While the establishment media has attempted to bury Vice President Kamala Harris’ record on the border, border security advocates are not letting the issue fade into the background.
Over 11 million illegal aliens have entered the United States since President Joe Biden and Harris took office. Communities have been struggling with crime and more homelessness as a result. School systems and healthcare have been overridden with problems because of the costs of illegal immigration. Billions of taxpayer dollars per year have been used for illegal aliens at the expense of American taxpayers.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “The short version of the story is that while total apprehensions (inflated by Title 42 expulsions during Covid) of aliens from what you might call the root-causes countries did indeed decline, apprehensions of aliens processed under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), so-called ‘Title 8’ apprehensions, have grown significantly, as have grants of parole at the ports of entry to inadmissible aliens.”
As illegal immigration from countries across the globe has exploded, the Biden-Harris administration’s “root causes” strategy focuses on just three countries in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, otherwise known as the “Northern Triangle.”
In Fiscal Year 2021, the year Harris undertook that “root causes” task, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended nearly 684,000 illegal entrants from the Northern Triangle. The fiscal year starts on the previous calendar year’s October 1, meaning around 588,000 of those apprehensions were made under the Biden-Harris administration.
Southwest border encounters with foreign nationals from those three countries dropped to fewer than 521,000 in FY 2022 and declined further to just over 447,000 in FY 2023. In the first nine months of FY 2024, Border Patrol agents have apprehended nearly 314,000 Northern Triangle residents at the U.S.-Mexico line and are on track to hit about 418,600 this fiscal year.
The Biden-Harris administration inherited a secure border, as illegal immigration from the Northern Triangle in particular was a lot lower before they took office. In FY 2020, agents at the Southwest border apprehended fewer than 104,000 illegal crossers from the Northern Triangle.
CIS Resident Fellow in Law and Policy Andrew Arthur analyzed that most root causes such as poverty, corruption, and violence in those countries have been long-standing and endemic. Democrats may point to COVID-19 and its economic effects; however, the pandemic was declared in March 2020, and the Biden-Harris surge didn’t develop until they took office—10 months into the pandemic.
Also, according to Arthur, tens of thousands of illegal crossers from the Northern Triangle were likely apprehended, sent back to Mexico, and kept reentering illegally until they successfully got in, between the start of the current administration and May 2023. When Title 42 was lifted, CBP’s “apprehensions” statistic included all individual arrests, not just those involving “unique individuals.”
Expulsions under Title 42 in FY 2021 of illegal border crossers from the Northern Triangle totaled 396,550, with 82,500-plus expulsions (about 21 percent) occurring in the first four months of the fiscal year. Illegal aliens who weren’t expelled under Title 42 were processed for removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), or what the Biden-Harris administration refers to as “Title 8.”
Arthur summed it up by stating, “While total apprehensions of FY 2022-24 (projected) declined by roughly 20 percent, apprehensions under Title 8 grew by 138 percent over the same time period.”
Border Patrol apprehensions are just half of DHS’s Southwest border “encounters” metric, as the other half of encounters are “inadmissibles,” aliens denied admission at the Southwest border ports of entry by CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO).
In FY 2021, about 17,000 inadmissible Northern Triangle border crossers were denied admission at those ports, a figure that climbed to about 21,000 in FY 2022, and then to about 48,000 in FY 2023.
In the first nine months of FY 2024, nearly 34,000 aliens from those three countries have been denied admission at the Southwest border ports, and OFO is currently on track to deny admission to 45,250 Northern Triangle aliens this fiscal year.
