Another record-breaking number of illegal immigrants were arrested trying to cross the Southwest border last month.
Preliminary data obtained by The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff shows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection made approximately 234,000 arrests of illegal border-crossers in April. That’s up nearly 13,000 from the 221,303 southwest border apprehensions recorded in March, marking back-to-back record-breaking months. Prior to March, the last time southwest border arrests surpassed 220,000 was March of 2000.
Already, border officials have logged at least one million arrests just six months into the 2022 fiscal year, putting them on track to record more than 2 million apprehensions by the end of the fiscal year.
This record-breaking projection should come as no surprise after illegal immigration surged in February 2021 immediately after President Biden took office and repealed a raft of Trump-era border policies. Instead of addressing the sharp rise in illegal immigration on his watch, Biden is preparing to scale back even more border protections, most notably Title 42, a public health order designed to expedite the expulsion of illegal border crossers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The repeal of Title 42 is set to go into effect on May 23, and currently there is no plan in place to handle the inevitably surge in illegal crossings.
The Biden administration’s attempt to revoke the expulsion policy is currently being blocked by a federal judge in Louisiana, but word about the end of Title 42 has already spread among smugglers and other migrant networks. As a result, thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants will trek to the U.S. southern border in coming weeks in hopes of filing asylum claims and getting released into the United States.
According to a new poll from The Federalist and Susquehanna Polling & Research, 52 percent of likely voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the illegal immigration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border while only 34 percent approve. Despite Biden’s flailing approval ratings, the president and his border czar Vice President Kamala Harris have largely ignored the growing crisis.
Instead of focusing on the influx of illegal immigration, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been preoccupied creating a government disinformation board led by Russian collusion hoaxer and Hunter Biden laptop denier Nina Jankowicz.
Border enforcement officials have said that if Title 42 is ended without a replacement mechanism to expel illegal border-crossers, federal law enforcement could be facing up to 18,000 apprehensions per day, and up to 500,000 per month.
