Illegal immigration apprehensions along the southwest border have surged 23 percent this past year, according to Monday’s U.S. Department of Homeland Security report. What’s remarkable, however, is not the drastic increase in the total number of illegal immigrants caught at the border between Fiscal Year 2015 and Fiscal Year 2016, (since 2015 had far fewer apprehensions than both 2013 and 2014) but the surge in the past four years of unaccompanied children and families illegally crossing the border.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson explained in a statement that illegal migration along the southwest border is now dominated by children and families attempting to escape Central America’s hardships and violence. “Border security alone cannot overcome the powerful push factors of poverty and violence that exist in Central America,” Johnson said. “Ultimately, the solution is long-term investment in Central America to address the underlying push factors in the region.” The notion that Central Americans are fleeing their home countries became clear in 2014 when apprehension demographics on the southern border revealed that Central Americans outnumbered Mexicans for the first time in history, and in 2016 they did so again.
137,366 unaccompanied children and family members were apprehended at the southwest border in 2016, a slight increase in comparison to 2014; that was the year the record of unaccompanied children was set, with 68,541 children nabbed before entering U.S. territory. But the juxtaposition of border statistics from 2013 to 2016 is the most alarming — 2013 had 53,614 family members and unaccompanied children apprehended, while total apprehensions remained well over 400,000. In other words, total apprehensions in 2013 and 2016 were equivalent as the number of unaccompanied children and family members crossing the border surged.
