Facing mounting voter backlash over the disastrous consequences of the border crisis, Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democrat allies have now taken to claiming that the Biden-Harris administration is making progress on securing the border. But the government’s own data leads to the exact opposite conclusion.
The most recent update from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) reports “58,000 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border,” in August, representing a 68 percent decrease from August 2023. Those figures came on the heels of July data showing just over 56,000 crossings, the lowest monthly total since September 2020.
The media has been quick to pounce on this narrative, declaring that the administration is making “progress” on the crisis that it intentionally created. “Boost for Kamala Harris As Illegal Immigrant Crossings Drop 70 Percent,” declared Newsweek. “Illegal border crossings fell in July to lowest level in four years,” The Washington Post reported. “July Immigrant Border Arrests Lower Than Trump’s Last Month In Office,” Forbes announced (apparently ignoring the fact that border crossings typically see a dramatic spike during the cool winter months and bottom out during the hot summer months).
But is the situation at the border really improving? A closer look at the numbers suggests otherwise.
In its monthly updates, CBP primarily highlights border encounters “between points of entry.” This important detail immediately undermines claims about fewer illegal crossings overall because it does not include the corresponding surge in crossings at those ports of entry thanks to Biden-Harris policies.
In reality, the administration has actually made it far easier for migrants to enter and remain in the country. But by funneling them to ports of entry and reclassifying vast swaths of them as “asylum seekers” or under various other temporary legal statuses, it appears as if border crossings are down.
A more accurate picture of the illegal immigration problem includes at least four “buckets” of people: illegal aliens caught at the border between ports of entry; illegal aliens who enter at ports of entry, usually making an asylum claim and surrendering themselves at the checkpoint; the “gotaway” population which evades law enforcement altogether; and recipients of Biden-Harris parole schemes.
The latter of these categories has seen a sharp increase over the past four years – in particular through Biden’s egregious abuse of the president’s parole authority. Starting last January, the administration began granting parole to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti. The program was notably resumed in August after a short pause due to rampant fraud.
In total, the Biden-Harris administration has granted parole to more than two million illegal aliens. Over the first nine months of FY 2023 alone, the Center for Immigration Studies reports, Biden “paroled in nearly 870,000 facially inadmissible aliens with no legal right to be here — one roughly every 28 seconds.”
For reference, Presidents Obama and Trump paroled just over 5,600 migrants per year on average.
Biden has also paved the way for flagrant abuse of the asylum system – a policy which has enticed illegal aliens to cross at ports of entry rather than between them. Under the Biden-Harris policy, virtually anyone can show up at the border, claim asylum, and then be released into the country with a court date, sometimes as far as 10 years in the future.
Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration has simply closed more than 350,000 asylum cases since 2022 – allowing those migrants to freely remain in the country without fear of deportation.
Unsurprisingly, crossings at ports of entry have skyrocketed as crossings between ports of entry have decreased. Exact figures are difficult to ascertain, as migrants are lumped in with everyone else crossing the border for travel or business in government data. But one good estimate is how many people use the CBP One app, which is essentially a platform for migrants to declare entry into the country. Through August 2024, more than 813,000 individuals had used the app to enter the country – none of whom were included in the administration’s data on encounters “between ports of entry.”
The number of “gotaways” under Biden is another enormous unmeasured part of the illegal immigration crisis, made all the worse by the fact that border patrol is stretched dangerously thin. The best estimates put the total number of people who have escaped into the country completely undetected north of 1.7 million as of May 2024 – more than the previous decade combined.
This group also isn’t included in official statistics. But if that 1.7 million number is accurate, it means that an average of 42,500 gotaways per month are flooding in.
All of this adds up to a crisis that is far, far worse than Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Democrat elected officials, or the corporate media are letting on. Whatever the administration reports about crossings “between ports of entry,” the actual number of illegal aliens entering the country each month is likely at least three to four times greater.
Even if the number of illegal border crossings were somehow reduced to zero overnight, there are still 10-20 million illegal aliens who have already flooded into the country over the past four years. If there were not even one more illegal border crossing between now and January 2025, Biden and Harris would still have the worst record on the border of any administration in American history.
Ultimately, the Biden-Harris administration’s claims about the situation at the border are not only misleading, they are intentional lies for political gain. Democrats and their media allies recognize that the contrast between Trump’s record of success on the border and Harris’s record of failure is one of the vice president’s biggest weaknesses in the upcoming election, and so they are shamelessly trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people.
Not only the American people deserve a secure border, they deserve honesty from their elected officials – honesty that is utterly lacking from the current administration.
Kristen Ziccarelli is a graduate of Christopher Newport University and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
