By the Republican National Committee

BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS SMASHES NEW HIGH

• Trying to hide just how bad the crisis at the border has become, the Biden administration released the December border numbers in a Friday night news dump.
  • This was the latest the numbers have been released in at least eight years.
• Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data shows 302,034 illegal immigrants were encountered attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in December, the highest month ever recorded in DHS history.
  • For 34 straight months, monthly encounters have been higher than even the highest month seen under the previous administration.
  • Biden’s border crisis is so bad, this is now the fifth time CBP has needed to adjust the y-axis on the illegal encounters graph.
• With roughly 9,700 daily encounters, this dwarfs the definition of a “crisis” set by Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson when he said in 2019 that “more than 1,000” encounters a day “overwhelms the system.”
• December’s 300,000-plus encounters is a 460 percent increase from the average number of October apprehensions from 2017-2020.
  • 13,475 unaccompanied children were encountered.
  • 123,512 migrants who crossed as part of a family were encountered – a near record high.
  • 170,283 illegal immigrants were encountered from countries outside the Northern Triangle and Mexico, showing that Biden’s crisis is global.
  • At least 49 people on the terror watchlist have been encountered trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry this fiscal year.
• More than 8.7 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border since Biden took office.
  • This includes the 7 million illegal immigrants that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered and the more than 1.7 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.
• 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.
• An average of 5,000 illegal immigrants are being released into the U.S. every day.
  • In FY 2023 alone, more than 900,000 illegal immigrants were released into the interior of the U.S. and now await future immigration court dates.
  • 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 migrants 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.
  • 1,148 pounds of deadly fentanyl and 12,787 pounds of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in December 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 December is the equivalent of roughly 260 million lethal doses.
    • Since Biden took office, roughly 26 tons of fentanyl have crossed the southern border, enough to kill roughly 11.7 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 BREAKS RECORD AFTER RECORD

• FY 2023 saw 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.
• 169 people on the terror watchlist were encountered at the southern border in FY 2023, 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.
• More than 15,000 non-U.S. citizens with criminal convictions were encountered at the southern border in FY 2023, a record high.

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.
• Last week, a Haitian illegal immigrant charged with rape of a developmentally disabled person was released back onto the streets in Boston after ICE requests were ignored.
• This month, a Virginia mother sued the Biden administration for $100 million after her autistic daughter was raped and murdered by an unaccompanied minor released by Border Patrol despite his alleged ties to MS-13.
• Last month, an illegal immigrant was charged with murdering a 16-year-old girl in her home and sent texts to her friends using her stolen phone after her death. 
• Last month, an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported four times was charged with killing two in a DUI crash.
• At least 2,297 people have died attempting to cross the southern border under three years of Biden, more than double the number that died under the entire previous administration.
• 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, aggravated extortion, weapon trafficking, and aggravated sexual assault 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.
  • Just this week, a Border Patrol agent was assaulted with rocks while trying to arrest several illegal immigrants, leaving injuries including a deep gash near the eye.

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.

Originally posted here.