Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe used to spend his days chasing smugglers through the Texas brush. Since January, his deputies have encountered exactly two smuggling cases on county roadways. Two. In nine months.
"It's an unbelievable change, and one we're happy with," Coe told Breitbart.
The sheriff's quiet roads are backed by a number that deserves to be carved into the side of the Capitol building. According to CBP border got-aways — illegal crossers who evade capture entirely — have dropped below 40 per day in the first two weeks of September 2026. The 14-day total: fewer than 550 known got-aways across the entire southwest border.
To appreciate what that means, you need to remember what it replaced. In April 2023, over 400,000 illegal aliens evaded apprehension in the first six months of that fiscal year alone — a daily average north of 2,200. The peak rate topped 2,000 per day. The current number represents a 98.5% reduction.
That's not a policy tweak. That's a different country.
Randy Clark, a 32-year Border Patrol veteran and former Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations in the Del Rio, Texas Sector, reported the data exclusively for Breitbart. Clark's sourcing runs through active CBP personnel along the southwest border — the agents actually standing post, not the ones writing press releases in Washington.
In Eagle Pass, Texas — ground zero of the border crisis footage that dominated cable news for two years — Assistant Chief of Police Beto Garza described a scene that would have been science fiction in 2023. "There are Border Patrol agents on patrol everywhere," Garza said. "Practically everywhere you look, there are law enforcement officers on patrol."
The transformation has a few mechanical parts worth noting. Border Patrol staffing hit a historic milestone of 21,271 agents, announced in late June. DHS has maintained a zero-release policy at the southwest border for the past 16 months — meaning not a single illegal alien has been released to pursue an asylum claim in that stretch. And CBP sources in Douglas, Arizona described cartel smuggling tactics as "desperate" — the language of an operation running out of options, not one probing for weaknesses.
Governor Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star and the Texas Department of Public Safety added a state-level enforcement layer on top of the federal surge. The combination turned what used to be a revolving door into something closer to a wall — the physical kind and the operational kind.
The argument against enforcement was always that it couldn't work. Too many miles of border. Too few agents. Too much demand. The numbers were supposed to be permanent, structural, baked into geography and economics. The got-away rate was treated like weather — something you complained about but couldn't change.
Forty per day says otherwise. The border wasn't an unsolvable physics problem. It was a policy choice. One administration chose 2,200 a day. The next chose 40.
Sheriff Coe's deputies used to track smugglers through Kinney County on a near-daily basis. Now they've had two cases since New Year's Day. Ninety-eight point five percent.
