How open is the border?
Part 1 of 2
Every year the NFL (like most sports leagues) announces official attendance numbers for each team’s games. But those numbers are determined by ticketed attendance. If you look at the stats, one thing they don’t tell us is the number of people in attendance who managed to sneak into the games and watch without buying a ticket. The reason the NFL can’t tell us that is because they don’t know. The only way to know who is in attendance without a ticket is by catching them at the ticket gate, at which point they aren’t allowed in so are not actually in attendance. If they manage to get in without a ticket, they have indeed attended, but having not been caught, there is no way for them to be counted. The result, of course, is that the NFL has no way of knowing how many people attended games without a ticket.
In a sane world, the same would be true of US immigration. It should be a matter of guesswork trying to estimate how many new people have entered and remain in the US illegally each year, because the only hard numbers would be those that are caught entering illegally, and such people would no longer be in the US. But we do not live in such a world. We actually have a lot of hard numbers on the number of new illegal immigrants in the US each year, because it turns out that when they get caught, they are not prevented from entering or staying. A lot of them are allowed in anyway, and are therefore easily known and counted.
So, what are the numbers? Of the people caught entering the country illegally in any given month or year, how many are allowed to stay and how many are removed? That, it seems, would be a pretty basic and important number to know, but it turns out that it is not an easy one to find out. Watch House Rep Jim Jordan struggle, in vain, to extract this basic number from DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas, who expertly refuses to answer the question while pretending to do so:
I decided to dive into the DHS statistics and try to come up with an answer. It wasn’t as easy at it seems it should be, for various reasons that would be too tedious and complicated to list here. However, the US Customs Border Protection agency (CBP) does provide us with some relevant info that gets us close to an answer. It has provided custody and transfer statistics for each of the last 3 fiscal years, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Included in these statistics is a monthly breakdown of “Dispositions and Transfers”, or, in other words, a breakdown of what happened to each person the Border Patrol (BP) apprehended under Title 8 between ports of entry. Title 8 is the portion of the immigration code that empowers the CBP to arrest people attempting to cross the border illegally.
To be clear, that means these numbers do not include either expulsions made under Title 42, which was a temporary public health order that started in 2020 and ended midway through 2023, nor apprehensions made under Title 8 by the Office of Field Operations at official ports of entry. (Did I just say “to be clear”?!? See, I told you it was tedious and complicated!)
In any event, the CBP lists 6 different “Destinations” for the people it has apprehended.
Humanitarian Release
Turned over to another Federal Agency (eg ICE)
Repatriation Flights
Port of Entry
State and Local Law Enforcement
Other
Now, with the exception of those put on repatriation flights, the ultimate destination of those in categories 2-6 remains unclear. For example, someone turned over to ICE or local law enforcement might subsequently be either deported or released into the US. We can’t tell from this info. But what we do know is that everyone in category 1, Humanitarian Release, has been released into the US. So, regardless of the ultimate disposition of people in categories 2-6 , we can establish a floor on the number of people who have crossed the border illegally, were caught, but were nevertheless released into the country.
In FY 2021, from Oct 2020 thru Sep 2021, the Border Patrol had 618,989 Title 8 apprehensions at the border, of which 248,778 were released into the nation. In other words, at least 40% of the people caught crossing the border illegally were, nevertheless, set free inside the borders.
In FY 2022, the BP had 1,148,933 apprehensions, of which at 304,033 were released into the nation, for a release rate of 26.5%.
In FY 2023, the BP had 1.495 million apprehensions, of which 908,669 were released into the nation, for a release rate of 60.75%.
Those are some startling numbers. But is this a new phenomenon? How do those numbers compare to the numbers for previous years? Unfortunately, it appears that the CPB didn’t start providing these particular numbers until 2020, so we only have 9 months of data prior to FY2021, and of course 2020 was also the year of Covid, so all of the numbers will be decreased dramatically, and won’t make for a fair comparison. But we do have 2 pre-covid months, Jan and Feb of 2020, that might provide some reasonable comparison.
In January and February of 2020, the BP made a total of 59,283 Title 8 apprehensions at the border, of which 171 were given “Humanitarian” release into the country. That’s a release rate of .003%. You are reading that correctly. It isn’t typo or a misplaced decimal.
The numbers make it clear that a change in policy occurred when the Biden administration took office. In President Trump’s last three full months in office, a total of 41 people who were apprehended at the border were then released into the country. In President Biden’s first full month, 8,797 were caught and released into the country. By the end of FY 2021, he was averaging nearly 31,000 a month.
So it seems obvious that Biden had implemented a new border policy designed to allow many more immigrants crossing the border illegally to remain in the US. But still, it is possible, as the Biden administration has claimed, that the sheer numbers of people crossing the border has overwhelmed the system, and made it impossible to process people in the way it has been done in the past. Of course, it should surprise no one of reasonable intelligence that, having drastically increased the probability of being able to remain in the US after illegally crossing the border, a lot more people would attempt to do so. If the NFL decided that 50% of the people attempting to attend the Super Bowl without a ticket would be allowed in anyway, it too would be overwhelmed by a lot more people showing up at the ticket gate without a ticket, once word got out. So if the process has indeed been overwhelmed, it is largely a problem of his own making. But is the system genuinely overwhelmed relative to past years? We’ll look at that in part 2 to come.