By the Republican National Committee

A CRISIS AT THE BORDER

• Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data shows 179,725 illegal immigrants were encountered attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in April.
  • For 38 straight months, monthly encounters have been higher than even the highest month seen under the previous administration.
  • Biden has yet to reverse his policies that created this crisis in the first place.
  • On day one, President Trump will seal the border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. 
• With roughly 6,000 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.”
• April’s 179,000-plus encounters is a 272 percent increase from the average number of April apprehensions during the Trump administration.
  • 8,521 unaccompanied children were encountered.
  • 93,244 illegal immigrants were encountered from countries outside the Northern Triangle and Mexico, showing that Biden’s crisis is global.
  • At least 80 people on the terror watchlist have been encountered trying to enter the U.S. between ports of entry this fiscal year.
• More than 9.6 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border since Biden took office.
  • This includes the more than 7.8 million illegal immigrants that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered and the 1.8 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. 
• Gotaways have exploded under the Biden administration compared to the Trump and Obama years.
• Biden has installed a de facto amnesty program in which 200,000 deportation cases have been thrown out due to his administration’s failure to file the proper paperwork in time.
• 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 a million illegal immigrants using a 1950s law in an “unprecedented” way.
• The Biden administration has failed to remove 99.7 percent of the illegal immigrants released into the interior of the U.S.
• 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.
  • 1,336 pounds of deadly fentanyl and 8,769 pounds of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in April alone, with much more getting through undetected.
  • 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 April is the equivalent of roughly 300 million lethal doses.
    • Since Biden took office, roughly 29.2 tons of fentanyl have crossed the southern border, enough to kill roughly 13.3 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.
  • 112,000 fatal drug overdoses occurred in 2023, a new record high.
  • On average, one person in the U.S. now dies from a fentanyl overdose every seven minutes.
  • The DEA seized a record 77 million fentanyl pills and more than 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder in 2023, enough to kill every American.
  • 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 illegal immigrant encounters, surpassing the FY 2022 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 in FY 2022.
  • 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’s border crisis is so bad, CBP has needed to adjust the y-axis on the illegal encounters graph five times.

BIDEN’S DEADLY BORDER CRISIS CONTINUES TO WORSEN

• Despite Biden’s promise of a “fair and humane immigration system,” his open border policies aren’t compassionate; they are deadly. In just the past month:
  • An illegal immigrant from Guatemala brutally stabbed to death his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter at their home in Florida.
  • In Alabama, an illegal immigrant has been detained for causing a fatal crash that killed a local teenager, while being intoxicated at four times the legal limit. 
  • Two girls under the age of 13 were sexually assaulted by an illegal immigrant who broke into their home, threatening to kill them if they screamed or tried to escape.
  • A 32-year-old illegal immigrant lured a woman into a Denver shelter for migrants and raped her; police are now investigating whether there are other victims.
  • Kurt Englehart, senior advisor to Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV) was killed in a car accident involving an illegal immigrant, who was charged with failing to stop at the scene of the accident.
  • Four illegal immigrants are facing federal charges for a year-long shoplifting spree at Home Depots across New England. 
• 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.
  • A senior Border Patrol agent in Arizona is warning that soaring temperatures could lead to an “unprecedented” number of deaths among migrants crossing the border in the coming months.
  • Border officials in Maverick County, Texas recover one or two people who drown in the Rio Grande nearly every day, while years ago it would have only been one or two per month.
    • First responders in the county have run out of body bags and burial plots amid soaring deaths of those attempting to cross the southern border.
• 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 sexual assault of a child, possession of child pornography, and homicide.
  • Border Patrol has arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions and 295 gang members so far in FY 2024.
• 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.
  • By his three-year mark, Biden had taken 535 executive actions related to immigration.
  • Biden’s new FY 2025 budget proposal calls for eliminating $50 million in border wall funding.
  • 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.
• 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.