There’s been much discussion of late about the role Vice President (and presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris has played in the Biden-Harris administration’s border crisis. Republicans (and a few Democrats) point out that she was “border czar” and thus bears her share of the blame, while her supporters contend she was tasked only with dealing with the “root causes” of illegal migration in Central America and nothing else.
So, assuming that she was responsible only for root causes, how fruitful have her efforts been in that regard? Not very, and the statistics prove it. The short version of the story is that while total apprehensions (inflated by Title 42 expulsions during Covid) of aliens from what you might call the root-causes countries did indeed decline, apprehensions of aliens processed under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), so-called “Title 8” apprehensions, have grown significantly, as have grants of parole at the ports of entry to inadmissible aliens.
Southwest Border Apprehensions from the “Northern Triangle”. Even as illegal migration from outside North America has exploded, the Biden-Harris administration’s root causes strategy has focused on illegal migration from just three countries in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The three are known collectively as the “Northern Triangle”.
In FY 2021, the year Harris undertook that root causes task, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended nearly 684,000 illegal entrants from the Northern Triangle. (Because the fiscal year starts on the previous calendar year's October 1, about 588,000 of those apprehensions were made under the Biden-Harris administration.) Southwest border apprehensions of nationals of those three countries dropped to fewer than 521,000 in FY 2022 and declined further to just over 447,000 in FY 2023.
In the first nine months of FY 2024, Border Patrol agents have apprehended nearly 314,000 illegal Northern Triangle migrants at the U.S.-Mexico line and are on track to hit about 418,600 this fiscal year.
Based on those statistics alone, illegal migration has fallen in the three-plus fiscal years that Harris has root-causes portfolio. Expect her campaign (and her legion of allies in the media) to focus on those figures alone and claim success.
Those apprehension totals, however, only tell part of the story – and paint a slightly dimmer picture.
The first thing to understand is that the Biden-Harris administration actually inherited a very secure border, as illegal migration from the Northern Triangle in particular was fairly low when the duo took office.
In FY 2020, agents at the Southwest border apprehended fewer than 104,000 illegal migrants from the Northern Triangle. As the administration would freely admit, most root causes (poverty, corruption, violence, etc.) in those countries were long-standing and endemic, which raises the question of why apprehensions have risen since, if simply addressing root causes was the answer.
Harris and her supporters would likely point to the one root cause that doesn’t have very deep roots: Covid-19, and its economic effects. The pandemic, however, was declared in March 2020, and the Biden-Harris surge didn’t actually develop until they took office – 10 months to the day into the pandemic.
As noted above, agents apprehended nearly 684,000 illegal Northern Triangle migrants in FY 2021, but fewer than 96,000 of them (14 percent) were caught under Trump in the first third of the fiscal year, between October 2020 and January 2021. The rest – nearly 588,000 apprehensions – were made under Biden-Harris.
Title 42 and “Title 8”. Which brings me back to Covid-19.
In response to the pandemic, on March 20, 2020, CDC issued the first of several orders under Title 42 of the U.S. Code to stem the introduction and spread of Covid-19. To that end, those orders required CBP to expel all illegal entrants at the Southwest border.
Just more than 396,550 illegal Northern Triangle migrants were expelled under Title 42 in FY 2021, and of that total, 82,500-plus expulsions (about 21 percent) occurred in the first four months of the fiscal year. Both administrations had that Title 42 mandate, but only Trump fully complied with it.
Illegal migrants who weren’t expelled under Title 42 were processed for removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), or what the Biden-Harris administration refers to as “Title 8” (the INA being Title 8 of the U.S. Code). That Title 8 figure tells a much different story than the one I started with.
In FY 2022, nearly 177,000 illegal Northern Triangle migrants were apprehended and thereafter processed under Title 8, a figure that rose to more than 309,000 in FY 2023.
The Biden-Harris administration itself ended Title 42 on May 11, 2023, and it was off to the races for illegal migration from the Northern Triangle thereafter.
All apprehended migrants in FY 2024 have been processed under the INA, meaning, again, that there have been nearly 314,000 Title 8 apprehensions from those three countries this fiscal year, with Border Patrol on track to make about 418,600 Title 8 apprehensions by September 30.
In other words, while total apprehensions FY2022-24 (projected) declined by roughly 20 percent, apprehensions under Title 8 grew by 138 percent over the same time period.
At this point, I should note that the total Biden-Harris Northern Triangle apprehension figures between February 2021 and May 2023 were likely inflated to a degree by “recidivism”, as nationals of those three countries were apprehended, expelled, and reentered again. Let me explain.
For Title 42 expulsions to occur, Mexico had to agree to take expelled migrants back. Migrants from the Northern Triangle were among the few non-Mexicans that country was willing to accept under the Biden-Harris administration (Trump much more successfully forced Mexico to accept third-country nationals).
Tens of thousands of Northern Triangle migrants were likely apprehended, sent back to Mexico, and kept reentering illegally until they successfully got in between the start of the current administration and May 2023. When it lifted Title 42. CBP’s “apprehensions” statistic includes all individual arrests, not just those involving “unique individuals”.
That explains part of that Northern Triangle surge under Biden-Harris up to May 11, 2023 – but none of it thereafter.
Of course, the Biden-Harris administration bears the blame for all the entries thereafter, because the president and VP made the choice to end Title 42.
In fact, they tried to end Title 42 nearly a year before they successfully killed it, going so far as to (futilely) fight to block state efforts by Louisiana and others (in Louisiana v. CDC) to keep those expulsion orders in place.
The VP can’t walk away from the decision to end Title 42, particularly given that on January 3, 2023, the White House issued a fact sheet titled “Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions” (emphasis added) to lay out its post-Title 42 plans.
I’ll return to that fact sheet, below.
CBP Port Encounters of Northern Triangle Nationals. I still haven’t told the whole story, because Border Patrol apprehensions are just half of DHS’s Southwest border “encounters” metric.
The other half or encounters are “inadmissibles”, aliens denied admission at the Southwest border ports of entry by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO).
In FY 2021, about17,000 inadmissible Northern Triangle aliens were denied admission at those ports, a figure that climbed to about 21,000 in FY 2022, and then to about 48,000 in FY 2023.
In the first nine months of FY 2024, nearly 34,000 aliens from those three countries have been denied admission at the Southwest border ports, and OFO is currently on track to deny admission to 45,250 Northern Triangle aliens this fiscal year.
(Here are the “Title 8” Northern Triangle inadmissibles at the Southwest border ports: FY 2021, 17,155; FY 2022, 21,016; FY 2023, 48,013. Again, all migrants encountered at the ports since May 11, 2023, have been processed under the INA.)
That brings me back to the January 2023 White House fact sheet. In it, the “Biden-Harris administration” announced that would-be illegal migrants in central and northern Mexico would be allowed to schedule appointments at the Southwest border ports of entry using the CBP One app.
I have deemed that plan the “CBP One app interview scheme”, and while CBP allows 1,450 migrants per day (more than a half million per year) to make appointments, little is known about what actually occurs during those port interviews.
The scheme can’t involve much screening, however, because congressional disclosures have revealed that fully 95.8 percent of aliens who schedule appointments using the app are thereafter paroled into the United States – where they will be allowed to remain indefinitely, if not forever.
Despite those aliens being paroled, all of them are recorded as encounters because they are inadmissible and in fact have been denied admission to the United States. Why were they denied admission? Because they have no visas and therefore no right to be admitted.
Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration fact sheet claims those migrants are being permitted to schedule interview appointments to allow them “to initiate a protection claim”, but that doesn’t make sense, and certainly not with respect to the vast majority of migrants from those three countries.
CBP doesn’t adjudicate asylum claims, and in any event, few nationals of the Northern Triangle countries are ever granted asylum.
DOJ immigration court statistics reveal that fewer than just 7 percent of El Salvadoran, 5.6 percent of Guatemalan, and 5.5 percent of Honduran asylum claims adjudicated in the first half of FY 2024 resulted in grants.
Given that, releasing Northern Triangle migrants who used the CBP One app interview scheme – and the whole program generally – is little more than an attempt by the Biden-Harris administration to hide the crisis at the Southwest border by funneling those would-be illegal migrants through the ports of entry disguised as “lawful” entrants.
Deep Roots, But Little Fruit. It’s disingenuous for Kamala Harris – half of the “Biden-Harris administration” – to deny any blame for the crisis at the Southwest border that has been ongoing since January 20, 2021. But even if she was only responsible for slowing illegal migration from the Northern Triangle, her efforts have been fruitless.