The number of migrants arrested at the southern border has plummeted in recent weeks to the lowest levels seen in President Joe Biden’s three years in office, easing for the moment a crisis that has touched every part of the United States.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) divulged during a House Appropriations Committee hearing this week that Border Patrol agents stationed along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico boundary made an average of 3,800 arrests per day over the past three weeks, a figure divided across March and April.
The number, 79,800 arrests in three weeks, would put Border Patrol on track to arrest 114,000 illegal immigrants in a month if that apprehension rate stays the same. The last time monthly arrests dipped that significantly was in February 2021, when 97,643 were recorded, and the 99,538 recorded in June 2023.
“We’re doing something right,” Cuellar told Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in the Wednesday hearing. “I ask you to continue looking at what we need to do to bring those numbers down.”
Border Patrol agents saw an unusual reprieve in the number of migrants crossing from Mexico in March compared to the same month in previous years, a trend that bucks the springtime surge that follows pent-up demand from a winter slowdown in travel.
Border authorities apprehended 137,484 migrants at the 2,000-mile southern border in March, according to federal statistics shared with the Washington Examiner.
Illegal crossings at the southern border have fluctuated between 150,000 and 250,000 per month over the past 38 months.
While the full extent of illegal immigration is unknown, the number of migrants who are caught is an indicator of the extent to which people outside the U.S. are attempting to enter.
The Washington Office on Latin America, an immigrant and human rights advocacy group, described the decline in recent weeks as “very unusual,” according to an analysis issued Friday.
“Across the U.S.-Mexico border, migration continues a very unusual springtime lull, sinking below the January-March levels, which were already among the lowest monthly migrant encounter totals of the Biden administration,” wrote Adam Isacson, WOLA’s defense oversight director, in the report.
Isacson said part of the cause for the decline lies with the Mexican government and its decision to step up enforcement and deterrence operations as migrants enter southern Mexico and attempt to travel to northern Mexico.
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“Mexico usually does not detain migrants for very long, and deportations have been infrequent this year,” Isacson explained. “Instead, security and migration forces have been placing apprehended migrants on buses and sending them further into the country’s south or elsewhere into its interior, away from the U.S. border.”
Mayorkas touted that the Biden administration had returned or removed 635,000 illegal immigrants over the past 11 months, though nearly all were turned away at the southern border. The border expulsions and removals may affect the number of migrants who attempt to enter, knowing they could be immediately sent back to Mexico.
