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When speaking with Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that President Trump was a conversation starter. Carlson said Trump entered Washington D.C. and began to ask the questions that no one seemed willing to ask. One of these questions was simply: why isn't the southern border working?

Migrants have been able to freely and illegally cross into the country for decades, something Trump brought to the forefront of political discourse.

While a funding fight for a $25 billion border wall has an uncertain outcome, one factor has been made remarkably clear: Trump will not tolerate illegal border crossing.

As the Washington Examiner reports, in the month of November over 51,000 people were apprehended at the Mexican border.

More than 51,000 people were caught illegally entering the United States from Mexico in November, according to Department of Homeland Security data released Thursday evening, the highest number recorded since President Trump took office almost two years ago.

"The November 2018 border numbers are the predictable result of a broken immigration system - including flawed judicial rulings - that usurps the will of the American people who have repeatedly demanded secure borders," DHS spokeswoman Katie Waldman said in a statement.

Half of those who illegally entered - 25,172 - were families. That figure is nearly four times more than the 7,000 families apprehended just one year earlier.
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According to the report, there was an immediate downshift in illegal crossings after Trump first entered the White House as fewer than 16,000 people were apprehended. Later in 2017, illegal crossings gradually began to increase.

As Daily Mail reports, dozens of people were arrested after illegally crossing the border earlier this week:
Dozens of Central American migrants scaled the border fence between Mexico and the US on Sunday, only to be arrested by US Border Patrol guards.

The migrants, who walked thousands of miles to the border as part of a caravan, said they now plan to claim political asylum - fearing violence because of their beliefs if they return home.
President Trump previously deployed thousands of United States troops to the southern border in an effort to prepare it for a looming migrant caravan of over 5,000 members. The troops constructed defensive barriers and were responsible for helping border protection agents.

The deployments were recently approved by the Pentagon to continue into the end of January, via the LA Times:
The Pentagon on Tuesday approved keeping several thousand active-duty troops along the Southwest border at least through January, extending a controversial mission to assist the Border Patrol as it grapples with a surge of migrants seeking asylum.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis signed the order to continue the mission through Jan. 31, according to a Pentagon statement. The deployment had been due to expire in mid-December.
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"About 5,600 U.S. troops are now deployed along the border in Arizona, Texas, and California to back up the Border Patrol," per the report.

On the Mexican side of the border, the Tijuana city government has been forced to relocate those migrants within the thousands-strong caravan after closing their previous sports complex shelter, the Associated Press reports:
The city government of Tijuana announced Saturday that it has closed down a migrant shelter at a sports complex close to the U.S. border that once held about 6,000 Central Americans who hope to get into the U.S.

Officials said all the migrants were being moved to a former concert venue much farther from the border. The city said in a statement the sports complex shelter was closed because of "bad sanitary conditions."

Experts had expressed concerns about unsanitary conditions that had developed at the partly flooded sports complex, where the migrants had been packed into a space adequate for half their numbers.