Border Apprehensions

FAIR's Matthew Tragesser, Spencer Raley, and Preston Huennekens talk about how apprehensions at U.S. borders have tripled since April despite COVID-19 travel restrictions. Will Joe Biden face another border crisis like we saw in 2019?

Show Notes

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.

Intro:
Today on Understanding Immigration, border apprehensions. Welcome back to another episode of FAIR's Understanding Immigration podcast. This is Matthew Tragesser FAIR’s press secretary and today I’m joined by our research director Spencer Raley and Preston Huennekens from our lobbying team. We hope each and every one of you had a relaxing and happy holiday season. Our podcast team is excited to bring you guys a full year of content that you won't want to miss. Today, we'll be discussing border apprehensions. We'll dive into their patterns, why they occur, and how to mitigate them. But before we address that, we're going to address some recent immigration news. The president was just down at the border to highlight the 450 miles of border wall built under his administration. The president also just renewed a foreign guestworker freeze that helps protect the American worker during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, guys what are the implications of these events, what should our listeners take away from each one?

Spencer:
Well I’ll jump on the border wall here really quick and kind of address that. This is obviously a good thing Trump campaigned on, improving the border wall and building a wall, and it's been four years and he's faced unbelievable opposition on this, many court battles, funding issues, and he still managed to build 450 miles. So, while it's not the big long, beautiful wall that he promised in the campaigns, I think he's done pretty well with this, under the circumstances. A lot of this is improving old wall, we hear that a lot that a lot of this isn't necessarily new wall, however if you've seen the old wall, it barely qualified, often times it was nothing more than just vehicle barriers that people could walk across and the segments that were actually wall, were not effective at all. So, there is quite a bit of new wall especially, in the Rio Grande valley which is one of those, we'll talk about today, is one of the highest traffic areas. So that's going to be extremely productive and, yeah, I think overall it's going to be a strong legacy and it'll be interesting to see if much more of this gets built at all because he did something that I believe was a smart tactical move, and that was his administration ensured that the grants for building the wall are paid out as much as they could. So, in order for the incoming president, President-elect Biden, to stop the building of the border wall, he's going to have to throw away billions of dollars, of U.S. taxpayer dollars in order to not build it, in order to cave to the interests of illegal aliens. So yeah, we'll see what happens there once Biden is inaugurated, but up to this point we've seen some good progress made there it's had a positive impact and hopefully some more wall will be continued to be built. I think right now we're at 452 miles and we'd like to at least see a little more done.

Matthew:
Right I think it'd just be a colossal mistake for Biden to stop construction or even unravel construction. I mean it's just; it's been proven time after time the border wall, all across the border has been super helpful and mitigating these border apprehension surges and hopefully he continues on and uses those earmarked grants in the future. So, Preston, let me ask you now, with the second major event that happened recently with the Trump administration, they recently renewed a guestworker freeze, which was thought to improve wages and job opportunities for displaced Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have millions of Americans unemployed; do you think Biden will end up renewing this come march because that's when it's gonna expire, or do you see him kind of saying, “You know what, I’m not gonna take this initiative anymore and we're gonna let it expire.”

Preston:
It's definitely hard to say and it's important to remember that this is actually a really good strategy from the outgoing Trump administration, to extend this until a few months into Biden's term. In December our unemployment rate was still 6.7% which was exactly the same as it was in November, so there's been no improvement in terms of the unemployment rate and if you look back, the low in February 2020 right before the COVID economic and health crisis hit the United States, it was three 3.5%. So, there's really no reason to lift this ban at all, and in fact I think it's a good move that President Trump extended it before he leaves office. So politically, I think it's going to be very difficult for Joe Biden to justify lifting this ban unless the unemployment rate has returned to the level that it was before COVID, which is in the mid three percent which that would be a halving of our current unemployment rate which I don't think is going to happen before March. There's still a long way to go in recovering our economy, so I think it'll be very telling what side Joe Biden stands on if he does choose to lift the pause of guestworkers in March and our unemployment rate is still very high.

Matthew:
No, I totally agree. I think he's really stuck in a difficult position, it's either he's gonna side with American workers or is he gonna side with the cheap labor lobby and the radical fringe group of his party? I mean, he's really in store for something that is going to take a lot of thinking to do and I guess we'll see, we'll be monitoring to see what he does come March, or even as soon as he enters the Oval Office, he could rescind the order, so we'll be paying close attention to that. So great stuff as always, now let's dive into the main topic of the day which is border apprehensions. Spencer, I want to start off with you on this topic. I want to give our listeners at home a brief overview of what border apprehensions are. How are they defined by immigration officials, what are some patterns we've seen in recent years but also historically? Just kind of give us a general overview if you can of this topic.

Spencer:
Yeah absolutely, Matthew, apprehensions are actually typically made up of two different categories. The first one is apprehensions, as we know and the other one is inadmissibles. And I bring that up because while CBP is typically pretty good about listing these separately, people often combine the two in reporting. So an apprehension is simply the arrest of an individual who is attempting to enter the interior of the country unlawfully, whereas when you hear about someone being inadmissible, it typically refers to one or more of three things; the first one being that the individual was encountered at a port of entry while seeking lawful admission in the United States but was determined to be inadmissible for any number of reasons, or an individual is presenting themselves to seek humanitarian protection under our laws such as asylum, or it could also be an individual who withdrew an application for admission and are ordered to return to their country of origin within a very short time period, sometimes the same day. So that's typically what makes up this definition of apprehensions that we hear. If you go to the CBP website, you'll often see apprehensions plus inadmissibles and that's the reported number the vast the vast majority of those are always going to be actual apprehensions, but typically 10-15 percent will include these inadmissibles as well, so I just wanted to make that distinction clear here. And of course, apprehensions, the vast majority of them, more than 99% over the last few years have occurred on the southern border. And that makes sense, that's where we've always had the most focus. Now this includes interior enforcement of course which is undertaken by ICE and other agencies of DHS, but you still have thousands of people who are apprehended along the coast and tens of thousands of people who are apprehended along our northern border with Canada, in fact recently 20 people were apprehended on a small john boat which is a very small boat trying to enter the United States off the Pacific coast of California. And of course, I think we've all seen the YouTube video of a coast guard official trying to board a homemade submarine that was speeding along last year that was just full of more than 80,000 pounds of marijuana and cocaine. So, a lot happens on our coasts and a lot happens on our northern border, in fact we did a podcast on that a while back. One of the things we're seeing is a large number of individuals from Central America and Mexico are flying to Canada in order to cross the less secure northern border. So, while the vast majority occurs on the southern border, there's a lot that happens along our coast in our northern border as well. We need to keep that in mind. Right now the Rio Grande valley, which we just talked about, is getting a border wall, or at least has received in the highest traffic areas is still the highest apprehension sector, meaning that I believe at this point, a majority of apprehensions happen in that Rio Grande valley on the southern border with Mexico and Texas. Used to it was, in Tucson, it was Arizona and that has shifted over the last 10 years or so, it's essentially reversed and that can happen for a number of reasons, that illegal aliens target certain areas, and the biggest reason is typically due to law enforcement action. One area is getting a lot of traffic, so we build a wall there, or we send a lot of law enforcement officers there and that forces illegal aliens to find another route and so for the longest time that route was crossing the Rio Grande river and entering the United States that way. Now that's getting a lot of attention, that's getting border wall, that's getting more law enforcement officers, and so it wouldn't surprise me if we'd see that shift to another area here. And we're already starting to see that, like I mentioned, apprehensions along the coast have reached record levels this past year. We're seeing more apprehensions at the northern border and essentially what this does is it offers proof that a lot of these deterrence methods are working, because those are a lot more difficult to do, to enter via the coast, or enter via the northern border. And so a lot of people are just giving up and not attempting to enter the United States and that's obviously what we ultimately want. Another thing to keep in mind is that summer is historically the busy season for illegal immigration you could call it, that's when most people attempt to cross, and it was interesting that we saw that was not the case in fiscal year 2020 because of COVID. There just weren't as many job opportunities in the United States, of course other countries were hit hard as well but when that job magnet tends to dry when it dries up, illegal immigration tends to dry up as well.
Matthew:
So why do you think it's the summer season is such a popular period for migrants to attempt enter the country illegally? I mean you’d think with Mexico being a very hot country in terms of temperature, migrants would not want to come during the summer, is there any particular reason you can think of as to why they’d be coming more so in the summer than the cooler months?

Spencer:
Well, I mean a lot of it still has to do with weather, I mean it still gets cold in a lot of areas along the border. It also has to do with job prospects, when jobs are available as well as certain enforcement measures. Again, looking at the Rio Grande, southern Texas, it can it can get pretty chilly in the winter, no one wants to cross the river in in the winter months. But a lot of this has to do with job availability, so if you're trying to jump into an agricultural job or something like that, a seasonal job you're gonna want to enter the United States during the summer months because that's when the highest availability of those jobs are present. So yeah, we saw that go down a lot last year and that makes sense because a lot of these jobs were not available, or Americans who had lost those jobs returning to this work in order to find some form of income. Conversely, the year before fiscal year 2020, 2019 we saw record apprehensions, in fact close to a million occurred on the southern border and this was due to a massive spike in the summer months. Now there were a lot of reasons that went along with this, there were discussions of DACA or potentially even some form of amnesty taking place and that always encourages more illegal immigration, people trying to get in before that offer is off the table or before it happens, and also the economy was very strong, there were a lot of jobs available and so you saw more and more attempt to enter the United States. And so far in fiscal year 2021, we're seeing higher levels than we saw at this point in 2019, so far. I think this is largely thanks to the promise of amnesty that President-elect Biden has offered. However of course we haven't entered the summer months of 2021 yet, so it has yet to be seen if we're going to experience another spike like that, but it's kind of hard to believe that we wouldn't, if enforcement efforts are minimized, if there is no more effort put towards building the wall, if amnesty is being promised, if interior enforcement is stopped for at least 100 days like Biden promises. So, I'd be very surprised if we didn't see these numbers rise again. And just for comparison, finally, normal levels since around 2010 were closer to about 350,000 to 450,000 apprehensions per year, so we more than doubled that in 2019 and we saw it return to a lower-than-normal level in 2020 due to COVID and now we're seeing higher than normal monthly averages now, so it's kind of all over the place. But again, it all comes down to job availability, how much of an effort is being put on law enforcement efforts along the border, and whether there's a promise of amnesty.

Matthew:
Sure, so Preston, Spencer just highlighted some alarming border trends not just historically but in the past couple years this past year in 2020. He touched on some items that might be contributing to these figures growing, but I want to take a deeper dive into this. In your mind, what are some factors that are pushing migrants to the southern border and attempting to enter our country illegally?

Preston:
Yeah so Spencer actually brought some of these up in his discussion, but there's really five reasons why we're seeing more people come to the southern border, more people try to enter illegally and I’ll just go through those each here real quickly. The first just like spencer said is that there's better economic conditions in the United States, there are jobs, the wages are higher, and this isn't even really a matter of debate. Even if an illegal alien is working illegally under the table, being paid cash, the wages are higher in the U.S. than they are in Honduras. They're higher than they are in Guatemala, they're higher than they are in El Salvador, and even when you factor in the cost for a potential migrant traveling from central America to the United States, there is still a huge financial and economic incentive for them to make an attempt at crossing the border and working in the U.S. illegally. And it's not helped by the second reason, which we've talked about almost ad nauseam, is that our border security is just nowhere near where it needs to be and even with the 450 miles of new wall, that President Trump built, there's still more that can be done, border patrol is still understaffed from where they need to be, and there's just gaps there that, until Congress has kind of the political courage and will to address those, there's always going to be large numbers of people that are able to cross the border successfully and go in the U.S. and work far away from the border. They don't just hang around in Texas and Arizona, they go to New York, they go to major cities in California, they go to major cities in the Midwest. And so just by that fact alone, we know that more can be done at our border to stop people from crossing illegally. And in addition to this kind of goes on with the job prospects, but by and large a number of states are very welcoming and accommodating to illegal aliens. There are a number of states that now offer driver's licenses to people that don't have any documentation, that can't prove that they're legally present in the U.S. In states like California, you qualify for in-state tuition at universities if you're an illegal alien, which is a huge draw because of how strong our school system is in the United States compared to some of these universities that are in countries in Central America, in South America and other parts of the world. And then even now, maybe 20 years ago this might not have been the case, but increasingly we're seeing that there's more of a willingness for activist groups and even large legal firms to offer pro bono legal assistance to illegal aliens that are fighting removal orders in the immigration courts. And so even if they are detected, even if they are apprehended by ICE, they don't just get immediately put on a plane, they have to go through the immigration court system. And we know just from those statistics that aliens that are represented by legal counsel have much better outcomes than those that aren't and when you have these large law firms providing them pro bono care, when you have even in certain cities, I know that New York has a pilot program doing this where, the city itself is paying for some immigration lawyers to be provided to illegal aliens. So, when that's going on, that's a huge incentive for people to come and stay because they see how accommodating certain parts of the country are to illegal aliens. And fourth, there's a lack of interior enforcement and this really started under the Obama administration where sure, we were kind of beefing up efforts at the border to an extent, but largely there was kind of an unspoken agreement where, if you made it past border patrol and got into the country, you were free to go, you were free to live your life. We weren't really going to go after you once you were in the interior. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there's no mandatory E-Verify, immigration and customs enforcement, ICE does not have the bandwidth to track down illegal aliens in the country to the extent that it would take care of the 14 million people that are here. And again too, in addition to people crossing the border, we have such a huge issue with visa overstays and that compounds the problem when in 2021 the easiest way to be an illegal alien is to buy a plane ticket and then just never leave and then that compounds the issue. When you, why would, if you have the money, why on earth would you try to cross the border when you could just buy, you could just qualify for a B-1/ B-2 tourist visa, buy a plane ticket to Chicago one way and then never leave. You're scot-free, you're good to go. And then finally, this is the final issue and this specifically has to do with those coming to the border is the huge issues that we have with our asylum laws that still have not been addressed, people are coming here and applying for asylum even if they don't, even if their case does not have any chance of granting them relief in immigration court. And that's an issue that we are going to face even if we built a wall that was 100 miles high 10 miles deep and 5 miles thick. There is no wall that could be built that could stop people from coming and legally applying for asylum the way that our laws are currently set up, and the way that our catch and release policies currently exist, and the way that our credible fear process currently exists. And so, until Congress, again we've been saying this on this podcast, we all probably sound like broken records at this point, until congress is able to address those issues, nothing is going to change and we're going to continue to see these problems at the southern border.

Matthew:
Great points, Preston, there's just so many pool factors right now, I don't understand how we don't have more people coming to the border. But let me ask you this, it's surprising, Spencer kind of touched on this, but given all of the COVID-19 immigration border travel restrictions in the past year, and our economy kind of tanking, meaning that there are fewer job opportunities in our country right now, and also more wall built, more than ever before; why are we seeing surges at the southern border still? I mean it's in the past six months or so I believe, they've completely just slowly climbed up, and I would have imagined with all these restrictions and all these other factors in the past year that people, that migrants would not want to come to the United States, so what's going on here, do you have some theories as to why this is strangely happening?

Preston:
So I’ve got two broad theories and the first one is very simple, Spencer already discussed this, is when you have a presidential candidate like Joe Biden, whose platform that was widely available, it was published in Spanish online, that says we are going to give an amnesty to every illegal alien in the country, we're going to pause deportations for 100 days, we're going to expand DACA and TPS, I mean those have consequences and when people that are considering making the journey to the U.S. hear that, and they time their arrival, so to speak, after January 20th when Biden's in office, people make those considerations. So that's broadly the first reason, but again, the second reason is that at the end of the day, the incentives to come are significantly stronger than the disincentives. If you're from the perspective of someone in Central America or South America that wants to come to the U.S., the incentives are… there are more incentives than there are disincentives. Nothing has been done to change the fundamental calculus that the job magnet still exists and that there is not enough enforcement against illegal aliens and there's not enough enforcement against their employers to stop that job magnet. And until that evens out, until there is just the highest chance that you get removed and deported as there is that you stay and live under the radar, then nothing's going to change and that's the biggest issue, is that right now, even with the increased enforcement that we saw under President Trump, even with the construction of the border wall, even with his attempts to change some of our asylum laws and to enter into these agreements with some of these countries, again at the end of the day the jobs are still there, the chance that if you make it past border patrol, you'll be able to find a job and live largely unmolested in the United States is still high and until those two things change, we're not going to see any difference in the number of people trying to come to the U.S. illegally.

Spencer:
I wanted to chime in here and add something as well. And Preston mentioned, there are still jobs available and the economy in the United States has improved, to some degree. We've seen unemployment go from roughly 20 percent down to six or seven percent now. Of course, there's still millions, tens of millions of Americans who are looking for good full-time work, but what we're seeing is a lot of employers knowing that there is just very little chance that they'll be prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens, are actually turning to illegal labor as a method of trying to increase their profits during a difficult time. And while we absolutely our hearts go out to any business that's struggling, that doesn't give you an excuse to break the law and to especially hire illegal labor during a time when millions of Americans are looking for work. And something else that we could touch on as well, is that, especially during the months where apprehensions were so low, the United States was facing our worst surges of COVID-19, of course they're going up again now, but we're also seeing COVID-19 take a toll on Central American countries and Mexico; it's really bad in Mexico, it's really bad in countries like Brazil, and a lot of other Central American countries, so a lot of people are seeing even more financial difficulty in these countries that already have weak economies. So, they're making that determination that it might be worth it to try to come to the United States and if nothing else, hopefully the United States will get things under control quicker than their home countries or that they'll be able to find employment in the United States where it's becoming even more difficult in the countries that they live in right now.

Matthew:
Yeah, great point there, Spencer. I actually want to kind of transition off of your point into some tangible solutions to help mitigate and curb these border apprehension numbers, especially during COVID-19 and I think both of you talked about this perfectly, about the job prospects and the economic opportunities in our country, and there are actually a couple of policies that we could put in place that could help reduce these job opportunities for illegal aliens in our country, and in turn decrease border apprehensions. So, the first is to federally mandate E-Verify and so E-Verify is a program that was created in 1996 by Congress as a way for employers to comply with the federal ban on employing unauthorized aliens. And it's a free program, it's relatively easy to use, you can find out the authorization of an alien, or the work authorization of an alien in a matter of minutes, and we actually did a full podcast on this program early in our series. But again, if we can make this program federally mandated, it would help cut off the jobs magnet and help employers not hire illegal aliens and so about 20 states have this at some capacity, but it's not federally mandated and we'd like to see this in all 50 states, but it's not there yet. So, if there's a way to pass legislation to federally mandate this or to put pressure on state legislatures, I think that'll be a great first step. Going along with that, I think it'd be also very important to increase worksite enforcement operations by ICE and I think the perfect example of this was in Mississippi, in the summer of 2019, when an ICE operation arrested about 700 illegal aliens at various food processing plants in Mississippi. And so, this was a perfect way to show illegal aliens that they, one: cannot be in the country illegally, but two: also, they can't be working the country illegally. And so, this kind of operation helps place a form of deterrence on illegal aliens and again, it could make them think again, “I shouldn't come to the United States because there's a chance of me being apprehended or being deported once I’m in and working illegally.” And Spencer, you touched on this also, it's a huge problem right now, that a lot of these U.S. employers, when they're hiring illegal aliens, they go unpunished, they're not prosecuted. And one study compiled by Syracuse University found out that between April 2018 and March 2019, only 11 individuals were prosecuted for knowingly employing illegal aliens, so that is a major problem. So, this can be done by ICE, they just need perhaps more resources to conduct these investigations, more funding to help with this, and that can be done through Congress as well. Another thing that could be a potential solution in driving down these border apprehension surges, is to eliminate the perks that make illegal aliens essentially U.S. citizens, which I think Preston also touched on a little bit, but we're talking about driver's licenses here, in-state tuition, COVID-19 financial relief. We have 15 states granting driver's licenses to legal aliens, 21 states plus DC granting in-state tuition, and now you look at California in the last year, Governor Newsom there just passed legislation to give 75 million dollars of state funds to illegal aliens for COVID-19 financial relief. Illegal aliens are for sure going to want to come here, and again these are when you come combine all these perks, they need to be eliminated. And this, again can be done through legislation, perhaps pressure from the White House, I’m not sure if the Biden White House is going to put much pressure, but perhaps the next administration could do that. And there are other solutions too. Let's talk about the 287(g) Program, okay. So, this is a way to increase interior enforcement in our country and it helps ICE. And what this program does, is it deputizes officers at the local and state level to federal immigration officers, so these individuals can now help with immigration enforcement, they have access to ICE databases, they can help start the removal process, and it seems to me like a no-brainer. As we talked about earlier in this podcast, ICE doesn't really have that much of a bandwidth to deport every single illegal alien in this country. But if you start deputizing these local and state law enforcement agencies, or departments, that helps them out a lot more. Another item, we see sanctuary cities, they continue to expand and expand. Well over 600 jurisdictions now, and they're probably only going to expand under the Biden administration, and so if we can again, highlight the dangers of these sanctuary cities, perhaps the next Attorney General of the United States, not the one under Biden now, but perhaps in the next administration, he's in charge of federal funding to these states and cities that continue to have sanctuary jurisdictions and he can essentially withhold this funding, or she, whoever the next Attorney General is. And the last thing I’ll bring up as a potential solution, is that we can continue to provide resources and funding to the southern border wall. It was almost impossible to build the 450 miles of border wall that the Trump Administration did in the past four years, but if we can secure more funding from Congress in the upcoming years, to help expand that wall, help replace old sections with new sections, eliminate the vehicle barriers and put pedestrian barriers. Let's not forget, we share a 2,000-mile border with Mexico and there's a lot of that area that's still uncovered and that helps illegal aliens enter the country illegally. So again, there's not really one solution, it's going to take a comprehensive plan. It's going to take efforts from the local, state, and federal level. And again, even with all these efforts, it may not completely eliminate border apprehensions, but it's certainly going to help control them better and reduce these numbers and relieve immigration officials at our southern border. So, I don't think anyone will be shocked when we see more caravans form and more border apprehensions surge under the Biden administration. I mean, there are a lot of pool factors still out there. Their immigration proposals right now are certainly going to incentivize more caravans to form and these apprehension totals to potentially climb, and with the COVID-19 pandemic already taking a toll on the country, I just cannot imagine his administration would want to deal with another border crisis like we saw in 2019. So hopefully the administration can help prevent this and realize that there's a lot at stake here. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have today. We hope that all of you enjoyed today's episode and learned something new about border apprehensions. Remember that all of our episodes are available on most platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. You can also access them on our website at FAIRus.org and on our Twitter, the handle for that is @FAIRImmigration. We also now have a transcript of all these episodes, so if interested in just exploring these episodes more, or want some further clarity on the content we presented, we have that too when you click on the podcast link. We hope each and every one of you are continuing to stay safe and sound during these crazy times, believe us, we're in there with you, but until next time this has been Understanding Immigration presented by FAIR.