Final FY 2019 CBP Numbers
Improvement with no help from a do-nothing Congress and obstreperous courts
By Andrew R. Arthur on October 10, 2019
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has released its final number of apprehensions for FY 2019. It was a mix of bad and good news. Long story short: There was significant improvement, no thanks to a sanctimonious Congress that was more interested in cheap photo-ops and tendentious statements than in actually improving the lives of the migrants they claimed to be helping, or to district court judges who have attempted to block responsible executive proposals.
CBP reported that 977,509 individuals were encountered attempting to cross the Southwest border. This was a 72 percent increase over FY 2014, which would suggest to an objective observer that there are significant issues that need to be addressed. Those numbers are on the decline, as described below, but many of those issues remain.
The question is whether those issues are internal (that is, loopholes and other deficiencies in U.S. law that need to be addressed), external (conditions in the countries of nationality of the migrants encountered), or some combination of the two. That question was actually answered by a bipartisan panel in April 2019, and by research from the Center itself.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Final-FY-2019-CBP-Numbers
