Fact check "Illegal border crossings" - Richard Hudson stated on March 15, 2021 in a tweet:
"Texas family detention centers expected to transform into rapid-processing hubs "Fact-Checking Claims on the Migrant Surge at the U.S.-Mexico Border"
"Illegal border crossings are up 173% from 1 year ago and 28% since January when President Biden stopped the wall & deportations and started catch & release."
true half-true
U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) appears in a Fox News segment posted online on March 15, 2021. (screenshot)
By Paul Specht March 25, 2021
Border crossings are up, but not because Biden stopped the wall or deportations
If Your Time is short
* U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) is generally right about a rise in crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.
* However, he's wrong to suggest the border wall has anything to do with the rise in crossings. He also falsely says deportations have stopped.
* Experts say more immigrants are coming mostly because the weather is warming, there's political instability in other countries, and because former President Trump's policies created a backlog of people seeking asylum.
"The reason we’re having this Biden border surge is because he’s reversed these policies, as you say. He stopped building the wall. He put a halt on deportations and he brought back catch and release," he said.
"Democrats are trying to shift blame but make no mistake - this is the #BidenBorderCrisis. The facts back it up: illegal border crossings are up 173% from 1 year ago and 28% since January when President Biden stopped the wall & deportations and started catch & release," he said.
While Hudson’s stats aren’t exactly right, he has a point about illegal border crossing numbers increasing significantly since last year and even since January. As for what’s causing the situation at the border, experts say his description is off.
When the webpage opens, a chart will appear showing data that combines two types of encounters: those recorded by Border Patrol, and those recorded by the Office of Field Operations.
What’s the difference? The field office deals with people who showed up at an official port of entry in an attempt to legally enter and were turned away. Meanwhile, Border Patrol data includes people who attempted to enter the country without going through the legal process.
If you combine the two pools of data, the total number of encounters this February is 173% higher than it was last February. This is likely where Hudson’s figure comes from. The agency reported a total of 100,441 encounters in February, up from 36,687 last February.
However, to focus on "illegal border crossings," it’s more effective to omit field office encounters and focus on Border Patrol data. If we just look at encounters with Border Patrol, they triple from 30,077 last February to 96,974 this February. That’s an increase of 222%.
One thing to note is that the agency tracks crossings — not people, meaning some of the documented crossings could be from the same person. In fact, the agency estimated that between last March and this February 38% of all encounters involved recidivism .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-announces-january-2021-operational-update , or individuals who have been apprehended more than once.
As for month-to-month numbers, encounters rose roughly 28% with or without field office data.
In summary, Hudson is right in that the rise in illegal crossings was likely 173% — at least. He looked at the wrong numbers but the miss doesn’t undermine his point.
Does the wall have anything to do with the current problem at the border? Experts say no.
"The wall was not a factor at all," said David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "It has no effect on whether people cross the border — only on where they cross."
"No more walls are being built right now. But it does not matter," said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
"The wall has no practicable effect on crossborder irregular migrant traffic or drug smuggling for that matter," Payan said.
"It is not as if continued construction of border walls and fences would have hermetically sealed the border tomorrow," said Lynn Marcus, director of Arizona University’s Community Immigration Law Placement Clinic.
"New segments of the wall take years to build," said Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. "The amount of wall that would have been built between January and now is negligible and would have practically no effect on how many people are crossing the border."
Deportations
Now to the last part of Hudson’s tweet. Did Biden "stop" deportations? And is that part of the reason for the rise in border crossings? This is a gross mischaracterization.
When Biden took office, his administration ordered a 100-day pause on the deportation of people with final orders of removal. However, that pause didn’t apply to people who posed a threat to national security, who were convicted of a felony, or who were incarcerated at the time of the memo. And a federal judge later blocked Biden’s move .. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/24/texas-Biden-immigration-deportation/ .
In the meantime, federal law allows border officials to turn people away because of the public health emergency. This law is referred to as Title 42. Out of the roughly 96,000 migrants encountered by Border Patrol in February, more than 70,000 were turned away .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics .. because of this rule.
"Per longstanding practice, when long-term holding solutions aren’t possible, some migrants will be processed for removal, provided a Notice to Appear, and released into the U.S. to await a future immigration hearing," an agency spokesman told Yahoo News .. https://news.yahoo.com/biden-admin-relaunches-catch-release-181832444.html .
Experts dismissed the idea that "catch and release" has much to do with the rise in border crossings.
"Biden hasn’t changed catch and release policy in any meaningful way from Jan. 20," said Bier, the Cato expert. "More people are being released only because Mexico is refusing to take more than a certain number back. But he is removing far more and releasing far fewer migrants than Trump in the 2019 wave."
Experts told PolitiFact they’re not surprised some migrants cite Biden as a reason for their reason for crossing the border, either because they’re overly optimistic or because they’re misinformed.
"No doubt, human smugglers take advantage of people's desperation by promising that, with the change in administrations, the U.S. will now welcome them with open arms," Marcus said. "While such messages may give hope to some who incur substantial debt to undertake the dangerous journey to the U.S. border, they are not the main reason people leave, nor are they based on fact."
"The number of migrants are on the rise," said Payan, the Rice University expert. "But, interestingly, they are showing the same pattern — they rise in the spring and summer and fall in the fall and winter."
They have cited warming weather, political instability in immigrants’ home countries, hurricanes that hit Central America last year, and the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. They also said Trump’s attempts to reject people seeking asylum, attempts that were challenged in the courts .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/15/politics/trump-sued-asylum-seekers-central-america/index.html, created a logjam.
Hallett, the expert at the University of Chicago, pointed out that border crossings still haven’t reached the level they were in spring 2019, when there were 100,000 crossings per month for four months straight .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters .
"That would suggest that something independent of U.S. policy is at least partly responsible for the increase," she said.
Our ruling
Hudson said "Illegal border crossings are up 173% from 1 year ago and 28% since January when President Biden stopped the wall & deportations and started catch & release."
Hudson’s numbers are slightly off, but his point about illegal crossings rising nearly 200% is accurate. However, experts say the reasons for the rise in border crossings are complex and not fairly summarized by pinning the blame on border wall construction and Biden’s deportation policies. We rate this claim Half True.
PolitiFact reporter Miriam Valverde contributed to this article.
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