The BorderLine: The Border Crisis by the Numbers

The BorderLine: The Border Crisis by the Numbers:

Math was never my favorite subject, so it’s easy to imagine Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas as its teacher. As the person in charge of border enforcement, he has been working with some pretty big numbers since he came into office. The man-made crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border is so staggering that it’s easy to be overwhelmed, and so, for this week’s column, I’d like to highlight and explain some specific numbers.

3 million people, more or less, were “encountered” by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, illegally entering the U.S. in fiscal year 2023 (which ended Sept. 30). On Mayorkas’ watch, we have set the record for the highest number of yearly illegal alien encounters in U.S. history. If those caught in 2023 formed a new city, it would the third biggest in America, behind only New York and Los Angeles.

304,000 illegal aliens were encountered this August alone (the last month for which we have official government numbers). That’s the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

75% of August’s inadmissible aliens were freely let in by President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security. Mayorkas has told the press and Congress many times that the border is not open. But if a door admits three of every four people who attempt to go through it, can we consider it closed? A philosophical question, perhaps. Maybe we can settle on “mostly open,” like the “mostly dead” Wesley in the movie “The Princess Bride” or the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020.

425,000 unaccompanied alien children, as they are formally called, were let into the country between Biden taking office in January 2021 and today. That’s more kids than the Chicago school district, the third biggest in the country. To pay for their schooling alone, let’s take a low estimate of Washington, D.C., school costs at $25,000 per student per year: 425,000 new students at that rate would cost over $10.6 billion a year. Even at the lower Texas or California yearly rate per student, we’re talking over $6 billion. Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com estimated that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the office charged with caring for unaccompanied alien children, spent $18,000 per child—nearly $3 billion—in fiscal year 2022, when “only” 150,000 were let in. That figure is on top of the previously mentioned costs for education.

407,983 convicted criminal aliens are currently on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” of over 5 million cases. Put simply, these are foreign nationals who were illegally in the U.S. and convicted of crimes here. After serving their sentences, they were released but not deported and remain in our communities. This could be because their home countries refuse to take them—although presidents before Biden succeeded in twisting arms—but mainly, it’s because ICE deportation target numbers are pathetically low. An inspector general’s report from back in 2017—when they were deporting 10 times as many from a docket half as big—found that “ICE is almost certainly not deporting all the noncitizens who could be deported and will likely not be able to keep up with growing numbers.”

30,000 is the paltry number of the above convicted criminal aliens the Biden administration intends to deport in fiscal year 2023, according to its budget request to Congress, and again in fiscal year 2024. If ICE manages to do that and not a single new alien is convicted of a crime in these two years, the total of foreign criminals running loose in the U.S. would go down just over 10% per year, leaving the rest in the U.S. Feel safer? —>LOTS MORE HERE

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