Trump says there’s a ‘crisis’ at the border

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Trump says there’s a ‘crisis’ at the border. Here’s what the data says

Politics Jan 8, 2019 5:41 PM EST

President Donald Trump’s argument for building a border wall has boiled down to one word: crisis.

Pence and Nielsen, among other White House officials, have focused their case for a crisis on three main points: the flow of illegal immigration, drugs and terrorism into the U.S. through the southwest border.

But a closer look at the numbers raises questions on whether these issues are getting worse, and, whether they constitute a crisis.

Here’s what the evidence, including from the government’s own data, shows:

Drugs

The administration claims there has been a dramatic spike in illegal drugs entering the country at the southwest border. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there was an increase in the number of drug seizures of methamphetamine and fentanyl from fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2018. (The data for fiscal year 2018 doesn’t have numbers for September.)

In a 2018 DEA drug threat assessment report, several of the drugs highlighted by Customs and Border Protection pass through legal ports of entry, not through illegal border crossings. (The agency traced most heroin and cocaine to privately owned vehicles passing through legal ports of entry. Fentanyl from Mexico is most often transported this way, too. Sometimes, drugs are mixed in with legal goods on tractor-trailers.)

According to drug threat assessments from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the majority of the drugs that cross the southwest border are brought in through official ports of entry. This has been the case for years.

David Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in a December 2018 blog post noted that the drugs Border Patrol agents seize at official ports of entry were three times more valuable than the drugs seized outside of those ports.

“In other words, a border wall would not target the most valuable drugs crossing the border,” Bier wrote.

Terrorism

Administration officials have provided varying numbers in recent days that point to a wave of terrorists or criminals seeking to cross into the U.S. through the southwest border. But the statistics have often been misleading.

Last week, Nielsen told Democrats in a closed-door meeting that immigration officials apprehended more than 3,000 terrorists and 17,000 adults with criminal records at the border in the last fiscal year. Trump cited the 17,000 number in his Jan. 4 letter to Congress.

Customs and Border Protection data shows that across the country in fiscal year 2018, immigration officials encountered 16,831 “criminal aliens.” These are individuals who have been convicted of a crime in the U.S. or abroad, and are flagged by officials at legal ports of entry or airports as being “inadmissible” into the U.S.

Terrorism has been repeatedly cited by White House officials as a specific concern about who enters the country along the southern border.

“We have terrorists coming through the southern border because they find that’s probably the easiest place to come through. They drive right in and they make a left,” Trump said at a news conference in the Rose Garden last week.

Sanders, in a Jan. 6 interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, claimed that nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into the U.S. illegally, adding that “we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”

Wallace refuted the claim, noting in an on-air fact check that most terrorists are stopped at airports.


Video by Fox News

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-s...-data-says

The State Department has said that no terrorists have been found crossing the southern border from Mexico into the U.S. In a 2017 report, the State Department said there was “no credible evidence” indicating that international terrorist groups have established bases in Mexico or sent operatives into the U.S.

Data obtained by NBC News shows that of the 41 people stopped by border agents in the first half of fiscal year 2018, six were determined to be “non-U.S. persons” and suspected of having terrorism ties.

When asked last week at the Rose Garden news conference about terrorism at the border, Nielsen said that number was classified and offered another term: “special interest aliens,” of which she said border officials stopped more than 3,000 last year.

Here’s how DHS has described a special interest alien, known as an “SIA” in a new Q&A posted on the agency’s website Monday: “Generally, an SIA is a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests.”

The agency goes on to say that this didn’t mean that SIA’s are necessarily terrorists, but that their travel behaviors warranted further investigation.

“DHS has never indicated that the SIA designation means more than that,” the agency added.

The flow of unauthorized immigration

Immigration officials keeps tabs on the number of apprehensions at the border every year; it’s partly how the government tracks trends in illegal immigration. This is a number that Trump has focused on, too.

According to CBP, there were nearly 400,000 apprehensions — of those trying to cross the border without authorization — in fiscal year 2018. The number of apprehensions increased for several consecutive months during this period, which started Oct. 1, 2017 and ended Sept. 30, 2018.

That number is far lower than the more than 1.6 million people who were apprehended in fiscal year 2000, widely considered a peak year apprehensions at the border in recent decades. Since then, overall apprehensions have declined to current levels.

Why have those numbers fallen so dramatically? Part of the decline has to do with a shift in migration patterns. During peak levels of unauthorized immigration, border patrol agents were largely stopping young Mexicans coming into the country.

Today, the number of Central American migrants seeking protection in the U.S. has risen, and the number of Mexicans apprehended at the border has dropped.

Several factors contributed to that long-term change, according to Randy Capps, the director of research at Migration Policy Institute: Better jobs and educational opportunities in Mexico combined with the tech crash and recession of the 2000s.

Today, more families and unaccompanied children have been arriving at the border, and as a result, the Border Patrol’s mission has shifted, Capps said.

Border agents are “increasingly tasked with providing a safe place for people, and sometimes they need to provide medical care as well for more vulnerable people, more women and children,” he said. “That’s a different kind of a job than the job of finding people who are trying to evade them in the desert.”

In December, Border Patrol announced that two migrant children died in U.S. custody, prompting criticism from advocates and lawmakers.

In an interview with CBS News, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said the facilities at border stations were built decades ago and meant to hold single adult males.

“What we’re seeing is more children than ever before coming into our custody,” he said. “At this pace in December we’ll have almost 25,000 children, most of the them accompanied by parents who have crossed our border and arriving in custody.”

He added: “That’s very different than we’ve seen before.”

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