Biden’s CBP has developed a shameful pattern of releasing its worst border statistics in weekend “news dumps”, but the agency took it to a new level last Friday, dropping the latest numbers on the Friday afternoon before Christmas. Those stats—on CBP encounters for last month—show that illegal aliens continue to flood into the country not only unabated but assisted by the administration. All the holiday tinsel and glitter can’t hide the fact that the president’s border disaster is only getting worse.
Border Patrol Apprehensions
“Encounters” is a term of art developed by DHS in March 2020 at the outset of Title 42 to describe both aliens apprehended by Border Patrol agents after entering illegally and aliens deemed inadmissible at the ports of entry by CBP officers from the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO).
In November, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended more than 191,000 illegal entrants, the twelfth highest monthly total in the first 33 months of the Biden administration.
Twelfth place might not seem that bad, but that’s only because of how unmitigated “Biden’s border fiasco” has been. Between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—when Congress first became serious about border security—and February 2021, Joe Biden’s first full month in office, monthly apprehensions at the Southwest border exceeded 100,000 just 18 times in a span of 232 months.
More recently, in the decade before Biden took office, monthly apprehension totals at the U.S.-Mexico line exceeded 100,000 only once—in May 2019, when they hit nearly 133,000. Trump responded by implementing the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), better known as “Remain in Mexico”.
MPP quickly drove monthly apprehensions down below 40,000 by October 2019, even before CDC issued its first Title 42 expulsion order in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.
Under Biden, however, monthly apprehensions at the Southwest border have only dropped below 100,000 twice—in February 2021 (97,643) and in June 2023 (99,538). And, as I’ll explain below, those June 2023 numbers were deliberately fudged.
Apprehensions actually rose—albeit by a modest 1.2 percent—between October and last month. The rise itself is not as concerning as the fact that apprehensions—a proxy for illegal entries—usually drop between October and November, mostly due to the weather (it gets cold at the border when winter sets in).
In other words, the illegal-entry “trendline” at the border is headed in the wrong direction, just as the public—and more importantly, Congress—is becoming increasingly concerned about that border.
Encounters at the Southwest Border Ports of Entry
The bad news extends to OFO encounters at the Southwest border ports. In November, CBP officers stopped more than 51,000 inadmissible aliens there, bringing the yearly total for the first two months of FY 2024 to 103,500. That’s 37 percent more aliens than were deemed inadmissible in all of FY 2021 (75,480) and 80 percent more than in all of FY 2020 (57,437).
Port encounters at the Southwest border exceeded 50,000 for the first time in history in July and have not dropped below that figure since. And that’s how the administration likes it. Let me explain.
Faced with the likelihood of a massive tsunami of aliens pouring illegally into the United States once Title 42 ended (which it did on May 11), and a resulting political backlash, the White House announced in January that it would begin allowing would-be border jumpers to pre-schedule their illegal entries at the Southwest border ports using the CBP One app.
That policy—which I have dubbed the “CBP One app port interview scheme”—has turned the Southwest border ports into a veritable turnstile for aliens with no right to come here. Nearly all (95.8 percent) of aliens who have scheduled appointments at the ports using the app have been paroled into the United States.
If that sounds like a shell game to hide the disaster at the Southwest border from the American people, you’re onto something (or at least not as stupid at the administration believes you to be). Despite that fact, Biden’s CBP couldn’t be prouder of this effort, as its latest Monthly Operational Update reveals:
The CBP One™ mobile application remains a key component of DHS’s efforts to incentivize noncitizens to use lawful, safe, humane, and orderly pathways and disincentivize attempts to cross between ports of entry. In November, CBP processed more than 43,000 individuals at ports of entry utilizing advanced information submitted in CBP One™.
Since the appointment scheduling function in CBP One™ was introduced in January 2023 through the end of November, nearly 360,000 individuals have successfully scheduled appointments to present at a port of entry using CBP One™. The top nationalities who have scheduled appointments are Haitian, Mexican, and Venezuelan.
In reality, there is nothing “lawful”, “safe”, or “humane” about the CBP One app port interview scheme, but that hasn’t slowed the administration down even a step.
It may be a more “orderly” way to enter the country illegally than crossing the Rio Grande or Sonoran Desert, but that doesn’t make it either right or legal. Why is CBP bothering inspecting aliens at all if it is just going to let them all in?
The implementation of this scheme, coupled with the administration’s hastily concocted “Circumvention of Law Pathways” (CLAP) rule in May, were the biggest reasons why Southwest border apprehensions briefly dipped below 100,000 in June.
The CLAP rule was ostensibly implemented to limit illegal migrants’ access to asylum, but smugglers have now discovered the loopholes in that policy, and most aliens aren’t waiting around for their CBP One appointments (assuming they even bothered to make them). That’s why CBP Southwest border encounter numbers are running at or near all-time records.
Nationwide Encounters
There is even worse news in the CBP November statistics.
Overall, including the Northern land border and the interior ports (airports), CBP encountered nearly 309,000 illegal aliens in November, marking the fourth straight month in which overall encounters exceeded 300,000. To put that figure into perspective, prior to August, nationwide encounters topped 300,000 just once in history, in December 2022, when they hit 302,392.
More than 617,000 aliens have been encountered in the first two months of FY 2024, roughly the population of Boston, and most have likely been released into the United States. I’d like to give you an exact release figure, but the Biden administration refuses to disclose it.
As I explained in a recent op-ed in the New York Post, the immigration system cannot handle the strains that these aliens are placing on it. The administration knows that—but it refuses to change its policies to stop the surge.
The only bright spot I can point to is that the Senate continues to negotiate border reforms in exchange to funding for the war in Ukraine, but as the Washington Post reported on December 19, those talks are moving slowly and the negotiators have gone home for the holiday break.
The migrants entering illegally at the border haven’t taken a break, however; rather, things have only gotten worse in December, as Fox News Bill Melugin has explained:
NEW: Per CBP sources, there have been approximately 45,000 migrant encounters at the southern border since Monday, essentially able to fill Yankee stadium in just 4 days.
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) December 22, 2023
Monday was the highest day of encounters ever recorded w/ 12,600.
December on pace for highest month ever.
Perhaps the Senate will force the president to actually enforce the laws at the border, end his unlawful migrant schemes, and slow the flood of aliens into the United States. There are no guarantees, however, because as Sen. Krysten Sinema (I-Ariz.) told the Post, negotiations have been hard because immigration is “very emotional for people on both sides of the aisle, like viscerally emotional, but it’s also the most complex area of law in our federal system.”
Respectfully, there is nothing especially “complex” about the law. As a federal judge explained in a recent decision: “The immigration system . . . dysfunctional and flawed as it is, would work if properly implemented.” The Biden administration refuses, however, to “properly implement” that system, preferring instead to try and hide the inevitable results in holiday news dumps. But it can’t hide the disaster at the Southwest border anymore.