Arrests of illegal border crossers at the southern border jumped from around 60,000 per month when Trump left office to regularly topping 150,000 and 200,000 per month under President Joe Biden, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers.
After peaking at nearly 250,000 last December, the Biden-Harris administration has seen figures reduce to below 60,000 each of the last few months, but Republicans say it is because the administration has pushed immigrants into the country through other means.
Under Biden, those figures have shot up to 370,190 parolees in 2023 alone and 416,450 in 2024, only counting the first nine months of the fiscal year.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the change in parole under Biden was not a matter of just making a few exceptions.
“This is a massive entry program that’s not authorized by law and that has profound impacts on the receiving communities,” said Vaughan, whose organization is nonpartisan but takes a stricter approach to immigration levels.
In less than two years, more than 786,000 immigrants have been paroled into the U.S.