After reaching record highs at the end of last year, the number of families claiming asylum on the Southern border has showed a precipitous decline in February.

January and February generally are slow times for illegal immigration, but lawyers and activists who work with the families held at two South Texas detention centers said the slowdown can’t be attributed to seasonal trends.

Underscoring the downward trend, the Homeland Security Department said Wednesday night that people caught crossing the border illegally had plummeted from 31,578 in January to 18,762 in February.

“Since the administration’s implementation of executive orders to enforce immigration laws, apprehensions and inadmissible activity is trending toward the lowest monthly total in at least the last five years,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in a statement.

Earlier this year, immigration officials shut down two emergency processing centers, one in South Texas and one near El Paso, that they had opened in December to handle an influx of families.

On Monday, only 194 people were in the 830-bed family detention center in Karnes County, and 439 in the 2,400-bed facility in Dilley, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The agency said it’s holding so few people because “fewer apprehensions are being made along the Southern border.”

The numbers are a big drop from December, when so many families were crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, mostly in South Texas, that ICE released hundreds of people from the Karnes City and Dilley centers in San Antonio, without bus or plane tickets, to create bed space.

Apprehension numbers for January show the number of unaccompanied children and families crossing the border fell by about 40 percent from December, then dropped another 40 percent in February. Other apprehensions also decreased, though less dramatically.

Officials in the Mexican border city of Reynosa said they’ve seen a drastic decrease in the number of accompanied children at a government-run shelter there.

Mexico’s family welfare agency in November housed 168 minors, including 124 non-Mexicans, at its Reynosa shelter. But by February, the number of minors had dropped to just 45, with only 13 from countries other than Mexico.

The decrease in apprehensions at the border comes as President Donald Trump and his Cabinet members have directed immigration officials to expand detention space and be more skeptical of asylum seekers. And Kelly has said he’ll consider separating children from their parents at the border.

The reasons for the decrease of asylum-seeking families remain a source of speculation, and it’s not clear if the total number of people trying to cross the border illegally has slowed as significantly. Trump’s tough talk on immigration is one of the reasons activists have suggested is stemming the flow of families crossing the border.

American Gateways, which provides immigration legal services in Central and South Texas, offers daily orientations at the detention centers. The week of Trump’s inauguration, American Gateways would see about 70 women in each of its orientation sessions, said Brett Goodman, an attorney for the organization who leads its family detention team.

“Women in our (orientation) presentations have also expressed concerns of their quality of life in the United States, uncertain of how viable living safely and for an extended period of time in the United States will be for them during the Trump administration,” Goodman said.

He also said women in the two detention centers reported that they were turned away by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers when they tried to claim asylum at international bridges along the border with Mexico.

The San Antonio Express-News in December reported that activists and immigrants said CBP officers were turning away asylum seekers, although they’re required by law to refer to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services anyone who expresses fear of returning to their home country.

Those complaints come as more families try to claim asylum at the ports of entry rather than crossing the Rio Grande into Texas and surrendering to Border Patrol agents. In a statement Wednesday, CBP said it follows asylum laws.

At the Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, where aid workers have opened a shelter to assist those released by Border Patrol, Sister Norma Pimentel, the head of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, said the numbers were down, but were in line with last year’s.

“The families aren't coming to Sacred Heart as many as we had before,” she said. Only one woman and her child stayed at the respite center Tuesday night — another mother and child stayed at the center Wednesday night. “The maximum we've hit for this week was between 20 and 30.”

Lawyers and advocates working with immigrants in South Texas warned it’s too soon to know if this is a long-term trend or if the numbers will climb again.

“This time of year tends to be a slower time of year, but it seems that these numbers are lower than average,” said Amy Fischer, the policy director for San Antonio’s Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. “We don’t know if people aren’t coming because they’ve heard about the change of administration and they’ve decided this is not a safe place to seek asylum. We don’t know if that news has traveled down to Central America. We know that country conditions have not changed, so we don’t know if they’re seeking safety elsewhere.”

Mexico, which at the request of the U.S. has cracked down on Central Americans trying to reach its northern border, has seen a sharp rise in the number of people requesting asylum. After just 3,424 asylum requests recorded in 2015, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance registered 8,781 asylum requests in 2016, most of them from Honduras and El Salvador.

After falling steadily for nearly a decade, illegal immigration increased in 2014, driven mostly by women and children from three Central American countries, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, crossing the border and requesting asylum.

The three countries are plagued by corruption, gang warfare and violence against women. The vast majority of families and unaccompanied children who cross the border do so in South Texas.

In response, the Obama administration opened the detention centers in Dilley and Karnes City, the only facilities in the country that hold large numbers of families. The increase in families seeking asylum and the decision to detain them sparked a debate between restrictionist groups and the unions representing ICE officers and Border Patrol agents who said the administration was doing too much to accommodate families who came to the U.S. illegally, while advocates like RAICES argue that the U.S. is required to hear the asylum cases of those fleeing violence in their home countries and shouldn’t keep them in detention.

In 2015, a federal judge sided with the advocates and ruled ICE can’t hold families for extended periods of time. ICE now says it holds most families for about 20 days. Secretary Kelly has said officials are considering coming into compliance with the judge’s order by holding parents in detention until their asylum cases are adjudicated and releasing their children to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The low numbers of families in detention this week stands in stark contrast to December, when more than 16,000 immigrants traveling in families were apprehended by Border Patrol, a record for that time of year. Another 3,800 surrendered at international crossings. The Dilley and Karnes City detention centers were so full they released more than 500 people in San Antonio over the course of one weekend, most of them with plans to reunite with family elsewhere in the U.S. but had no way of getting there.

Aid workers here were overwhelmed as the families camped out on the floor of the San Antonio Mennonite Church in Southtown.

To process the large numbers of families, CBP opened two tent cities, one in Donna near McAllen and the other in Tornillo near El Paso. However, both facilities shut down last month.

jbuch@express-news.net

Twitter: @jlbuch