Border arrests in July drop to low under Biden

The number of arrests by border agents of migrants who crossed the southern border illegally in July is expected to fall under 60,000, according to three people with knowledge of the data, a precipitous drop from the record numbers of crossings that plagued the Biden administration just months ago.

The July arrest numbers are set to represent the lowest monthly apprehensions under the Biden administration. The previous low came in January 2021, the month President Joe Biden assumed office, when around 75,000 migrant apprehensions were made at the border.

The plunge in arrests – border agents made around 250,000 in December alone – comes after the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the southern border in June for migrants who cross illegally in an effort to deter them from making the journey to the United States. The changes suspended longtime guarantees that gave anyone who stepped onto U.S. soil the right to seek a safe haven, allowing border officials to more quickly return migrants to their home countries or Mexico.

The drop could provide a powerful counternarrative to what has been one of the Biden administration’s largest political weaknesses at a critical time before the November election. Republicans have excoriated Biden over his handling of the surge of border crossings, and are attacking Vice President Kamala Harris over her role as well now that she is the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The numbers, which were shared by the people on the condition of anonymity because they were preliminary and not yet released publicly, remain above those for most of President Donald Trump’s term. But they have fallen much more in line with border crossings during his presidency: There were nine months during the Trump administration in which arrest numbers exceeded July’s, according to Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Republicans and immigration opponents argue that the numbers are not comparable. They say the Biden administration is simply letting migrants enter the country through other means, like a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app that allows a certain number of migrants a day to schedule entering the country at a port of entry. Altogether, they say, entries still exceed the totals at almost any point in the Trump administration.

The Biden administration’s “unlawful mass-parole schemes have exploded the number of inadmissible aliens entering” through ports of entry along the southern border “despite having no right to do so,” Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee said last week on social media.

Biden administration officials have lauded their crackdown in previous statements noting downturns in arrests. Experts, too, have credited the new border policies for the drop but have pointed out that other factors are most likely at work as well.

“This is a dramatic downturn in arrivals,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. She said the numbers most likely reflected quick deportations at the border, migrants using other ways of entering the country and “ongoing Mexican enforcement that has slowed the arrival of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border.”

For most of his presidency, Biden struggled to stop migrants from entering the country illegally, a challenge exacerbated by failing governments in countries like Venezuela and what was seen as his softer immigration language after the often incendiary invective of Trump.

The number of border crossings skyrocketed – more than 2 million arrests were made in the 2023 fiscal year – and reached their peak in December, when more than 5,000 migrants a day were arrested.

Seeking to stanch the surge, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Biden administration officials flew to Mexico City, lobbying Mexican officials to ramp up enforcement in their country against migrants. U.S. border arrests began to drop early this year.

Immigration advocates have criticized the effort to bar asylum for those who cross illegally. The American Civil Liberties Union sued over Biden’s asylum ban, and the union that represents the nation’s asylum officers sided with the ACLU.

And some experts doubted the plunge in border crossings would last.

“This is a result of the Biden administration’s ban on asylum for most who cross between ports of entry,” Isacson said. “If past crackdowns are any guide, we can expect the impact to be short term: Numbers will bottom out within a few months and start to recover again.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.