On Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released new data from May. Attempted crossings reached a 21-year high. Border agents stopped 180,034 people who tried to enter the country illegally along the U.S.-Mexico border. This news comes after Vice President Kamala Harris, whom President Joe Biden commissioned to solve the border crisis, cackled when a reporter asked her if she plans to travel to the border.
Border officials denied entry to about 8,000 of the 180,034 number, while the vast majority of illegal border crossers went across the border through unfenced areas. May’s tally represents an uptick from the 178,622 people stopped in April and the 172,331 stopped in March. These figures do not include the number of illegal immigrants who got away from authorities, a number that hit 40,000 in April.
Since the 2021 fiscal year began in October 2020, border officials stopped 929,868 people who illegally crossed the border, almost double the 459,000 they stopped in 2020.
Harris traveled to Guatemala this week, ostensibly to handle the “root causes” of the border crisis. During her visit, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei blamed Biden for the border crisis, saying that the change from Trump’s administration emboldened the human traffickers on the border, known as “coyotes.”
Giammattei said the change in government led to a change in message. “The message changed to ‘We are going to reunite families and we are going to reunite children,” the foreign leader said. “The very next day the coyotes here were organizing groups of children to take them to the United States.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Del Rio Sector Border Patrol agents have arrested 95 convicted sex offenders since October 1, 2020, a whopping 3,166 percent increase over the same timeframe last fiscal year. Biden canceled Operation Talon, a Trump administration initiative that deported illegal immigrants who had been convicted of sex crimes.
Biden rushed to reverse the Trump policies that had gotten the border crisis under control. Not only did the president order an end to border wall construction, but he also ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico until their cases had been adjudicated. Biden also unilaterally dropped Trump’s “safe third country” deals with Latin American countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador that enabled the U.S. to direct asylum seekers to settle in countries that were safe for them, rather than allowing them into the U.S.
Biden’s campaign rhetoric — promising a deportation moratorium (that got blocked by court order) and health care for illegal aliens, among other things — arguably encouraged migrants to rush to America. Immigrants have come to the border wearing shirts that read, “Biden please let us in!”
Trump’s policies helped get the border crisis under control. Biden reversed those policies and the results have been disastrous.
Recommended: Guatemalan President Blames Biden for Border Crisis
“We proudly handed the Biden Administration the most secure border in history. All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot. Instead, in the span of a just few weeks, the Biden Administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster,” Trump said in March.
Each month, Trump’s record on the border looks better and better.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member