The US border patrol chief revealed Tuesday that the country is set to pass a staggering 1 million migrant encounters at the border for the first half of the fiscal year.
The mark would be the highest through the first six months of a fiscal year in at least two decades and would put the US on pace to surpass the 1.7 million encounters in all of 2021.
“Probably in the next two or three days we’ll get over a million encounters or apprehensions along the southwest border,” Chief Raul Ortiz said at the Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Tx., according to Fox News.
Through February, there were already 838,685 Southwest land border encounters through the 2022 fiscal year, which began in October. In February alone, there were 164,973 encounters – up from the 101,099 encounters logged in 2021 and the 36,687 logged in 2020, according to Customs and Border Protection numbers.
The revelation comes as the Biden administration plans to announce whether it’s ending a policy that allows authorities to turn away migrant asylum seekers as part of the effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
The controversial Title 42 policy has allowed the US to keep asylum seekers on the Mexico side of the border while their cases are heard. COVID-19 rates have been plunging among migrants crossing the border, according to the Associated Press, which cited results from several major corridors.
In California, for example, the positivity rate through the first two weeks of March was 1.9 percent, down from a peak of 28.2 percent in January.
There are now about 7,000 migrants being stopped at the southern border each day – up from about 5,900 per day in February, Ortiz said.
Border officials have been challenged by a surge of migrants from countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which have not been countries of origin for large numbers of people migrating into the US.
With Post wires