By Kamden Tackett
On October 25th of last year, I wrote a piece on the current Southern border crisis. In that piece I said, “we can only hope the situation is solved sooner rather than later.” Now it’s 7 months later, and the Southern border situation hasn’t gotten any better. From October of 2023 to March of 2024, (April metrics haven’t been released at the time of writing) there has been a total of 1,340,801 encounters by the United States Border Patrol (USBP). An encounter is defined by the USBP as “The sum of USBP Title 8 apprehensions, Office of Field Operations (OFO) Title 8 inadmissibles, and noncitizens processed for expulsions under Title 42 authority by USBP or OFO.” Or in laymen terms; the number of times the USBP or OFO detained an illegal immigrant. To boil this down, that means within the last 6 months over 1.34 million illegal immigrants have been detained. As we obviously don’t have metrics on those not detained or caught crossing the border illegally, we can safely assume the number to be even higher.
As of October, of last year, the most recorded encounters per month was in September of 2023, with 269,735 recorded encounters; however, during December of 2023, that number was dwarfed by a record breaking 301,981 recorded encounters. The highest month ever. Before the Biden presidency, March 2000 had been the most, with 223,305 total encounters. Furthermore, the highest number of encounters during a single year was 1.6 million, again in 2000, however, if we include Biden in this the highest number for a year is 2.4 million, during 2023. In fact, Biden has the first, second, third, and fifth most encounters per year, ever. That includes the current 2024 fiscal year, where there have already been 1.34 million encounters in only six recorded months (Fiscal Year metrics begin in October of the previous calendar year, meaning the 2024 fiscal year started in October of 2023). In total there have been 7.71 million recorded encounters with illegal immigrants by USBP and OFO at the southern border since the start of the Biden presidency. The most of any president by order of millions, and that is not even within a full 4-year term as Biden still has at least six more months in office. As well, these numbers do not account for illegal immigrants who have not been ‘encountered,’ by USBP or OFO, with some sources estimating 20 million illegal immigrants have flooded into the nation.
Not only do these number convey the worst Southern border crisis ever seen in the history of the United States, but the Biden regime has admitted to flying as many as 320,000 illegal immigrants into the United States directly. Meaning not only has the current president of the United States seen the biggest border collapse since the inception of America, but he has also intentionally transported more than 300,000 thousand illegal immigrants into the country. Assuming 320,000 is an accurate number, Biden and his team purposefully transported more illegal immigrants into the country than those who crossed at the border in 2017, totaling 310,531 encounters for that year, according to cbp.gov. What reason did the administration have for this? To decrease the number of illegal immigrant encounters at the Southern Border. The current sitting president of the United States of America purposefully flew illegal immigrants into the country with the goal of not looking as bad. That is categorically against the law.
To make this situation look worse, in a scathing report on January 18th of 2024, the House Judiciary Committee stated, “in early December 2023, DHS officials admitted that ‘an average of 5,000 illegal aliens are currently being released into the U.S. each day at the border.’ Even Secretary Mayorkas has acknowledged the high rate of releases, telling Border Patrol ‘that the current rate of release for illegal immigrants apprehended at the southern border is ‘above 85 [percent].’” adding later on “Of the nearly 6 million illegal alien encounters from January 20, 2021, through September 30, 2023, at least 3,095,577 illegal aliens had no confirmed departure from the United States … an increase of 631,153 illegal aliens in just the six months between March 31, 2023, and September 30, 2023, and does not include any releases from record-high encounters in the period from October through December 2023 or the more than 1.7 million known “gotaways” who entered the United States under Biden’s watch.”
Indeed, both the encountered and release rates of the Biden administration have dwarfed all previous metrics. To frame the situation, over a 15-year period from 2005 to 2020, a total of 9,238,337 illegal immigrants were encountered. Over the 3 years and 5 months of data during the Biden presidency, a total of 7,930,100 illegal immigrants were encountered. No other 4-year period even comes close to that metric. The highest 4-year total before Biden was 6,097,615 from 1996 -1999, which is 1,832,485 less than the current Biden numbers. Unfortunately, there are sparse metrics on release rates for the Southern border, meaning I cannot definitively compare the dataset of 85% given by Secretary Mayorkas against metrics from before the Biden presidency. I recognize I’ve thrown countless numbers at you (pun intended), but that’s the point. This is not subjective; every metric shows a complete meltdown at the Southern Border.
Why is it happening? Well, it’s hard not to point fingers at the president and his stance on the border. With numbers so high one would expect a trend from before Biden took office of rising encounters, however, what we see is the opposite. Since 2010 illegal encounters had remained under 500,000, except for one year in 2019 where there was 859,501. Yet the jump from 2020 to 2021 was from 400,651 all the way to 1,734,686 million, a difference of 1.33 million people. Due to the massive jump, as well as the massive push to resend voters ID laws, many Americans are suspicious that Joe Biden is trying to import voters for his upcoming reelection campaign. If we consider that every state without voter ID requirements is a democratic state it’s not hard to see where these suspicions come from, especially if we account for the fact that on average undocumented migrants vote democrat. (via Pew Research Center). This coupled with the executive order signed by Biden in 2021, requiring that the U.S. Census Bureau factor in all residents, including noncitizens, as part of its decennial calculation of the U.S. population, has caused many Americans to question if the upcoming election will even be legitimate.
I could continue more into the societal, economic, and legislative consequences of the crisis, but I’ve already lost over half of readers, so instead I leave you with the following:
The Biden administration has overseen the largest border collapse in the history of the United States, dwarfing all previous metrics by magnitude of millions. The administrations soft policy has seen more than 7.9 million illegal immigrants flood into the country since 2021. The optics of the situation have gotten so bad that the president was willing to legitimately break the law and fly more than 320,000 illegal immigrants into the country. The Southern border crisis has left a massive stain on an already shaky presidential term for the Biden administration, and the United States will feel the impacts of these failures for years to come.
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