Breaking Down the FY 2024 Southwest Border Numbers
It would be fair to call FY 2024 the worst year ever, at both the border and the ports
By Andrew R. Arthur on October 24, 2024
Lehigh
On October 21, I complained that CBP’s border and port encounter statistics for September—the last month of FY 2024—had yet to be released even though they were almost a week late and that early voting had begun in 34 states. I’m too modest to say that the squeaky pundit gets the grease, but shortly thereafter CBP finally released the September 2024 numbers. Here’s what they have to say.
First, a definitional note: “Encounters” is the term DHS has used since March 2020 to define both Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants who have crossed illegally between the ports of entry and aliens deemed inadmissible at the ports of entry by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO).
Border Patrol Southwest Border Apprehensions
In September, agents at the Southwest border made nearly 54,000 illegal migrants, bringing total apprehensions in FY 2024 to 1.53 million illegal entrants, the same total I predicted in that earlier piece.
Border Patrol has published Southwest border apprehension numbers going all the way back to FY 1960 (the last full fiscal year of the Eisenhower administration), and in that period, apprehensions only topped 1.53 million on six occasions: FY 1986 (nearly 1.616 million); FY 1999 (1.537 million on the nose); FY 2000 (less than 1.644 million); FY 2021 (more than 1.659 million); FY 2022 (more than 2.206 million); and FY 2023 (nearly 2.046 million).
https://cis.org/Arthur/Breaking-Down-FY-2024-Southwest-Border-Numbers
