September Border Patrol encounters lowest since the pandemic

Fewer migrants were apprehended between ports of entry at the southern border in September than in any month since August of 2020, according to new data released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

According to the numbers released Tuesday, the Border Patrol encountered 53,858 people crossing the border illegally in September, in line with similar numbers posted in July and August, and down from a high of 249,740 in December.

Overall encounters — including both Border Patrol apprehensions and CBP encounters with migrants at official ports of entry — remained flat at 101,790 in September, the lowest posted number since the 101,099 encounters in February of 2021, President Biden’s first full month in office.

“The data published today by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that since the President announced new executive actions to secure the border on June 4, unlawful border crossings have dropped by more than 55% to the lowest levels in over four years. Encounters between ports of entry are lower than they were during the last several months of the previous Administration,” said White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández.

The distinction between CBP and Border Patrol encounters is important, because CBP encounters include foreign nationals without visas granted an appointment to seek parole or asylum through official U.S. government channels, such as the CBP One app.

Border Patrol encounters also encompass many prospective asylees and parolees, but those who choose to cross the border illegally before turning themselves in to U.S. officials.

The effect of the Biden administration’s parole programs is apparent in the CBP statistics.

The Border Patrol reported encountering only 1,003 nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) — four of the Western Hemisphere’s most politically and economically troubled countries — in September, the lowest such number since May of 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and down from a low of 84,208 in December of 2023.

The Biden administration in 2022 began the CHNV program to open legal pathways for nationals of those countries to enter the United States in an effort to discourage them from presenting unannounced at the border.

Last month, CBP’s Office of Field Operations, in charge of managing official ports of entry, reported 27,737 encounters with CHNV nationals, a number that’s remained stable for approximately a year as the program has taken hold.

The administration earlier this month reported it would not renew the legal status for many CHNV parolees, encouraging them to instead seek to extend their status through other programs, including asylum, or potentially face deportation proceedings.

The third straight month of flat border numbers follows the Biden administration’s unilateral implementation of asylum restrictions at the border and a controversial Mexican crackdown on third-country nationals trekking toward the U.S.-Mexico border.

The administration’s asylum restrictions loosely mirror what was proposed in the failed bipartisan Senate border deal, which was panned from the left for allegedly violating U.S. international asylum and refugee obligations and eventually abandoned by the right at the behest of former President Trump.

That failed deal has become a central point of Vice President Harris’s border security pitch and a cudgel to attack Trump for politicizing the issue.

“For months, the Biden-Harris Administration worked with a bipartisan group of Senators to craft a historic bipartisan border security agreement that would have added thousands of frontline personnel to the border — but Congressional Republicans voted against that agreement twice — proving that they are more interested in cynically playing politics than securing the border. The Biden-Harris Administration has taken effective action, and Republican officials continue to do nothing,” said Fernández.

Still, immigration restrictionists slammed the Biden administration over the border numbers, pointing to the cumulative fiscal 2024 annual figure of 2.9 million encounters.

“The small decline in encounters of illegal aliens attempting to enter the country is hardly something to celebrate. 2,901,142 encounters is still greater than the population of Chicago and five times greater than the 646,822 such encounters in FY 2020, the last full year before the Biden-Harris administration took office," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation of American Immigration Reform, in a statement.

“Moreover, the overall decline in encounters, particularly along the southwest border, had more to do with policy decisions made in Mexico City than those made in Washington, D.C."

—Updated at 5:35 p.m.