President Joe Biden’s administration blamed Republicans for a historically bad month of illegal immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border last month, despite Democrats controlling the entire federal government and both chambers of Congress up until a few weeks ago.
The administration broke the all-time record for the number of illegal aliens encountered on the U.S.-Mexico border last month, according to newly released numbers by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Friday evening.
Federal officials had 251,487 encounters with illegal aliens last month on the southern border, the highest number ever recorded in U.S. history.
Last month’s numbers, combined with the first two months of fiscal year 2023 — October and November — put the U.S. on track to have more than 2.87 million illegal alien encounters on the U.S. southern border this year.
“Of course the numbers will be higher when Republican elected officials, like smugglers, falsely proclaim the border is open because of a court order to lift Title 42,” an administration official claimed to Fox News. “Despite their misinformation, our border enforcement measures continue to hold strong with the number of Venezuelan nationals arriving at the border unlawfully continuing to drop dramatically.”
December’s numbers mean that the Biden administration has now experienced ten straight months of 200,000 plus illegal alien encounters per month on the southern border.
“A reminder, there have been approximately 1.2 million known gotaways at the southern border since President Biden took office,” Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted. “The last several months have been around 70,000 per month, per CBP sources.”
“And those are only the *known* gotaways,” Melugin added.
Chad Wolf, the former Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, slammed the numbers in a tweet. “The insanity, insecurity, and chaos continues,” Wolf said. “This admin has abolished any pretense of border security.”
Mark Morgan, former acting CBP commissioner and Heritage visiting fellow, responded to December’s numbers by calling it “a catastrophic crisis.”
“Secretary Mayorkas has been in his post for two years. He has presided over all this chaos and destruction, willfully implementing every single one of his boss’ open-borders policies,” Morgan added. “Those policies have abjectly failed, yet he continues to absurdly claim the opposite, even to the point of lying under oath before Congress. No sane person could look at the border and claim we’re on the right course.”
Tom Homan, former acting ICE director and Heritage visiting fellow, responded by saying that Biden was “the first president in my lifetime to intentionally un-secure the border.”
“By way of more than 90 executive orders, he undid the successful Trump-era policies that brought illegal immigration to a 40-year low and gave us the most secure border of our lifetimes,” Homan added. “This president and his team were warned what would happen if they got rid of those policies. They did it anyway, and you’re looking at the consequences.”
Homan noted the human toll that Biden’s border crisis is having on communities across the U.S., the nation’s law enforcement, and even those trying to come to the U.S. illegally.
“More Americans than ever dying from fentanyl flooding across the southwest border,” Homan said. “More women and children abused and sexually assaulted on the dangerous journey through Central America and Mexico. More migrants found dead on U.S. soil than ever. Record profits for the cartels as they traffic and smuggle historic numbers of drugs and people across the border. It’s inhumane. It’s a slap in the face to the men and women of the Border Patrol, who are absolutely overwhelmed, as well as to ICE agents who’ve been told they can’t detain or deport most of those who break our laws.”