McALLEN, Texas -- Along the route through Mexico, no one was really sure how to say U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's name. Smugglers called him "El Malo," the bad one, or "El Feo," the ugly one, and told migrants they had better hurry north before his wall went up.
The U.S. agents who took them into custody said he would be president and that it was a new day at the border.
"They said it to the whole group: We would all be deported because Trump won," said Octavio de Leon, 43, a Guatemalan who was detained with his son while crossing into Texas right after the election.
Trump has promised overhauls of the U.S. immigration system at a time when Central American families are flowing into the United States in growing numbers, many fleeing warlike conditions and poverty back home. U.S. Border Patrol has captured more migrants over the past three months than during the same period in each of the past five years.
[TRUMP: Timeline of president-elect’s career + list of appointments so far]
Trump has pledged to build a towering border wall and deport millions, proposals that have been sketched out so far only in broad terms.
By winning the election, Trump may have inadvertently made his job even harder. His plans have become a selling point for the smugglers urging people to cross the border before a wall goes up, according to migrants and officials in the United States and Mexico.
Others were hoping Democrat Hillary Clinton would win and offer them some form of blanket amnesty, according to Border Patrol agents. So many families have arrived in recent weeks that U.S. authorities announced last weekend that they are sending 150 agents to shore up the stretch of border in the Rio Grande Valley.
At the border, the obstacles to Trump's plans appear daunting. To hold, quickly process and deport the tens of thousands of arrivals each month, the Trump administration would have to add scores of immigration judges and dramatically expand detention facilities, which have faced legal challenges. A wall could cost billions.
Some welcome a Trump crackdown. Many Border Patrol agents resent what they see as a "catch and release" approach to the flood of Central Americans. To them, Trump's win has delivered the morale-boosting equivalent of a Red Bull, an energy drink.
"We're going to be able to do our jobs again," said Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent and a spokesman for their union, which endorsed Trump for president.
"We've turned into a detention agency," he said. "We're not out there enforcing. We're doing jailer work and sometimes babysitting."
But analysts, lawyers and elected officials on both sides of the border say it is a place that has always defied easy fixes and expensive barriers.
What is often lost in the debate about border control is the dramatic change in who is trying to migrate. The number of Mexicans caught trying to illegally cross has been dropping -- from more than 400,000 in fiscal 2010 to about 177,000 this year. Meanwhile the number of migrants from violence-plagued El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has nearly quadrupled in the same period, to almost 179,000.
Many of the Central Americans do not sneak over under the cover of darkness; they are delivered by smugglers to the banks of the Rio Grande and wade across in broad daylight to turn themselves in to Border Patrol. That's because most of the migrants are asking for some type of asylum and, therefore, are entitled to go before an immigration judge to plead their case, rather than being quickly deported. But it often takes months, if not years, for the backlogged courts to determine whether asylum seekers face danger at home and deserve protection.
In the meantime, most of the migrants are released from detention after a few days. Often, they do not appear for their court dates. Of the 20,000 families whose legal proceedings ended with deportation orders between July 2014 and August this year, 85 percent did not show up in court, fueling the perception that migrants are gaming the system and intending to remain in the country illegally.
Border Patrol union leaders want more agents and immigration judges, plus longer detention periods for asylum seekers awaiting court dates. Sending a stern message will discourage future migrants, said Hector Garza, a Border Patrol agent in the Laredo, Texas, sector and a union representative.
"You do have to take some action," he said. "Right now, it's out of control."
But U.S. courts have already ruled that asylum seekers can't be held simply to deter other migrants from coming. And "you can't get rid of the due-process proceedings," said Lorilei Williams, director of the immigration unit at Staten Island Legal Services, in New York. Asylum applicants are generally entitled to court hearings under the terms of international law.
A big increase in judges would take time and money. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents the Texas border and received budgetary approval for 55 more immigration judges in fiscal 2016, said it was unrealistic to think that the courts could quickly accelerate their processing of cases.
"Right now, we're backlogged half a million [cases] with the current judges that we have," Cuellar said. "Practically, you're talking about years and years" to process those cases.
Spikes in illegal migration to the United States occur for different reasons, including misinformation about potential amnesties and fears of a stricter climate in the future.
"I'm sure that the discussion about a wall and getting tough on immigration was used by people down there to say, 'Get up here now before it's too late,'" McAllen Mayor Jim Darling said in an interview.
A Section on 11/19/2016