There was a 21% rise from August’s total of 181,084 illegal aliens apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the Southwest Border to September’s total of 218,763 interactions with people of all nationalities between ports of entry. The Border Patrol made 54,833 arrests of Venezuelans who entered the country through Mexico in September, more than doubling the previous monthly high of 33,749 arrests in September 2022. In September, border patrol agents arrested 39,733 Mexicans. Only Venezuelans accounted for more border crossers.
While promising to deport individuals who enter the country illegally after July 31 and fail to claim asylum, the Biden administration has granted temporary legal status to the almost 500,000 Venezuelans already present in the country on that date. The number of Mexican nationals seen by CBP agents along the Southwest Land Border dropped to 53,296 in September from 55,493 in August 2023 and 63,431 in September 2022 after the United States “surged resources and manpower” to the border that month.
4,042 Chinese people were encountered at the southwest land border in September, up from 2,379 the previous month. There were just 399 occurrences involving Chinese nationals in September 2022. The number of reported encounters with Russian citizens dropped from 2,099 in August to 1,779 in September. Nearly 2.5 million migrants have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year, with around 1.5 million of them being adults without children.
There were more than 2 million arrests made during the government’s fiscal year that concluded on September 30, down 7% from the record high of over 2.2 million during the same period a year earlier.
About $14 billion of the $106 billion spending package revealed by the Biden administration on Friday would be allocated to border security.
