President Joe Biden’s raging border crisis worsened in August when 232,972 people were arrested attempting to illegally cross the Southern U.S. border.
Illegal border crossings typically decline in summer months due to high temperatures and increasingly hazardous conditions. This August, however, saw the highest number of arrests recorded for the month since Customs and Border Protection began tracking apprehension statistics in 2000.
Not only did August yield the highest number of arrests recorded at the southwest border in a given month since December 2022, but it also pushed CBP’s 2023 fiscal year apprehension total well over 2 million.
Apprehensions are only expected to increase in September after thousands of migrants flooded underequipped regions like Eagle Pass, Texas, Tucson, Arizona, and Cochise County, Arizona each and every day for the last three weeks. The third weekend in September alone yielded more than 20,000 illegal border crosser arrests.
September’s surge means the country is on pace, by the time the 2023 fiscal year ends at the beginning of October, to surpass the record of nearly 2.4 million illegal border crossers arrested in the 2022 fiscal year. These millions of new migrants will likely have already been released by the Biden administration.
Due to a backlog in U.S. immigration courts, some of these migrants will wait years for a court date. There is very little that can be done if an illegal border crosser chooses to ignore his audience with a judge.
The sudden migrant influx, which Fox News’ national correspondent Bill Melugin called a “total free for all,” forced Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. to declare a local state of disaster emergency last week.
Days after his announcement, Salinas took to CNN to blame Biden for the surge afflicting his 29,000-person town.
“I will be honest with you. I believe 100% [Biden] does bear some responsibility for this crisis,” Salinas replied. “I haven’t heard from anybody in the administration. The president hasn’t put out a statement, the vice president, I haven’t heard from anybody.”
Salinas’ feeling “abandoned” by the Biden administration — two years into the worst, deadliest border crisis in the world — is a widespread, bipartisan sentiment.
In June, 73 percent of Americans said they thought the Biden administration was doing a bad job handling the U.S.-Mexico border. Of the 5,115 U.S. adults surveyed by Pew Research, 94 percent said illegal border crossings are a problem for the country.
The Biden White House, however, has actively exacerbated the border issues plaguing states all across the country. Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson wrote in a Sept. 21 column that the Biden administration’s silence on all of the problems overwhelming regions like Eagle Pass “leave no doubt the actual policy of the Biden administration is uncontrolled mass illegal immigration.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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