Surge: Number of Migrants Stopped at the US-Mexico Border in July the Highest in 20 Years
(CNSNews.com) – U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents recorded around 210,000 “encounters” with migrants along the southwest border in July, the highest monthly figure in two decades, a senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said in a court filing on Monday.
Of those stopped at the border, more than 19,000 were unaccompanied minors – a record number – while another 80,000 were family units traveling together, according to David Shahoulian, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the DHS.
While in May and June there were more than 6,000 encounters a day; in July the daily average rose to 6,779 individuals a day, he said, describing the July figures – the highest since fiscal year 2000 – as “historic.”
The CBP has yet to release official data on numbers of migrants stopped on the southwest border for July, but Shahoulian provided the preliminary figures in papers filed in the D.C. District Court, in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, challenging the use of Title 42 public health authority to expel migrants without a court hearing due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19.
Shahoulian argued that stopping Title 42 now would carry serious risks.
“During this period and given the unique public health danger posed by the ongoing pandemic, implementation of the CDC Order is critical to preventing overcrowding and the spread of infection within DHS facilities,” he wrote.
On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended the Title 42 order issued under the Trump administration last October. It said the order would remain in place “until the CDC Director determines that the danger of further introduction of COVID-19 into the United States from covered noncitizens has ceased to be a serious danger to the public health, and the Order is no longer necessary to protect the public health.”
The number of migrants stopped at the border each month has been rising steadily since the start of 2021: 78,442 in January, climbing to 101,095 in February, then a sizeable jump to 173,265 in March, up to 178,850 in April, 180,641 in May, 188,829 recorded in June, and now the preliminary figure of 210,000 in July.
The 210,000 encounters for July reported by Shahoulian would mark a 413.08 percent increase over the same month one year earlier, when 40,929 were recorded. Going back another year – before the COVID-19 pandemic – the monthly number for July 2019 number of encounters was 81,777, still significantly lower than the month just ended.
The 210,000 figure takes the total number of encounters since fiscal year 2021 began on October 1 to around 1,329,204 – up 279.3 percent from the 350,400 recorded for the equivalent 10-month period in FY 2020 (an increase of 279.3 percent) and up from 862,256 for the 10-month period in FY 2019 (an increase of 54 percent).
The more than 19,000 unaccompanied minors picked up on the border in July, as provisionally reported by Shahoulian, compares to 2,509 in July 2020 (an increase of 657.2 percent), and to 5,846 in July 2019 (an increase of 225 percent).
Shahoulian in his court filing did not provide a nationality breakdown for the preliminary July figures, but the number of migrants stopped at the border who are not from either Mexico or the northern triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, has also climbed sharply this year.
In June, 47,224 encounters related to people from countries “other” than Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, up from just 1,821 in June 2020 and 16,188 in June 2019.
The year-to-date total number of those from “other” countries in FY 2021 stood at 187,634 at the end of June, compared to 42,090 for the equivalent 9-month period in FY 2020 (an increase of 345.7 percent), and 82,304 for the 9-month period in FY 2019 (an increase of 127.9 percent).
Referring to the overall figures, Shahoulian in his filing offered some historical context, and indicated that the department’s facilities, operating with restrictions due to the pandemic, were struggling to cope with the border surge.
“These constitute the highest numbers of monthly encounters recorded by CBP in more than twenty years, including during previous surges when the Department was not constrained by COVID-19 capacity considerations,” he wrote.
“As noted above, due to COVID-19-related guidance, border facilities are currently expected to operate at only 25 to 50 percent capacity, depending on individual facility infrastructure and facility type. Due to this combination of factors, many CBP facilities are already over that capacity – many significantly so, even with the CDC Order in place.”
DHS Mayorkas Blames Trump for Biden’s Record 2021 Migration Wave
President Donald Trump is responsible for the record wave of economic migrants now crossing the U.S. border, according to Alejandro Mayorkas, the pro-migration Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
“We certainly have a challenge at the border,” Mayorkas said as he fielded easy questions from MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on August 2.
We’re following an administration that frankly dismantled our capabilities to address it, and so we are building it from the ground up. We lost four years of investing in the countries from which these individuals are migrating. Our safe and orderly systems were torn down, so we’re rebuilding them. And our plan is in place, and we’re executing it.
Mitchell did not ask Mayorkas to explain how Trump’s success at blocking migration by late-2020 “dismantled our capabilities to address it.” But the Secretary subsequently told Mitchell that “We are … rebuilding the safe and legal and orderly pathways to come to the United States.”
Mitchell did not ask how many foreign workers the Cuban-born Mayorkas plans to extract from poor countries for subsequent use by U.S. employers and investors in Americans’ national labor market.
So far, Mayorjkas has helped to bring 700,000 migrants into the United States. That post-Trump economic policy of labor inflation has given U.S. investors a renewed ability to hire profitable and compliant foreign workers instead of Americans — especially unemployed, disabled, or sidelined Americans.
That huge inflow is lowering nationwide pressure on employers to raise Americans’ wages and is helping to push housing prices upwards. Yahoo News reported July 30:
Job switchers saw their wages grow 5.8% year over year in June, while job holders experienced a 3.1% gain, according to a report by ADP derived from payroll data of 18 million workers. Overall, wage growth decelerated from the first quarter, while still growing 2.3% in June compared with a year earlier.
In contrast, wages grew much faster in Trump’s low-migration economy. In September 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reported:
Median household income was $68,703 in 2019, an increase of 6.8 percent from the 2018 median of $64,324 … Real median household incomes increased for all regions in 2019; 6.8 percent in the Northeast, 4.8 percent in the Midwest, 6.1 percent in the South, and 7.0 percent in the West.
The Cuban-born Mayorkas is an immigration zealot and has encouraged the great migration by inviting many single men and fragmented families to get through the Title 42 anti-disease barriers set up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Roughly half of those families — comprised usually of a mother and a child or two — are trying to join up with their illegal migrant spouse in a U.S. town or city.
Mayorkas is also admitting migrants on the grounds that they have the right to reunite with family members in the United States. He also uses the rules for Unaccompanied Alien Children to admit many young job-seeking men who claim they are 17 or younger. He has also given work permits to perhaps 100,000 migrants from Haiti under the “Temporary Protected Status” program.
The wave of migrants is growing in the hottest part of summer, despite Mayorkas’s prior claims that the migration wave is seasonal.
Mitchell did try to push back against Mayorkas one time. But Mayorkas dodged Mitchell’s tentative question, “Do you have to change the plan though if it is not working?” by exhaling a cloud of cliches:
It is a dynamic situation and we change and we modify as the needs require. We’re investing in the root causes to address the reason why people leave their homes to take the perilous journey.
That takes “years and years,” Mitchell quickly responded.
“That’s why that’s only one part of the plan,” Mayorkas said as he repeated the vague claims that he has told many audiences:
We are also rebuilding the safe and legal and orderly pathways to come to the United States under our laws, so they don’t have to take the perilous journey and arrive in between the ports of entry — [for example] the Central American Minors program that we’ve reconstituted — and other paths.
Overall, businesses want to import more migrants — even very poor migrants — because they spike consumer sales, boost rental rates, cut wages, minimize workforce pushback, and so raise profits and stock values. They also serve as clients for welfare agencies, and eventually, as voters for Democrat activists.
But migration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, and fractures their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture.
In general, legal and illegal migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor.
Biden’s decision to restart the economic extraction of valuable consumers, renters, and workers from poor countries also helps move wealth — and social status — from heartland red states to the coastal blue states. Within each state, the extraction policy also helps to move wealth and status from GOP rural districts to Democrat cities.
Unsurprisingly, a lopsided majority of Americans oppose labor migration.
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