Biden Admin Reports Record 250K Migrant Encounters Along Southwest Border in December

The Biden Administration announced another record-setting month for migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border. The report of nearly 252,000 migrant encounters came in a Friday-night after-hours news dump. This represents the largest single-month report in U.S. history.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released the December Southwest Land Border Encounters Report early Friday evening. The report revealed that U.S. Border Patrol agents and CBP officers encountered 251,487 migrants in the month of December 2022.

While the December report sets yet another record for the Biden administration, it represents the tenth-straight month of reports exceeding 200,000 migrant encounters.

Former border security officials from the Obama and Trump administrations were quick to criticize the Biden administration for the skyrocketing numbers.

“Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime to intentionally un-secure the border,” former acting ICE Director and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Tom Homan said in a written statement on Friday. “By way of more than 90 executive orders, he undid the successful Trump-era policies that brought illegal immigration to a 40-year low and gave us the most secure border of our lifetimes.”

“This president and his team were warned what would happen if they got rid of those policies,” Homan stated. “They did it anyway, and you’re looking at the consequences.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart Texas shortly after President Biden took office, former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan reported on the warnings given to the Biden administration during the transition.

“Look, I know what our team said to the transition team,” the former commissioner said at the time. “I know the facts and data and analysis that was provided.”

On Friday, Morgan, also a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow, brought the impact of Biden’s changes in border security and immigration into focus.

“What’s been happening at the border the last two years continues to be a catastrophic crisis, and the White House, Secretary Mayorkas, and the open-borders advocates on the left continue to lie about it,” Morgan stated. “Under the last Democratic president, 25,000 encounters was a borderline crisis—for the Biden administration, 10 times that number is simply business as usual.”

“Secretary Mayorkas has been in his post for two years. He has presided over all this chaos and destruction, willfully implementing every single one of his boss’ open-borders policies,” the former CBP commissioner added. “Those policies have abjectly failed, yet he continues to absurdly claim the opposite, even to the point of lying under oath before Congress. No sane person could look at the border and claim we’re on the right course.”

The CBP Southwest Land Border Encounters Report reveals that since February 1, 2021, President Biden’s first full month in office, and December 31, 2022, Border Patrol agents and CBP officers encountered more than 4.5 million migrants along the southwest border with Mexico.