You wouldn’t know it from corporate media coverage of President Joe Biden’s border crisis, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrested yet another historic high in illegal Southern border crossers, 154,998 in February. This means another historically high number also likely evaded Border Patrol and arrived inside the United States illegally, with authorities having no knowledge of who they are.
The number of border arrests may be down more than 11,000 from February 2022, but, historically speaking, it’s far higher than the number of arrests recorded in 21 of the past 23 years. Outside of 2022, there haven’t been this many arrests in the month of February since the CBP began recording apprehension data in 2000.
Not only are border arrests up from past years, so are detainments of illegal crossers who appear on the FBI’s terror watchlist. Only eight of the people on the terror watch list were arrested trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between fiscal years 2017 and 2020. In fiscal year 2022, that jumped to 98, a number that is expected to be overshadowed by the end of this fiscal year.
In addition, Biden’s expansion of “humanitarian parole” grants a loophole “legal” status to intended illegal border crossers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. That means, as border expert Todd Bensman explains, the Biden administration is putting these migrants into a different category to hide the true numbers of people illegally crossing into the United States.
By all measures, catching and likely
