Border Patrol agents working the United States-Mexico border took into custody approximately 851,000 people in 2019. This is the highest numbers of arrests since 2007 according to government data. As of August 31st, 263,000 more people were encountered at ports and were not arrested, but simply denied entry. These numbers do not include additional arrests and denied port crossers at the U.S.-Canada border, the Pacific coast, or Atlantic coasts.
Roughly 40,000 people were apprehended after crossing into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California during the month of September. That number was added to the previous 11 months to bring fiscal 2019, which ran Oct. 1, 2018, through Sept. 30, to slightly more than 851,000 arrests. Those arrested for illegally crossing into the U.S. from Mexico may have claimed asylum once in custody, but that figure is not released by the government each month.
The 851,000 arrested at the southern border does not include the number of people who approached ports of entry, or border crossings, to claim asylum or pass through but were turned away. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security agency that oversees these figures, is expected to release this and related data in a few weeks. (source)
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 250,000 Guatemalans and 250,000 Hondurans were apprehended, while CBP noted that the greatest change in current patterns of apprehension has been a shift to families. In 2015, fewer than 80,000 people who arrived with a family member were among those apprehended by the Border Patrol. As of August 2019, more than 450,000 people who arrived with a family member were taken into custody.
The information presented in the latest report, aside from the fact that numbers of “apprehensions” are at the highest rates since the Bush administration, is the fact that overall, the Border Patrol not only does their job, but they work well.
Recall that the porousness of the US-Mexican border is a political and economic issue for both sides. The US needs cheap Central American labor in order to produce the food that she needs to run her agricultural programs which serve to keep the Americans passive and foreign nations dependent on the US for survival. The Central Americans live very hard lives and will take well below minimum wage for the US work rates because in their nations, a little bit of money goes a long ways. Consider that in the US, a person working at federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour, which would be the equivalent of jobs in some stores and fast food jobs) earns in a 40 hour work week about $290. in one quarter, or 13 weeks, this is equivalent to $3770, or almost an entire year’s worth of wages for the average Mexican. By contrast, the US median income is now about $50-60,000 per year.
If somebody told you that you could make a year’s income in three months, would you take it? Even if it meant traveling to a strange land on a somewhat dangerous journey? You could stay a year, and send back four years worth of income to your family.
This is just Mexico. In nations such as Guatemala at approximately $2000, El Salvador at $660, and Honduras at under $400 USD per year, what are wages that objectively one cannot live on in the US is a lifeline sent from Heaven for these people, allowing for decades worth of income to be earned in a year.
This does not even address also the drug violence, the social instability, general poverty, and all of the other issues that are in those nations.
But one has to get in first. The US allows people in, but they can also be very picky and not allow people in for reasons that seem at best arbitrary.
Likewise, the US is a major power- she knows when she lets people pass illegally, and when she does not.
Consider that during the Second World War, the US hunted down and rounded up people of Japanese descent throughout the US. She also viciously suppressed the local culture of the descendants of German immigrants.
If the US wanted to, she could stop the border influx immediately. The fact is that she chooses not to for political reasons.
The entire border issue has very little to do with Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, or anybody else. The people of Central America are looked at as expendable pawns in a game of geopolitical chess, and are used for this reason.
If the Trump administration happens to be apprehending more, it is not because of any “invasion”, or even because Trump is doing an excessively good job or not, but rather it is simple border policy being enforced more and for political reasons.
Border politics, apprehensions and all or any lack of them is a distraction from other political realities, such as a declining economy (still), unemployment, and a furious population undergoing massive demographic changes due to internal movements as opposed to illegal immigration. Trump would rather have people debate him being a “racist” or not likewise for the same reasons.
What matters at this point is fundamentals, and the fundamentals are that (a) the world is moving towards war, (b) it is going to include the USA, (c) moral rot in the US being sowed for political gain is also destroying the people, and (d) as Biblical truth has not changed, the need to “repent and believe” is more urgent than ever.
One cannot stop war from coming. The die has already been cast. What matters now is whether one is personally ready in the eyes of God regardless of what happens.