Illegal border crossings counted by U.S. officials last month were the highest since 2006, the latest demonstration that migrants are rushing the border to take advantage of President Biden’s historic loosening of restrictions.
Analyst Steven Kopits said that the reported 96,974 migrants apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection broke many records.
“This was almost three times the level of one year earlier and the highest since 2006, that is, during the Bush administration. It was far worse than any February under either the Obama or Trump administrations,” said Kopits, who has promoted a market-based visa as a workable immigration reform.
And it hasn’t ended. Twitter today showed reports of long lines of illegal immigrants waiting to cross the Rio Grande to enter the United States.
The surge started after Biden was elected. During the election, he promised to wipe away former President Donald Trump’s immigration initiatives that were credited with slowing illegal crossings to a crawl.
Now, there are so many migrants being caught or walking up to border crossings that the administration has had to reopen some facilities that were decried by the Democrats during the Trump administration.
VIDEO CAPTURED THIS MORNING: Brazen Smuggler Illegally Ferries Huge Line Of People Across Rio Grande pic.twitter.com/pNhbrlRy1w
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) March 11, 2021
The Biden team has expressed some surprise with the surge, but Kopits said that is disingenuous. What’s more, his outfit, Princeton Policy Advisers, predicted it.
“In our November 23rd note, I wrote, ‘The numbers suggest the border problem will continue to worsen as long as the current catch-and-boot regime lasts, possibly through Q1 2021. If so, the apprehension numbers in the December to March period could once again be eye-popping and a policy priority — or at least a policy headache — for the incoming Biden administration.’ Not only was this qualitative guidance, we forecast the numbers,” Kopits said.
And, he added, “Reported apprehensions were even worse than our forecast, which itself might reasonably have been characterized as ‘alarmist.’ That the Biden administration has been caught unawares is frankly surprising. The Obama administration had problems with its own surge, and consequently, these issues should not have been novel or unexpected for President Biden.”
What’s more, he predicted that the administration may have to employ Trump-era restrictions to slow the flood. “Expect some entirely Trumpian, and fairly nasty, measures to be implemented in the next month or so to control the surge,” said the analyst.
