SAN DIEGO (AP) – House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday during a visit to El Paso, Texas, that, “It’s more than a crisis. This is human heartbreak.” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday called the wave of migrants a difficult challenge but nothing new.
Spin and semantics aside, migration flows to the U.S. from Mexico are surging in a major way for the third time in seven years under Republican and Democratic presidents – and for similar reasons.
HOW HAVE FLOWS CHANGED SINCE JOE BIDEN BECAME PRESIDENT?
Border encounters – a widely-used but imperfect gauge that tells how many times U.S. authorities came across migrants – rose sharply during Donald Trump’s final months as president, from an unusually low 17,106 last April to 74,108 in December. Last month, encounters topped 100,000 for the first time since a four-month streak in 2019.
That’s only part of the picture, though. Who’s crossing is just as important a gauge as how many are making the attempt, if not even more.