Border Patrol agents in the Tucson sector arrested about half as many people attempting to enter the U.S. between ports of entry in July compared to June, a decrease largely driven by fewer arrivals from Mexico, according to federal data released Friday.
Border agents arrested 11,722 people in the Tucson sector last month, a 48% drop from 22,436 in June.
In July the Tucson sector recorded about 9,000 fewer Mexican arrivals between ports, including 6,000 fewer Mexicans traveling as part of a family unit, said Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.
That could be due to word spreading about the Biden administration’s June restrictions on access to asylum, Ruiz Soto said.
Border-wide, agents encountered 56,408 migrants between ports of entry in July, the lowest number since September 2020, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Officials attributed the decrease to President Joe Biden’s June 4 executive order dramatically limiting access to asylum for migrants who enter the U.S. outside ports of entry.
Since the proclamation went into effect June 5, arrests between ports of entry dropped by 55%, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to their home countries, including through 300 repatriation flights, CBP said.
“Total removals and returns over the past year exceed removals and returns in any fiscal year since 2010,” a Friday CBP news release said.
White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández told the Associated Press, “The Biden-Harris Administration has taken effective action, and the Republicans continue to do nothing.”
The AP reported that U.S. Rep. Mark Green, Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, countered, “This administration is orchestrating a massive shell game, encouraging otherwise-inadmissible aliens to cross at ports of entry instead of between them, thereby creating a façade of improved optics for the administration, but in reality imposing a growing burden on our communities.”
Despite the slowing migration in 2024, illegal-entry prosecutions in Arizona are up 25% in the second quarter of 2024 — the three-month period that ended June 30 — compared to the previous quarter. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona brought criminal charges against 2,641 people who entered or re-entered the U.S. illegally in the second quarter.
That increase is both due to three additional attorneys lent to the Arizona office by DHS, as well as to a heightened ability for U.S. Border Patrol to focus on prosecutions, U.S. Attorney Gary Restaino said on Friday.
“It turns out when encounters go down, the Border Patrol has more resources that it can devote to charging the right cases criminally,” he said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office focuses felony charges on individuals with previous felonies on their U.S. criminal record, and misdemeanor charges for those whose only violation is illegal entry, Restaino said.
“Most aliens coming across the border are not a danger to us, and are coming over for a better life for them and their families. But we still need accountability,” he said. “We’re never going to prosecute everyone who comes across the border illegally. It’s a matter of trying to provide the right accountability, to deter people from doing it.”
The office also prosecuted 319 individuals for human smuggling, most of whom were U.S. citizens, including four juveniles, who are often recruited over social media, Restaino said.
Other factors at play
CBP’s July data are also a dramatic turnaround compared to December 2023, when agents in the Tucson sector alone arrested more than 80,000 migrants between ports of entry, amid a global surge in migration.
Ruiz Soto says other factors are also at play in 2024’s reduction in migrant arrivals at the U.S. southern border: Decreases in Venezuelan migration are largely due to Mexico’s ongoing migration-enforcement efforts south of the border, and are reflected in drops in arrivals at Texas border sectors, where Venezuelans tend to cross into the U.S., Ruiz Soto said.
“The question is: How long is Mexico going to be able to financially, and politically, continue to do so?” and whether aggressive enforcement will continue under Mexico’s incoming president Claudia Sheinbaum, he said.
Factors outside the U.S. control could mean arrival volumes ticking back up in the near term, Ruiz Soto said, pointing to Venezuela’s recent contested election that could prompt another surge in migration from Venezuela.
Biden’s June 4 order limiting asylum processing is already facing a legal challenge from human rights advocates, which if successful, could also prompt a reversal in current trends, Ruiz Soto said.
Immigrant advocates say the asylum restrictions violate U.S. and international laws, which say it’s legal to request asylum on U.S. soil, no matter how one entered the country.
Under the new order, agents no longer have to ask migrants if they face danger in their home countries; migrants have to know to speak up and make their claim. But the Arizona Daily Star has reported that even some of those who manage to speak up are being ignored, rather than referred to a credible-fear screening with an asylum officer.
That’s a violation of protections built in to the Biden administration’s own rule, said Pedro Velasco, director of education and advocacy at binational migrant-aid group Kino Border Initiative.
On Friday, a newly deported asylum seeker told Velasco that a border agent dismissed her fear claims by saying, “’Again, with your stories about death,’” Velasco said.
Agents are so accustomed to migrants’ stories of violence that those expressions of fear have become “normalized,” he said.
“They’re hearing it every day, so they’re disregarding it,” he said.
But border agents aren’t supposed to be arbiters of asylum claims, and they’re not trained to be, Velasco said.
“Their responsibility is to channel (asylum seekers) to an asylum officer,” he said. “And that’s not happening.”
An Aug. 7 report from Human Rights First, in collaboration with Kino Border Initiative and other aid groups, chronicled testimony from deported asylum seekers who reported widespread violations of refugee protections, family separations and barriers to requesting asylum following Biden’s asylum restrictions.
The cost of reducing migration volumes through deterrence policies will be counted in lives lost, Velasco said, as those with legitimate asylum claims are returned to their countries of persecution, and as more asylum seekers decide to evade border agents by crossing through remote parts of the desert instead of surrendering.
“Deterrence policies by themselves are doomed to fail, because they don’t take into consideration how desperate a person must be to leave everything they love, everything they own behind,” he said.
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