Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has reported a staggering surge in illegal border crossings: 172,000 in March, the highest number in nearly 20 years; as well as 18,890 unaccompanied children, which — the governors note — is the largest monthly number in history.
CBP’s monthly totals do not include illegal crossers who are detected by surveillance technology but are not apprehended. These crossings are referred to as “got-aways.” Border Patrol Deputy Chief Raul Ortiz said that the agency is recording 1,000 got-aways a day.
The border patrol apprehended 85,326 aliens from the northern triangle countries in March and 78,252 in April.
CBP statistics indicate that 57,690 of the 342,673 illegal crossers who were apprehended at the southern border in March and April of this year were not from northern triangle countries or Mexico. At this rate, the yearly total of aliens from other countries will likely be more than 346,000, which would be almost three times as many as in fiscal 2019.
The diversity of the illegal crossers is reflected further by the fact that at least 40 different languages were spoken by the nearly 30,000 asylum seekers who were waiting in Mexico for an asylum hearing as of the end of March 2021.
“Let me give you some numbers that we talked about today, knowing that it was just four weeks ago that I deployed the Texas Department of Public Safety,” Abbott said:
And in just four weeks, they’ve been able to arrest almost 600 criminals who were here illegally or engaged in illegal activity and apprehended more than 16,000 people here illegally and turned them over to the Border Patrol.
Let me give your audience just a couple of examples. The Texas Department of Public Safety, they investigated a stash house. And in the stash house, they found four illegal immigrants, plus a gang member who was wanted on two counts of rape of a child.
In addition to that, DPS, they pulled over a vehicle and in the vehicle, they found a smuggler with a car full of illegal immigrants, including a 14-year-old girl who the smuggler had sexually assaulted.
There was a story about a six-month-old baby that smugglers — that were bringing people in these rafts across the river. They tossed that six-month-old baby into the river, and it took a Texas Department of Public Safety officer to go into that water and to save that child.
These are the types of reckless criminal behavior that Texas is having to step up and respond to.
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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) : Vice President Kamala Harris “didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis, because they’re not there,”
In an interview with CBS News that aired on Sunday, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said he and Vice President Harris are “not on the same side of the coin.”
Giammattei said the administration’s message “changed” when Biden took office: “The message changed to, we’re going the reunite families and we’re going to reunite children. The very next day, the coyotes were here organizing groups of children to take them to the United States. We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving.”
Sen. Cotton said it looks like the Biden administration doesn’t really want the illegal border crossings to stop, although Harris, speaking in Guatemala on Monday, told the people, “Do not come. Do not come.”
Hagerty said Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) refused an administration request to accept the migrants, but his refusal apparently is being ignored:
“They are an illegal entry into the United States. They have not properly — we don’t know that they have been properly vetted, nor do we know what type of health crisis that they might present.
“Certainly, we need to know, because this is going to overcrowd our schools. It’s going to overwhelm our hospitals. It’s going to overtax our public safety. We have got an important right to know what the Biden administration is doing with these people that they’re moving into our state.”
Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also has sounded an alarm about the Biden administration off-loading unaccompanied minors to the states without prior notification.
The Biden administration insists that things are “getting better” at the southwest border, but their definition of “better” doesn’t reassure Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma:
Secretary Mayorkas last week what he means by “it’s getting better” is — we’re holding fewer people at the border, and we’re releasing them into the country faster.
Lankford said the Biden administration released 19,000 people into the country in April and May, all of them without a notice to appear in immigration court — “just basically saying the line is too long.”
I asked Secretary Mayorkas how many of those 19,000 people have actually checked in and done that. He said it’s a lot — I don’t know the exact number. We know the exact number — 550. Two and a half percent of the people have actually checked in. That means 97-and-a-half percent of the people that the secretary just released in the country, they have no idea where they are. And those are the people that we actually interdicted, that are being released in the country.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) warned last week that the Biden administration is “making every state a border state — every town a border town.”
What we know is that the Biden administration is absolutely living in fantasyland if they’re telling people that that border is secure. They have apprehended 500,000 illegal entrants since Joe Biden took office. A and what they’ve begin to do is to move them out and about around the country, so that they are off-loading the cost for housing, child services, health care, education, to the states and the counties.
“And what we have found out is that they have these planes coming into Chattanooga, putting these children on buses, and then taking them to communities around the area. Now, Jen Psaki has been over at the White House saying they were just moving them closer to relatives. But HHS has said they have been housing illegal migrants since April in the Chattanooga area, so somebody needs to clean their story up and they need to come clean with the people of Tennessee and the people of this country so that we know what it is that is happening,” Blackburn said.
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In a May 20 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Tennessee Reps. Bill Hagerty, Chuck Fleishmann, and Sen. Blackburn expressed concern about the “management of unaccompanied alien children in federal custody and where they’re being housed.”
“We are particularly concerned about recent reports regarding the use of Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a central location for resettling UACs in the United States,” they wrote. The lawmakers point to media reports saying at least four planeloads of UACs have landed in Chattanooga, where the minors were loaded onto buses and transported “to multiple cities across the southeastern United States for apparent resettlement, with zero transparency regarding what was happening.”
Blackburn said Gov. Lee had declined a request from the Biden administration to accept some of the migrant children.
“And this is a 10th Amendment violation, because they’re doing it anyway. They’re sending them into these communities with no one’s knowledge.
“So, if any of your viewers see this happening in their community, if see these planes and buses coming into the community, call their local Fox affiliate. They will come out and cover this and make certain that people know about it.
“Because this will force the state — once these individuals show up for education, healthcare, housing, children’s services — the state, the taxpayer is paying the bill for every bit of this,” Blackburn said.
“And one of the things that is so egregious — you have the cartels. Nobody crosses the border unless they’re going through a cartel. But then what is the U.S. Federal government doing? They’re finishing the job for the cartel. Because once someone is caught, they (feds) take them, the taxpayer is paying for it, and we find out they are flying them and busing them to a neighborhood near you.”
On May 11, 19 governors signed a letter about the border crisis that was sent to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “We call on you to take action on the crisis at the southern border immediately,” reads the letter. “Contrary to statements from your Administration, the border is neither closed nor secure. The crisis is too big to ignore and is now spilling over the border states into all of our states.” “This Administration has enticed a rush of migrants to our border and incentivized an influx of illegal crossings by using irresponsible rhetoric and reversing a slew of policies — from halting border wall construction to eliminating asylum agreements to refusing to enforce immigration laws,” reads the letter.
“Even officials of our neighbor, Mexico, reportedly conveyed concerns that the shift in U.S. policy is stoking illegal immigration and creating business for organized crime,” the governors wrote. “As Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador stated, ‘They see him as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States. We need to work together to regulate the flow, because this business can’t be tackled from one day to the next.” “The cause of the border crisis is entirely due to reckless federal policy reversals executed within your first 100 days in office,” states the letter.
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said his state is among those suing the Biden administration for its “reckless policy” of refusing to hand over criminal aliens to Immigration and Customs Enforcement after they have served their state prison sentences.
The first sentence of the Florida lawsuit filed on March 8 reads:
Within hours of being sworn in, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and members of his administration violated their oaths of office, flouted Congressional statutes, failed to protect U.S. citizens and immigrants alike, and created what will quickly become a public-safety nightmare.
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) visited the southwest border last Thursday and Friday with a group of fellow Republicans, he saw first-hand how overwhelmed the Border Patrol is, to the point where they’re just releasing people, including adults, into the interior of the country.
“The Border Patrol agents indicated that there are actually migrants coming here illegally from as many as 54 different countries. This isn’t just Central America,”