Maybe it's a coincidence, but (legal) border-crossing data, once supplied monthly by the Department of Homeland Security and published by the Department of Transportation, has disappeared since the arrival of President Biden.
As of April 6, the most recent data available on the DoT website is for last December, which ended almost 100 days ago. Is this bureaucratic non-performance or is it deliberate?
Whatever the reason, the lack of data denies policymakers and potential critics of DHS access to information on the wasteful staffing patterns DHS has used during the Covid-19 period, as it has continued to keep staffed and open little-traveled ports of entry on the Canadian border.
We found, for instance, that there were eight ports of entry in rural areas of Washington, Montana, and North Dakota that were averaging fewer than two cars a day, month after month. There was virtually no pedestrian or bus traffic at these points.
We estimated that the cost of inspecting an individual vehicle would be either $5,167 or $10,333, depending on whether the port in question was staffed by a single person, or two of them. Were there two people on duty, or just one? DHS, citing “national security”, would not tell us.
These ports, heavily impacted by Canada’s tough rules on the quarantine, which discourage crossing that border either way, should have been closed and the staff moved to our southern border, where the imbalance of staffing and illegal crossings is allowing surges of people from the Northern Triangle to either cross illicitly, or to flood our asylum application processes.
The people at those little-used ports at our northern border should be helping out at the Mexican border, but are not.
And the data to support that argument is missing.