EXCLUSIVE — Border Patrol arrested half the number of illegal immigrants in January than it did the previous month, as the Biden administration grapples with ways to stem the border crisis, according to government data obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner.
Federal law enforcement agents apprehended approximately 125,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally in January, a significant decline from more than 250,000 arrests in December 2023.
The Washington Examiner viewed a U.S. Customs and Border Protection data page Wednesday that showed 77,000 of the 125,000 immigrants arrested in January were adults traveling alone. More than 40,000 people were part of a family, and the remaining 7,000 were unaccompanied children.
CBP has not released January data and typically publishes border data for the previous month in the third or fourth week of the following month.
The drop in arrests, from 251,222 in December to 125,451 in January, is not unusual for this time of year, a period when human smugglers typically push fewer people across the border. Numbers have climbed in the early spring months historically.
Border Patrol agents arrested 224,017 illegal immigrants in December 2022 and saw the figure drop to 131,720 in January 2023.
But the January 2024 numbers are noteworthy, given that they are the third-lowest number of arrests across the 36 months President Joe Biden has been in office.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have struggled to deal with the situation at the border, particularly this week after a Republican-led effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas failed and a bipartisan immigration deal in the Senate was rejected by GOP leaders in both chambers.
Despite the decline in arrests in January, illegal immigrant encounters nationwide remain very high.
A Fox News report found that the number of Border Patrol arrests combined with the number of immigrants who were denied admission or paroled into the country at ports of entry topped 1 million since fiscal 2024 commenced in October 2023 through January, rising at a faster rate than any other year on record.
However, the number of immigrants arrested solely by Border Patrol was lower between October 2023 and January than the same period a year earlier.
The busiest parts of the 2,000-mile southern border for illegal immigration last month were in Tucson, Arizona, and San Diego, followed by the El Paso and Del Rio regions of Texas.
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Border Patrol agents in Tucson arrested roughly 50,000 illegal immigrants in January, an average of 1,610 arrests per day. In San Diego, agents apprehended nearly 25,000 people illegally entering throughout the month.
The DHS and CBP did not respond to requests for comment.
