The number of illegal immigrants encountered at the nation’s borders in January was a major decline from that of December 2023, marking the first big decrease in six months. It comes at a time when the Biden administration is facing calls for retribution from Republicans infuriated over the three-year border crisis.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection data released Tuesday afternoon, hours before House lawmakers are scheduled to vote on impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, revealed 242,587 non-U.S. citizens were encountered attempting to enter the United States last month.
The last time encounters dropped below 300,000 in a month was July 2023, when roughly 245,000 immigrants were tallied.
Of the 242,587 encounters, more than 125,000 were arrested by Border Patrol agents for illegally crossing the border between the ports of entry.
The 125,000 was slashed by half from more than 250,000 arrests nationwide in December 2023, confirming the Washington Examiner’s Feb. 7 report that previewed the enormous decline in arrests.
“As a result of seasonal trends, as well as enhanced enforcement efforts by the men and women of CBP and our international partners, southwest border encounters between ports of entry dropped by 50% in January,” said Troy Miller, CBP’s Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner, in a statement Tuesday. “We continue to experience serious challenges along our border which surpass the capacity of the immigration system.”
The remaining 117,000 immigrants encountered were people who lacked proper documents to be admitted through an airport, land port, or sea port of entry, as well as immigrants who were paroled into the country through initiatives that the Biden administration has created to deter immigrants from crossing illegally. Republicans have decried the parole-based programs as going around the law as Congress intended.
The timing of the data release was unusual. CBP typically publishes monthly border statistics for the previous month at the end of the third or fourth week of the following month.
More than 40,000 people were part of a family, and the remaining 7,000 were unaccompanied children.
The drop in Border Patrol arrests was not unusual for this time of year 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 after failing to pass a bipartisan immigration deal in the Senate.
Despite the decline in arrests in January, illegal immigrant encounters nationwide remain higher than average months throughout past White House administrations.
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.
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.
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A growing number of immigrants traversing Mexico to get into the U.S. are bypassing the Texas border to cross into Arizona and California in the wake of Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) stepped-up enforcement.
In 2021, 69% of illegal immigrant arrests across the southern border occurred in Texas. As Abbott stepped up security at the start of the Biden administration in 2021, arrests of illegal crossers began to fall and dropped to just 34% last month.
