Unprecedented Illegal Crossing Swamping Border States

U.S. Border Patrol agents working in El Paso, Texas, apprehend 1,036 illegal aliens, the largest single group ever caught, May 29. CBP photo

Fox News’s Adam Shaw and Griff Jenkins report on the unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants crossing America’s southern border thanks to the lax policies of the Biden administration. Over one million illegal aliens have already stormed the border in fiscal year 2023 (which began in October), an unprecedented number. Shaw and Jenkins write:

Migrant encounters at the southern border have already surpassed the one million mark for Fiscal Year 2023, multiple Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources tell Fox News, marking an unprecedented pace for encounters.

As of Friday, the total migrant encounters at the border were at 1,008,217 for the fiscal year, which began in October. Of those, 87.8% were single adults. Just 328,454 were expelled under Title 42 — the pandemic-era protocol that allows border agents to rapidly expel border crossers.

There were more than 1.7 million encounters overall in FY 2021 and over 2.3 million in FY 2022. The first months of FY 2023 have outpaced those of the prior fiscal year. This time last year, numbers for FY22 through March 1 were 839,819 — well under the 1 million mark.

Meanwhile, there have been 354,522 known “gotaways” — illegal immigrants who have evaded Border Patrol agents but have been detected on another form of surveillance. In FY 2022, there were nearly 600,000 gotaways.

Despite the high number of encounters, the Biden administration has pointed to a sharp drop in numbers from the historic high of 251,000 in December to over 156,000 in January. While that figure is the highest on record for the month of January, officials still linked the drop to a number of measures rolled out by the administration last month — including a humanitarian parole program that allows 30,000 migrants from four nationalities into the U.S. each month.

CBP sources tell Fox that early indications for February’s numbers suggest that encounters are down again and could come in at around or under the 150,000 mark once the numbers are fully counted. Last February there were 166,000 migrant encounters.

However, hitting one million so early has some agents concerned that if numbers pick up again in the spring, as often happens, then it could bring yet more record-breaking numbers.