This is one of those “good news, bad news” stories in terms of the ongoing Biden border crisis. The good news, as highlighted by the Associated Press, is that there was a drop in illegal crossings at the Mexican border last week. This change was almost entirely driven by actions taken by Mexican officials rather than anything that the Biden administration did. The not-so-good news is that the “drop” was more of a drop in the bucket than any sort of plunge or return to normalcy. But with the United States drowning in illegal migrants these days following a record-setting month of December, I suppose we should take whatever good news we can get where we find it. Mexican officials have been removing migrants from trains and shipping them back to Mexico’s southern border. Some have been placed on buses and planes back to their home country, primarily Venezuela.

In addition to forcing migrants from trains, Mexico also resumed flying and busing them to the southern part of the country and started flying some home to Venezuela.

Even if temporary, the decrease in illegal crossings is welcome news for the White House. President Joe Biden’s administration is locked in talks with Senate negotiators over restricting asylum and $110 billion in aid for Ukraine and Israel hangs in the balance.

Bermudez said his wife became separated from her family when she talked to authorities as he gathered his stepchild and their belongings. He wanted to run, but his wife said they shouldn’t because they had followed procedure by making an appointment with U.S. immigration authorities.

These actions by the Mexican government are clearly the result of recent talks between Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Biden administration officials, including Antony Blinken. Since we should be grateful for any progress, no matter how small, I’ll offer a tip of my hat to Blinken’s team for getting the ball rolling.

But with that said, we’re not talking about a very large ball here. You have to dig quite a ways into the AP’s reporting of this “good news” to find the actual numbers in question. Mexico sent 22 commercial airlines filled with migrants to its southern border in the last ten days of December. Most came from the Eagle Pass, Texas region. That’s not the same as sending them all home, but it’s a start. But that’s still only two or three thousand migrants in a month when tens of thousands were apprehended at the border and a single caravan of 15,000 was making its way north.

Just two “removal flights” went to Venezuela with 329 migrants aboard. So what was the total impact on the number of migrants crossing our border? Arrests on Monday were “down” to 2,500. 13,800 arrests were recorded during the seven-day period ending Friday. Yes, that’s considerably lower than the nearly 20,000 recorded two weeks earlier in December, but that’s still a boatload of people. Recall that during the Obama administration, we were told that 1,000 encounters in a single day would constitute a “crisis.”

To be clear, any help from Mexico in this effort is welcome and the same goes for Canada if they ever start paying attention to the situation. But in the end, America’s border security is America’s responsibility. We will never be able to get the situation on the southern border under control until we address the “root causes of migration,” as our border czar so famously put it. And the root cause of mass migration is Joe Biden’s open border policy and refusal to take serious action to prevent it. As long as the word on the street around the world continues to be that anyone can walk into America illegally and they will be given free stuff forever, they will keep coming. Mexico doesn’t have the resources to deal with that sort of an army of illegal migrants and it shouldn’t be their responsibility to address the problem alone.