Record Number of Illegal Aliens Entered the U.S. in December

A mind-blowing 371,000 illegal aliens were “encountered” by border agents in December 2023, a new record. This includes nearly a quarter million illegal aliens apprehended crossing the southern border, also a new record that smashed the former high mark (achieved, of course, under Biden border policies) of 224,400 in May 2022. The December number is a 23.5 percent increase over the number of “migrants encountered” at the border in November.

The outrageous December numbers are crunched by the Center for Immigration Studies’ invaluable Andrew R. Arthur. His piece is here and should be read and reread in its entirety. Some highlights:

First, the timing. The Biden administration has had the December statistics for weeks. Usually, monthly stats are released on the 15th day of the following month (which would have been January 15 for December). I’d be shocked if the senators currently negotiating with the White House were not informed about them. Yet Biden officials sat on the numbers until last Friday evening, January 26. Obviously, they know that the staggering numbers are sure to fuel demands that Biden close the border using the more than sufficient current authority he has to do that. That would stiffen the already strong opposition to a Senate deal, demanded by Biden, that would normalize some intolerably high amount of illegal immigration.

As we’ve noted any number of times, the government uses the euphemism “encountered” as opposed to “arrested” because many of the illegal aliens apprehended attempting to enter are released into the country — notwithstanding that federal law mandates that illegal aliens be detained until the conclusion of their legal proceedings. Bear in mind, then, that reports of monthly “encounters,” jaw-dropping though they are, do not account for tens of thousands of additional “got-aways” who evade U.S. agents entirely.

Obviously, the got-away number cannot be known with certainty. The House Homeland Security Committee estimates, however, that it is about 50,000 per month — or about 1.7 million since 2021. We should add that the got-away number inexorably climbs because the crisis in the Southwest is so acute that border agents have been shifted to the administrative duties of “processing” illegal aliens (including for release into the country) rather than patrol duties. When Biden tells us he needs more public money for “border enforcement,” understand: That’s his idea of border enforcement.

As Arthur observes, the 371,000 illegal aliens encountered by U.S. agents last month is 15,000 larger than the population of Cleveland, a major American city. Entering in a single month.

It is hard to pick out a most infuriating part of all this, but for me it is the various Biden parole scams. As I have pointed out several times, the president does not have legal authority to parole hordes of ineligible aliens into the United States; the president’s authority is limited to allowing individual aliens in “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Only Congress has the power to expand that authority; yet Biden has done it by edict and, thus far, gotten away with it.

The most fraudulent of the parole programs is the Biden app: Instead of showing up at the border, illegal aliens who’ve made it to central and northern Mexico are encouraged to schedule their illegal entry, using an app that enables them to make arrangements at Southwest border ports. The red carpet is rolled out for most of them, along with a work permit — how’s that for discouraging illegal immigration! Except, according to Biden math (which also apparently undergirds Bidenomics), these illegal aliens are somehow not illegal because they’ve used the Biden app and gotten a parole Biden has no legitimate authority to grant.

Arthur writes:

CBP officers at the Southwest border ports set their own new dismal record in December, stopping nearly 52,250 inadmissible aliens. That’s a 42 percent increase over December 2022, and more than six times the number of port encounters as in December 2021.

That new flood at the ports is due nearly exclusively to a January 2023 White House policy that allows would-be migrants in central and northern Mexico to preschedule their illegal entries at the Southwest border ports using the CBP One app, a program I referred to as the “CBP One app interview scheme.”

The administration makes 1,450 appointments available per day at the ports under that scheme, and congressional releases reveal that 95.8 percent of those migrants have subsequently been paroled into the United States.

Do the math and you will see that nearly 45,000 aliens with no right to enter the United States took advantage of that scheme at the Southwest border ports last month, and 43,062 of them were likely waived into the country with a status that allows them to immediately obtain work authorization.

Oh, and there’s also Biden’s “CHNV parole” program, available to nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It allows entry by some 360,000 of these “migrants” per year — also bigger than Cleveland’s population. As ever with such lunacy, the program creates the incentive for even more illegal immigration: In December, Arthur reports, 61,500 nationals of these countries were “encountered” entering the U.S. illegally (up 112 percent over November’s tally).

Again, read it all, but one last point. The southern border’s influx of about 250,000 illegal aliens is, if possible, even worse than that sounds. Roughly 40 percent of that total — 101,725 — were adults traveling with children in “family units” (what the government calls FMUs). Young men traveling on their own can usually make do — although, as last week’s letter from former government officials details, young fighting-age men, many of them from countries hostile to the United States, create a significant national-security threat. But, as Arthur details:

FMUs and unaccompanied alien children (UACs) are the most difficult categories of migrants for agents to deal with, as they must be segregated from unrelated adult males during transport and processing, and agents must do their best to keep families together. That requires a lot of manpower, pulling agents off the line for hours at a time.

When you’re done reading Andrew Arthur’s analysis of the dismal December numbers, read him on the ramifications of admitting, monthly, exorbitant numbers of FMUs and UACs: It is how you get the crisis that is breaking the education, health-care, law-enforcement, and other social-services resources of major cities across the country.