I wrote yesterday about the attempts to deny the border crisis, including a data-analysis piece at the Washington Post that was completely unpersuasive. I cited numbers that our friend Steve Camarota at CIS has been crunching:
Per his analysis, there were more than twice as many unaccompanied minors apprehended in January of this year (5,694) than in January 2020 (2,680), prior to the pandemic.
In February, the number of unaccompanied minors, more than 9,000, was higher than it had been in any month since May 2019, when there was a widely acknowledged crisis at the border.
In February of this year, more family units were apprehended at the border, nearly 19,000, than in any month since August 2019.
Also, every indication is that the numbers from March are going to be astonishing. An immigration reporter at the Washington Post, pushing back against some of the shoddy analysis denying the crisis, made this point on Twitter:
Pundits and chart-makers are using CBP data from Feb to insist nothing unusual is happening at the border.
Beat reporters are getting data about what's happening in March, as the govt mobilizes FEMA, opens 7 emergency shelters and says it'll be a 20-year high.
That's the gap. pic.twitter.com/g9gKblR23p
— Nick Miroff (@NickMiroff) March 25, 2021
And this number from yesterday is jaw-dropping:
Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 700 unaccompanied children on Wednesday.
— Hamed Aleaziz (@Haleaziz) March 25, 2021
This is obviously not in any way an apples-to-apples comparison, but to give you an idea of just how big that number is, we apprehended 712 unaccompanied children at the border the entire month of April 2020. A former Trump official tells me that 300-a-day has, in the past, been considered a crisis level.
On the current trajectory, the numbers are headed off the charts.