Border apprehensions drop:

The number of border apprehensions has dropped for the eighth straight month, following

crackdowns by the Trump administration that include forcing asylum seekers back over the US-Mexico border to wait out their claims, a Homeland Security official

said Monday.

The official said the number of encounters with border officials over the past four months was 165,000. A year earlier during

the same time it was about 242,000. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official results have not been released.

The tally for the month of January was about 36,000, including apprehensions of people crossing illegally and migrants who were declared inadmissible by border officers at a port of entry . It was a 10 percent decline from December.

The steep decline will almost certainly figure heavily into President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday. Trump has made cracking down on immigration – legal and illegal – a signature issue. He has railed against asylum seekers and other border crossers as con artists who “scam” the system, and derided immigrants from Mexico as “bad hombres. ”

Trump uses the monthly border tallies as a benchmark to determine how his policies are working, railing against Homeland Security officials when the numbers are up. The number of people crossing the border traditionally declines when it’s hot outside – but the winter months often see creeping increases.

The monthly tally is down almost 75 percent from the peak last May, when there were more than 144,000 encounters with migrants, the large majority families from Central America who are not easily returned over the border. The immigration system was vastly strained last spring, with migrants crammed for weeks into small border stations not meant to hold people beyond a few days. (AP)

In this Jan 9, 2008 photo released by the US Navy, the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine USS Wyoming approaches Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Ga. The Pentagon’s top policy official tells The Associated Press that the United States for the first time has deployed the newest addition to its nuclear arsenal - a submarine-launched weapon that the Trump administration says will make nuclear war less likely. (AP)