The crossing of asylum-seeking migrants has been reduced in recent weeks on the border of California (USA) with Mexico, even by the popular Nido de las Águilas, a stretch of about 500 meters without a wall and one of the favorites of coyotes or human traffickers in decades.

The Border Patrol recognizes that the area, just 5 kilometers east of the urbanized area of San Diego, where the Otay mountains begin to be steep, is still one of the resources of migrants to enter the country. “There are migrants who still continue to cross in that area, as in others of the San Diego Sector of the Border Patrol,” said officer Gerardo Gutiérrez.

However, the Patrol says it does not know how many people have crossed there since President Donald Trump took office on January 20. Throughout San Diego County, civilian groups and the Coast Guard have reported a total of 77 detainees, but now most, 63, have arrived by sea, and there are no reports of arrests in the area without walls.

Residents of the place told EFE that although they still hear nocturnal noises of people passing by, now it is minimal. “I would tell you that at the end of 2023 large groups of people passed by, from about 30 to 40 people every now and then. One group was on right now and in minutes the other. Now I only have to see a small group of four people and stop counting, that was all, about two weeks ago,” Ventura, a resident of the area in Tijuana (Mexico) told EFE.

“I see that they continue to arrive, but it can no longer be compared,” said another resident of the Nido de las Águilas neighborhood, a highly populated neighborhood in Tijuana where the border wall about 9 meters high is interrupted.

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The resident whose window has a direct view of the border said that now “very few people are seen crossing. Nothing as it was until a few months ago.”

Without wanting to say his name or accepting that photos be taken “for safety”, he said that “before they were groups every now and then: last year still sometimes in an hour I could see groups one after another.”

‘El Nido’ became one of the most frequented corridors since the 1990s, when the construction of the wall with Mexico began for the first time on the San Diego border and the Border Patrol deployed for the first time a larger operation, Operation Guardian.

The wall was then a closed metal obstacle ten feet (about 3 meters) high with a sharp finish that often cut fingers or caused injuries to migrants.

But unlike San Diego, with the largest and most populated urban area on the US border, ‘El nido’ has constantly had less surveillance and still has no wall, on top of a hill.

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From the homes of the people who live in Mexico you can see the two interrupted parallel walls, and also if there is surveillance of the Border Patrol. For those ‘adventages’, it became known as a neighborhood of coyotes.

However, the mountain and open field area on the side of the United States, represents much less obstacle than, for example, San Ysidro, about 10 kilometers to the west, where there is not only a double wall and greater surveillance of patrol boats, but also teams of military engineers reinforced with barbed wire.

Another of the sections where migrants still arrive is to an area between parallel border walls to the west of the San Ysidro checkpoint, where in previous years thousands of people came to camp in search of asylum.

The director of the American Friends Committee, Pedro Ríos, who has headed a permanent post of assistance to migrants who arrive at that point reports only two groups so far this month: eight people from the Middle East and Africa, and a family of six people from Uzbekistan.

The other resource, more frequented since last January 20, is the sea, which has led the Coast Guard to take charge for the first time of intercepting boats with migrants, a task that CBP previously carried out in the Pacific with the support of the Border Patrol.

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The Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported on Tuesday an 85% reduction in crossings along the southern border with Mexico during the first eleven days of the Trump administration, compared to the same period in 2024.

Since former President Joe Biden (2021-2025) decreed greater restrictions on asylum in June 2024, border crossings have been decreasing.