You see the headline numbers every month. 178,000 in April. 180,000 in May. 190,000 in June. Our southern border is being flooded with migrants every month thanks to President Joe Biden’s decision to dismantle President Donald Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols.
But those topline numbers only capture part of Biden’s border crisis. Each of those numbers represents tabulated “encounters” by Customs and Border Protection agents on the Southwest border. It does not capture all of the illegal immigrants who successfully snuck over the border without being detected.
And all indications are the number of illegal immigrants evading CBP detection is growing.
“They will keep families, they will keep unaccompanied minors in the stash house on the Mexican side,” former acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan recently told Fox News. “They will bring them across in one area and say ‘go here.’ While the Border Patrol agents are distracted providing humanitarian care, drugs and criminal aliens are just pouring through wide open, unmonitored unsecured areas.”
But just how many illegal immigrants are sneaking undetected across our southern border each month?
In 2018, engineers and economists at Yale and MIT developed a model estimating what percentage of illegal immigrants trying to cross the southern border were successfully apprehended by CBP based on the percentage of repeat offenders.
At the time, the authors predicted that 50% of illegal border crossers were being apprehended. Reached by email, one author of the study estimated that percentage to be 68% today.
Applying that to estimates that 1.8 million migrants will be caught on the southern border this year, that means an additional 576,000 estimated illegal immigrants will successfully enter the U.S. this year.
