330 Apprehensions Per Day: Border Patrol Swamped With Asylum Seekers

Central American migrants are now entering the US at a historic rate. In fact, their numbers are rapidly approaching the scope of the 2014 immigration crisis. From October of 2015 to last March, the border patrol has averaged around 330 apprehensions of Central Americans per day, which is double the rate seen last year.

In fact, the number of Central Americans trying to come to the US may not have declined at all over the past two years. The only reason why their numbers fell in 2015, was because the US government started pressuring Mexican authorities to detain them while en route to the US. All told, the Mexican and American governments detained 332,430 central Americans last year, which was just shy of the 347,085 caught by the US in 2014. By comparison, 187,284 Mexicans were detained by the US government in 2015.

And there’s no reason to expect this wave of migrants to decline, given the way the border patrol is forced to deal with these people once they’re caught.

According to Brandon Judd, the union president of the Border Patrol, “What happens is if you are arrested in the United States and you ask for any sort of asylum, what we do is we will process you, and we will walk you right out our front door, give you a pat on the back and say, ‘Welcome to the United States.’ And they’re good to go.”

Due to laws preventing the detention of asylum seekers, the Border Patrol’s hands are tied. Once they ask for asylum, they are joined with a backlog of over a half a million people, waiting to receive a hearing with the US immigration court system. The wait time for these hearings is almost two years long.