WASHINGTON – Arrests of undocumented immigrants along the Southwest border last year were at their lowest rate in 46 years, according to data released Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security.
“We have clearly seen the successful results of the president’s commitment to supporting the frontline officers and agents of DHS as they enforce the law and secure our borders,”? Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke said in a news release.
DHS said that in 2017, it arrested 303,916 “removable illegal aliens,” a 25.6 percent decline from the arrest totals in the same area in 2016 and the lowest number since 1971.
While the year-to-year shift from 2016 to 2017 is significant, such changes have happened before. In 2015, Customs and Border Protection reported a 30.8 percent decline in arrests along the border with Mexico from the previous year, and in 2009 it reported a 23.2 percent decline.
Matthew O’Brian, director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for lower levels of immigration, said that President Donald Trump’s policies have served as a deterrent to illegal immigration.
Source: CBP
“The Trump administration sent a very clear message that it was willing to enforce immigration laws, and I think people have heard that,” he said.
Joshua Breisblatt, senior policy analyst at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy nonprofit, said that while the Trump administration’s rhetoric may have deterred some undocumented immigrants, he doesn’t believe the numbers were significant.
Breisblatt said there have been drops in previous years, but what’s most interesting about the 2017 statistics is that “the number of Central Americans being apprehended crossing the border is actually eclipsing the number of Mexicans crossing the border, and this is largely due to the record levels of violence that we’ve been seeing in the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras over the last few years.”
The Office of Immigration Statistics at DHS will release its annual report on DHS-wide enforcement data sometime next month.