Migrants used to gather by the hundreds in encampments in Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting for a chance to cross into the United States. But as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office on Monday, few people could be found this past week on the once-teeming embankments.

All that remained were extinguished campfires, discarded shoes, shirts and toothbrushes.

One Mexican city after another has reported a similar situation along the border with the United States, where the number of migrants has steadily dropped in recent months. The decline has been attributed largely to hardened restrictions introduced by the Biden administration and by Mexican and Panamanian officials meant to deter migration.

As President Biden came under increasing pressure during his re-election campaign to curb migration flows, he issued in June an executive order effectively blocking undocumented migrants from receiving asylum. That month, U.S. border officials recorded 83,532 illegal crossings, a significant drop from the previous month’s 117,905.

Despite the decline, illegal crossings remain higher than during much of Mr. Trump’s first term, fueling calls by the new Trump administration, and even by some Democrats in Congress, for more severe restrictions on migration to the United States.

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Homeland Security Department, told senators on Friday that she planned to reinstate a Trump-era policy forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. cases and reduce temporary immigration relief for people from countries experiencing unrest.

“Border security must remain a top priority,” Ms. Noem said.

Some officials in Latin America are pushing back, arguing that the tougher restrictions on both sides of the border have worked to stem the crisis.

“The flow of migration from the south of Mexico toward the border has diminished in the last few months,” said Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for receiving migrants. “There is no crisis,” he said of Ciudad Juárez. “There is no problem.”

The quieter border these days contrasts with the recent years of frequent tragedies along the frontier, including family separations and the 2023 fire at a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez that killed dozens.

Thousands of migrants are still trying to make their way north even as the authorities on both sides of the border harden restrictions. But overall, movement through the Darién Gap, the inhospitable land bridge connecting North and South America, and shelter capacity in U.S.-Mexico border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros have become indicators of how migration flows are easing.

“Normally, we would have around 150,” said Lucio Torres, who has been overseeing a shelter in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande, for three years. The shelter has capacity for 300 people. This week, the facility housed only seven.

Mr. Serrano Escobar said that migrant shelters run by government and civic organizations in Ciudad Juárez, with capacity for about 3,000 migrants, are currently only about 40 percent full. “The city is calm,” he added.

In November, more than 46,000 people crossed the border illegally, the lowest number during the Biden administration. December saw more than 47,000 illegal crossings. By comparison, in December 2023, illegal crossings surpassed a record of roughly 250,000.

Mexican security forces said that they detained more than 475,000 migrants in the last quarter of 2024. That is nearly 68 percent more detentions compared with the same period a year earlier, according to government data.

Solsiree Petit, 44, a Venezuelan teacher in Ciudad Juárez, said she had tumors in her breasts that require surgery. She said her sons, 10 and 17, had turned themselves in to the U.S. authorities seeking asylum about a week ago. She said she had an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in El Paso to submit her own asylum application on Jan. 29.

She said she hoped that her appointment would still be honored under the Trump administration. “I prefer not to think otherwise about that,” she said, “because it depresses you more.”

CBP One, the phone app that Ms. Petit used to schedule her appointment, allowed U.S. immigration authorities to process nearly 44,000 migrants in December at ports of entry.

While the Biden administration created the app to incentivize migrants to avoid crossing into the country illegally, Ms. Noem, the Homeland Security nominee, said she would wind down use of the app, reflecting concerns among Republicans that it was used to allow migrants into the country who should be barred from entry.

Similar to the tense calm seen in Ciudad Juárez, the Pumarejo shelter in Matamoros, which can accommodate 1,500 people, currently has only 260, according to shelter officials. In Tijuana, three notable shelters indicated that they were only 50 percent full.

Shelters in Guatemala City have also all but emptied of migrants heading north, said Karina López, a social worker at the city’s Casa del Migrante shelter. Several years ago, the shelter struggled to care for more than 3,000 weary migrants with just over 100 beds. Those numbers are unheard-of today, Ms. López said. That is partly because people are staying only a few hours in their rush to get to the border before the inauguration, she said.

Fear of violent crime and extortion is also thought to be keeping some migrants away from shelters targeted by organized crime in Mexico. Instead of seeking refuge there, some are choosing to stay with acquaintances, in rented rooms or with their smugglers as they try to make their way to the border, legally or illegally.

“I don’t care if the devil himself is in my way, I’m going forward,” said Juan Hernández, a handyman from Honduras. Mr. Hernández, 45, said he had lived in the United States for 23 years and had been deported five times. He arrived six months ago in Monterrey, a major industrial hub in northeast Mexico, after being deported to Honduras following a conviction in North Carolina for drunken driving.

He said he planned to cross the border again soon in a bid to reunite with his two children living in Raleigh, N.C.

For now, migrants like Mr. Hernández appear to be a minority. Not long ago in the historic center of Guatemala City, the sidewalks were filled with people begging for spare change or a meal for their children, many of them draped in the Venezuelan flag. This week, they were mostly absent.

In the Darién Gap, the number of migrants fell sharply after the Panamanian government introduced tougher restrictions to complement the Biden administration’s new asylum policies.

Two years ago, boatloads of people trying to get to the jungle would leave every day from Necoclí, a Colombian beach town at the southern end of the jungle. Migrants would often photograph the boat journeys and share pictures on social media, where they came to symbolize the migrants’ last moments of safety before entering the perilous Darién Gap jungle.

Now, days go by when there are not enough migrants to fill a single boat. Instead, the boats are leaving every two or three days and not always full.

In August 2023, a record 80,000 migrants passed through the Darién in a single month. In December, just under 5,000 people went through, according to Panamanian officials.

Yet, as the Trump inauguration approaches, smugglers have continued to urge migrants to get to the border and avoid a potential crackdown. Fearing it could be their last chance to make their way to the United States, some have resorted to begging friends to loan them money or to turning over the deeds to their homes to smugglers as collateral, shelter operators say.

One option offered by smugglers and referred to by migrants as the “V.I.P. route” shuttles migrants from Guatemala to Cancún, Mexico, by land, and from Cancún to Ciudad Juárez by air using false Mexican passports, according to Ms. López, the social worker. The price of a one-way flight on this route peaked at around $450 this week.

After the inauguration, the price drops to about $100.

Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal from Guatemala City; Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia; Chantal Flores from Monterrey, Mexico; Edyra Espriella from Matamoros, Mexico; Aline Corpus from Tijuana, Mexico; Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Rocío Gallegos from Mexico City; and Hamed Aleaziz from Washington.

Making his final trip as America’s top diplomat last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Paris, his former hometown, to a hero’s welcome.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed Mr. Blinken “an eminent servant of peace” at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace before awarding him the country’s highest tribute, the Legion of Honor medal. With its red silk ribbon pinned to his jacket, Mr. Blinken called the medal “the honor of a lifetime.”

It was a very different scene back in Washington a few days later, when Mr. Blinken gave a final speech before a crowd of foreign policy experts.

“Secretary Blinken! Your legacy will be genocide! You will forever be known as ‘Bloody Blinken, Secretary of Genocide,’” shouted a protester who had infiltrated the Atlantic Council event. Security officers led her out of the room, as well as a man waving a sign that read “Blinken: War Criminal.”

A similar drama punctured Mr. Blinken’s farewell news conference at the State Department two days later, as a journalist, shouting that Mr. Blinken belonged in The Hague, was carried from the room by security officers.

The contrasting scenes reveal the duality of Mr. Blinken’s tenure as secretary of state. Over four years and more than one million flight miles logged, Mr. Blinken was the face of America’s deep involvement in two wars, one in Ukraine and the other in Israel and Gaza. The first, the defense of Ukraine against Russia, was a popular cause marked by Ukrainian flags flying from American porches, and Mr. Blinken basked in accolades as he invoked the highest principles of international law and human rights.

But the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ignited by Palestinian terrorist attacks became a political and moral nightmare for the Biden administration as Israeli strikes with American-supplied weapons killed an estimated 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children.

While President Biden set the policy, Mr. Blinken, his decades-long aide and surrogate son, presented it to the public. The diplomat was accused of gutting the very principles he had championed in Ukraine, and became the target of vitriol rarely directed at a U.S. secretary of state.

So entwined are Mr. Blinken’s work and his reputation with conflict that he could just as easily be called by a retired cabinet title that is still on office plaques in the old State Department building — secretary of war.

Mr. Blinken reflected on the question during an interview this week in his wood-paneled office, which he had decorated with contemporary art pieces from the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Mr. Blinken said, “If we want to use the term ‘war’ expansively, I think the State Department has been” — he paused — “yes, it has taken up a lot of our time and effort, and yes, as part of that, you learn a lot about weapons systems.”

War presented the Biden administration with the opportunity to forge closer international partnerships, and it is there that the president and his aides have excelled, Mr. Blinken said. “The United States is able to engage a more contested, a more complicated, a more combustible world from a position of strength,” he said. “That’s what I believe our legacy is.”

Mr. Blinken was no stranger to war when he started in his current post. Over a long career as a Washington foreign policy hand, including as deputy secretary of state, he had grappled with armed conflicts, notably the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his childhood was shaped by the memory of World War II, specifically by stories of how his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, had survived the Holocaust.

At the ceremony in Paris, Mr. Blinken cited a lesson he had learned from his stepfather: “We have to remain eternally vigilant, because humanity’s striving for the best can sometimes be overcome by its capacity for the worst.”

But the world served up an especially ugly parade of horrors as Mr. Blinken took charge of the State Department: strife and atrocities in Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia, Armenia, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, where the secretary declared this month that combatants were carrying out a genocide.

Bearing a flawlessly polite and self-effacing demeanor, Mr. Blinken spent countless hours trying to resolve and prevent conflict. But for better or worse, his legacy rests not on forging grand peace treaties — those traditional diplomatic prizes eluded him — but on his role in two wars that often cast him in very different lights.

Drawing the Line Against Russia

Mr. Blinken’s first test, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, was widely seen as a fiasco.

The Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul in August 2021 caught the State Department by surprise, forcing a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies. Some Republican lawmakers demanded that Mr. Blinken resign.

His moment came when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

As Mr. Putin was building up for the assault, Mr. Blinken delivered a speech in Berlin invoking how Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had stood up to Soviet power and declared that the United States would again defend “the governing principles of international peace and security.” A day later in Geneva, he faced down his grim Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, warning that a Russian attack would draw “a swift, severe and a united response.”

It was the kind of commanding, high-stakes diplomacy you might see in the Netflix series “The Diplomat.” Mr. Blinken deployed his flawless French in Paris and Brussels, and cajoled leaders in Seoul and Tokyo. The result: a coalition of about 50 nations committed to supplying weapons to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

As the war progressed, neither side sought negotiations, so Mr. Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist. Immersed in details of military hardware and battlefield conditions, he often argued against more risk-averse Pentagon officials in favor of sending powerful American weapons to Ukraine.

And when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should capitalize on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted the fight should go on.

Visiting Kyiv in May, Mr. Blinken, a guitar player, took the stage at a packed music club and led a local band in a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The defense of Ukraine had offered him a literal rock star moment.

Bombs and Bodies in Gaza

Five days after the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas in October 2023, Mr. Blinken stood next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at a military base in Tel Aviv and told the world how the killings had seared him personally.

“I come before you not only as the U.S. secretary of state, but also as a Jew,” he said. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews and for Jews everywhere.”

That moment, too, had a noble glow. Mr. Blinken was rushing to the rescue of an American friend who had been horribly violated in the attacks. Hamas and its partners took hostages and killed more than 1,200 Israelis — the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

But this time the narrative would grow far more complicated. In private meetings on that same trip, Mr. Blinken and his aides heard about war plans for Gaza that foretold more mass killing — including ominous reminders from Israeli officials that America had once been willing to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

Mr. Blinken would make a dozen wartime trips to the Middle East. They were grim affairs, in contrast to the European tours where he was hailed as a savior of Ukraine. Israeli officials complained about pressure from Washington on one day while Arab monarchs fumed on the next that Israel was out of control.

Again he immersed himself in military matters. Meeting with Israel’s war cabinet, he would study maps of Gaza and discuss details of strategy. On one visit, they scrambled into a bunker when Tel Aviv came under rocket attack.

He beseeched the Israelis to let in more humanitarian aid and limit civilian casualties as they pummeled Gaza, turning hospitals, schools and mosques to dust. Some State Department officials argued in vain that Israel was intentionally withholding food and medicine from desperate Palestinians. For months, Mr. Blinken has said the department was “assessing” reports of Israeli war crimes.

Over time, Mr. Blinken’s visits with Mr. Netanyahu seemed to become less and less effective. Sometimes the Israeli leader would publicly undermine his American guest’s positions hours after hosting him.

Critics of the war said that only withholding military aid would change the Israeli approach. That never happened.

In keeping with Mr. Biden’s “bear hug” approach, Mr. Blinken and the State Department kept sending Israel weapons, including 2,000-pound bombs that U.S. military officials call unsuited for urban combat.

Over the 16 months of war, Mr. Biden has approved $26 billion in aid to Israel. Mr. Blinken has never expressed regrets over refraining from using that leverage to influence Mr. Netanyahu. Signs of “daylight” between the United States and Israel only encouraged Hamas, he says.

State Department officials sent Mr. Blinken dissent cables opposing the policy. A handful resigned and became public dissidents.

“We don’t have a policy,” said Michael Casey, a diplomat and Iraq war veteran who resigned last year from his State Department post in Jerusalem, where he worked on Gaza. “We support the Israeli government’s goals over our own interests.”

He said that “of everyone in the cast of characters at the top, Antony Blinken has been the most disappointing.” Despite showing flashes of empathy with Palestinians, he said, Mr. Blinken never veered from the approach to Israel.

Protesters camped outside his Virginia home and splashed fake blood on his black Suburban. The descendant of a Holocaust survivor was accused of enabling “genocide.”

Such invective “comes with the job,” Mr. Blinken said, while warning that a trend of hounding public officials in private spaces like their homes could deter people from entering government.

For a time, it seemed that he and his colleagues might have nothing to show for their many months pressing the warring parties for a cease-fire deal. Then came this week’s agreement between Israel and Hamas.

Even if it took pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the deal, if it holds, could be a welcome part of Mr. Blinken’s legacy. But the clock has run out on his greater ambition of brokering a historic agreement to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would, in theory, have included a first-ever explicit pathway to a Palestinian state.

Such a pact might have won him some forgiveness from furious Western liberals and Muslims worldwide.

He admits that public opinion toward the United States has grown “very challenging” in places where America is seen as hypocritical for denouncing Russia’s war while defending Israel’s.

He must also accept frustrating uncertainties. Ukraine’s fate could be in peril under Mr. Trump. And as for Gaza, some doubt that a cease-fire can endure.

That is the nature of war, Mr. Blinken says: “Most of these challenges don’t have neat Hollywood endings.”

He leaves haunted by his gazing into the same abyss of humanity that his stepfather survived decades ago. “What really drives me more than anything else is the demonization we see in all directions,” he said. “The inability to acknowledge suffering on each side, the inability to see the humanity in the other.”

After Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday, Canadians will learn whether he intends to follow through on his threat to immediately impose 25 percent tariffs on exports from Canada to the United States.

Many people here have told me they are looking forward to the details of the federal government’s response to any American trade action. Matina Stevis-Gridneff, our Canada bureau chief, reports that it will be much like Canada’s response to the tariffs on aluminum and steel that Mr. Trump introduced during his first administration. Any coming retaliatory tariffs, she writes, will “focus on goods made in Republican or swing states, where the pain of tariffs, like pressure on jobs and the bottom lines of local businesses, would affect Trump allies.”

[Read: Canada’s Plan for a Trade War: Pain for Red States and Trump Allies]

But given the size of Canada’s economy, the country cannot inflict the same amount of harm that the United States can. That raises the question of whether retaliation, no matter how politically targeted, will be effective.

There is, of course, no way to answer that question. But an earlier trade war between Canada and the United States might offer some indications of what’s to come.

Back in 1930, as today, the North American neighbors were each other’s largest trading partner. But the mix of goods was quite different: For one thing, Canada was importing most of its oil from the United States, while today oil and gas are Canada’s largest exports.

A movement by American farmers to close off competition from imports, including those from Canada, to bolster prices ballooned into a sweeping piece of legislation known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It raised already high U.S. tariffs, eventually bringing the average import duty to a staggering 59.1 percent.

Then as now, the tariffs were denounced by many economists. Over 1,000 of them unsuccessfully petitioned President Herbert Hoover to veto the bill.

Historians and economists still debate the effect of Smoot-Hawley on the Great Depression. But a 1997 paper by three economists at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania documents how it harmed Canada’s economy and profoundly influenced its politics.

Most of the seven largest exports from Canada to the United States at the time, the paper says, had large declines. Exports of milk and cheese plunged by 65 percent, and cattle sales to the United States fell by 84 percent.

Before Smoot-Hawley, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberal prime minister, had been planning to reduce tariffs on Canadian imports of U.S. goods. In the hope of avoiding a trade war, Mackenzie King matched the new U.S. tariffs on only 16 products, which accounted for 30 percent of imports from the United States.

Like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today, Mackenzie King led a minority government. He passed bills with the support of the Progressives, a party supported largely by farmers.

During the 1930 election campaign, R.B. Bennett, the Conservative leader, relentlessly attacked Mackenzie King for not retaliating more forcefully against the United States.

Bennett’s speeches about the merits of high tariffs were remarkably similar to Mr. Trump’s social media posts on the topic today.

“How many tens of thousands of American workmen are living on Canadian money today?” he said while campaigning in Quebec. “They’ve got the jobs, and we’ve got the soup kitchens.”

He promised the crowd that he would use tariffs to “blast a way into markets that have been closed.”

A vote analysis in the Lehigh paper concludes that tariff issues were a key factor in Bennett’s victory in the 1930 election, which brought the Conservatives their only majority government between 1911 and 1958.

While Bennett did increase tariffs, they failed to blast a way into any market, according to Robert Bothwell, an emeritus professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto.

But, Professor Bothwell told me, Bennett found another solution, which involved expanding on one of Mackenzie King’s actions: When he imposed the tariffs on U.S. goods, Mackenzie King also cut them on 270 products from Britain and other countries within its empire.

Bennett hosted a conference in Ottawa that led to a series of agreements between Britain and its former colonies that greatly opened up trade between them by reducing and in some cases eliminating tariffs.

That arrangement, Professor Bothwell said, could neither offset the economic collapse of the Depression nor fully replace the American market for Canadian exports, but it did greatly mitigate the harm caused by Smoot-Hawley.

“We had an out of sorts, and it really did work in the ’30s,” he said. “Every time the Americans jacked up their tariffs, we would tend to trade more with the British.”

When Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded Hoover as U.S. president in 1933, Professor Bothwell said, his administration soon noticed the loss of exports to Canada, driven by the combination of American tariffs and the Imperial arrangement with Britain, and moved to compromise on trade.

Today there is talk that Canada will again try to build up exports with nations other than the United States. But Professor Bothwell said that changes in trade, manufacturing and transportation have made a repeat unlikely.

“We don’t have an obvious alternative,” he said. “I don’t see us having a way to absorb the same amount of exports as we did in the ’30s.”

• Mark Carney, former governor of the Canadian and British central banks, and Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister, have both officially announced their campaigns to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the Liberal Party leader.

• With the Buffalo Bills and the Detroit Lions both Super Bowl contenders, N.F.L. fans in Canada have two border city teams to cheer for.

• Canada is sending air tankers and dozens of its battle-tested wildland firefighters to Los Angeles.

• Home security-camera footage shows a puff of smoke, along with the sound of an explosion, as a meteorite lands in Charlottetown.

• In a lawsuit, Drake accused his own record label, Universal Music Group, of putting his life and his reputation at risk by releasing and promoting a popular diss track by his musical rival Kendrick Lamar.

• In Opinion, the Times columnist Ross Douthat makes the case for Canada’s joining the United States. Two readers respond with letters declining the invitation.

Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected]. More about Ian Austen

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