John Ladd sleeps better knowing Donald Trump is in the White House.
Not just in some figurative sense. When Ladd lays his head down at his ranch house a mile and a quarter from the U.S.-Mexico border, he no longer worries about hundreds of trespassers a day trampling his pastures, tearing up fencing or setting his cattle loose.
He doesn’t fret as much as he once did about stumbling across a dead body — 18 have turned up over the years — or finding a migrant sitting in his living room, which happened once back in 2002.
“The amazing thing is as soon as Donald Trump got elected, the border issue of illegal entries coming into the U.S. has dramatically stopped,” the 69-year-old Ladd said, overstating things somewhat. “And we’re delighted with that.”
Back in the White House for just over a month, Trump has rapidly and ruthlessly delivered on his promise to turn America upside down, firing government workers en masse, eliminating whole agencies and slashing certain programs.
The promised benefit — a leaner, less costly and more efficient federal government — is purely theoretical at this stage.
But one place where Trump’s return to power has been tangibly felt, and greatly welcomed, is here in the far southeastern corner of Arizona, where the U.S. and Mexico sit uneasily side by side. After growing to record levels under President Joe Biden, illegal border crossings began falling during the final months of his term, a trend that has accelerated since Trump moved back into the Oval Office.
At the crossings’ peak, Ladd said, as many as 700 migrants a day passed through his property. That number fell drastically during Trump’s first term, then shot way back up during the Biden administration, despite hidden cameras, motion-detecting sensors and the installation of soaring steel fence posts — the border wall, as it’s known — across the southern length of his ranch. Today, under Trump, daily crossings have fallen to around 10 or so, Ladd said, and Border Patrol agents tell him they’ve grown bored.
He paused alongside the wall, the rust-colored soil at his feet spreading for miles around, his view bracketed by the San Jose Mountains to the south and a majestic limestone bluff to the north. The stillness was so profound it was almost a physical presence.
“If we didn’t have to deal with the border,” Ladd said, “there’s no finer life.”
When it comes to the country’s dysfunctional immigration system, Ladd went on, there’s plenty of blame and hypocrisy to go around.
Clinton, Obama and the Bushes, he said, rattling off past presidents, all promised to fix the problem. None did. Even Ronald Reagan, Ladd’s all-time favorite president, disappointed. If anything, he said, Reagan made things worse by signing a 1986 law granting amnesty to about 3 million people who came to the U.S. illegally. Then he failed to deliver the border enforcement he promised, or the crackdown on employers who hired undocumented workers.
“It’s a scam,” Ladd said, differentiating between what politicians say and what they do. “Republicans want cheap labor. Democrats want cheap votes. Americans want cheap tomatoes.”
And who can blame them, given how accustomed America has grown to the fruits of a low-cost, undocumented workforce?
Ladd doesn’t agree with every one of Trump’s words or deeds, but he does more often than not. “I admire him,” Ladd said, “because he says stuff that nobody else will say. I admire him for having the fortitude to say it.”
And when the president utters obvious falsehoods, like claiming that Mexico would pay for the border wall, which was never remotely plausible? “I don’t take him literally,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t think he takes himself seriously, either.”
It remains to be seen whether the drastic dropoff in illegal border crossings will continue. It’s not unusual for traffic to fall at this time of year. And some migrants may simply be waiting to see how court battles over Trump’s immigration policies play out.
But for now, Ladd is enjoying more peace of mind than he’s had in years. And he ranks Trump just behind Reagan as his all-time favorite president.
Mark Z. Barabak is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
