’t touch any of them.

Most fentanyl comes through the front door. From 2015 to 2024, 88% of fentanyl seized at the border was caught at official ports of entry, and another 4% at highway checkpoints just past them. About 80% of the people caught carrying it at the ports were U.S. citizens, recruited by cartels because they draw less suspicion.

Source: Cato Institute analysis of U.S. Customs and Border Protection drug seizure data.

Most vehicles still aren’t scanned. As of spring 2024, only 20% of commercial trucks and 5% of passenger vehicles at southern ports went through drive-through scanners that can see inside them. Congress passed a bipartisan law in 2021, the Securing America’s Ports Act, requiring a plan to scan far more, and senators are still pressing CBP to deliver. Fentanyl that gets through those ports ends up in Utah.

88%of border fentanyl seizures happen at ports of entry

5%of passenger vehicles were scanned at southern ports (2024)

~40%of new undocumented arrivals in 2023 overstayed a visa

Why a fence alone falls short

Barriers have a place. In cities like San Diego and El Paso, where a person can disappear into a neighborhood within seconds of crossing, a wall buys agents valuable time. But a fence by itself doesn’t secure a border.

It can be cut and climbed. CBP’s own maintenance records show smugglers sawed through new sections of wall 3,272 times from 2019 to 2021, usually with power tools from a hardware store, costing $2.6 million in repairs. Agents and ranchers say climbing with ladders is even more common.
It only slows people down. A barrier buys minutes. Without cameras and sensors to spot the crossing and agents close enough to respond, those minutes don’t matter. CBP itself says fencing is valuable when combined with surveillance technology and enough personnel.
It doesn’t reach the biggest problems. A fence does nothing about fentanyl driven through ports, visas that expire, boats off Florida, the northern border, or people who walk up to an agent and ask for asylum.

The goal is to detect every crossing, slow it where that helps, and respond fast. Barriers do the middle part. Technology and people do the rest.

Technology is the force multiplier

No number of agents can watch every mile of desert, forest, and coastline. Technology can.

Border Patrol now uses surveillance towers that spot movement miles away, ground sensors, drones, and blimp-mounted cameras. DHS has about 830 towers and plans to nearly triple that over the next decade, and Congress set aside more than $6 billion for surveillance technology in 2025. Newer towers use AI to flag a person or vehicle and alert an agent, so agents spend their time responding instead of watching screens. The same tools work on the northern border, where there’s far more ground to cover with far fewer agents.

Two cautions. Washington has wasted money here before: a “virtual fence” program was canceled in 2011 after costing $3 billion, so every dollar should be tied to testing and results. And millions of Americans live along the border. Watching for smugglers shouldn’t mean building permanent files on ranchers and families who live there.

The compromise that almost worked

In 2013, four Republicans and four Democrats in the Senate, nicknamed the “Gang of Eight,” wrote a bill to fix the whole system at once. To win more Republican votes, they added a border package that would have roughly doubled the Border Patrol to about 40,000 agents, required 700 miles of fencing, and deployed specific technology in each part of the border. It also funded an electronic exit system to track visitors who overstay. In exchange, it modernized legal immigration and created an earned path to citizenship, with border goals that had to be met first.

It passed the Senate 68 to 32, with every Democrat and 14 Republicans. Utah’s Sen. Orrin Hatch voted for it and passed more than 20 amendments to improve it. The House never voted on it.

In 2024, it happened again. A Republican, a Democrat, and an independent negotiated a border bill with more agents, more asylum officers and immigration judges, and new scanning technology at ports of entry. It died in an election year, caught between both parties’ bases.

The compromise was there both times. Politics got in the way. I’d go back to it.

The bottom line

Republicans and Democrats both want a border that works, on land, at sea, and at our airports. The tools are already on the table: scanners at the ports, smart technology everywhere else, enough people to use it, and a deal that pairs security with reform. Utah sent a senator who voted for that deal in 2013. It’s time to finish the job.