Thursday 22 September 2022 07:47 PM 'Border czar' Kamala Harris says Republicans are 'playing games' by dropping ... trends now
Todd Bensman is Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and author of 'Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.' He previously served for nine years as senior intelligence analyst for the Texas Department of Public Safety's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
All it took was the arrival of 50 migrants on Martha's Vineyard to wake Democrats and the mainstream media up to the reality of America's historic and transformational immigration crisis.
Who knew?
All they needed was 19 months, dating back to the start of the Biden administration, to be wrenched out of their partisan fog to recognize the scope of this humanitarian disaster.
It's sickening, but here we are.
On Monday, The New York Times grudgingly ran a story that used the 'H' word to describe the 'historic pace of undocumented immigrants entering the country.'
It is a pace that would have struck generations of Democrats as totally unacceptable, until recently.
This week, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at long last released statistics from August showing the stark numbers: More than 2.15 million encounters with immigrants on the southern border, between October 2021 and August 2022.
The Biden presidency could easily end with seven million or more new migrants in America – a population larger than the size of Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
The full reporting period, which runs through September, will probably end with 2.35 million encounters.
By definition, an encounter happens each time a Border Patrol agent physically lays hands on an individual attempting to enter the country illegally, so one migrant may be countered multiple times.
These numbers are literally off the charts.
2.15 million encounters is the highest number since the Eisenhower administration started keeping records in 1960.
It's also up significantly from 1.7 million encounters during Biden's first term – and even that was a record at the time.
For comparison, between 2010 and 2016, Border Patrol handled less than 500,000 encounters and never topped 400,000 in 2011, 2012 and 2015.
All together Border Patrol's 17,000 agents have had to process immigrants approximately 4 million times since Biden became president.
And while millions were arrrested on the border, millions more got into America – and they will continue to do so.
The Biden administration itself has legally paroled some 1.4 million family members and unaccompanied minors into America bound only by the promise that they'll report to immigration authorities someday.
Add to that at least another 900,000 'gotaways,' which is a slang term once only used by Border Patrol agents to describe individuals who they suspect were able to evade capture.
The problem of 'gotaways' has become so pronounced that it is now part of the official lexicon.
Adding these two groups together, a total of more than at least 2.3 million illegal immigrants have entered America since Biden took office.
2.15 million encounters is the highest number since the Eisenhower administration started keeping records in 1960.
On Monday, The New York Times grudgingly ran a story that used the 'H' word to describe the 'historic pace of undocumented immigrants entering the country.' (Above) Migrants on the border in downtown El Paso, Texas, U.S., September 21, 2022
In this trend holds, and there's no indication that it won't, a second half of the Biden term could boost that number to some five million or higher.
If
