Irecently analyzed CBP’s border statistics for the month of June and highlighted the fact that Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal migrants at the U.S.-Mexico line last month (83,536) represented “a 29.3 percent decline over May, but more importantly the lowest monthly total since January 2021 (75,316)”. January 2021 was the last partial month of the Trump administration, but the White House now asserts “there are fewer unlawful border crossings than at the end of the previous Administration” — a clearly erroneous claim likely advanced to fool the public. Here are the facts.
The White House Tweet. On June 16, the official White House X (previously Twitter) account issued the following tweet:
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“The End of the Previous Administration”. The phrase “the end of the previous administration” is to a degree subjective. Is the last full month under Trump “the end”? If it is, in December 2020 Border Patrol agents apprehended fewer than 71,200 illegal migrants at the Southwest border, roughly 15 percent less than in June.
In fact, apprehensions creeped up between the November 2020 election and the inauguration, as illegal migrants (reasonably and correctly) expected “kinder, gentler” treatment under Biden than under Trump, rising about 3 percent compared to October 2020 (the month before the election).
To be clear, that rise actually began in May 2020, but only because apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico line cratered in April 2020.
That was the first full month after CDC exclusion orders under Title 42 of the U.S. Code were put into place. Those orders, implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, directed CBP to expel all illegal entrants, and that April agents apprehended fewer than 16,200 illegal migrants at the Southwest border.
That was the lowest monthly apprehension total in four years, with the all-time record low in the 25-year-period CBP has published monthly records being April 2017 (two months after Trump took office), when agents apprehended just 11,127 illegal entrants at the Southwest border.
The “Trump Effect” and Its Limitations. That April 2020 nadir plainly was due to the “Trump effect”, an early expectation among migrants (and more importantly, their smugglers) that there would be a massive border crackdown under the 45th president.
That Trump effect didn’t last, however, because smugglers quickly realized the then-president alone couldn’t close the loopholes that facilitated the quick release of — among others — adults travelling with children in “family units” (FMUs) and “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs) entering illegally without parents or guardians.
He needed Congress to plug those loopholes, but a closely divided Congress did nothing except argue about UACs and take meaningless votes, all while apprehensions at the border surged.
The Nielsen “Border Emergency” and “Remain in Mexico”. By early 2019, so many FMUs and UACs were arriving at the Southwest border illegally that in late March, then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen declared a “border emergency”, explaining:
Today I report to the American people that we face a cascading crisis at our southern border. The system is in freefall. DHS is doing everything possible to respond to a growing humanitarian catastrophe while also securing our borders, but we have reached peak capacity and are now forced to pull from other missions to respond to the emergency.
…
In the past, the majority of migration flows were single adults who could move through our immigration system quickly and be returned to their home countries if they had no legal right to stay. Now we are seeing a flood of families and unaccompanied children, who — because of outdated laws and misguided court decisions — cannot receive efficient adjudication and, in most cases, will never be removed from the United States even if they are here unlawfully. The result is a massive “pull factor” to our country. [Emphasis added.]
Trump and Nielsen responded by implementing the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico”.
Under MPP, illegal entrants apprehended at the Southwest border were sent back to Mexico to await their removal hearings at border “port courts”, but the program was initially met with court challenges and resource issues.
During that implementation period, illegal entries — and entries of FMUs in particular — surged, rising from fewer than 93,000 in March (when Nielsen issued her statement) to nearly 133,000 in May. Of those May apprehensions, nearly 64 percent involved aliens in FMUs.
By late September 2019, however, MPP along with other quickly implemented Trump policies drove apprehensions down to just over 40,500 — fewer than half of which involved FMUs. That decline continued through the fall and into the early winter of 2020, just before Title 42 was implemented and drove apprehensions down further.
The Benefit of a Questionable Doubt. Perhaps the White House considers that period — the “border emergency” summer of 2019, prior to the start of Title 42 — to be “the end of the previous Administration”. It’s an odd description (the end of the Trump administration would have been May 2023, when apprehensions neared 172,000), but at least it would explain things.
If that’s the case, the administration should accept the blame for quickly suspending and then (twice) ending MPP, even as Southwest border apprehensions surged and states sued (successfully at first before ultimately losing at the Supreme Court) to force the administration to reimplement Remain in Mexico. “Blame” and “politics” mix like bleach and ammonia, however, creating a toxic brew.
The termination of MPP coupled with the administration’s refusal to comply with statutory mandates directing DHS to detain all illegal migrants and abuse of its limited parole power to release those migrants instead have been the main drivers of the border disaster that now hangs around the president’s neck like an albatross heading into the November elections.
By the way, it’s not just my opinion that Biden’s “catch and release” policies have driven that migrant surge; a federal judge shares that sentiment as well, concluding in March 2023:
There were undoubtedly geopolitical and other factors that contributed to the surge of aliens at the Southwest Border, but [Biden DHS officials’] position that the crisis at the border is not largely of their own making because of their more lenient detention policies is divorced from reality and belied by the evidence. Indeed, the more persuasive evidence establishes that [those officials] effectively incentivized what they call “irregular migration” that has been ongoing since early 2021 by establishing policies and practices that all-but-guaranteed that the vast majority of aliens arriving at the Southwest Border who were not excluded under the Title 42 Order would not be detained and would instead be quickly released into the country where they would be allowed to stay (often for five years or more) while their asylum claims were processed or their removal proceedings ran their course.
Title 42 vs. “Title 8”. Making yet another assumption in the White House’s favor, perhaps when it issued its tweet it was referencing CBP statistics that have yet to be released. As I explained in that earlier post on the June numbers, certain actions that the administration has taken of late are likely to yield some short-term decline in illegal entries, at least until smugglers sort out the latest loopholes to exploit.
If that’s true, then there is yet another distinction to consider, this one the difference between total apprehensions and what the administration has termed “Title 8” apprehensions.
“Title 8” refers to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which is formally “Title 8 of the U.S. Code”, in the same way public health laws are in Title 42. Aliens processed under Title 42 were quickly expelled, while aliens processed under Title 8 are removed only following either “expedited removal” or “regular removal” proceedings under the INA.
In the last three full months of the Trump administration, October to December 2020, there were fewer than 24,500 total Title 8 apprehensions at the Southwest border. That’s not a monthly average — that’s the total.
For what it’s worth, in the six preceding months (April to September 2020), there were only just over 17,000 Title 8 apprehensions all told, resulting in an eight-month “end of the Trump administration” total of fewer than 42,000 Title 8 apprehensions. All the rest were “Title 42 expulsions”.
Title 42 ended on May 11, 2023, so every illegal migrant apprehended at the Southwest border since is a Title 8 apprehension. Normally, I’d cut the administration slack on that issue, except that Title 42 only ended because the White House demanded it be ended, after fighting yet another state federal-court challenge to keep those expulsion orders in place.
The administration had wanted to end Title 42 in late May 2022 — nearly a year earlier — and I can’t begin to imagine what the migrant crisis gripping cities and towns across the United States would look like had plaintiff Louisiana and its sister states not stepped into to stop it.
“Southwest Border Encounters”. Finally, there’s one last factor that both skews CBP’s June border stats and whatever future stats the White House tromps out to support its claims that it has the situation at the U.S.-Mexico line under control: total Southwest border encounters.
Beginning at the outset of Title 42, and to reflect what was really happening at the Southwest border, Trump’s DHS combined Border Patrol apprehensions and aliens deemed inadmissible by CBP officers at the Southwest border ports of entry under a single reporting metric called “encounters”.
For as bad as the 2019 border emergency was, that fiscal year there were just 977,509 Southwest border encounters: 851,508 apprehensions and 126,001 inadmissibles at the ports.
Southwest border port encounters have mushroomed under Biden, rising from fewer than 75,500 in FY 2021 to nearly 460,000 in just the first nine months of FY 2024.
That’s by design, because in January 2023 the administration started allowing thousands of would-be illegal migrants to preschedule appointments at the Southwest border ports using the CBP One app, a policy I refer to as the “CBP One app interview scheme”.
The administration hasn’t publicly disclosed what happens at those interviews, but it can’t be more than perfunctory processing. That’s because congressional disclosures have revealed that 95.8 percent of illegal migrants who schedule interviews using the app are released on parole into the United States.
At the same time Biden’s CBP was crowing over the apprehension decline in June, it also admitted (well down in the weeds of its “Monthly Update”) that it processed 41,800-plus aliens — none of whom had proper documents or any right to enter the United States — under the CBP One app interview scheme.
Those “over 41,800” CBP One app aliens should be included when considering the other aliens who were apprehended by Border Patrol in June, as CBP “encountered” all 125,000-plus of them last month, and as I’ve explained elsewhere, the INA treats them all the same.
This latest tweet proves a point I’ve made in the past: The White House knows the border is a serious electoral headache and thus its DHS is deliberately funneling would-be illegal migrants through the ports to hide the disaster from the electorate. Whether the electorate buys it is up to them.