U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2026: Record Low Crossings, a World Cup Surge, an Ebola Alert, a Sanctuary City Threat, and the Agency at the Centre of America's Most Contested Policy Debates

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is the largest law enforcement organisation in the United States, employing more than 69,000 men and women who work at airports, land border crossings, seaports, and in the airspace above the country's borders every hour of every day. In a normal year, the agency processes approximately one million travellers and more than 70,000 cargo containers daily, enforces the tariff schedules of the world's largest economy, interdicts fentanyl and other controlled substances entering from Mexico, China, and beyond, responds to public health threats at the border, and manages the flow of people and goods across one of the world's most active trade and travel systems. In 2026, there is nothing normal about the environment in which CBP is operating. The agency is simultaneously managing the lowest southern border crossing numbers in its recorded history, preparing for the largest single travel event ever staged on American soil, responding to an active Ebola outbreak in central Africa that has reached the US border management system, enforcing an unprecedented tariff architecture on virtually every major US trading partner, and navigating a political environment in which its own political leadership has proposed measures that would effectively weaponise the agency's operational presence against American cities whose politics the administration opposes. Each of these strands deserves examination on its own terms, because together they describe an agency under pressure from more directions simultaneously than at any previous point in its history.

The headline statistic that the DHS and CBP have been publicising most aggressively is the border crossing data. On April 30, 2026, the agencies announced that US Border Patrol had recorded its eleventh consecutive month of zero releases at the southern border — a streak that stretches back to June 2025, representing eleven months of essentially zero unauthorised migrants being released into the United States pending immigration proceedings. The numbers behind that streak are genuinely historic by any comparison with the recent past. Southwest border encounters — the metric that counts both apprehensions and inadmissible determinations at ports of entry — have fallen to levels not seen in decades, driven by a combination of aggressive enforcement policies, the rapid processing and removal of nearly everyone apprehended, the elimination of most legal pathways for asylum that had previously been available at ports of entry, and the deterrent effect of high deportation visibility on migrant decision-making in sending countries. Administration officials describe these numbers as the product of restored border security and the fulfilment of Trump's most prominent campaign commitments. Critics describe them as the product of policies that have closed legal as well as illegal pathways, that have produced documented due process violations in the speed and conditions of removal proceedings, and that have stranded people with legitimate protection claims in dangerous situations in Mexico and Central America without adequate legal recourse.

The public health dimension that CBP is currently managing adds a layer of operational complexity that would be significant in any normal border management environment and is doubly so in the current one. In late May 2026, an active Ebola disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan prompted the Secretary of Homeland Security to direct all flights to the United States carrying persons who had recently been present in any of those three countries to arrive at Washington Dulles International Airport, where the CDC is concentrating public health resources for enhanced screening. Two separate announcements — one on May 21 and a modification on May 24 — updated the list of designated airports under this protocol, reflecting the operational management of a public health measure that directly affects routing decisions for commercial aviation across sub-Saharan Africa. CBP officers at Dulles have been working alongside CDC personnel to implement the enhanced health screening for arriving passengers who fall within the restriction's scope, defined as anyone who has been present in the DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan within 21 days of their US arrival. The interim final rule that the CDC issued to support the restriction introduced a new procedural mechanism: a formal authority for the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting through the CDC Director, to suspend the entry of even lawful permanent residents from designated countries for public health reasons — a significant expansion of public health-based entry restriction authority whose legal and practical contours are still being evaluated.

The FIFA World Cup 2026 preparation is the operational project that has consumed the largest share of CBP's forward planning attention in the first half of 2026, and for understandable reasons. The tournament, co-hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico with matches in 11 American host cities beginning in mid-June, is expected to produce the largest single international travel surge in American history — vastly exceeding any previous Super Bowl, Olympics, or major international event in its geographic scope, the number of countries represented among arriving visitors, and the duration of the increased demand on the border management system. CBP's own data indicates the scale of the preparation underway. From October 1, 2025 through April 30, 2026, the agency received over 5.9 million Electronic System for Travel Authorization applications under the Visa Waiver Programme, generating over 5 million approvals. The United Kingdom led all nations with over 1.2 million ESTA approvals in that period, followed by France with over 570,000, Germany with over 530,000, Japan with over 500,000, and the Republic of Korea with over 320,000. During the same period, CBP received over 1.6 million applications for Trusted Traveller Programmes — Global Entry, SENTRI, and NEXUS — the pre-approved traveller systems that allow expedited processing at airports and land crossings.

To handle the physical processing of that volume, CBP has undertaken an unprecedented preparedness programme including Global Entry mobile enrolment events held in Germany, Croatia, and Australia, joint NEXUS enrolment events with the Canada Border Services Agency in Fort Lauderdale and Seattle, and the deployment of a new interactive virtual assistant called Compass specifically designed to answer FIFA World Cup travel questions in multiple languages. The agency has established a unified command structure for World Cup security that coordinates CBP's land, air, and sea assets with the Secret Service, FBI, TSA, and local law enforcement in the 11 host cities. CBP's public-facing messaging to international visitors has been careful and deliberately welcoming — "CBP is committed to ensuring safe and lawful travel for all visitors attending the FIFA World Cup 2026" — in pointed contrast with the immigration enforcement posture that has characterised the agency's other public communications across the same period and that has produced documented anxiety among some international visitors about whether the enforcement environment that has applied to unauthorised migrants might extend in some unpredictable way to legitimate international tourists.

That anxiety is not without basis in the broader political environment, even if CBP's operational guidance and its legal authorities make clear that international travellers with valid visas or ESTA authorisations are not subject to immigration enforcement action unless they overstay or violate their admission conditions. The administration's aggressive deportation operations, the public statements from senior officials about the consequences of any irregular immigration encounter, and the general atmosphere of heightened immigration enforcement have reduced inbound travel from some countries and some demographic groups who might previously have visited without hesitation. Travel and Tour World noted in its CBP coverage that "signs of U.S. World Cup tourism falling short amid invasive crackdowns" had emerged even as ESTA numbers remained high — suggesting that the deterrent effect of the enforcement environment has not been fully offset by CBP's welcoming messaging, at least among some potential visitors who have chosen destinations other than the United States for their World Cup experience.

The tariff enforcement dimension of CBP's current mandate represents perhaps the most dramatic expansion of the agency's operational scope in its history. Following the March 4 and March 7, 2025 presidential executive orders implementing comprehensive tariff updates, CBP became the primary enforcement mechanism for an import taxation regime that imposed significant new tariffs on goods from China, Canada, Mexico, and dozens of other trading partners simultaneously. The agency described itself in its own communications as "uniquely positioned to implement and enforce the President's tariffs using all our enforcement and revenue tools." In practice this has meant deploying the agency's port-of-entry workforce — trained primarily for immigration, drug interdiction, and customs compliance in the traditional sense — into the role of administering a tariff system of greater complexity and higher stakes than any that has existed in the post-NAFTA era. CBP's revenue collection function, which processes the import duties paid on the roughly $3 trillion in goods imported into the United States annually, expanded sharply in 2025 and 2026 as tariff rates rose across dozens of product categories. The operational challenges of correctly classifying goods, applying the correct tariff rate under a system that has been modified by executive order multiple times in rapid succession, and managing the appeals and disputes that arise from tariff assessments have placed significant new administrative demands on the agency's port-of-entry officers.

The drug interdiction numbers from CBP's recent operational record illustrate the scale of what its officers are doing alongside all of these other functions. In Fiscal Year 2025, CBP officers seized over 21,000 pounds of fentanyl at ports of entry alone — enough, at standard dosage concentrations, to kill hundreds of millions of people. Cocaine seizures at the Texas ports of entry have been a consistent feature of CBP's recent media releases: over $692,000 in cocaine at the Progreso Port of Entry in a single seizure, over $1.2 million worth at Hidalgo and Pharr International Bridges in another. In Yuma Sector, Operation Checkmate arrested 52 individuals in a single week for being in the United States illegally, of whom 36 were found to be driving vehicles. In Champlain, New York, CBP officers are enforcing border integrity at the northern border. The operational breadth of a single week's CBP activity covers multiple continents, multiple drug types, multiple border vectors, and multiple legal authorities.

The New Border Patrol Chief appointment announced in CBP's recent newsroom adds another dimension to the current moment. Rosario "Pete" Vasquez was announced as the new Chief of US Border Patrol — the component of CBP responsible for enforcement between ports of entry along the 2,000-mile southern border and the 5,500-mile northern border. Vasquez's appointment came at a moment when Border Patrol's operational posture is more aggressive, its authorities are more expansive, and its political visibility is higher than at any point since the post-9/11 reorganisation that created the Department of Homeland Security and CBP in the first place.

The most politically explosive CBP-related development of the current period, however, has nothing to do with drug interdiction, World Cup travel, or tariff enforcement. It is a proposal that, as of the most recent reporting, had not been implemented and whose legal and operational feasibility remained genuinely uncertain but whose articulation by a cabinet official had generated enormous controversy: the DHS Secretary's reported plan to withdraw CBP processing from international airports in so-called sanctuary cities. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin reportedly said on Fox News that the Trump administration is drawing up plans to withdraw immigration and CBP processing of international flights at airports in sanctuary cities, including both international travellers and cargo. The stated rationale was that if "radical left Democrats" are not allowing the government to enforce federal laws, the government "shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities either."

The proposal, if implemented, would mean that international flights arriving in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco — cities whose local governments have declined to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement in various ways — would be unable to land and process customs and immigration at their destination airports. Passengers and cargo would need to be re-routed to other airports where CBP was still operating. The operational and economic consequences would be immediate and staggering. O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, LAX in Los Angeles, JFK and Newark Liberty in the New York area, and San Francisco International Airport are among the busiest and most economically significant airports in the world. The cargo flowing through them is not optional to the supply chains it serves — cargo carriers do not have the option to simply add an intermediate stop in Dallas or Atlanta for every shipment destined for California or Illinois without enormous cost and delay consequences.

CBP officials speaking on background to travel and aviation journalists have expressed scepticism about the proposal's feasibility, noting that CBP is a federal agency with federal statutory obligations that do not include the discretion to simply decline to process arrivals at major airports as a political sanction against local governments. The agency's enabling legislation and the customs and immigration statutes it enforces were written on the assumption that CBP processes international arrivals at all airports of entry, not at airports whose local governments align with federal policies. Several immigration law analysts have noted that the proposal, if attempted, would face immediate legal challenge and that the courts would likely find that CBP does not have the authority to selectively refuse its statutory obligations based on local government political positions. The administration has not specified a timeline or the cities to which the secretary was referring, and the reporting suggested the plan might not be implemented before the FIFA World Cup games conclude in July, given the operational chaos that would result from withdrawing CBP processing from any major airport while hundreds of thousands of international football fans are trying to enter the country.

The coexistence of these two CBP stories — the meticulous, welcoming, linguistically sensitive World Cup preparation effort and the proposal to use airport processing withdrawal as a political weapon against opposition-governed cities — captures something important about the agency's position in 2026. CBP is simultaneously being asked to be the world's most welcoming border management agency for the global football community and a coercive political tool in domestic partisan conflict. It is simultaneously enforcing the most aggressive immigration restriction regime in modern American history and preparing to process the largest international travel surge in American history. It is managing an Ebola outbreak screening protocol, a record tariff enforcement mandate, a record drug interdiction mission, and an unprecedented political controversy about its own operational scope in the same weeks that its leaders are appearing at FIFA preparation events and announcing Global Entry milestones.

The 69,000 men and women of CBP are the people who actually have to do all of this. They are the officers at Dulles who are screening passengers from central Africa for Ebola symptoms while simultaneously processing millions of ESTA applications for World Cup tourists. They are the agents in Yuma who are processing zero-release numbers while their counterparts in Chicago prepare for the largest international travel event their city has ever hosted. They are the trade specialists enforcing tariff schedules that changed three times in one month. They are the drug interdiction officers whose cocaine and fentanyl seizures represent the daily operational expression of the border security mandate. Whatever decisions political leaders make about what CBP should or should not do, and wherever the courts resolve the legal questions about what it can and cannot be ordered to do, the people executing the mission are, as the agency's own communications note with some consistency, America's frontline.

Sources

1. CBP Official — Trump Administration Preparations for FIFA World Cup 2026 Pay Off — https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/trump-administration-preparations-fifa-world-cup-2026-pay
2. CBP Official — CBP Reports Significant ESTA, TTP Approvals for FIFA World Cup 2026 Qualified Nations — https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-reports-significant-esta-ttp-approvals-fifa-world-cup-2026
3. CBP Official — CBP Welcomes You to FIFA World Cup 2026 — https://www.cbp.gov/travel/cbp-welcomes-you-fifa-world-cup-2026
4. CBP Official — Modification of List of Designated Airports Regarding Arrival Restrictions, May 21, 2026 — https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/announcements/modification-list-designated-airports-regarding-arrival-restrictions-may-21
5. CBP Official — Modification of List of Designated Airports Regarding Arrival Restrictions, May 24, 2026 — https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/announcements/modification-list-designated-airports-regarding-arrival-restrictions-may-24-2026
6. DHS Official — CBP Announces Eleventh Consecutive Month of Zero Releases at the Border — https://www.dhs.gov/keywords/customs-and-border-protection-cbp
7. CBP Official — Media Releases and Newsroom — https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom
8. Cyrus D. Mehta & Partners — Immigration Update June 01, 2026: DHS Secretary Sanctuary City Airport Withdrawal Plans, Ebola Rules — https://cyrusmehta.com/blog/2026/06/01/immigration-update-june-01-2026/
9. Travel and Tour World — United States for International Travellers as Customs and Border Protection Shapes 2026 Travel Experiences and Global Entry Trends — https://www.travelandtourworld.com/news/article/g3s8cy8p4lio/
10. The Travel — U.S. Customs and Border Protection's World Cup Data Shows One Country Is Far More Prepared to Travel Than the Rest — https://www.thetravel.com/us-customs-and-border-protection-world-cup-data-shows-united-kingdom-has-most-estas-prepared-to-travel/
11. Forth News — CBP Boosts Travel Authorizations for 2026 World Cup, Warns of Border Delays Ahead of Memorial Day — https://www.forth.news/stories/CbAAFYcVS31zXxpnwVL6Q