Left Unchecked, Biden’s Border Crisis Will Become The New Normal: What Happened on the U.S.-Mexico Border This Year is Without Precedent, and if States Don’t Act, It Will Become Permanent
The Biden administration quietly made history late last week when U.S. Customs and Border Protection released September data on apprehensions at the southwest border. Those exceeded 185,000 and put total southwest border arrests for this fiscal year at 1,659,206 — an all-time record.
Never before have federal authorities made so many arrests at the southwest border. The Border Patrol keeps records of southwest border apprehensions going back to the Eisenhower administration (and maintains records of total apprehensions, which include the northern border and the coasts, going back to 1925). This year topped the previous record in 2000 by about 15,000 illegal immigrants, marking a new milestone in what has become the dreary annals of America’s porous and crisis-stricken border.
But what you won’t find in the Border Patrol data tables, or the equivocating explainers in the corporate press, is a frank admission that, shocking as these totals are, they represent what will certainly become the new normal on the U.S.-Mexico border under the Biden administration.
In addition to the sheer numbers of illegal immigrants coming over — a 314 percent increase from 2020 and a 95 percent increase from the last border surge in 2019 — this year marks a shift in the usual seasonal pattern of illegal border-crossing. Typically, illegal immigration picks up in February as temperatures warm, peaks in May, then recedes during the hotter summer months. And no wonder: it gets very hot in south Texas during the summer, and crossing on foot as most migrants do can be dangerous, even deadly.
President Joe Biden, along with his courtesans in the press, tried back in March to dismiss what close observers could already see was an historic surge along the border, saying at a news conference, “The truth of the matter is, nothing has changed. It happens every single, solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”
What Biden failed to mention is that even back in February border arrests had reached a 15-year high of 97,000. The historic surge was already underway, and it wasn’t following the usual pattern. Apprehensions kept climbing throughout the spring months, and then in June when we would expect the numbers to decrease, they kept climbing, hitting a 21-year high.
Then something really strange happened. In both July and August, typically slow months on the U.S.-Mexico border on account of the brutal heat, total arrests exceed 200,000. The number of unaccompanied children encountered at the border reached a record high in July.
This was unprecedented. Migration experts said they could not explain a mid-summer surge, which defied all previous patterns of border traffic. (The shift was not slight, either. For context, Border Patrol made nearly 87,000 more arrests this past July than it did in the July of the previous record year, 2000.)
Now, we have numbers for September, which is also typically a slower month on the southwest border because of the heat. Going back more than two decades, southwest border arrests in September have never exceeded even 100,000, let alone come close to 200,000 as they did this year.
Read the rest from John Daniel Davidson HERE
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