The border trends during Biden’s presidency, and how his policies played into them, explained.
Unauthorized crossings at the US southern border soared higher and higher during the first three years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Now, in the first half of 2024, they’ve fallen sharply, but they’re still significantly higher than in the decade before Biden took office.
That’s the basic numerical trend, according to numbers from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). How much Biden’s policies have affected that trend is tougher to untangle, and that will likely be a major area of dispute at his debate with Donald Trump this Thursday.
The dramatic surge in unauthorized immigration in Biden’s first few years was spurred by major factors outside of the president’s control, such as the ebbing of the Covid-19 pandemic and upheaval in several Latin American countries.
It is also plausible that Biden’s more lenient immigration stance, relative to Trump, contributed to some degree. He has tried to strike a balance between humane policies toward migrants (like offering new legal pathways for entry or protections against deportation for some already here) and more hard-headed actions trying to cut down on unauthorized arrivals.
Yet for his first three years, the number of such arrivals remained quite high. His defenders often argued that the main drivers of immigration were not within the president’s control and that his responses were constrained by a broken legal and political process, insufficient resources, and Republicans’ refusal to act on legislation.
The twist in recent months is that the number of unauthorized arrivals finally has dropped. “Illegal crossings at the southern border continue to plummet,” Fox News reporter Bill Melugin wrote on X this week, adding that CBP was now seeing “the lowest border numbers of Biden’s presidency.”
We don’t know how long those lower numbers will persist, of course, and there are still more unauthorized migrants arriving than was typical in the Obama or Trump years. But it’s a notable change, and it’s worth digging into why it appears to have happened.
There really was a major unauthorized migration surge under Biden. For most of the decade before he took office, US Customs and Border Protection had in the range of 300,000 to 500,000 “encounters” with migrants at the southern border each year. Under Biden, the average number has been about 2 million a year, with last year being the highest yet.
These are frequently cited as “record breaking” and “highest ever” migrant arrival numbers. But some analysts say it’s more complicated than that. Justin Fox argues at Bloomberg Opinion that the true numbers were likely higher from the 1980s through the mid-2000s because back then far more migrants escaped CBP’s notice.
But it does seem to be clearly true that far more people are coming in unauthorized under Biden than under Obama or Trump.
