On July 15, CBP released its monthly encounter statistics for June, and they reveal Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border dropped to their lowest monthly level since January 2021 — the month Biden took office. That is likely due to beefed-up enforcement on the Mexican side of the line, Texas’s continued efforts to secure the border, and — critically — the uncertainty inherent in DHS’s enforcement of the president’s so-called “asylum ban”. The administration should enjoy the lull while it can, because smugglers will almost definitely figure their way around the Mexican government’s dragnet and quickly realize the president’s “Proclamation on Securing the Border” is at best a paper tiger.
Border Patrol Apprehensions. In June, Border Patrol agents apprehended 83,536 illegal migrants, a 29.3 percent decline over May, but more importantly the lowest monthly total since January 2021 (75,316).
Taking a victory lap over this decline, the agency proclaimed in its “Monthly Update” for June: “Recent border security measures have made a meaningful impact on our ability to impose consequences for those crossing unlawfully.” They may want to temper their enthusiasm, at least temporarily, because it’s doubtful the good news will last.
As noted at the outset, there are likely three main factors that have led to this decline.
The first is a significant increase in Mexican government efforts to crack down on “other than Mexican” (OTM) migrants traversing that country on their way to the Southwest border, a topic my colleague Todd Bensman has reported on extensively in the past few months.
The second is the continuing positive results of Texas state efforts to deter illegal migrants from crossing the Rio Grande illegally, most prominently “Operation Lone Star”, which Gov. Greg Abbott (R) launched in March 2021.
In June, fewer than 31,000 illegal migrants were apprehended in the five Texas Border Patrol sectors (Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Del Rio, Big Bend, and El Paso) — less than 37 percent of the monthly total along a stretch that runs more than 64 percent of the way across the Southwest border.
In FY 2022, by contrast, more than 63 percent of all Southwest border apprehensions occurred in those five sectors. Of course, that was before Lone Star was expanded to include concertina-wire (c-wire) barriers along the river in the immediate run-up to the end of Title 42 on May 11, 2023.
The Biden administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to destroy those barriers in order to allow illegal migrants to cross illegally into Maverick County, Texas, but curiously after it won the first round in that case in January 2024, the administration stopped cutting the wire.
Perhaps it wasn’t so curious after all, however, because the White House likely realized destroying those barriers: (1) was a public relations disaster for a president coming under increasing scrutiny for his border policies; and (2) was counter-productive because the barriers were effective in dissuading migrants from entering.
The third factor that drove June’s apprehension totals down was, indeed, the ambiguity created on June 4 when the president issued his “Proclamation on Securing the Border”, which was touted as a plan to deny certain illegal entrants the opportunity to seek asylum.
Would-be illegal migrants — and as importantly, their would-be smugglers — hate uncertainty, and it was facially unclear from that proclamation and its implementing rules and public guidance how Border Patrol would enforce the restrictions therein.
Would illegal migrants be detained? Would that proclamation mean protection claims would be more quickly adjudicated? Would migrants be deported without having their claims heard at all?
As it turns out, a leaked memo revealed that for migrants coming from most countries, releases would continue as usual. Mexican nationals would likely be turned around (though not removed), and possibly nationals of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well. For everyone else (aside from nationals of six former Soviet republics), it would be business as usual.
Nationals of those former Soviet states were to be detained, but the worst that would happen to the OTMs from the other countries listed above would be that they would be subject to expedited removal.
The problem — and this is significant — is that expedited removals of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol plummeted last month, to fewer than 4,700 from more than 29,000 in June, an 84-percent decrease.
Instead, the destinations of a plurality of the aliens apprehended last month (32,181) were lumped together in official disclosures as “Other”, a category described as “Includ[ing] all paroles and … not limited to Parole+ATD”. That’s likely a typo, but if it isn’t the federal judge who barred “Parole+ATD” releases last March may want to know about it.
In any event, as my colleague Elizabeth Jacobs explained in responding to the rule that implemented the proclamation, it’s little more than a “watered-down” version of a much more effective Trump-era rule.
Once the smugglers figure that out, expect illegal entries to resume their fevered Biden-era pace, unless — as Jacobs recommended — “DHS implement[s] additional policies to stem the border crisis and curb asylum fraud and abuse.” The Biden administration hasn’t done that in the past 40 months, and there’s no reason to think it will change course now.
That will leave Lone Star and the Mexican government to secure the “U.S.” Southwest border.
Biden’s Southwest Border Encounters Now Exceed Eight Million, Total Encounters Near 10 Million. Beginning in March 2020 with the start of Title 42, DHS has lumped Border Patrol apprehensions together with aliens deemed inadmissible by CBP officers at the ports of entry together under a single category called “encounters”.
In June, Southwest border port encounters dropped slightly, to just fewer than 47,000 from just below 53,000 in July.
Credit Mexican government enforcement for that decline, as well, because would-be illegal migrants who could not make it to the border ports were unable to schedule their illegal entries there using the CBP One app (under a Biden program I’ve dubbed the “CBP One app interview scheme”).
Regardless, the 130,419 CBP encounters last month were enough to push the total number of Southwest border encounters under the Biden administration to 8,114,601 (starting in February 2021, the president’s first full month in office).
Add in the Northern and Coastal borders, and aliens stopped at interior U.S. airports arriving from abroad, and the encounters total nears 10 million — a figure that’s roughly equivalent to 3 percent of the total U.S. population.
Border Patrol’s Southwest border apprehension total accounts for 6,989,078 of those encounters, which is pretty close to the total population of Massachusetts (the 16th largest U.S. state). Influxes like this are unsustainable, which explains why CBP officers and agents are demoralized.
And of course, none of these figures includes the 1.84 million aliens as of May who are known to have evaded agents at the border and entered successfully, identified in statute as “got-aways”. As Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CBS News in March, those are the aliens who are “keeping [him] up at night”.
Owens asked, rhetorically:
Why are they risking their lives and crossing in areas where we can’t get to? Why are they hiding? What do they have to hide? What are they bringing in? What is their intent? Where are they coming from? We simply don’t know the answers to those questions. Those things for us are what represent the threat to our communities.
Plainly nothing to see here, move along: CBP has “meaningful impacts” to celebrate.
Good News, Bad News, and Worst News. The good news from the latest CBP stats is that migrant encounters at the Southwest border dipped significantly in June. The bad news is the good news likely won’t last. The worst news is that Biden’s border damage is already done — for him and for the country.