Decoding CBP’s Southwest Border Statistics for May
Not what they appear to be — they’re much, much worse
By Andrew R. Arthur on June 26, 2023
CBP released its Southwest border encounter statistics for May last week, along with its usual self-congratulatory “Monthly Operational Update”. Both require some decoding because neither is what it appears to be at first glance — they are much, much worse.
By way of explanation, “encounters” are the total of illegal entrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents at the border between the ports entry plus aliens deemed inadmissible (generally because they lack proper entry documents) by officers in CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) component at the ports.
Border Patrol Apprehensions. In May, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended more than 169,000 illegal migrants, a slightly less than 8 percent decline from April, about 75 percent as many apprehensions as in May 2022, and a 2 percent drop from May 2021. That’s the good news.
Here’s the beginning of the bad news: Last month’s apprehension total was the third highest for the month of May in recorded history at the Southwest border (records go back to FY 2000), after just the last two fiscal years. In other words, Biden’s DHS is only doing better in comparison to its own prior performance, and its record at the U.S.-Mexico line has been historically bad.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Decoding-CBPs-Southwest-Border-Statistics-May
