Illegal Immigration Doubled During the Last Four Months In Wake of Trump’s Failed Efforts to Stop It

Illegal immigration into our southern border has doubled in the last four months, negating any gains made by President Donald Trump’s attempts to stem the tide according to new data from the government.

According to the Washington Times, over 30,000 illegal immigrants were nabbed in August by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. This is a stark increase of 22 percent from July’s numbers, but an even greater increase of 100 percent from April.

Regardless of the massive increases, these numbers are still lower than 2016’s numbers during Obama’s presidency. According to a CBP memo, the fact that there are far less attempting to illegally cross the border compared to last year should still qualify as success.

“These numbers represent a 41 percent decrease as compared to August of 2016, and year-to-date totals for FY 2017 are 24 percent lower than the same period in FY 2016,” said the CBP memo.

The trouble here is that officials are using the amount of people captured to make a rough estimate as to how many are illegally crossing the border. If this uptick in apprehensions are any indication to a rise, then that means there are many more people sneaking through successfully.

Just last July, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd was telling C-SPAN that the U.S. was seeing a “miraculous” drop people attempting to illegally enter the U.S. According to Judd, he figured this was a result of Trump’s rhetoric supposedly scaring illegal immigrants away.

“What we’ve seen is nothing short of miraculous,” Judd said. “If you look at the rhetoric that President Trump has given, it’s caused the number of illegal border crossers to go down, something that we’ve never seen in history at the Border Patrol.”

The CBP itself didn’t offer an explanation as to why the increase in illegal immigration is happening, so the reason for the uptick is anyone’s guess.

However, it might be that the rhetoric that originally made people hesitant to cross the border in the first place is beginning to seem hollow. Trump promised a wall, and yet it seems like its construction is a day far away. The president also promised an increase of 5,000 border patrol agents, and yet we’ve lost 220.

If potential illegal immigrants are beginning to see Trump’s threats and promises as a lot of hot air, then they may be starting to believe the risks are far less, and the rewards are still greater.

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