No, the border crisis hasn’t abated

Following the end of Title 42 last month, the predicted increase in illegal border crossings from their already ridiculous levels never fully materialized. And for a time, there was even a dip in the numbers. This left the administration “crowing” over the reports. The administration’s plan was “working as intended,” we were told. It was a “major victory” for the White House in the face of MAGA “misinformation” about how bad things were on the southern border. And most of the legacy media ate up these tales. But a closer look at the actual data (which we’ll get to in a moment) tells a very different story.

The Biden administration on Tuesday took a victory lap, declaring that its immigration plan is “working as intended” nearly a month after a major shift in policy at the nation’s southern border.

The Department of Homeland Security said that since the lifting of the public health order known as Title 42 at midnight May 12, unlawful border crossings have plummeted by more than 70 percent. In a press release, the Biden administration cited its “execution” of a plan that paired tough consequences for unlawful entry with an expansion of lawful pathways and processes for migrants in the hemisphere.

Unfortunately for the administration’s cheerleaders, while all of this celebrating and end zone dancing was taking place, Customs and Border Security quietly released their latest Southwest Land Border Encounters report. If things are going so swimmingly well, why do the numbers still look so bad? Let’s start with their chart of total migrant encounters per month covering the fiscal years 2020 through the present.

As you can see, border encounters in the month of May were slightly lower than in the same month last year. (Approximately 200K versus 240K.) But that’s still 20K higher than in 2021 and nearly ten times higher than in 2020. And there are still four months left in the current fiscal year. We’re on track to still set another record. And even if we don’t we’ll still wind up well above two million, which is completely unacceptable.

Then there’s the issue of the demographics of all of these illegal border jumpers. We keep hearing about the plights of all of the families “seeking a fresh start in America.” Think of the children! And there definitely are some children crossing the border and what’s happening to them is a sin. But they don’t make up nearly the percentage of the total human flood that you’ve probably been led to believe. Check out these numbers.

Those figures further put the lie to the spin you generally get from KJP’s briefings. The vast majority of all of the people entering the country illegally are single adults, almost (but not quite) entirely comprised of young adult males. Their numbers more than double those who were counted as being “individuals in a family unit.” (And without DNA testing, there is no way to know how many of them were actually related.) And the number of unaccompanied minors was only a handful by comparison. Some of those later turned out to be lying about their age, also.

In other words, the number of border encounters did dip a bit after Title 42 ended, but it didn’t “plummet.” (A word KJP actually used.) So rather than the problem being “solved,” it just turned out to be slightly less horrible than some of us had anticipated. That’s not exactly a cause for celebration.

The crisis remains and it also remains entirely fixable. Finish the border wall. Triple the funding for both the Border Patrol and the immigration courts and staff them up to levels where they at least have a chance of handling this debacle. And beef up ICE and get them back out on the streets locating, detaining, and deporting as many of the ones that Biden turned loose into the interior as possible. Sadly, the will to do all of this doesn’t exist in the current White House or among Democrats. That’s why we desperately need new leadership next year.