Here is one more staggering number to put into perspective the all-encompassing crisis currently transpiring at our beleaguered southern border: According to Texas-based border agents, an astonishing 5,500 illegal aliens cross the border every day in South Texas alone.
Fox News reports:
New Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan toured the border in South Texas on Saturday with Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.
“We’re not going to leave until the border is secure,” said Shanahan, who is trying to transfer $1.5 billion from numerous defense projects to secure the Southwest border.
In South Texas, border agents the last several days apprehended 229 migrants an hour, or 5,500 a day, forcing the agency to set up tents in parking lots and hiring jets at $16,000 a flight to send adults to nearby Del Rio just for processing.
Pictures released by the Rio Grande Valley sector show migrants piling up in makeshift tents in parking lots as agents struggle to handle the surge.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) numbers continue to show the inundated migrant influx affecting America’s 1,900-mile-long border with Mexico. The Daily Wire reported last week on CBP’s April border numbers:
Per CBP’s official data release, total border apprehensions between points of entry in April rose 6.62% over March’s already-record-shattering pace. Astoundingly, April’s apprehension total of 98,977 is a full 94.04% higher than the monthly total from the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year, in October 2018. In other words, apprehensions between points of entry along the border have nearly doubled in just the first seven months of the current fiscal year. As Daniel Horowitz observes, the combined total for points of entry inadmissibles and apprehensions between points of entry is 109,144, which is the highest monthly total since the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Furthermore, as Horowitz states, “it is very likely the highest number of unique individuals of all time, given that many in the past were the same individuals deported multiple times within the same week, while almost all of these are first-timers.”
As The Daily Wire has also noted before, part of the reason for the influx is the dissemination in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region of transparently false claims pertaining to America’s asylum statute. Our asylum statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), is operative for those who are persecuted in their native countries for “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” For instance, ethnic Yazidis persecuted in Islamic State-overrun Iraq should qualify — but purely economically motivated migrants simply hoping to “seek a better life,” in the abstract, should not.
CBP has sounded the alarm on Twitter, tweeting last week: “#CBP is experiencing an unprecedented and unsustainable situation at the Southwest border. In April, CBP apprehended or deemed inadmissible 109,144 individuals along the SWB.”
One unanswered question is why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has aborted its unilateral rewriting of the much-ballyhooed and highly flawed Flores consent decree, which the Trump administration cites as hamstringing much of its detention and enforcement efforts at the border.