Gotaways at the southern border are down 99 percent. That's not a typo, and it's not a projection. It's the current number, confirmed by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.

The word for what's happening at the border right now is "enforcement." Mullin used it himself.

"One of the directions that we changed, or President Trump changed when he came in, was we switched to enforcement rather than humanitarian," Mullin told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle. The shift wasn't rhetorical. It was operational. Agents who spent the last administration processing paperwork are now patrolling 1,800 miles of border.

The policy change Mullin described is as straightforward as it sounds: "We're going to catch them at the border and push them back across. We're not allowing them to claim asylum unless they can prove asylum means by the letter of law."

For years, the asylum system operated as an honor system. Show up, say the word "asylum," and you were in — released into the interior with a court date years away that most people never kept. The cartels figured this out faster than Washington did. They used large groups of migrants filing asylum claims as a distraction, tying up Border Patrol resources while smugglers moved drugs and trafficking victims through unpatrolled sections.

Mullin's DHS flipped the model. Instead of pulling agents off the line to process claims, they're keeping agents on the line and requiring proof before anyone crosses. The result is the number Boyle cited in the interview: land encounters down to roughly 10,000 a day, with gotaways — the migrants who slip through without any contact — cratering by 99 percent.

The previous administration's approach left a specific body count. Under Biden-era policies, 450,000 children went missing after crossing the border. Mullin's DHS has recovered between 150,000 and 160,000 of them. That means somewhere between 290,000 and 300,000 children are still unaccounted for. Every one of those kids entered a system that prioritized "humanitarian" processing over knowing where they actually ended up.

The objection to the new enforcement posture has always been that it violates asylum law. The actual text of asylum law requires applicants to demonstrate a credible fear of persecution based on specific protected grounds. Demanding proof isn't a violation of the statute. It's the statute. The previous policy of accepting claims at face value was the departure from the law, not the other way around.

What Mullin described isn't a pilot program or a proposal. It's active policy, running right now across the full length of the southern border. Agents are on the line instead of behind desks. Migrants are being turned back instead of processed in. The cartels' distraction playbook doesn't work when there's no one to distract.

A 99 percent reduction in gotaways. Between 150,000 and 160,000 missing children found. Enforcement by the letter of the law.

They kept saying it couldn't be done. The numbers say it's already done.