We hear a lot about “encounters” at the border. That’s when an illegal alien is either caught crossing the border into the United States or caught sometime soon after, maybe at a checkpoint in the interior. Often, especially nowadays and especially if the alien is an “unaccompanied child” or accompanied by a child, he or she is not so much caught as surrendered. Sometimes, given the scant protection the border receives due to a stretched-thin Border Patrol, an illegal alien has to go looking for someone to surrender to. It’s that ridiculous.
Be that as it may, how many such encounters are we seeing?
According to an unnamed source in the CBP, in October there were 158,000.
And where are they now?
According to the source, 59,000 were immediately returned to Mexico under the CDC’s Title 42. (None were returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols [MPP], though the courts have ordered that program reinstated.) Nearly 100,000 were kept in longer-term detention and of them fully 60,000 were released into the U.S., some with court dates to appear, some with little more than requests to contact ICE once they’re established somewhere.
But that’s not all. The CBP estimates that in the previous 12 months, perhaps 400,000 illegal border crossers got away without being “encountered.” The “got-away” estimate is always uncertain and usually on the low side, but let’s assume it is correct and that the average monthly number is about 400,000/12, or 33,000. Adding that to October’s tally, we see that in the month of October alone the U.S. acquired at least 93,000 new illegal residents. That’s about the size of, say, Quincy, Massachusetts.
Add those in with the guest workers, students, asylees, refugees, etc, that we referred to yesterday, and you see why we have an immigrant–legal and otherwise–population of a whopping 45.4 million, equivalent to that of, for example, Spain.
For more, see Breitbart News.