Illegal immigration at the southern border dropped in January as the holiday season and stepped-up enforcement by Mexico helped give the beleaguered Homeland Security Department a bit of a reprieve.
But Troy Miller, acting chief of Customs and Border Protection, said the agency still faces “serious challenges” and the flow of people is beyond “the capacity of the immigration system.”
The Border Patrol saw a massive drop in arrests, down from nearly 250,000 in December to less than 125,000 in January.
The drop included fewer families and fewer children traveling unaccompanied.
But the ports of entry, where illegal immigrants are streaming in welcomed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s power of “parole,” saw near-record levels of encounters with unauthorized migrants.
The Border Patrol’s numbers dipped dramatically around the new year, following a meeting by top U.S. officials in Mexico, where they won new promises of cooperation from Mexican authorities.
But by the end of January, the numbers had already ticked back up, according to reports from individual Border Patrol sectors.
In the El Paso region, for example, agents were recording 470 migrants a day in the week leading up to Jan. 19. For the week ending on Feb. 9, it was up to 729 a day.
CBP released the numbers just hours before the House planned to vote on impeaching Mr. Mayorkas. The two articles of impeachment accuse him of lying about the border and mismanaging the situation, leading to the unprecedented chaos of the last three years.
Mr. Mayorkas has argued the impeachment proceedings are a distraction from his work on the border. Indeed, he declined to show up for an impeachment hearing at one point last month because he said he was meeting with Mexican officials.
After years of insisting the border was secure, the Biden administration has done an about-face in recent months and now says there is a “crisis.”
Mr. Mayorkas says he cannot secure it without new powers from Congress.
Republicans argue that’s not true. They say he has the same tools that were available to the Trump administration, which had largely solved the border by the end of 2020.
In January 2020, for example, the Border Patrol encountered fewer than 30,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border.
That’s roughly a quarter of the number just recorded under Mr. Biden.
Just as dramatic is the rate of unauthorized migrants streaming in through official ports of entry.
In January 2020 CBP officers recorded just 22,451 encounters at airports, seaports and land crossings.
Last month CBP recorded 117,143, including a staggering 50,580 who flew into airports.
That is intentional. Mr. Mayorkas created parole programs to try to get migrants without visas to schedule their arrivals, figuring it would take pressure off the Border Patrol if they weren’t trying to sneak in but could come in another way.