Border arrests drop for 8 straight months
WASHINGTON – 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 U.S.-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 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% decline from December.
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% 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 strained last spring, with migrants crammed for weeks into small border stations not meant to hold people beyond a few days. News of the conditions in the border stations, coupled with migrant deaths, promoted massive outrage and pushed Congress into emergency funding to help ease the crush.
More than 55,000 asylum seekers have been sent over the border to Mexico to wait out their asylum cases and have faced sickness and squalid conditions in makeshift camps, plus assault and kidnapping by cartels that patrol the borderlands.