SW Border Apprehensions Exceed One Million in First Six Months of FY 2024
Even while the administration funneled tens of thousands of other illegal migrants into the country, but President Biden likely owes a debt of gratitude to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R)
By Andrew R. Arthur on April 15, 2024
CBP released its monthly encounter statistics for March on Friday, and they reveal that Southwest border apprehensions between ports of entry have exceeded a million in just the first six months of FY 2024. As bad as that is, those apprehension numbers would likely have been much higher if the Biden administration weren't funneling tens of thousands of other aliens through the ports — and if Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) weren’t taking unprecedented steps to secure his state’s border with Mexico.
As a reminder, since March 2020, CBP has been using the term “encounter” to refer to both aliens apprehended by Border Patrol agents between the ports of entry and aliens deemed inadmissible at those ports by CBP officers.
Southwest Border Apprehensions. In March, Border Patrol agents apprehended just fewer than 137,500 illegal migrants at the Southwest border, for a total of nearly 1.032 million in the first six months of FY 2024.
By comparison, between FY 2008 and the outset of the Biden administration in FY 2021, agents never apprehended more than 860,000 illegal entrants total in any given fiscal year, and in most of those years apprehensions never exceeded a half million.
Border Patrol released more than 78,000 of those aliens (56.8 percent) agents apprehended in March directly into the United States last month despite the fact that section 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires DHS to detain them all.
https://cis.org/Arthur/SW-Border-Apprehensions-Exceed-One-Million-First-Six-Months-FY-2024
