The number of people being taken into custody per day on the southern border has surpassed the number that Border Patrol agents saw at the height of the 2019 crisis during the Trump administration.
Approximately 6,000 adults and children were apprehended by agents across the 1,950-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday, a senior official said during a call with reporters Friday. During the busiest months of the 2019 surge, agents were seeing 4,500 people per day.
The official said agents took an average of 5,000 people into custody each day over the past month, which over 30 days would equate to 150,000 people detected after illegally crossing the southern border. In February, agents saw more than 97,000 people come across the international boundary between land ports of entry where pedestrians and vehicles are supposed to come through.
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Approximately half of all those being stopped at the border are families and children from Central America, while the other half are Mexican adults.
Last March, the Trump administration followed the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and opted to return all children and adults immediately to Mexico or other countries to avoid bringing people into its facilities in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
In January, President Joe Biden chose not to return children who arrive alone. Since then, increasingly more children are showing up at the southern border, in part, as the Washington Examiner has learned, because families that are returned to Mexico are choosing to send their children back across alone.
Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have repeatedly claimed that most families are being sent back south of the border under the CDC provision, but data from February indicates that just 40% of the 19,000 people who came with a family member were returned.
The Border Patrol official who spoke with reporters on Friday said that of the 6,000 people apprehended a day earlier, only 1,900 were able to be booked into the system and will be allowed to stay in the United States while their legal cases proceed. Only 300 people were returned to Mexico. Customs and Border Protection did not explain the discrepancy in the numbers.
Biden downplayed the increases during a press conference Thursday as nothing more than seasonal shifts. The Border Patrol official credited the shifts as one factor but said this year is not normal.
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“The reason this is much different this year than it has been in previous years is, one, we’re faced with some unique challenges, the demographic or the population that we’re encountering is much different,” the official said. “And then, certainly, COVID has thrown a wrench into the whole process and has forced us to make some adjustments both operationally and administratively to ensure that we’re able to protect the population that we’re retaining within our facilities, as well as protect our workforce and the communities that we serve.”
