Gotaways Are Surging; Mission Accomplished for Mayorkas?
Midway through Fiscal Year 2023, at least 400,000 illegal aliens have evaded capture at the southern border.
This “gotaway” figure, up 30 percent from the same period last year, must be considered a conservative estimate. Though the Border Patrol can count migrants who were detected but not detained, there are whole other groups of people who were neither seen nor captured.
In any event, human smuggling cartels increasingly like their odds of success.
Take Texas’ Del Rio Sector, for example. Border Patrol’s weekly recap for March 26-April 1 tallied 3,850 apprehensions and 2,242 known gotaways. During the month of March, agents detained some 24,000 migrants while reporting nearly 11,000 gotaways.
Gotaway estimates are a compound of: 1) migrants seen crossing the border, but not apprehended; 2) migrants who are part of a group that is only partially apprehended; and 3) estimates based upon tracks found in smuggling areas.
The 30 percent increase in gotaways is just the tip of the iceberg because Border Patrol apprehensions do not necessarily result in removal. Under the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policies, more than 700,00 illegal aliens have been paroled into the U.S. over the past two years.
FAIR asserts that the White House is playing a shell game to hide illegal entries from the public. By excluding gotaway data from official border-crossing reports and using parole to cover up illegal crossings, Biden & Co. have been shuffling numbers like “Enron at the border,” FAIR says.
But migrants know very well what’s going on. The unprecedented scale (and questionable legality) of the parole program, coupled with a sharp increase in gotaways, signal to illegal aliens and their transporters that the chances of pushing into the U.S. are better than ever.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly refused to call the chaos at the southern border a “crisis,” claiming that such an admission would indicate a “withdrawal from our mission.”
The secretary’s surreal deflection was reported on April Fool’s Day, but this is no joking matter. What, after all, is DHS’s mission, if not to enforce U.S. immigration laws and to competently safeguard this nation’s security? As Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., mused, “Either Secretary Mayorkas believes in completely, completely open borders, or he is not qualified to manage a Chuck E. Cheese.”