Border numbers plummet as Biden’s new strategy kicks in

Homeland Security Department officials took a victory lap Friday after seeing illegal border crossings plummet in January, saying a new program to convert crossings into legal arrivals appears to be working.

Border Patrol agents caught 128,410 illegal crossers at the southern border last month, down more than 40% compared with December. It’s the best number since February 2021, which marked the start of the Biden administration’s control.

The number of people jumping the border from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — which had largely driven the record-high illegal immigration rates last year — dropped dramatically.

In early January, they averaged more than 1,200 a day. By the end of the month, it was just 59 people a day.

The difference, officials said, was President Biden’s new program announced on Jan. 5 that allows some would-be migrants from those four countries to find a sponsor and pre-apply for admissions. Migrants from those four countries who don’t go through that process will generally be expelled to Mexico.

The carrot-and-stick approach seems to have worked.

“These numbers and these achievements are no coincidence,” one administration official said in briefing reporters about the numbers.

January’s Border Patrol numbers are nearly the best of the Biden administration. But they were still worse than every month under President Obama and worse than all but one month under President Trump.

When the nearly 28,000 unauthorized migrants encountered at ports are added into the mix, January does become the worst since George W. Bush’s administration, topping even Mr. Trump’s worst month.

“Any attempt to spin this as a positive development is gaslighting the American people,” said Robert Law, who served as a senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration and is now director of the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the America First Policy Institute.

The changing border numbers track closely with the rise and fall of get-tough policies.

When Mr. Biden took office, he erased some Trump policies that had largely solved the border problem, and the number of illegal crossings shot up.

Now, his administration is tacking back toward some of those same get-tough policies, and it is paying off.

The pivot has angered Mr. Biden’s backers among the immigrant rights crowd.

News this week that the administration is planning a new crackdown on asylum claims prompted one activist to call it a “moral outrage.”

“It flies in the face of any statements of welcome offered by the administration and instead relies heavily on the failed strategies of deterrence and detention,” said Katie Adams, co-chair of the Interfaith Immigration Coalition.

Mr. Biden’s new program created 30,000 new spaces a month for migrants to enter under the temporary legal pathway. Customs and Border Protection said 11,637 people were granted admission under the program for the month.

The program relies on the Department of Homeland Security’s power of “parole.” That is supposed to be applied in case-by-case instances in which there is an urgent humanitarian reason or a significant benefit to the American public.

A coalition of Republican-led states has sued to block that part of the program, arguing that the president has stretched those parole powers past the breaking point.

While the four countries affected by the new program showed improving numbers, there were still some problematic signs.

The number of Mexicans caught by agents at the southern border rose by more than 15,000, to top 52,000.

And people on the government’s terrorism watchlist continue to stream in, with Border Patrol agents recording 15 more apprehensions of terrorism suspects in January.