In a Friday night news drop, U.S. Customs and Border Protection released the official number of border crossers for December, showing that immigration officials had over 250,000 encounters with illegal immigrants. That number was not only a high for the month, it was also the highest number recorded in U.S. history. And according to one administration official, Republicans are to blame.
This is now the tenth month in a row of more than 200,000 migrant encounters at the southern border. CBP sources tell FOX there were over 70,000 known gotaways at the border in December as well. @FoxNews
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 20, 2023
“Of course the numbers will be higher when Republican elected officials, like smugglers, falsely proclaim the border is open because of a court order to lift Title 42,” a Biden administration official told Fox News.
The claim comes despite the fact that Democrats have been in control of the federal government and Congress for the last two years. Republicans took control of the House earlier this month.
“Despite their misinformation, our border enforcement measures continue to hold strong with the number of Venezuelan nationals arriving at the border unlawfully continuing to drop dramatically,” the official added.
The official also said that new measures announced in October to deal with a surge in Venezuelan migrants, which combined a limited humanitarian parole program with expanded removals under Title 42, are working. CBP said in its release that there was an 82% drop in encounters since September, dropping from roughly 1,100 a day the week before the process was announced to about 100 a day in December. (Fox News)
Acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller also said the administration’s efforts are paying off.
"The December update shows our new border enforcement measures are working,” he said. “Even as overall encounters rose because of smugglers spreading misinformation around the court-ordered lifting of the Title 42 public health order, we continued to see a sharp decline in the number of Venezuelans unlawfully crossing our southwest border, down 82% from September 2022. Early data suggests the expanded measures for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans are having a similar impact, and we look forward to sharing the additional data in the next update.”