U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended more than 2 million migrants at the southwest border during President Joe Biden's first year in office, likely the highest number in over 20 years, according to a National Review analysis of CBP data.
According to the data, agents encountered 2,033,863 migrants at the border in 2021, with the vast majority – more than 1.9 million – being apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol officers. The rest were apprehended by Office of Field Operations agents at U.S. ports of entry.
The 2 million apprehensions in 2021 is more than double the 921,812 apprehensions in 2019, during a surge at the border under then-President Donald Trump's administration. There were 341,519 Southwest border apprehensions in 2017, Trump's first year in office.
The 2021 Border Patrol encounters are the most in over 20 years, and more than the 1.6 million Border Patrol apprehensions in 2000, the next highest on record, according to the data. Earlier CBP data reviewed by National Review doesn't include Office of Field Operations data.
Since May, Border Patrol encounters at the Southwest border have broken all monthly records, said Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. The peak was in July, when CBP agents apprehended 213,593 migrants at the border. The number of monthly encounters dipped slightly through October, but have since ticked up again.
"Apprehensions typically peak in May, and decline through January, when they pick up again in February. We haven't seen that sort of pattern this year," Arthur said. "This migration doesn't look anything like that historical trend."
Biden's critics blamed the border surge on the president's pro-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail, and executive orders and efforts to dismantle Trump-era immigration deterrents, like the "Remain in Mexico" policy for asylum seekers and a temporary deportation moratorium. In early 2021, the Biden administration and mainstream media outlets claimed the border surge was part of a regular seasonal pattern. The Washington Post reported in March that the surge was "actually a predictable pattern." Biden said "it happens every single, solitary year."
But the surge never really stopped, and by late spring the Biden administration was blaming Trump for the chaos at the southern border. The surge "began during and was exacerbated by the Trump administration," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in May. "After four years of an immigration system rooted in destructive and chaotic policies, President Biden is talking the challenge head on and is building a fair, orderly, and human immigration system."
Arthur said there are leaders in the Biden administration who aren't happy with the ramped-up border apprehension numbers, because they know they are "poison for Democrats." But there are immigrant advocates in the administration who are less concerned, he said.
"This is the frog in the hot water," Arthur said. "They just want you to kind of get used to the fact that you're going to see huge numbers of people enter illegally."
Over the last few months, only about half of the migrants encountered at the southern border have been expelled. Arthur said that part of the problem is that a decade ago, the vast majority of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border were single men from Mexico. Now, family units and children make up about a third of the Border Patrol's encounters. It takes about eight hours to process a single adult male, whereas it can take days to process a family, he said.
"The reason they're letting so many people go is they just don't have the resources, they don't have the manpower to actually care for that many people," Arthur said.
"The Biden administration has broken the border," Arthur said. "It might have been Biden's rhetoric at the beginning; it certainly was. But now there are just so many people, the border's broken, and Border Patrol lacks the capacity, CBP lacks the capacity to deal with the huge numbers of people that they're seeing. So they let them go, which just encourages more to come in."
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