DHS report: 1 million illegal immigrants expected this year, 53,077 family units in March
The U.S. Border Patrol expects to apprehend nearly 1 million illegal immigrants this year, a decade high, according to a Department of Homeland Security panel charged with recommending fixes to the broken immigration system.
“Apprehensions by USBP, currently at levels not seen in a decade, will approach one million in FY19 unless actions are immediately taken,” said the interim report from the Customs and Border Patrol Family and Child Custody Panel.
“The unabated 600% surge of [family units] from Central America to our borders and properly caring for this population have overwhelmed the entire government and brought our border security and immigration management systems to the point of collapse,” said the report.
It showed that 53,077 “family unit" immigrants were apprehended last month alone. It projected more than 500,000 in fiscal 2019.
The report released in mid-April generated some news for recommending immediate changes to stall the freeing of illegal immigrants into the country.
But it also included new numbers on the border crisis and blunt assessments of how easy it is for illegal immigrants to game the system and stay in the country for years.
Proponents of tougher immigration rules have long claimed that current rules make it easy for illegal immigrants to stay in the country and the nonpartisan report agreed.
The executive summary lays out the issue in one paragraph:
After being held for several days at inadequate and overcrowded holding areas at USBP stations, most of the adults -- provided they have a child with them and have stated that they fear returning to their country of origin -- are issued Notices to Appear (NTA) at a later time before an immigration judge somewhere in the U.S. and then dropped at a local bus station or delivered to already overwhelmed non-profit shelters. The NTA, combined with long delays in the adjudication of asylum claims, means that these migrants are guaranteed several years of living (and in most cases working) in the U.S. Even if the asylum hearing and appeals ultimately go against the migrant, he or she still has the practical option of simply remaining in the U.S. illegally, where the odds of being caught and removed remain very low. A consequence of this broken system, driven by grossly inadequate detention space for family units and a shortage of transportation resources, is a massive increase in illegal crossings of our borders, almost entirely driven by the increase in FMU migration from Central America.
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