Apprehensions at the southern border of the United States have nearly doubled from last year at this time, data from Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) show. However, the number for fiscal 2018 isn’t as high as it was a few years under President Obama.
CPB released the numbers just as President Trump proclaimed asylum requests null and void if they come from someone caught crossing the border illegally.
Trump’s order and the migrant invasion it is intended to stop notwithstanding, the border-jumpers with which American border cops must contend seem as determined as ever to enter the United States illegally. If successful, many would undoubtedly take advantage of the social-welfare goodies that are available to all.
October And Fiscal 2018
CBP apprehended 60,345 border jumpers in October, the first month of fiscal 2019, the data show. That number is about 20 percent more than the figure for September (50,568) and a nearly doubling of the number for the same period last year (34,871 figure in October 2017).
The figures have been up and down for the past few years.
The total for fiscal 2018 (which ended September 30th) was 521,090 a 25.4 percent increase over the 415,517 for 2017.
But that figure was 22 percent less than the 533,378 the CPB apprehended in 2016, which itself was 19 percent more than than the 444,859 in 2015.
In 2014, CPB apprehended 569,237.
In his proclamation, President Trump noted that CPB is overwhelmed at the border and handling some 2,000 aliens every day.
The question of who gets in and who does not — that is, who is admissible — is a key point in Trump’s proclamation.
Of the 60,345 caught at the border in October, only 9,770 were found “inadmissble,” a category into which any almost alien could fit on the grounds of health alone.
That means 50,975, including 4,991 unaccompanied minors and 23,131 family units, were not “inadmissble.”
For the fiscal year ending in September, of 521,080 aliens caught at the border, Trump noted in his proclamation, just 124,151 were deemed inadmissible. The number in the remaining bunch is frightening: 396,579, including 107,212 family units and 50,036 unaccompanied minors.
Trump Explains the Problem
The difficulty is catching up with these illegals once they are release in the country, which is one reason Trump issued the proclamation clamping down on bogus asylum claims.
“The vast majority of such aliens are found to satisfy the credible-fear threshold, although only a fraction of the claimants whose claims are adjudicated ultimately qualify for asylum or other protection,” the proclamation said.
As well:
Aliens found to have a credible fear are often released into the interior of the United States, as a result of a lack of detention space and a variety of other legal and practical difficulties, pending adjudication of their claims in a full removal proceeding in immigration court. The immigration adjudication process often takes years to complete because of the growing volume of claims and because of the need to expedite proceedings for detained aliens. During that time, many released aliens fail to appear for hearings, do not comply with subsequent orders of removal, or are difficult to locate and remove.
And as The New American reported Friday, the immigration courts are contending with a backlog of more than one million cases. That number comes from the TRAC Immigration website of Syracuse University, which also reported a record-high number of deportation orders for fiscal 2018: 287,741.
That’s about 1,110 orders for every one of the year’s 261 working days .
Beyond all that, news reports showed that the migrants are not running from trouble. Many if not most are coming because they are simply looking for work.
One sign they aren’t fleeing persecution is the way the caravan suddenly assembled and departed for better climes. That’s wasn’t the mark of an inchoate mass of frightened, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
It’s the mark of an organized movement that, unstopped, will wreck the borders of the United States and alter its political and cultural landscape.
Caravan Still Coming
On Friday, the caravan — 4,000 to 6,000 strong — departed Mexico City, having assembled there to rest before beginning the final push to overwhelm the border. Apparently, the group has something of a soft spot for democratic procedure given that it voted on whether to head north.
But hours later, Trump published his order: Migrants who cross the border illegally, and not at a legitimate point of entry, will not be granted asylum.
Immediately, a coalition of leftsit open-borders activists, including the hard left American Civil Liberities Union and Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a lawsuit to stop the executive action.
Photo: U.S. Border Patrol
