USA TODAY International Edition
Southwest border crossing arrests climb
Line with Mexico ‘under siege,’ Trump declares
The number of people caught trying to cross the southwest border with Mexico increased for a third straight month in April, but overall apprehension numbers remain at historic lows, according to data released late Thursday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The increase comes as more than 150 people from Central America have reached the border and applied for asylum, a caravan that has drawn the fury of President Trump and prompted his administration to redouble its efforts to secure the border.
U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 38,234 people along the U.S.-Mexico border in April, a 227% increase from April 2017, according to the new data. The Trump administration is pointing to the data as proof that the U.S. must do more to secure the border. Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton warned that apprehensions have “more than tripled” from April 2017 to April 2018.
“Our Southern Border is under siege,” Trump tweeted Friday morning after the numbers were released. “Congress must act now to change our weak and ineffective immigration laws. Must build a Wall. Mexico, which has a massive crime problem, is doing little to help!”
Yet immigration experts say the department is cherry-picking data to exaggerate the recent increase in illegal immigration.
Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a group that advocates for immigrants, said it’s impossible to gauge the flow of people along the border by looking at only two specific months.
Overall, the Border Patrol is on pace to catch 363,000 people trying to cross the border illegally in fiscal year 2018, which is lower than the total in seven out of the past 10 years. It’s also far below the peak during the 2000s, when the Border Patrol was routinely catching more than 1 million people a year.
“When you’re looking at data like this, you have to look at multiple years, not one particular month,” Noorani said. “The data shows that the border remains as secure as ever.”
Even supporters of the Trump administration’s attempts to crack down on illegal immigration say it’s hard to measure the border crossings in monthly increments.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that has advised the Trump administration on ways to limit illegal immigration, said the recent increase shows that there are definitely problems along the border.
She said Congress has failed to provide funding to expand the border wall, allowing people to continue crossing illegally. She said immigrants are lured by talk of an “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., by American companies that continue to hire them and by asylum laws that allow them to enter the country to plead their case.
But Vaughan said that conversation should be conducted in the context of historical trends, not individual months. She said the numbers are further skewed by the sharp drop in illegal immigration in the months following Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, which she described as an “outlier” in the overall numbers.
“It’s hard to draw any conclusions just looking at particular points in time,” Vaughan said. “It’s really the longerterm trends that are important.”
“You have to look at multiple years, not one particular month.” Ali Noorani Executive director of the National Immigration Forum