Feds Remove 660,000 Migrants in 11 Months
Despite Governor's Biden Open Border Claim
Capitol Inside
April 15, 2024
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection stole Governor Greg Abbott's thunder and discredited Texas Republican claims about President Joe Biden's "open border" policy when it announced during the weekend that the federal government had removed hundreds of thousands of migrants in the past 11 months.
According to the CBP analysis, the Department of Homeland Security gave more than 660,000 migrants the boot from the U.S. between May 12, 2023 and April 3 after they failed to establish a legal right to stay in the United States. The federal agency said the vast majority of the migrants who were removed had entered the country at the southwest border that extends from Texas to California. Senior CBP official Troy Miller did not cite individual statistics for Texas when he revealed the migrant return rate in the agency's monthly activity report for March on Friday.
“CBP - in coordination with our partners across the Federal government as well as foreign partners - continues to take significant actions to disrupt criminal networks amidst unprecedented hemispheric migration activity,” Miller said. “Encounters at our southern border are lower right now, but we remain prepared for changes, continually managing operations to respond to ever-shifting transnational criminal activities and migration patterns."
The federal agency knocked a substantial amount of steam out of a Fox News post on Friday on X about a program that has made it possible for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly into U.S. airports if they have formal sponsors here and have been approved in advance after "robust security vetting" and compliance with other criteria.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick - a Republican who's parroted the false assertions on a wide open southern border - repost the Fox News message on the CHNV initiative. Some GOP leaders and lawmakers on the right have portrayed the program as a devious Biden scheme to sneak migrants into the country by flying them over the razor wire fences, the tiny stretch of border wall that the state has built and legions of Texas National Guard members and state police who are eager to arrest them from minor offenses like trespassing.
The Customs and Border Protection agency said the CHNV program has allowed 404,000 migrants from the four countries to began their quest for legal asylum in the United States in a "safe, orderly, and lawful" manner instead of being subject to harassment, potential jailings and chaos they could expect to encounter if attempting to cross the Rio Grande.
The CBP report said that federal agents apprehended 189,372 migrants at the southwest border in March without details on the number encountered in Border Patrol regions in Texas, Arizona and California. The agency reported that 137,480 of the migrants who were taken into federal custody last month after entering the U.S. between official ports of entry.
Forty-five percent of the migrants who the feds encountered in the past six months were apprehended in Texas during that span of time. Border Patrol officials would have taken in more than 85,000 migrants in the Lone Star State in March if 45 percent of apprehensions took place here then.
That would represent a vault of almost 50 percent compared to the Texas migrant count in February and 93 percent spike when sized up to January. The Texas tally for March would be closer to the February mark if only 25 percent of the total number of migrants who were apprehended on the entire southern border were attributed to the nation's second largest state.
Abbott and other Texas Republicans failed to give the Biden administration its due for a sharp drop in migrant apprehensions on the Rio Grande in the first few months of 2023 after the imposition of tighter restrictions on migrants from the same countries in the CHNV group. But the governor sought to take credit in post on X on Sunday for a significant decline in the number of migrants crossing the river between the official ports.
"The reason for the lowest March for migrant encounters is because of Texas," Abbott asserted. "Illegal crossings are down 72% in Texas while up 24% in other border states. We continue building border wall & razor wire barriers to reduce illegal immigration into Texas."
Abbott clarified the statement on Monday to say that his forces at the border contributed to the fall that he claimed without any supporting data beyond Fox News and Breibart stories that did not mention the specific decrease the governor touted. But the CBP report for March suggested the federal government has done or more than Texas to slow the flow.
"The majority of all individuals encountered at the southwest border over the past three years have been removed, returned, or expelled," the CBP added. "Total removals and returns since mid-May exceed removals and returns in every full fiscal year since 2011."
more to come ... |
