Democrat President Joe Biden’s border crisis reached a new level on Friday as data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) showed that the Border Patrol has made approximately 1.66 million arrests of illegal aliens entering the U.S. from Mexico for Fiscal Year 2021.
“Border crossings surpassed 1.6 million annually at least twice recently, in 1986 and in 2000,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “In 2019, when crossings reached a peak under the Trump administration, the Border Patrol made about 850,000 arrests.”
The Journal added that the 1.66 million arrests in Fiscal Year 2021, which started in October 2020, was “the highest annual number ever recorded.”
CBP said that it recorded 192,001 encounters along the southern border for the month of September, a slight decrease from the previous month.
Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary and Heritage visiting fellow, slammed Biden in a statement over the latest numbers, calling his policies a failure.
“Instead of upholding the rule of law, the administration has chosen to open the border by eliminating effective, humane border security policies that were working, replace those policies with no alternative, and then process the subsequent historic flows of illegal aliens into the United States as quickly as possible,” Wolf said. “And make no mistake, contrary to the Biden administration’s spin, the vast majority of those apprehended at the southern border are being released into our communities, as CBP’s own publicly available numbers show. The men and women of CBP deserve so much better than this. They deserve leaders who will help them do their jobs, enforce the rule of law, and give them the tools they need. The Biden administration has done the opposite at every turn, and we’re all paying the price for it.”
Mark Morgan, former acting CBP commissioner and Heritage visiting fellow, warned Americans to not be “fooled” by the Biden administration’s attempts to “spin these still sky-high numbers as some sort of win.”
“These 192,000 apprehensions are still more than 40,000 higher than the highest monthly total during the 2019 crisis, a crisis that then-President Trump quickly and successfully moved to solve,” Morgan said. “The Biden administration knowingly created a crisis because it sees a political benefit in mass illegal immigration, and thus it has no interest in slowing the historic surge to our border.”
“More importantly, however, official apprehensions dropped slightly while the number of got-aways—those who evade apprehension and enter the country after escaping law enforcement—increased from August,” Morgan added. “The numbers remain at unsustainable highs, and now more illegal aliens are crossing the border without even being apprehended, as more and more Border Patrol agents are pulled off the line to process migrants through overcrowded CBP facilities and release them into the United States. This cannot continue.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said in a statement that since Biden took office, “there have been over 1.4 million border apprehensions, more than the entire population of Dallas, Texas.”
“Despite the flashing red warning signs, President Biden and his appointed border czar, Vice President Harris, continue to think they can wish the situation away and pretend that they are powerless in the very crisis they created,” McCarthy said. “It is embarrassing that it has gotten to the point where a foreign diplomat went on record to say that for months she ‘sounded the alarm’ about the thousands of migrants that were headed to our border and the Biden administration failed to take any action to get ahead of the surge.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated after publication for clarity.