CBP Border Numbers Released: December Was Officially the Worst Month in History
Nearly 250K apprehensions at the Southwest border — and 302K total encounters
By Andrew R. Arthur on January 28, 2024
CBP finally released its statistics on Southwest border encounters in December — 11 days late, and in a Friday, January 26, late-afternoon “news dump”, as I predicted on January 18. To say they’re bad is an understatement, given that those figures reveal that last month was the worst month at the U.S.-Mexico line in history.
“Encounters” in this context is a term of art coined by DHS following the initial implementation of Title 42 in March 2020. It’s defined as the total number of aliens apprehended by Border Patrol after entering illegally plus inadmissible aliens stopped by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the ports of entry.
Border Patrol Apprehensions. In December, Border Patrol agents apprehended nearly 250,000 illegal entrants at the Southwest border, a 23.5 percent increase over November, but more significantly a more than 10 percent increase over the prior monthly apprehension record, set in May 2022, of nearly 224,400.
Those numbers are actually even worse than they appear, because included in that total were 101,725 adult migrants travelling with children in “family units” (FMUs). That’s not quite a monthly record (agents apprehended just over 103,000 aliens in FMUs in September), but it’s close enough to one, and it is also a 18.7 percent increase over November (nearly 82,700).
https://cis.org/Arthur/CBP-Border-Numbers-Released-December-Was-Officially-Worst-Month-History
