Biden is breaking records and making history at the border

OPINION:

President Biden is breaking records and making history at the southern border. But that’s not a good thing.

During this fiscal year, federal authorities encountered more than 1,746,119 undocumented migrants, a record breaker for any fiscal year since 1960, according to Custom Border Patrol reports. 

To make matters worse, more than half a million migrants who illegally crossed the U.S. border this fiscal year have successfully evaded authorities, according to a new report published by the Department of Homeland Security. 

The department said there has been a monthly average of about 55,000 “gotaways” — illegal immigrants who are detected by authorities crossing the border but evade capture — during the Fiscal Year 2022, which began Oct. 1, 2021. 

In a recent interview with The Federalist, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott and senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation said the actual number of gotaways for this fiscal year is most likely much higher than half a million.

“The 500,000 that are documented, they do exist. But by leaving hundreds and hundreds of miles of border completely unpatrolled for days or weeks at a time, which is what’s going on currently because most agents are in processing, that number is very, very, very artificially low,” Mr. Scott said. 

With two months left in this fiscal year, the total for FY22 is already more than double the 389,155 known gotaways that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified there were last year in FY21. 

After Mr. Mayorkas spoke at the Aspen Security Forum on Tuesday and asserted that the border was secure, some border patrol agents pushed back and said that they’re facing a tsunami of migrants illegally crossing the border.

“Hundreds of thousands crossing every month is not the definition of secure,” one agent reportedly told Fox News Digital last week. “They are liars and anyone who believes them are fools.”

Since FY21, there have been a total of about 900,000 gotaways, a number that far exceeds the population of the nation’s capital. 

Despite the overwhelming number of gotaways evading authorities, the total is still just a fraction of the total amount of migrants attempting to cross the border. June was the fourth month in a row that border patrol agents had more than 200,000 interceptions, according to agency reports. 

Meanwhile, Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials recently announced they are moving forward with a pilot program to issue as part of an effort to keep track of the tens of thousands of migrants released each month. 

ICE officials say the new Secure Docket Card program will “modernize various forms of documentation provided to provisionally released noncitizens through a consistent, verifiable, secure card.”

While such measures are a step in the right direction to help authorities keep track of those migrants who are captured and released, the Biden administration should instead focus on this crisis where it begins, at the border — and give authorities what they need to make sure that would be gotaways do not “get away” in the first place.