Early Voting’s Started in 34 States — Where Are the FY 2024 Border Numbers?

As I write this, we are 22 days into the month of October, and early voting in my (current) home state of North Carolina has been ongoing for five straight days. And yet CBP’s border and port encounters stats for the month of September — the last month of the federal government’s fiscal year — have yet to be released, even though they are traditionally published for any month on the 15th day of the succeeding month. What gives?

Flashback to October 2022. It’s been two years and a day — in the heat of a tight mid-term election and well after early voting had begun — since I asked a similar question. As I noted at that time:

Although the Biden administration has yet to admit as much, the border is in crisis. In fact, it is beyond a simple “crisis”; it has moved to the sphere of much stronger descriptors, along the lines of “disaster”, “catastrophe”, or “calamity”. And “chaos”.

In fact, it wasn’t until January 2024, when he was attempting to marshal support for the ill-fated “Senate border bill” (which at that point hadn’t yet been released) that Biden admitted that the border wasn’t secure, while DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas didn’t concede that the border was in “crisis” until nearly three months later.

If I had been in the White House, and attempting to maintain my party’s control of the House in the 2022 mid-terms, I wouldn’t have been in any hurry to release those September numbers, either.

They revealed that more than 207,000 illegal migrants were apprehended at the Southwest border that month alone, capping off a fiscal year in which apprehensions rose to an all-time high of more than 2.2 million.

In fact, CBP’s FY 2022 final stats didn’t see the light of day until the dead of night, ultimately being released at 11:15 PM on Friday, October 21. My post was out that following Monday, and I think my headline breaking down those numbers was wholly apt: “Late Night CBP ‘News Dump’ Reveals the Border’s in Freefall”.

Fast-Forward to Now. Fast-forward to the present, and things are both better and worse (or either better or worse, depending on how you look at it) at the Southwest border than they were two years ago.

Through the first 11 months of FY 2024 (the end of August), Border Patrol agents apprehended nearly 1.477 million illegal entrants.

Absent some seismic wave of entrants in September that has thus far failed to leak out to the public, there will be around 1.53 million apprehensions last fiscal year when all is said and done — the sixth worst year for Southwest border apprehensions since FY 1960, when Border Patrol started keeping records. The last three fiscal years under Biden-Harris were the top three for apprehensions, but final apprehension numbers will plainly be better than they were that Friday night two years ago.

Or will they?

In FY 2021 and 2022, Title 42 was in effect, and agents could “expel” (turn around) many of the migrants that they apprehended and could send them back to Mexico. Title 42 has been over since May 2023, however, and now every migrant who is apprehended must be dealt with under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), or as the administration refers to it, “Title 8”.

Title 8/the INA is not the quick expulsion process that Title 42 was. Every apprehended migrant must now either be subject to expedited removal, “regular” removal (a years-long process when the alien is not detained), or be allowed to voluntarily depart or to withdraw his or her application for admission.

As a result of that more burdensome Title 8 process, an unknown number of migrants apprehended at the Southwest border who would have been expelled will now be released into the United States.

In the first 11 months of FY 2024, there were nearly 1.477 million Title 8 apprehensions — less than 20,000 fewer than in FY 2023 with one reporting month to go, and 300,000-plus more than in FY 2022.

Of course, that is just apprehensions: It does not include inadmissible aliens stopped by CBP officers at the Southwest border ports of entry, most because they lack proper documents to be admitted to the United States.

In FY 2022, there were just over 172,500 “inadmissibles” at the Southwest border ports of entry, nearly 430,000 in FY 2023, and more than 556,000 in the first 11 months of FY 2024 — a 223 percent increase in just two years. Looking just at Title 8 inadmissibles, that increase is even larger, 278 percent.

Combined, those Southwest border apprehensions and inadmissibles are what DHS has deemed “encounters” since March 2020. In FY 2022, there were 1.3 million CBP Southwest border Title 8 encounters; through the end of August, there were more than two million.

Regardless of whatever side of the illegal migration debate you’re on, you can make valid arguments for why that increase in encounters represents an increase or a decline in border security. Few in the media and even fewer in the public stick around for the finer points, however; the raw numbers are key.

That’s especially true when partisans are drawing and reinforcing their battle lines in advance of a hotly contested election. Don’t be surprised if both campaigns highlight the final tally in their final ads.

Understand: I’m not saying anybody is playing politics with CBP’s Southwest border numbers for FY 2024, but: (1) the timing of prior releases, especially when the numbers are indisputably bad, has been highly suspicious; and (2) if I were responsible for the policies and could control how the stats were released, I’d likely do so to my benefit.

North Carolina is hardly an outlier when it comes to early voting. By my count, it’s underway in 34 states, while in Virginia, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Vermont it’s been going on for over a month.

It’s incumbent upon DHS and CBP to release their border statistics in a timely manner, especially given how critical immigration is to voters this year. Friday night “news dumps” undermine voters’ confidence in the system — and bolstering Americans’ trust in their elected officials should be a key goal of our government, regardless of who wins on November 5.