Migrant Apprehensions Drop 42 Percent from December, Up 70 Percent from Biden Inauguration

U.S. Customs and Border Protection rushed out this month’s border apprehensions report amid the sudden decrease in migrant apprehensions. Migrant apprehensions by Border Patrol agents along the southwest border dropped 42 percent from December to January. However, the numbers are still 70 percent higher than in January 2021 — the month Joe Biden became president.

“The January monthly operational update clearly illustrates that new border enforcement measures are working, with the lowest level of Border Patrol encounters between Ports of Entry since February of 2021,” CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller said in a written statement Friday afternoon. “Those trends have continued into February, with average encounters of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans plummeting.”

During the month of January, Border Patrol agents apprehended 128,410 migrants who crossed the border between ports of entry, according to the January Southwest Land Border Encounters report. The January apprehensions represent the lowest single month since February 2021, President Biden’s first full month in office. They also represent a 70 percent increase over January 2021 when Biden took over border security responsibility from President Donald Trump.

The report for January 2023 is the first month since March 2022 where the number of apprehended migrants dropped below 200,000. The January apprehensions brought the total migrant apprehensions for the first four months of FY23 to 763,383 — an increase of more than 90 percent from FY 2020, President Trump’s last full fiscal year in office.

Family unit migrants and unaccompanied migrant children both fell significantly — 50 percent and 24 percent respectively. Single adult apprehensions also dropped by 33 percent, officials reported.

The January apprehensions do not include January’s estimated 48,000 migrant got-aways reported by Breitbart Texas earlier this month.

The number of got-aways in January fell from the 72,000 estimated in December — a drop of 33 percent. This brought the total number of got-aways for the first four months of FY23 to approximately 267,000, a source operating under the umbrella of U.S. Customs and Border Protection told Breitbart.

Combining the approximate 763,000 migrant apprehensions during the first four months of FY23 and the known 267,000 migrant got-aways during that period brings the total of known border crossers to 1,030,000.

CBP officials placed the blame on the dramatically increasing migrant crossings that began during the first full month of the Biden Administration on the reductions of “the most severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on migration.” The report fails to mention the impact of President Biden’s radical changes to President Trump’s border security and immigration policies on January 20, 2021.

Former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart, said, “With the stroke of a pen, President Biden made this country less safe.”

Morgan said he was amazed at how quickly he transitioned on these issues without taking the time to talk to the experts in Border Patrol and CBP about the direct impact of the executive orders that ended border wall system construction and the highly successful “Remain in Mexico” program.

“So this was this is something we’ve been saying was the most dangerous thing that he’s (Biden) been saying all along, that he was going to get rid of on day one, and that’s what he did,” Morgan stated. “That policy alone (Remain in Mexico program) attributed to the absolute reduction of [migrant] families coming up from Central America.

Since February 2021, President Biden’s first full month in office, Border Patrol agents apprehended approximately 4,343,367 migrants who crossed the border between ports of entry — an average of nearly 181,000 per month.