Border Security News: Number Of Immigrants Caught Trying To Enter US Illegally Rises For Second Straight Year

The Wall Street Journal reported today that apprehensions of undocumented immigrants who try to brave the risky journey from Mexico across the border into the United States have risen for the second straight year, with the U.S. Border Patrol catching 388,422 people over an 11-month period ending in August. With a month to go in the 2013 fiscal year, that number is already considerably more than the 364,768 people apprehended en route to the U.S. in the previous year. Of all border states, Texas saw the biggest increases, and is now the site of over half of all apprehensions made at the border.

Rosendo Hinojosa, the Rio Grande Valley sector chief for the Border Patrol, told the Wall Street Journal, "It obviously means more people are coming this way." Numbers are still far from its peak -- from 1980 to 2005, the Border Patrol averaged over 1 million apprehensions per year, with 1.6 million in 2000. That may have to do with the relative stabilizing of migration from Mexico, which despite an increase since the 2007-2009 recession, is not expected to return to pre-recession levels, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study released earlier this week.

Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants are coming in greater numbers from Central America, especially "Northern Triangle" countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where many are fleeing gang violence and poverty. And the route which they and undocumented Mexicans take into the US is increasingly away from the formerly high-traffic Tucson area and more in Texas. Some have been apprehended as they try to paddle their way over on rafts, some are nabbed in cars that traverse rural roads, and others turn up on ranchers' lands when they get lost or injured. In Brooks County, about an hour north of the border, authorities have found the bodies of 76 undocumented border-crossers already in this calendar year. The county deputy sheriff, Benny Martinez, told the Wall Street Journal that amount of traffic in a county 70 miles north of the border was "crazy".

The highest-traffic part of Texas is the Rio Grande Valley, where as of June, numbers were up 55 percent. Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher told the New York Times in June that he began in 2012 to shift operations toward the Rio Grande Valley region. "We did it smartly," Fisher said. "We wanted to maintain some discipline and not move our resources from our primary focus in Arizona."

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