Homeland Security officials took a victory lap Friday after seeing illegal border crossings plummet in January, saying a new program to convert illegal immigrants into legal arrivals appears to be working.
Border Patrol agents nabbed 128,410 illegal crossers last month, down more than 40% compared to December. It’s the best numbers since February 2021, which marked the start of the Biden administration’s control.
The number of people jumping the border from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba — which had largely driven the record-high illegal immigration rates last year — dropped dramatically.
In early January, they averaged more than 1,200 a day. By the end of the month, it was just 59 people a day.
The difference, officials said, was President Biden’s new program announced on Jan. 5 that allows some would-be migrants from those four countries to find a sponsor and pre-apply for admissions. Those migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba who don’t go through that process will generally be expelled to Mexico.
The carrot-and-stick seems to have worked.
“These numbers and these achievements are no coincidence,” one administration official said in briefing reporters about the numbers.
January’s numbers are nearly the best of the Biden administration. But it was still worse than every month under President Obama and worse than all but one month under President Trump.
When Mr. Biden took office he erased some Trump policies that had largely solved the border problem, and the number of illegal crossers shot up.
Now, his administration is tacking back toward some of those same get-tough policies and it is paying off.
The pivot has angered Mr. Biden’s backers among the immigrant-rights crowd.
News this week that the administration is planning a new crackdown on asylum claims prompted one activist to call it a “moral outrage.”
“It flies in the face of any statements of welcome offered by the administration and instead relies heavily on the failed strategies of deterrence and detention,” said Katie Adams, co-chair of the Interfaith Immigration Coalition.
It wasn’t clear from the numbers released Friday how many people from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba had taken advantage of the new temporary legal pathway Mr. Biden has opened to them.
The number is capped at 30,000 per month for the four nations combined.
A coalition of GOP-led states has sued to block that part of the program, arguing that the president has created a new immigration program outside of the laws written by Congress, which under the Constitution has the power to regulate immigration.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.