Over the past fiscal year, migrant arrests outside ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border were the lowest since fiscal year 2020 and a 25% drop from the year before.
The decrease reflects the impact of Mexico’s migration-enforcement efforts and asylum restrictions imposed by the Biden administration, analysts say.
Border agents logged 1.5 million arrests of migrants who crossed the border outside official ports of entry in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, compared to about 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to statistics released Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
A migrant mother brings her sick child to speak with U.S. Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border wall, about 15 miles east of Sásabe, Arizona, in November 2023.
The Tucson sector — which was the busiest of the southern border’s nine border sectors from July 2023 through May — has seen migrant arrests drop by two-thirds since the Biden administration implemented restrictions on asylum access in June.
Migrant arrests in the Tucson sector declined from more than 33,000 in May to about 11,000 in September, making it the third-busiest sector that month, behind San Diego and El Paso, CBP data show.
In terms of total encounters throughout fiscal year 2024, which included a major surge in arrivals in late 2023, Tucson was the year’s busiest sector, with 463,000 arrests between ports of entry, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Over the the last year, an increase in lawful migration pathways, including a parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, and the CBP One scheduling app, have led more migrants to cross through ports of entry, rather than cross irregularly between the ports, Putzel-Kavanaugh said.
“These nationalities were making up some of the highest proportions of those arriving irregularly in previous months and the previous year,” she said. “It’s been a huge shift.”
The CBP figures also reveal a 26% drop in fentanyl seizures compared to last fiscal year, dropping to 21,100 pounds from 26,700 pounds seized in fiscal year 2023 — the first drop since the drug began appearing along the border, said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and human-rights advocacy group.
About 86% of the fentanyl seizures occurred at ports of entry and 4% at Border Patrol’s interior checkpoints, he said.
The drop could be related to a reported edict from leaders of a faction of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, ordering a halt on fentanyl production in the state of Sinaloa, following last year’s extradition to the U.S. of Ovidio Guzmán López, son of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Isacson said Wednesday.
If true, “it probably disrupted things for a while, but it’s almost impossible to confirm,” he said. “I think we’ve seen more labs cropping up in Baja (California) and Sonora since then.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has removed or returned more than 160,000 people to 145 countries since June, when the Biden administration imposed restrictions on access to asylum leading to rapid deportations even for asylum seekers claiming fear of return to their home country. The rule is facing a court challenge from human-rights groups who say the asylum restrictions are illegal.
The rule suspends asylum eligibility for most at the border when crossings reach a seven-day average of 2,500, and only reopens asylum access when encounters go below 1,500 for four weeks straight.
That’s an extremely low threshold, Isacson said, considering encounters are now about 1,800 per day.
“For all intents and purposes, its a ban on asylum between ports of entry,” he said.
Humanitarian aid groups coordinating to aid migrants daily at the border wall east of Sásabe are still seeing between 30 and 50 migrant arrivals daily, a significant decline in arrivals at this remote Arizona location compared to last year.
Once a week Tucson Samaritans volunteer Charles Cameron makes the five-hour roundtrip journey from Tucson to the end of the border wall more than 20 miles east of the Sásabe port of entry, to help provide humanitarian aid to asylum seekers waiting to surrender to border agents. Most have to pay organized crime groups to access the U.S. border through northern Mexico.
Despite the decline in border arrest figures in the U.S., a global surge in forced migration is ongoing, he said.
“The numbers are down and it makes good optics, as the politicians say,” Cameron said. “But the bottom line is, the U.N. estimates there are 100 million people on the planet who are displaced right now, and whatever we do at the border doesn’t reduce that number. ... The human suffering is just the same or even greater than it was before.”
Usually about a third of the migrants he and fellow volunteers aid at the border are children, he said. Over fiscal year 2024, about 43% of arrests made by the Border Patrol were of unaccompanied minors or people traveling with family, CBP said.
For the asylum seekers Cameron has spoken to on the border, who have shared traumatic stories of why they fled, returning home isn’t a real option, he said. Many will try again after being deported, and seek to avoid border agents instead of surrendering to them, he said.
“If your house has been burned down, your neighbors murdered, your daughter sexually assaulted, are you really going to go back home, when you’ve sold everything you own to pay the cartels?” he said. “Folks just don’t have an option.”
