As President Joe Biden’s border crisis rages on, the number of arrests on the U.S.-Mexico border reached a record number unmatched by any November dating back to when U.S. Customs and Border Protection first started measuring apprehensions more than 20 years ago.
The Washington Post, which reported on the unofficial numbers on Thursday, framed the uptick as the “first increase since summer.” In reality, border officials arrested at least 173,600 people on the U.S.-Mexico border last month as the number of illegal aliens crossing the border continues to rise.
As The Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson noted on Twitter, “There’s never been close to that many arrests in Nov[ember] since CBP began tracking them by month in 2000.”
"Border arrests ticked up 5 percent in Nov, first increase since summer." Doesn't sound that bad, right?
Reality is more than 173,600 arrests in Nov. There's never been even close to that many arrests in Nov since CBP began tracking them by month in 2000. https://t.co/wp14MO0Krh
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) December 16, 2021
Of those arrested, only about 50 percent were forced to leave. Most of those expelled were single adults kicked out under the Trump administration’s Title 42 policy, which the Biden administration has since adopted. The Washington Post noted, however, that “almost all unaccompanied minors and most family members apprehended were allowed into the United States; it remains unclear how many were then released from custody to pursue their immigration cases.”
Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to downplay the migration crisis, arrests on the southern border have exceeded 100,000 every month since February. That too is an administration-induced phenomenon that hasn’t happened since CBP began tracking monthly arrests in 2000, and it’s contributed to the record-breaking 1.7 million illegal aliens apprehended in total in the 2021 fiscal year, which ended in September.
While the Biden administration grapples with how exactly to mitigate the overwhelming number of migrants pouring over the border, a federal judge, reinforced by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to resume a program that makes border crossers who claim to be seeking asylum wait for their immigration hearings in Mexico.
