Approximately 239,416 illegal immigrants were arrested trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in May, the highest number of border apprehensions ever recorded by the U.S. government.
That two-decade high beats out the previous records of 221,303 southwest border apprehensions documented in March of 2022, the 234,088 arrests recorded in April of 2022, and the 220,063 noted in March 2000 when U.S. Border Patrol first began tracking arrests.
Since the beginning of the 2022 fiscal year in October, border officials have logged at least 1.5 million arrests. That sharp increase in apprehensions puts the U.S. on track to see more than 2 million arrests at the Southwest border by the end of the fiscal year in September.
One glance at the CBP’s “Southwest Land Border Encounters By Month” chart, which was lengthened to accommodate the unparalleled influx of illegal migration over the last year and a half, clearly shows that the current surge started as soon as President Joe Biden took office in January of 2021 and hasn’t subsided since.
Even before Biden entered the White House, he promised to repeal a number of Trump-era border policies. The removal of protections such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (also known as the Remain in Mexico program) and his explicit scaling back of ICE arrests and deportations paired with the administration’s open-border rhetoric has encouraged an exponential rise in illegal immigration.
Instead of addressing this increase in illegal border crossings, Biden has repeatedly tried to scale back even more border protections, most notably Title 42, a public health order designed to expedite the expulsion of illegal border crossers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Biden’s plans to nuke Title 42 at the end of May were put on hold after a federal judge stepped in but thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants still made the trek to the U.S. southern border with hopes of filing asylum claims and getting released into the United States.
A Fox News poll conducted last week found that 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border.
Source: The Federalist
