Border bust at record high
Illegal immigration into the United States is hitting a new record, with arrests made by the Border Patrol during the 2021 fiscal year exceeding the previous highest level in 1986, according to a report.
US Customs and Border Protection data obtained by The Washington Post reveal how illegal immigration numbers have shot up during President Biden’s administration — with some illegal migrants thanking Biden for lifting strict immigration policies implemented under former President Donald Trump.
Mexico was the largest single source of illegal immigration during the fiscal year, the data revealed, with the Border Patrol arresting more than 608,000 Mexican nationals. This number alone is bigger than the average number of border arrests from 2012 to 2020 — 540,000.
The second-biggest source of illegal immigrants was categorized as “other” and comprised Haitians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, Cubans, Brazilians and migrants from other countries — totaling around 367,000 arrests.
The Border Patrol also made about 309,000 arrests of Honduran illegal immigrants, 279,000 Guatemalan nationals and around 96,000 migrants from El Salvador.
In total, the agency has made more than 1.3 million arrests of illegal immigrants along the southern border since Biden took office in January. The number of border arrests made in Fiscal Year 2021 — more than 1.7 million — is the second-highest annual total ever recorded, according to the report.
Border Patrol agents saw the largest levels of arrests in July and August, when they took more than 200,000 migrants into custody. That number was closely followed last month, when officials arrested about 192,000 migrants, CBP data revealed.
In 1986, Border Patrol agents made 1.69 million arrests nationwide. CBP data does not specify how many were made along the southern border or elsewhere in the US. Out of the 1.7 million detained in FY 2021, 1.66 million were apprehended along the Mexican border alone, per the report.
Amid the growing number of arrests along the border, CBP data did indicate declining seizures in cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
Local and state officials have pleaded with the administration for assistance, citing a lack of Border Patrol manpower and security concerns.
The Biden administration has faced backlash since January over its inaction on the border crisis. Most recently, the president was slammed after The Post reported planeloads of migrants are being flown secretly into suburban New York.
IF President Biden thought illegal migrants were Republican voters, you know the southern border would be slammed shut tomorrow. Instead, his administration is not even trying to stem the flood of border crossings. It has only become more efficient at dispersing the migrants covertly throughout the country to avoid the optics of overcrowded detention facilities.
We know Biden threw the border wide open on Day 1 of his presidency when he dismantled the Trump administration’s border-protection measures.
He laid out the welcome mat to “coyotes,” cartels and criminal human-smugglers who prey on the most vulnerable people in the world.
We know that more than 1.7 million migrants were apprehended crossing the Mexico border this year through September, the highest numbers recorded.
But the mystery is where have they all gone. The Biden administration won’t say.
The Post this week exposed one small piece of the federal government’s covert operation to disperse illegal migrants around the country: charter jets arriving as late as 3 and 4 a.m. at White Plains airport in suburban Westchester.
We staked out the airport for three nights last week and recorded the arrival of two migrant flights.
On Friday, we watched a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, operated by World Atlantic Airlines, fly in from El Paso, Texas, via Jacksonville, Fla., at 9:52 p.m. Disembarking were approximately 100 migrants, who appeared to be older teenagers and adults in their 20s.
They were whisked onto three buses operated by American Dream Coaches, and dropped off at the nonprofit MercyFirst in Syosset, LI.
On Wednesday, night The Post photographed another World Atlantic Airlines flight that landed at White Plains at 10:49 p.m.
About 100 migrants boarded two buses operated by J&F Tours and were dropped off at 12:47 a.m. at the Thomas Edison service area off the New Jersey Turnpike in Woodbridge. They were then driven away by people who arrived in cars and did not appear to be asked for identification by the officials overseeing the operation.
On Saturday night, a Post team in Florida watched a third migrant flight land at Jacksonville International Airport from Houston and disgorge 10 to 15 migrants who were driven 130 miles to a juvenile-detention center near Tallahassee. The Boeing 737-700, operated by California-based Avelo Airlines, continued onto White Plains, landing at 1:02 a.m. Sunday.
These were just three of the flights shuttling into White Plains every week from McAllen, El Paso and Houston, Texas, since at least Aug. 8.
The clandestine operation run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the direction of Secretary Xavier Becerra is conservatively estimated by aviation experts to cost $150,000 per flight.
We would like to tell you how many migrants have been flown into White Plains, who they are, where they have gone, and how much the airlift has cost. We would like to tell you exactly where else in the country the government has been secretly flying migrants, instead of having to figure it out from public flight logs.
But the Biden administration, and the federal government agencies involved in the operation will not answer questions.
They have stonewalled, obfuscated and obstructed attempts to learn more about their migrant-dispersal operation.
The secrecy surrounding the late-night flights says it all, says Mark Morgan, former chief operating officer and acting commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection in the Trump administration.
“If they felt they would get political mileage out of it, they would do it in broad daylight and have a ticker tape parade,” he said.
“This is another example of ‘what happens at the southwest border doesn’t stay at the southwest border.’ Every city and town is a border town.”
By the end of September, 150,000 unaccompanied minors had been released into the country, he says.
“There are thousands of unaccompanied minors who claim to be 17 but are absolutely not 17. No doubt a significant amount are older . . . but how do we prove it? They have no documents and we’re releasing them so fast, there is no way you can verify how old they are.”
He says sponsors or people who claim to be relatives of the unaccompanied minors are supposed to be carefully vetted before migrant children are released into their care.
But “the vetting process is a joke,” he says. The Biden administration has “all but gotten rid of the process . . . They’re just getting better at processing so the American people don’t see the magnitude of what’s happening at the border. It’s a shell game.”
The White House, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security referred all inquiries to HHS.
But HHS ignored e-mailed questions sent last Friday morning, which I resent five times.
It was only after I posted a tweet at 11:57 a.m. Saturday, lamenting that HHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Sarah Lovenheim and her boss, Becerra, were refusing to answer questions from The Post, that I received an e-mail from HHS spokesman Jorge Silva — 14 minutes later, at 12:11 p.m.
But his e-mail was a boilerplate paragraph that the White House had already provided. It did not answer nine of the 10 questions I asked.
Silva’s statement said that all migrants flown into White Plains were “unaccompanied children [who] passed through the Westchester airport en route to their final destination to be unified with their parents or vetted sponsor.”
They receive a COVID-19 test before flying. If they test positive they are “medically isolated for a minimum of 10 days.”
“A vast majority” have received at least one dose of vaccine.
I had also asked: How many migrants have flown into White Plains? When did the flights begin? What is the age range of the migrants? Why do most of the flights arrive after midnight — as late as 3 and 4 a.m.? Why do some planes stop at Jacksonville? What other airports in the country are used as “hubs” to resettle migrants? Are Alexandria, La., ana and Long Beach, Calif., also hubs? What is the cost of the program? How much longer are the flights expected to continue? How does HHS ensure migrants are adequately housed and fed after they are released? How does HHS ensure the bona fides of the people picking up migrants at freeway rest areas without checking IDs against a manifest, which would seem to be an important safeguard of the welfare of unaccompanied children?
Are the adult migrants also COVID-tested, quarantined and vaccinated?
The answer was a resounding silence.