Trump’s ‘border crisis’ is not backed by reality
President Donald Trump and his administration sought last week to cast the situation at the southern border as an urgent security and humanitarian crisis that only his long-promised wall — the cornerstone of his campaign — could fix.
With the government shutdown over $5.7 billion for the barrier stretching into the longest in history, federal workers missed their first paycheck and Trump briefly visited McAllen to press his case.
“This is a national emergency,” he told reporters, continuing to insist he could invoke rare presidential powers to proceed on construction without Congress — a controversial move that would likely end up in court.
“If I have to, I will,” Trump said Thursday, though he appeared to back away from that idea Friday, saying, “It’s the easy way out, but Congress should do this.”
With both sides at an impasse, the president and his administration continued dialing up the rhetoric.
“Without (a wall), our Country cannot be safe,” Trump tweeted Friday. “Criminals, Gangs, Human Traffickers,
Drugs & so much other big trouble can easily pour in.”
But the crisis he has repeatedly tried to portray — dangerous migrants flooding across the border, bringing massive drugs and crime — does not exist.
Illegal crossings drop
The number of migrants caught crossing the border illegally is at a historic low, having dropped from a peak of 1.6 million in 2000 to a record low of about 303,900 after Trump took office in 2017. Apprehensions rose slightly last year to about 396,600, but almost twice as many immigrants — 606,926 — came here legally and overstayed their visas in 2017.
Fewer migrants are crossing illegally in part because of a steep decline in migration from Mexico as its economy has grown and birth rates have fallen. Border enforcement after 9/ 11 has also grown much more aggressive. Annual funding for the two enforcement agencies — Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — more than doubled, to $19.3 billion, from 2003 to 2016.
In 2006, each Border Patrol agent at the southern border apprehended an average of 97 immigrants a year, compared with only 18 in 2017, said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
“Immigrants are definitely not pouring across the southern border,” she said.
Trump and his administration have repeatedly and falsely tried to connect illegal immigration at the southern border with the surge of heroin and fentanyl deaths in the United States. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in a USA Today op-ed Wednesday, suggested the increased smuggling of fentanyl, a powerful opioid, is related to border security.
In fact, most fentanyl is shipped from China via the U.S. Post Office.
Trump, in his first televised Oval Office address, said Tuesday night that 90 percent of heroin comes across the southern border, implying a wall is necessary to prevent “taking far too many American lives.”
Though most heroin does come from Mexico, almost all of it is trafficked through legal ports of entry and only a “small percentage” was seized in between them — the areas where a wall would make a difference — according to a 2018 Drug Enforcement Administration report. Most cocaine and methamphetamine also come across this way, mainly hidden in vehicles, and it is primarily only marijuana that is smuggled between ports of entry.
The president, who launched his 2015 campaign calling Mexicans criminals and rapists, has consistently characterized immigrants as a danger to Americans. He emphasized that theme repeatedly last week, listing several Americans who were killed by immigrants here illegally.
“How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” he asked.
Multiple studies have found that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than are native-born Americans. A 2014 Northwestern University analysis of crime statistics and county records found “essentially no correlation between immigrants and violent crime.”
Gang connections
Trump has often railed against MS-13 gang members crossing the border. Between 2012 and 2017, about 4,940 immigrants with suspected or confirmed gang affiliations were apprehended at the border, about 900 a year, according to Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost’s Senate testimony in 2017.
And though U.S. officials encountered almost 17,000 people convicted of crimes in the United States or abroad in fiscal 2018, 63 percent of them arrived at ports of entry, including airports. They would not have been impacted by a wall.
Of more than 8,530 migrants with criminal records apprehended by Border Patrol agents in 2017 for crossing illegally, about half had convictions for illegal entry and re-entry after being deported. Only three had been arrested for homicide.
The administration has also falsely suggested that thousands of terrorists are flooding across the southern border, though a 2017 State Department report found “no credible evidence” of that.
In a document sent to Congress this month, the White House claimed more than 3,750 “known or suspected terrorists” on government watch lists were blocked from entering the United States in fiscal year 2017. The administration later clarified that most had tried to come by air, not across the southern border.
In the first half of fiscal 2018, Customs and Border Protection agents stopped only six immigrants at ports of entry at the southern border whose names were on such watch lists, according to data provided to Congress in May 2018 and reported by NBC News.
The administration has said that more than 3,000 “special interest aliens” were encountered at the southern border last year. The broad category includes people from any country that has ever promoted terrorism, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, and does not mean they have ever been suspected of a crime or were not allowed to enter the U.S.
‘Guilty of fear mongering’
“There is no wave of terrorist operatives waiting to cross overland into the United States,” Nicholas Rasmussen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center until 2017, wrote last week on the online site Just Security. “Anyone in authority using this argument to bolster support for building the wall or any other physical barrier along the southern border is most likely guilty of fear mongering and willfully misleading the American people.”
What has changed — creating a genuine crisis for federal officials — is who is coming and why. The number of immigrant families crossing the border, mostly from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, reached record levels over the past four months. More than 27,500 turned themselves in or were apprehended by Border Patrol agents between ports of entry in December.
It was the third month that more families than single adults have come — a significant change from decades of migration patterns — and families now make up about 60 percent of all apprehensions at the border.
The surge has overwhelmed some federal processing facilities along the border, and two Guatemalan children died last month after being taken into custody. Trump this week called the arrival of so many families a “crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.”
The administration has criticized a 2008 anti-human trafficking law and a 1997 federal settlement protecting children in detention for forcing it to release most families after just three weeks in detention.
A record backlog of nearly 800,000 cases in the civil immigration courts means many migrants can wait years before their deportation cases are processed. By then, some have disappeared into the fabric of American life and critics say such a “free pass” encourages more to come.
‘Incentivized people’
The surge in families is in part because many are fleeing crippling gang violence, poverty and corruption. Trump’s policies are also partly to blame, said Pierce, the migration analyst.
“There is a direct relationship with the president threatening very harsh policies and a bit of a rush to our southern border,” she said.
Trump rescinded his controversial family separation policy last June, spurring a sudden rise in families coming here. He has also attempted to limit how migrants could qualify for asylum between ports of entry, although that policy was halted by a federal judge. The administration also announced it would force asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico — but that hasn’t been implemented yet.
“We think those (announcements) likely incentivized people to come in as quickly as possible,” Pierce said.
Border agents have also limited how many asylum seekers can ask for refugee protection at legal ports of entry. Weekslong waits in dangerous border cities have spurred some migrants to cross illegally out of desperation.
Any extension of current border fencing would likely not stop families from coming here. Most are turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents and asking for asylum, not running away.
Adding asylum officers and immigration judges to more quickly adjudicate their claims would make a far greater difference, Pierce said. Trump’s most recent request would allocate $563 million for 75 more judges and support staff.
If Democrats agree to fund the $5.7 billion for about 250 more miles of border fencing, it would be somewhat of a symbolic gesture.
Much of the area at the epicenter of the southern border’s illegal crossings — the stretch of the Rio Grande west of Brownsville near McAllen — is private land that would have to be seized through eminent domain.
More than a decade after passing the 2006 Secure Fence Act, the government is still tied up in lawsuits over some land seizures in the Rio Grande Valley.