Mayorkas reveals 600,000 migrants avoided capture and entered the U.S.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed Tuesday that 600,000 migrants evaded apprehension when crossing the U.S. border illegally this year alone. prison or deported.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) asked President Joe Biden’s DHS head during a hearing Tuesday about the recorded number of illegal border crossings his agents have evaded over the past year. He also asked about the status of people on the terror list. “I believe that number is over 600,000,” Mayorkas told senators Tuesday during a hearing on threats to America’s home front.

“The escape phenomenon has been a challenge for the Department of Homeland Security for decades,” he added. “In fact, it’s a powerful example of a broken immigration system.” The latest figures are in addition to the nearly 2.5 million migrants detected and apprehended in the 2023 fiscal year, which ended in September, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures. This year’s numbers were similar to fiscal year 2022, where a DHS document reported more than 600,000 escapes from October 2021 through September 2022 and 389,155 the year before.

But the latest numbers are a huge increase from years earlier, when the policy was controlled by Donald Trump’s Republican administration. Only 150,000 escapes were reported in fiscal year 2019. Since January, 1.75 million migrants have been apprehended by CBP at the southern border. There was a huge spike in the number of people seeking entry by applying for asylum in the summer and autumn.

September saw multi-year record numbers of monthly crossings, with CBP apprehending 269,735 migrants attempting to illegally enter the U.S. at the southern border. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing Tuesday with Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, on current threats to the US.

One threat Republicans are particularly concerned about is the unprecedented number of migrants crossing the southern border illegally since Biden took office. While the number of people apprehended has increased dramatically, so has the number of people who evade arrest and are only later reported by other forms of detection, such as cameras.

Senator Marshall wanted to know more about migrants on the terror watch list apprehended at the southern border — but Mayorkas had no numbers on him at Tuesday’s hearing. “Let’s talk about the 169 individuals we encountered on the terrorist watch list between ports of entry in FY 2023,” Marshall told Mayorkas. “How many have been deported, how many are in prison, how many are still in the country?”

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