Immigration crisis: Illegal border crossings into US hit record highs
Luis Pablo Beauregard - Tuesday
More than 239,000 migrant encounters were registered at the US-Mexico border in May, setting a new record high for illegal crossings. The number surpasses the previous record set in March 2020, when 220,000 were registered. Encounter numbers refer to events, not individuals; a single person trying to cross the border can be caught, expelled and then repeat the attempt multiple times, each of which would count as a new expulsion.
The May figure represents a 2% rise compared to April – an uptick attributed to an influx of migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, as well as Russia and Ukraine due to the war in Ukraine.
Border Patrol authorities arrested 177,000 people at the border, 15% more than in April. More than 60,000 of the individuals had attempted a previous crossing before. The government has attributed the spike to Title 42, a controversial immigration policy introduced under the Trump administration that allows US border officials to deport certain migrants without court hearings. The provision was introduced at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic on the grounds that immigration flows posed a public health problem.
“The large number of expulsions during the pandemic has contributed to a higher-than-usual number of migrants making multiple border crossing attempts,” US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stated in a press release on Wednesday.
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