Why Did Illegal Immigration Apprehensions Suddenly Decrease?
After two years of chaos at our southern border, the Biden administration has failed to get a grasp of its border crisis or, even acknowledge the massive surge of illegal immigrants arriving as a major catastrophe. Every day, the White House continues to deflect responsibility by gaslighting the American people about the severity of the border crisis. The administration’s first two years have been marred by unprecedented illegal immigration apprehensions estimated to be at 4.5 million. Even worse, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apprehension numbers have climbed each month breaking all-time records with December 2022 being the highest single month of encounters at the border at 251,978. However, January 2023’s numbers sharply dropped by about 100,000 for the first time since President Biden assumed office. What caused this major drop?
According to FAIR, January’s border numbers do not actually represent a sharp decline in illegal immigration as the Biden administration is trying to claim. The data, notes FAIR, simply masks the border crisis by creating illegal programs designed to allow inadmissible aliens to enter the country. In other words, the administration is engaged in creative bookkeeping in order to move tens of thousands of illegal entries off the books. In reality, the January numbers do not represent a true drop in inadmissible aliens entering the country. Moreover, they achieved this sudden decline in border apprehensions by means of what amounts to a massive illegal parole scheme. As a result, southwest land border encounters may have dropped, but that does not mean that fewer illegal aliens entered the country. Instead, Biden’s policies saved them the trouble of sneaking across the border by allowing them to enter by other means.
Alarmingly, many of the migrants are encouraged by DHS to use an app to notify DHS of their intent to file an asylum claim, the vast majority of which are phony. As a result, they are then allowed to enter the country until their hearing is taken up. A recent FAIR analysis points out that CBP data may no longer be an effective tool for measuring illegal border apprehensions because the Biden administration’s ‘expanded legal pathways programs’ are not counted in these statistics. In addition, the numbers don’t reflect ‘gotaways’, or the thousands of illegal immigrants who have entered the United States and evaded detection. The border crisis rages on, but the administration’s priority appears to be masking the numbers rather than ending mass illegal immigration.
Exposing this deception will be the biggest challenge for elected officials, immigration watchdogs, and news outlets who monitor monthly CBP encounters. Effective solutions identified by FAIR to deter mass illegal immigration include better physical border security, keeping Title 42 in place (expelling illegal immigrants on public health grounds), and restarting the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP requires asylees to remain in Mexico until given a court date) to name a few. In the end, the Biden administration has created and prolonged this crisis of its own making. The American people at least deserve an honest leader who is willing to tackle this crisis head-on and provide accurate numbers of who is illegally entering their country.