To read some headlines, you’d think President Joe Biden had solved the border crisis: "Border Arrests Down 70% the Biden administration claims." And if you cherry-pick the worst of the days just before Title 42 ended, the 70% number is technically true.
But if you take a step back and look at the monthly numbers, you’ll see some progress but still a raging border crisis by the standards of any previous administration, all while Biden is actively lying to illegal immigrants and pushing them into makeshift encampments that are more dangerous than anything that existed during the Trump presidency.
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First the numbers.
According to the latest Southwest Land Border Encounters report released this week, 144,571 illegal immigrants were encountered on the southern border in June. Yes, that is a 30% drop from May and a 42% drop from the all-time high in December 2022, but it is higher than the highest number ever under President Trump (144,116 in May 2019), a number that everyone agreed at the time was a crisis.
For a functioning border, look to fiscal 2017, when just 21,657 illegal immigrants were encountered on the southern border. Biden’s most recent 144,571 migrants encountered is orders of magnitude worse than 21,657.
The narrative that the Biden administration wants to sell is that what limited progress it has had in reducing southern border encounters, that is all due to the other “legal” pathways Biden has created for immigrants to enter the United States. Specifically, Biden is granting “parole” to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans every month who are flown into the U.S. from other countries. This is in addition to the 1,450 immigrants Biden is granting CBP One app appointments per day on the southern border.
None of the immigrants granted parole through these programs will receive a final asylum determination before their two-year “parole” term is up. What happens to all of them once their parole is up and they are no longer legally in the country? Who knows? If Biden remains president, it is likely they will be given new “parole” terms indefinitely.
But even with the 30,000-a-month aerial parole program and the 1,450 CBP One app parole program, there are tens of thousands of people who want to enter the U.S. every month. What is Biden doing with them?
Forcing them to "Remain in Mexico" with the threat that if they do cross, they will be denied a CBP One app appointment.
The result is thousands of immigrants living in encampments on the Mexican side of the border. According to the Biden administration’s own estimates, approximately 104,000 immigrants are amassed in northern Mexico, waiting to get in.
Life in these camps is not good. According to Human Rights First, the immigrants stranded in Mexico are “exposed to violent crime, assault, and even torture.”
Those who grow tired of living in squalid encampments and try to cross the border illegally without the CBP One app are then lied to by the Biden administration and are tricked into being sent further south in Mexico.
Danelis Benita Perez Rosas, for example, told the Guardian that once she was arrested after crossing the border illegally, she was told she would either be deported back to her native Venezuela or be sent back to Mexico if she signed a document presented to her by Customs and Border Protection officials.
Rosas signed the document and was then transported to Villahermosa, a Mexican city 450 miles southwest of Mexico City. Rosas knew no one there, had no money, and even worse, the CBP One app did not work because the app's geolocation feature required the person to be in Mexico City or near the U.S.-Mexico border.
“For her it had been a bewildering experience,” the Guardian reported. “For the US authorities it was one less migrant going through the asylum process.”
Even worse for Rosas, the voluntary return document she signed included the admission that “I do not fear return to my own country.” A statement that will make it even harder for her to win asylum should she ever make it into the U.S.
And Rosas is not alone. You can see it right in the CBP data. In April, the month before Title 42 ended, just 2,000 illegal immigrants were “voluntarily” returned to their home country. In May, that number jumped to 19,000 and rose again in June to 20,000. Another 16,931 were processed through expedited removal, which means they were most likely deported to their home countries.
To the extent that the Biden administration is lowering illegal border crossings, it is because they have stepped up border enforcement and are denying illegal immigrants entry.
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But many illegal immigrants are being caught and released into the U.S. At least 35,793 were caught and released in June alone. And this number will most likely go up. While CBP is supposed to deny entry to those who did not first apply for asylum in another country, there are loopholes to that policy, including: 1.) the inability to access the CBP One app, 2.) medical emergencies, 3.) imminent threat to migrant safety, and 4.) human trafficking victims.
As illegal immigrants learn what specifically to say and do to qualify for these exemptions, and the cartels who smuggle them coach them on how to do it, more and more of them will be caught and released into the U.S. At that point, the number of illegal crossings will again go up, and the Biden administration will again be setting records for illegal border crossings every month.