US Customs and Border Patrol’s migrant encounter numbers along the southwestern border with Mexico have hit a four-year low, new figures suggest.
“In July, the Border Patrol recorded 56,408 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border,” the agency said in a press release, referring to the border between Mexico and the US states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
CBP said its “operational statistics” for last month “show a significant decline in migrant encounters during the first full month after a Presidential Proclamation issued June 4, 2024 by President Biden to temporarily suspend the entry of certain noncitizens across the southern border. US Border Patrol encounters in July were 32% lower than in June 2024 and were the lowest monthly total along the southwest border since September 2020.”
Last month’s figures are also “lower than in July 2019, and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic,” the agency added.
Biden’s June proclamation moved to restrict asylum eligibility for illegal aliens entering the United States via the southern border, with some 92,000 individuals ejected from the US and sent to their home countries on 300+ repatriation flights – with removals ballooning to their highest level since 2010.
The proclamation came after years of increasingly harsh criticism of Biden’s border policy by Republicans, and fears among Democrats that the issue may cost them the White House in November.
A Fox News poll this week found that some 87% of would-be voters consider the situation at the southern border a serious concern, with 44% dubbing it an "emergency" and 43% a "major problem," and the issue found to be a concern among all demographics, including among black Americans, Hispanics, women, and registered Democrats. Some 71% of respondents blamed the Biden administration for failure to enforce the border, with 57% also saying that former President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans deserve some of the blame for blocking legislation on comprehensive immigration reform.
The border crisis is tied with abortion at 14% as the second most important issue in this year’s election behind the economy (38%).
The Biden administration facilitated the crisis at the southern border almost immediately after entering office in 2021 by moving to repeal a series of hardline Trump-era immigration directives and vowing to scrap Trump’s signature border wall in favor of a digital "smart wall" which never materialized. An estimate earlier this year suggested that over 7.3 million illegal aliens had entered the United States since Biden took office in 2021.
After Biden announced last month that he would not be seeking a second term, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign sought to distance the candidate from her status as the administration’s “border czar” – a title bestowed on her by US media in March of 2021. Harris’ handlers have gone to stupefying lengths to dismiss the “border czar” moniker, to the point where some media have released "fact check"-style articles assuring that Harris was never really a “border czar,” despite ample reporting from 3.5 years ago using the epithet to refer to her.
Donald Trump and his allies have dubbed the situation at the southern border a “disaster” and an “invasion” that could “destroy our country.” Some have also attacked those mainstream Republican lawmakers who voted for nearly $100 billion for wars earlier this year abroad while consciously ignoring the border crisis.