On Wednesday, Fox News border correspondent Bill Melugin shared some internal Customs and Border Protection data obtained via FOIA request. Melugin obtained 13 years of gotaways data — that’s data on illegal migrants seen crossing the southern border but not apprehended.
Melugin shared the following on X:
For perspective, in the decade of FY 2010 through FY 2020 under both Obama & Trump, CBP recorded over 1.4 million known gotaways. In the three years of FY 2021 through FY 2023, CBP recorded over 1.6 million known gotaways. A reminder, @PressSec has previously claimed that Biden has “done more than anybody” to secure the border.
.@FoxNews article on this data w/ colleague @AdamShawNY. I filed this FOIA with CBP on Halloween last year. More to come from it on another topic. Stay tuned. https://t.co/SqeDaidKXQ
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 15, 2024
From Fox News:
So far in FY 24, which began in October, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources have told Fox News separately there have been more than 175,000 gotaways.
Officials have regularly expressed concern about the numbers crossing without being encountered, even though it is a relatively small number compared to the more than 1.3 million migrants encountered this fiscal year.
“That number is a large number, but what’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known gotaways,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CBS News in March, when numbers were lower.
“If a person is willing to put themselves into harm’s way crossing through very remote, very dangerous conditions to evade capture, you have to ask yourself why. What makes them willing to take that risk?” he told a House committee in May 2023. “That’s of concern to me. What’s also of concern to me is I don’t know who that individual is. I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know what their intention is. I don’t know what they brought with them. That unknown represents a risk, a threat. It’s of great concern to anybody that wears this uniform.”
Biden is reportedly weighing executive action that would close the border after 4,000 migrant encounters in a day — but that doesn’t help Joe’s gotaways problem.
“The number of illegal immigrants evading Border Patrol agents has skyrocketed under the Biden administration, new data obtained by Fox News shows.” #BidenBorderCrisis https://t.co/OL5pzM531t
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) May 15, 2024
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