Border officials say Rio Grande crossings soaring
Some 1,000 people per day are sneaking by agents busy attending families
Nearly 1,000 people per day are sneaking into the United States without being identified or taken into custody because U.S. border agents are busy attending to migrant families and unaccompanied children while also trying to stop soaring numbers of male adults, according to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials familiar with the data.
While CBP has never claimed to interdict every border crosser, the number of so-called got aways recorded in recent weeks is the highest in recent memory, said two of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the data. The agency defines a got away as an individual who is not turned back to Mexico or apprehended, and is no longer being actively pursued by Border Patrol.
Counting got aways is not an exact science, but CBP has spent more than $1 billion over the past two decades on surveillance technology and camera networks that have given the agency far greater ability to detect illegal crossings in real time.
Apprehending those individuals is another matter.
When migration levels surge, as with the current influx, border agents spend significant amounts of time transporting and processing families and unaccompanied minors, who generally do not attempt to evade capture, turning themselves in and seeking humanitarian refuge in the United States.
Department of Homeland Security officials say they expect border crossings to leap to a 20-year high in 2021. The number of migrants taken into custody by agents in March is projected to top 160,000 — the highest one-month total since March 2006 — and include more than 18,000 teenagers and children who arrived without parents, a record.
A CBP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Border Patrol Deputy Chief Raul Ortiz said during a podcast in February that the agency had recorded 1,000 got aways on a single day, describing that as an unusual event. But since then, the figure has become a new normal.