- For the first time, US Border Patrol reported 2.15 million encounters with migrants on the southern border
- Under Biden, an average 139,000 illegal migrants entered the US every month
- CBP reported 900,000 ‘gotaways,’ which is a term that describes individuals who they suspect were able to evade capture, between Oct ’21 and August ’22
- The Biden administration has legally paroled some 1.4 million family members and unaccompanied minors into America
- 107,742 unaccompanied children were released to sponsors inside the U.S from October ’21 to July ’22
- The Biden presidency could easily end with seven million or more new migrants in America – a population larger than Los Angeles and Chicago combined
By Todd Bensman for The Daily Mail as published September 22, 2022
Todd Bensman is Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and author of ‘Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.’ He previously served for nine years as senior intelligence analyst for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division
All it took was the arrival of 50 migrants on Martha’s Vineyard to wake Democrats and the mainstream media up to the reality of America’s historic and transformational immigration crisis.
Who knew?
All they needed was 19 months, dating back to the start of the Biden administration, to be wrenched out of their partisan fog to recognize the scope of this humanitarian disaster.
It’s sickening, but here we are.
On Monday, The New York Times grudgingly ran a story that used the ‘H’ word to describe the ‘historic pace of undocumented immigrants entering the country.’
It is a pace that would have struck generations of Democrats as totally unacceptable, until recently.
This week, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at long last released statistics from August showing the stark numbers: More than 2.15 million encounters with immigrants on the southern border, between October 2021 and August 2022.
The full reporting period, which runs through September, will probably end with 2.35 million encounters.
By definition, an encounter happens each time a Border Patrol agent physically lays hands on an individual attempting to enter the country illegally, so one migrant may be countered multiple times.
These numbers are literally off the charts.
2.15 million encounters is the highest number since the Eisenhower administration started keeping records in 1960.
It’s also up significantly from 1.7 million encounters during Biden’s first term – and even that was a record at the time.
For comparison, between 2010 and 2016, Border Patrol handled less than 500,000 encounters and never topped 400,000 in 2011, 2012 and 2015.
All together Border Patrol’s 17,000 agents have had to process immigrants approximately 4 million times since Biden became president.
And while millions were arrrested on the border, millions more got into America – and they will continue to do so.
The Biden administration itself has legally paroled some 1.4 million family members and unaccompanied minors into America bound only by the promise that they’ll report to immigration authorities someday.
Add to that at least another 900,000 ‘gotaways,’ which is a slang term once only used by Border Patrol agents to describe individuals who they suspect were able to evade capture.
The problem of ‘gotaways’ has become so pronounced that it is now part of the official lexicon.
Adding these two groups together, a total of more than at least 2.3 million illegal immigrants have entered America since Biden took office.
In this trend holds, and there’s no indication that it won’t, a second half of the Biden term could boost that number to some five million or higher.
If the administration follows through with its pledge to lift the Trump-era pandemic-related ‘Title 42,’ which sped the expulsion of migrants in the interest of public health, then as many as 540,000 migrants a month could pour in, according to intelligence community estimates.
In that case, the Biden presidency could easily end with seven million or more new migrants in America – a population larger than the size of Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
To put this unprecedented migration in even sharper perspective — consider that over nearly six decades, 12 million legal immigrants were admitted to the US through Ellis Island in New York City’s Hudson Harbor.
At its peak, those numbers reached 1,004,756 in 1907, an average of 84,000 legal immigrants a month.
Under Biden, the average is 139,000 illegal immigrants per month.
Obviously, America has grown since the migrant waves through Ellis Island stopped, but the current period clearly rivals that transformational era in American history.
Ordinary Americans are already paying a steep price for this.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the immigration policy think tank Center for Immigration Studies, estimates the lifetime fiscal cost of the illegal aliens Biden has let in so far at more than $100 billion.
That’s in addition to $140 billion a year taxpayers already bear for benefits and services to the longer-term illegal alien population.
But those aren’t the only costs.
Probably the very area of civic life where most Americans will first and most viscerally experience the impact of the Biden border crisis will be in the schools.
A 1982 Supreme Court ruling required enrollment of minors in public school regardless of immigration status no matter the costs or hardships.
In Austin Independent School District, teachers held protests in April 2022 drawing attention to a 400-student influx of immigrant teenagers from Central American nations at its International High School and Eastside Early College High School campus. Teachers complained they were left to give instruction in hallways and conference rooms.
In and around New York City, a significant surge of 5,000 immigrant children flooded into four counties in a single 11-month span through August 2021, posing a $139 million additional burden on New York taxpayers to educate them.
This is the story all across the country. Health and Human Services reported that 107,742 unaccompanied children were released to sponsors inside the U.S from October 2021 to July 2022.
Los Angeles county took in 4,579 children, Florida’s Miami-Dade county accepted 2,306 and Texas’ Harris county absorbed 7,170.
It’s impossible to determine from available public records exactly how many immigrant children have been enrolled in the nation’s public schools.
But accounting for the surge of migrants under both the Biden and Trump administrations, probably close to two million have been added to the nation’s 49.5 million students in public schools, a four percentage increase over four years, by my estimation.
Long before frustrated Republican governors tried to force northern Democrats to ‘please, just pay attention to what is happening to all of us,’ no one said a word about the roaring conveyor belt that had already bused and flown many hundreds of thousands of border-crossers to cities all over America.
That machine runs full-throttle even now, pouring a biblical Noah’s Flood of foreign nationals into schools, homeless shelters, jobs and welfare lines across America.
Would liberal America just listen for a minute to what Republican governors are trying to say, they would know that millions more are on the way thus making an already-dire crisis that much more dire.
Perhaps, if they opened their ears and their eyes, they’d join with Republicans in a normal civil discourse about whether this permanent new condition is what everybody really wants.
And if it’s sustainable.