The State of the Border: New FAIR Issue Brief Paints a Grim Picture of a Self-Induced Disaster
(February 10, 2023, Washington, D.C.) In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden barely made mention of illegal immigration – a national issue that now trails only government dysfunction and inflation on the American public’s list of concerns.
A new illustrated and concise report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) depicting the exponential growth in illegal immigration since January 2021 shows why he largely avoided the issue. The report graphically illustrates how Biden Administration policies have created a humanitarian, national security, and public health crisis at the border dwarfing anything that came before.
The State of the Border: an Illustrated Analysis of Biden’s Failure to Secure the Southwest Border, shows the staggering increase in the numbers of people encountered entering the country illegally; the number of people encountered who are listed on the federal Terrorist Screening Database; the number of “gotaways” who were detected but eluded apprehension; and the volume of lethal fentanyl seized at the border. At the same time, the report shows the precipitous decrease in the number of illegal aliens who were expelled under Title 42, or detained after being encountered.
“Like the national debt, or the size of the federal budget, the cumulative numbers of people illegally entering our country have become so large that it is hard for most people to grasp the magnitude of the Biden Border Crisis,” commented Dan Stein, president of FAIR. “The raw numbers also lack context. As the report demonstrates, the 251,487 illegal migrants encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in December is not only a huge number, but just as importantly, a threefold increase over the number of illegal border-crossers in December 2020, the last full month before Biden became president.”
“As the numbers of people entering the country illegally have exploded, the report also illustrates how removals of illegal aliens have plummeted. As recently as October 2020, 90 percent of illegal aliens encountered at the border were removed under Title 42. Two years later, that figure is now just 19 percent.”
“The graphic before-and-after picture leaves little doubt that the immigration crisis that is not only overwhelming the border, but communities all across the United States, is not a problem that the Biden Administration inherited and is struggling to manage, but one they created and are deliberately perpetuating,” Stein concluded.
The report, The State of the Border: an Illustrated Analysis of Biden’s Failure to Secure the Southwest Border, can be found here.
Contact: Ron Kovach, 202-328-7004 or [email protected].