Record 2.2 Million Migrants Apprehended Along Southwest Border During Last Year

U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended a record-setting 2.2 million migrants during the recently closed Fiscal Year 22. This represents a massive 33 percent increase over the previous record set just last year by the Biden administration.

The year-ending Southwest Land Border Encounters Report released after hours Friday night confirmed an unofficial report published by Breitbart Texas earlier this month revealing the apprehension of just over 2.2 million migrants. The apprehension of 2,206,436 migrants who illegally crossed the southwest border between ports of entry is up by 547,230 over last year’s record-setting report.

By contrast, during FY2020, President Donald Trump’s last year in office, Border Patrol agents apprehended only 400,651.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is pledging to dismantle the sweeping changes President Trump has made to the American immigration system, if he wins the White House in November.

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The Trump administration has undertaken more than 400 executive actions on immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Those include tougher border and interior enforcement, restricting asylum, rolling back Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), slashing refugee visas, streamlining immigration courts and creating Remain in Mexico.

"What the administration has sought to do is to simply turn off immigration and to do it unilaterally by presidential edict, without the approval of Congress or the consent of the American people," says Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. "That project should be reversed."

That's exactly what Biden pledges to do. His position paper on immigration — 51 bullet points that fill 22 pages — seeks to roll back Trump's accomplishments and reenact Obama-era policies.

"If I'm elected president, we're going to immediately end Trump's assault on the dignity of immigrant communities. We're going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers," Biden said in his acceptance speech at the virtual Democratic National Convention.

The former vice president has an exhaustive to-do list. Within his first 100 days, Biden says he would implement a wide range of policies: not another mile of border wall, no more separating families, no more prolonged detentions or deportations of peaceable, hardworking migrants.

Biden also says he would restore the asylum system and support alternatives to immigrant detention, such as case management, that allow an applicant to live and work in the community while their case works its way through the hearing process. Trump has derisively called this "catch and release."

And Biden would fully reinstate DACA, which allows migrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to live and work without fear of deportation.