Biden, Kamala Harris accused of ‘gaming’ border statistics to create illusion of declining border crossings in ‘ground zero’ swing state
According to a former Border Patrol agent, the Biden-Harris administration is selectively cherry-picking data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to support its narrative that immigration problems are improving in the run-up to the election.
Recent immigration data shows that encounters with migrants are declining from record highs months ago. But that’s not the whole picture, Art Del Cueto, vice chairman of the National Border Patrol Council, told DailyMail.com.
“The reality is the numbers are down, but (the Biden administration) has been experimenting with the numbers a little bit,” he charged.
“The encounters (have decreased), unlike the ‘runaways.’ Nobody really knows what the runaways are,” he said, calling it the “biggest problem” facing the country.
Well-known “gotaways” are migrants who have entered the US without being apprehended by authorities.
And it’s especially bad in the crucial state of Arizona. “This is ground zero,” Del Cueto told DailyMail.com.
Winning the support of Arizona voters is essential to winning the 2024 election. Kamala Harris knows that.
Art Del Cueto, a board member of the National Border Patrol Council, walks with Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump along the U.S.-Mexico border on August 22, 2024, south of Sierra Vista, Arizona. Del Cueto told DailyMail.com that the White House has been playing with the number of official migrant crossings
Del Cueto says millions of people have joined over the past 3.5 years under Joe Biden.
Immigration figures estimate that more than eight million illegal migrants have entered the U.S. through the southern border since Biden took office. That number could rise to 10 million by the end of his term.
“This has been an area for many years where a lot of people have been forgotten,” Del Cueto told DailyMail.com at a Donald Trump campaign rally in Cochise County, Arizona.
But even with only about 58,000 encounters recorded by CBP in July, a record low since Trump took office in 2020, many migrants — if not the majority — are going undetected.
“So every time you hear ‘runaways,’ the answer you hear from these (officers) is ‘potential runaways,’ or something like that,” Del Cueto clarified.
“They’ve got two million (gotaways) is what they’re saying right now,” he continued, citing numbers he’d heard from sources inside the agency. “But there’s no way to really tell.”
“I mean, actually, for a lot of the two million trips we take, we’re counting footprints in the ground.”
Del Cueto advised Trump on what was happening along the border in the Tucson Sector during the former president’s visit to the area last week
Migrants set up camp in Mexico, just yards from the U.S. border wall, as they prepare to cross. One of them looks out with binoculars.
While at the Arizona border, DailyMail.com spotted several suspected human smugglers dressed in camouflage clothing
There were sections along the border that appeared to be completely missing. Migrants were seen entering the US at the location pictured here
A group of men from Nepal and Bangladesh sit on a dirt road near the U.S.-Mexico border, waiting for a ride from federal agents. These men were eventually found by authorities and would not be considered an escape route
Keeping track of the number of migrants travelling abroad through border crossings has long been a notorious problem for the agency.
Migrants who appear on sensors or video images but continue unchecked are also counted as runaways.
“You count the footprints and you tell me you’re getting an accurate number,” Del Cueto said. “And a lot of times that’s what they’re looking at.”
Historically, the agency has been able to apprehend about 40 percent of migrants crossing the border, but that number is set internally and has not been reexamined for years.
“Before President Trump, and let’s go back to before President Obama took over, they said the effectiveness of what they found was 40 percent.”
“So 60 percent got away,” the former agent continued.
If that figure is correct, it means that 60 percent of migrants who enter the U.S. illegally arrive without being encountered by a federal agent.
“So they can’t say how many people will actually get away,” he told DailyMail.com.
Del Cueto accuses White House of ‘gaming’ immigration numbers
The border patrol eventually captured the group of men from Asia
The remote stretch of border wall in Cochise County that Trump visited was “dangerous,” he said at the time, and the former president’s visit made him “nervous.”
The Border Patrol union leadership previously operated out of the Tucson Border Patrol Sector, the sector responsible for the area.
At the event along the border wall, Trump announced new death sentences for illegal immigrants found guilty of heinous crimes, then left without incident.
When he received a tip on the ground that a manhunt was underway for a man who had threatened to kill the former president, he admitted it was a dangerous area and joked that he had to get out of there immediately.
Migrants wait for a Border Patrol ride in remote areas of the southern Arizona desert
A group of migrants from India wait in the shadow of the border wall for a ride from the border patrol
There were 36 migrants encountered by authorities along a small stretch of road from Sasabe, Arizona, heading east on Friday, August 22, 2024. It was just one of three daily routine pick-ups from the remote area
And Border Patrol in the Tucson area and construction workers are hard at work stopping migrants and their cartel leaders from trying to breach the border wall.
“There are actually holes in the wall itself,” he noted, indicating that cartels often try to create holes to make it easier to smuggle people into the country.
“Every day there are more and more violations,” he added.