Shortly before Vice President (and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris made her campaign speech in North Carolina on August 16, CBP released statistics on its encounters at the borders and the ports in July. The good news is that Border Patrol Southwest border apprehensions were down to their lowest monthly level under this administration last month. The bad news is everything else, including the fact that the Biden-Harris DHS continues to funnel inadmissible aliens into the country at an alarming rate. Americans deserve answers about the ongoing migrant crisis, but all CBP’s offering is deflection and happy talk.
The Good: The Deceiving Decline in Southwest Border Apprehensions. In July, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended 56,408 illegal entrants, a 32.5 percent decline compared to June (83,533 apprehensions) and the lowest monthly apprehension figure since September 2020.
Roughly 63 percent of those apprehensions involved nationals of Mexico (22,231) and the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (14,435). The remaining 20,742 aliens apprehended at the Southwest border came from farther afield, including 1,851 nationals of the People’s Republic of China, 1,469 Indian nationals, and 4,631 Colombians.
That good news, however, is deceiving, and to explain I must first offer some recent border history.
In March 2020, CDC issued the first of its orders under Title 42 of the U.S. Code to stem the introduction and spread of Covid-19, following the announcement of a pandemic. Those orders directed CBP to expel aliens encountered at the land borders and ports and (later) coastal borders and ports.
The Biden-Harris administration ended Title 42 expulsions in May 2023, but not all aliens encountered by CBP while those CDC orders were in effect were expelled under Title 42.
For example, while 197,000-plus aliens apprehended by Border Patrol at the Southwest border between March and September 2020 were expelled under Title 42, just over 41,150 other aliens apprehended by agents were instead processed for removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
The INA is “Title 8” of the U.S. Code, and likely for reasons of symmetry (and confusion) with those CDC orders, the Biden-Harris administration refers to INA removal proceedings as “Title 8”.
Excluding the 42 full months of the Biden-Harris administration (February 2021 to July 2024), you must go all the way back to July 2019 to find a month at the Southwest border in which Title 8 Border Patrol apprehensions exceeded last month’s total.
That month five years ago, agents apprehended nearly 72,000 illegal entrants at the Southwest border, and the key reason why apprehensions declined from that point to the start of Title 42 six months later was a Trump administration policy formally known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) but more commonly referred to as “Remain in Mexico”.
Under MPP, illegal entrants stopped at the Southwest border were sent back to Mexico to await their “Title 8” removal hearings, which were held at “port courts” along the border.
The current situation at the border is like a leaky balloon, and ports of entry are the hole — especially now that illegal migrants can preschedule their entries there.
In an October 2019 assessment, DHS described Remain in Mexico as “an indispensable tool in addressing the ongoing crisis at the southern border and restoring integrity to the immigration system”, particularly as related to alien families. Asylum cases were expedited under the program, and MPP removed incentives for aliens to make weak or bogus claims when apprehended.
The Biden-Harris administration, however, quickly suspended and then ended MPP (twice), all while fighting state suits brought to force it to reinstate the program (thus far successfully).
Title 42 served a similar purpose of quickly returning illegal entrants back to the Mexican side of the border as MPP — albeit without the promise of future asylum hearings — but the Biden-Harris administration never used Title 42 expulsions as effectively as Trump had and was increasingly unable to convince Mexico City to take “other than Mexican” (OTM) migrants back.
In any event, even in a vacuum the Biden-Harris administration is (at best) more or less in the same place with respect to Title 8 apprehensions that the Trump administration was in during the summer of 2019.
The problem is, the current situation at the border is not in a vacuum; instead, it’s much more like a leaky balloon, and ports of entry are the hole — especially now that illegal migrants can preschedule their entries there.
The Bad: the Funneling of Would-Be Migrants at the Ports and a Big Question for Mexico. Since the start of Title 42 in March 2020, DHS has used the term “encounters” to refer to CBP migrant enforcement actions at the borders and ports. Migrants apprehended by Border Patrol are encounters, as are migrants deemed inadmissible by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO).
In July, CBP officers at the Southwest border ports encountered 47,708 inadmissible aliens, a 1.75 percent increase compared to June but more importantly more Southwest border port encounters than in any month in history prior to the Biden-Harris administration (records go back to FY 2012).
To be clear, July’s OFO encounter total at the Southwest border ports isn’t a Biden-Harris record; CBP officers set that in December, when they encountered nearly 52,250 inadmissible aliens in what’s best described as a “holiday rush”.
But it’s still 83 percent as many Southwest border port encounters in one month than in all of FY 2020 (57,437), and nearly 38 percent as many as in all of FY 2019 (126,001). That’s by design, to hide the ongoing border disaster from American voters heading into a hotly contested election year.
Let me explain.
In January 2023, the White House announced would-be illegal entrants in central and northern Mexico could preschedule their illegal entries at the Southwest border ports using the CBP One app, a policy I dubbed the “CBP One app port scheme”.
It’s unclear what occurs at those port interviews, but it can’t be much: Congressional disclosures have revealed that 95.8 percent of all those would-be illegal migrants who schedule appointments are then paroled into the United States.
Worse, the House Judiciary Committee recently reported three nationals of Tajikistan with terror ties were released into the country after scheduling interviews using the app.
On August 23, CBP quietly expanded the zone in which Mexicans can preschedule CBP One interview appointments to the whole of Mexico, and for OTMs to include the southern Mexico border states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Which raises a significant question I’m not sure anyone is asking.
As I explained last month, three main factors explain the recent decline in Border Patrol apprehensions: an increase in Mexican efforts to crack down on OTM migrants traversing that country; a Texas program called “Operation Lone Star”; and ambiguity created by the president’s June 4 “Proclamation on Securing the Border”, which was touted as a plan to deny certain illegal entrants the opportunity to seek asylum.
Of the three, the White House proclamation has likely had the least effect, while the Mexican crackdown has had the greatest impact (Lone Star has shifted migration west to more impenetrable sections of the border in Arizona and California, complicating illegal entries).
For how little is known about the CBP One app interview scheme, it’s translucent compared to what the Mexican government is doing. The administration hasn’t explained what it promised Mexico City to get it to agree to crack down on OTM travel, and nothing is known about how Mexico is implementing its new OTM policy.
But it would be futile for CBP to expand the zone in which OTM migrants could schedule port interviews using the app to the southern border states of Tabasco and Chiapas if Mexican security officials were also stopping OTM migrants with interview appointments from passing through the whole of the country to the U.S. Southwest border ports.
The CBP One app spits out an interview notice migrants can present at the ports, and if I had to make a guess that notice also serves as a de facto transit visa through Mexico.
In other words, all OTM migrants likely have to do is cross (legally or otherwise) into Mexico, schedule port interviews using the app, and transit free from restraint for 1,000 miles through Mexico to the U.S. Southwest border land ports — meaning the U.S. border now starts in Guatemala.
CBP makes 1,450 CBP One interview appointments at the Southwest border ports per day, and through the end of July, 765,000-plus inadmissible migrants — none of whom have visas or any right to come here — have scheduled appointments at the ports.
In July, “CBP processed over 38,000 individuals with appointments” under this scheme, and if you add them to the 56,408 illegal entrants apprehended by Border Patrol last month, you get a much more realistic view of what’s happening at the border.
“Statistics Show Lowest Southwest Border Encounters in Nearly Four Years”. If you want proof that these administration policies are intended to deceive, look no further than the press release for CBP’s “July 2024 Monthly Update”, headlined: “Statistics Show Lowest Southwest Border Encounters in Nearly Four Years”.
That’s sloppy and misleading, because while Southwest border apprehensions in July may have been at their lowest levels in the past four years (with the Title 8 caveats above), all told there were more than 104,000 CBP Southwest border encounters last month.
“Remain in Mexico” protected the United States; the Biden-Harris CBP One app interview scheme — “Remain in the United States”, if you will — benefits only illegal migrants.
Excluding the 42 months of the Biden-Harris administration, you must go back to June 2019, at the height of the “border emergency” declared by the Trump administration that year, to find a higher number of CBP Southwest border encounters, and even then, it’s close. That month, CBP encountered 104,311 aliens at the border and the ports — 195 more than last month.
In fact, except for April 2019 (109,415 CBP Southwest border encounters), May 2019 (114,116), and the aforementioned June 2019 figures, CBP has encountered more aliens at the Southwest border every month under the Biden-Harris administration than in any prior month in history — last month included.
As noted, the Trump administration responded with Remain in Mexico, but while there are aspects of MPP in the CBP One app interview scheme (migrants must wait in Mexico for their appointments), it’s actually the opposite of that Trump-era policy, because nearly all app migrants get to live and work here while waiting for their asylum hearings — not in Mexico.
If that sounds like a major incentive for migrants to make fraudulent asylum claims during perfunctory interviews at the ports, it is. And the vast majority of Americans have no idea they’re paying for it and will continue to pay as those migrants settle in and start living here, likely forever.
Simply put, “Remain in Mexico” protected the United States; the Biden-Harris CBP One app interview scheme — “Remain in the United States”, if you will — benefits only illegal migrants.
Cities and states across the nation aren’t struggling with migrants merely because of the number of aliens apprehended by Border Patrol. Fiscal costs are rising and education, medical, and housing resources are strained because the administration is also allowing so many inadmissible aliens to enter through the ports of entry. That trend continued in July, and the Mexican government will likely allow it to continue indefinitely.
The American people deserve answers about what’s happening at the Southwest border, but instead they are receiving smoke, mirrors, double-talk, and deflection. None of which will end the migrant crisis — or lower the costs of illegal migration — anytime soon.