June sets record for most migrants reaching border
WASHINGTON» A record number of migrants arrived at the southwestern border last month, a slight uptick from May and a sign that the surge this year may extend into the hotter summer months when numbers typically start dropping.
According to new data released Friday by Customs and Border Protection, June also brought more migrant families to the border than any other month since President Joe Biden took office. In all, border officials encountered migrants there 188,829 times, the largest number in a single month in recent history.
The number of migrant children and teenagers arriving at the border increased slightly from May, but the influx has slowed since early spring, when a steep surge created Biden’s first immigration crisis as president.
On average about 500 migrant children and teenagers arrived alone at the border in June, compared with about 600 a day in March.
The uptick in family arrivals in June still falls well short of the record set in May 2019, when 84,000 families came. But the growing overall numbers, and Biden’s rejection of former President Donald Trump’s hard-line tactics toward immigrants living in the country without legal permission, soon will force the administration to grapple with vexing policy and political questions that the public health rule, known as Title 42, largely has allowed it to avoid.
As of Friday, nearly 15,000 children were in government shelters overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to internal data obtained by The New York Times.
The number of times that single adults tried to enter the country last month was down slightly; they were turned away under the public health rule 82% of the time.
According to Customs and Border Protection, 34% of all the migrants encountered in June had tried at least one more time to enter the country in the past 12 months. The number of new migrants to arrive at the southern border since October is just slightly lower than the last surge in 2019 during the Trump administration, the agency said.
Republicans have seized on the surge in migration to the southern border — driven in part by violence and poverty in Central America, as it has been for years — and have turned it into a political attack on Biden.
The party is hoping the issue will galvanize voters in midterm elections next year, when it will have a chance to recapture control of the Senate and the House.
Biden campaigned on rebuilding the country’s asylum system — once an emblem of its identity — after the Trump administration enforced hard-line changes, shrinking the categories of migrants who could apply for asylum and making it harder for asylum-seekers to stay in the United States while their claims were considered. As part of that, the Biden administration is preparing to start accepting more migrant families, possibly beginning in the coming weeks, in a phased-in approach to repealing the public health rule, which many public health experts have said was unnecessary in the first place.
But increasingly, the administration has been allowing most migrant families to come into the country, permitting 72% of them to enter from March to June. Last month, officials turned families away only 14% of the time under the public health rule, which has been in effect since the beginning of the pandemic. In March, by comparison, border officials turned away migrant families 40% of the time.
The Biden administration has been accepting migrant families from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela and other countries outside Mexico and Central America who arrive across the Mexican border, despite the public health rule, because Mexico will not take them back once they have entered the United States. Most families who are not turned back at the border ask for asylum and are released from detention to wait for their cases to go through the clogged immigration court system.
Migrant families started showing up at the southern border in larger numbers in 2014. Most have been from Central America, where they have been fleeing violence and poverty.