By the Republican National Committee

A CRISIS AT THE BORDER

• New data shows 269,735 illegal immigrants were encountered attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in September – a 15 percent increase in crossings from the previous month and the highest total for September in DHS history.
  • For 31 straight months, monthly encounters have been higher than even the highest month seen under the previous administration.
  • FY 2023 has seen nearly 2.5 million encounters, surpassing last year’s record.
  • The Biden administration has now set the all-time record for migrant encounters at the southern border for the last three years in a row.
• With roughly 8,900 daily encounters, this dwarfs the definition of a “crisis” set by Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson in 2019 when he said that “more than 1,000” encounters a day “overwhelms the system.”
• September’s 269,000-plus encounters is a 462 percent increase from the average number of August apprehensions from 2017-2020.
  • 13,771 unaccompanied children were encountered.
  • A record 123,815 migrants who crossed as part of a family were encountered.
  • 147,042 illegal immigrants were encountered from countries outside the Northern Triangle and Mexico, showing Biden’s crisis is global.
  • At least 169 people on the terror watchlist have been encountered trying to cross the southern border this fiscal year – breaking the all-time record of 98 set last year.
    • More people on the FBI terror watchlist have been arrested at the southern border this fiscal year than the previous six years combined.
• Nearly 7.9 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border since Biden took office.
  • This includes the nearly 6.3 million illegal immigrants that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered and the more than 1.6 million gotaways that have escaped past Border Patrol into the U.S.
  • Border officials say that the official number of gotaways vastly undercounts the illegal immigrants who make it into the U.S. without being apprehended.
• Biden has installed a de facto amnesty program in which over 75,000 illegal immigrants have had their cases dismissed in court due to his administration’s failure to file the proper paperwork.
• Additionally, at least two million illegal immigrants have been released into the U.S. and now await future immigration court dates since Biden took office.
  • Experts say the likelihood U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will remove them is “virtually nonexistent” and that they “are here indefinitely, if not forever.”
• Biden has unilaterally paroled over half a million illegal immigrants using a 1950s law in an “unprecedented” way.
• Homeland Security Investigations estimates that Mexican cartels are now making $13 billion a year smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S., 26 times what they made in 2018.

DRUGS ARE POURING OVER THE BORDER INTO OUR COMMUNITIES

• Illicit drugs are flowing into the country at an alarming rate, with only 5 to 10 percent being intercepted as border officials struggle to contain the smuggling.
  • 1,404 pounds of deadly fentanyl and 12,103 pounds of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in September alone, with much more getting through.
  • Joshua Sharfstein of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: “If they’re seizing a lot, it’s because a lot is coming in.”
  • The amount of fentanyl seized in September is the equivalent of more than 318 million lethal doses.
    • Since Biden took office, more than 23 tons of fentanyl have crossed the southern border, enough to kill roughly 10.8 billion people.
• Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45, with the number killed by the drug up 94 percent since 2019.
  • Of the 110,000 fatal drug overdoses in 2022, two-thirds involved fentanyl; on average, one person in the U.S. now dies from a fentanyl overdose every seven minutes.
  • According to Biden’s own DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, cartels are “killing Americans with fentanyl at catastrophic and record rates like we’ve never seen before.”

BIDEN IGNORES THE SOUTHERN BORDER AS HIS HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE WORSENS

• Despite Biden’s promise of a “fair and humane immigration system,” his open border policies aren’t compassionate; they are deadly.
• At the beginning of this month, a bus full of illegal immigrants traveling to the U.S. crashed in southern Mexico, killing at least 16 and injuring 29.
• A few weeks ago, an illegal immigrant who came into the U.S. under the Biden administration was charged with the murder of an American citizen.
• Last month, an illegal immigrant was charged with stabbing a man to death in New York.
  • This same illegal immigrant had been previously released by police because of a paperwork delay despite being accused of a separate stabbing in another state.
• In early September, Dallas police got in a shootout with an illegal immigrant, with an officer getting injured, after witnessing the immigrant shoot and kill his roommate in broad daylight.
• Tens of thousands of migrant children who have come to the U.S. are being exploited and forced into de facto “indentured servitude.”
  • Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) lost track of 85,000 children after responding to Biden’s demands to “move the children quickly out of shelters” by rolling back important vetting and safeguard procedures.
• Criminals are flooding across the border, with Border Patrol arresting illegal immigrants accused of homicide, sexual assault of a child, fondling, arson, strangulation and suffocation all within the past two months.
• Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents have been left demoralized and “overwhelmed” by the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis.

BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS ARE TO BLAME FOR THE BORDER CRISIS

• Biden’s failed policies have created the crisis at the southern border.
  • In Biden’s first 100 days he took more than 94 executive actions on immigration, including halting construction of the border wall and ending the successful “Remain in Mexico” policy.
  • Illegal immigrants have confirmed this: “The border is open…everybody believes that the border is open. It’s open because we enter. We come in, free, no problem…We came illegally.”
• The Biden administration lost track of at least 150,000 illegal immigrants during the summer of 2021.
• Joe Biden and “border czar” Kamala Harris are nowhere to be seen, with each only having visited the border once since taking office.
• It’s not just Biden; Democrats in Congress have consistently voted for policies that make the border and country less secure.
  • Democrats aided sanctuary cities and sent stimulus checks to illegal immigrants, opposed legislation to fund Title 42, and repeatedly voted against funding the border wall.
  • Democrats voted against hiring more border agents, deporting felons, preventing illegal immigrants convicted of crimes from becoming permanent residents — and voted against strengthening the successful Remain in Mexico policy.
  • Democrats voted against funding for counternarcotic operations and ensuring the enforcement of immigration laws at the border.
  • Democrats voted against ensuring all local and state law enforcement are permitted to cooperate with federal immigration officials to track illegal immigrants.
• 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Biden is handling the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.

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