The immigration issue is increasingly threatening U.S. President Joe Biden's re-election hopes.
Along with the economy, this is a dominant concern for voters in most polls, and majorities disapprove of Biden's efforts.
Migrants have crossed the southern border in unprecedented numbers over the past three years as conflict or instability in their home countries grows and the post-pandemic job gap in the United States widens.
These numbers began to rise in 2018 as Central Americans fled a series of complex crises, before falling sharply in 2020 due to pandemic-era restrictions. I started climbing again in 2021.
More than 6.4 million immigrants have crossed into the U.S. illegally and been detained during the Biden administration. Many of them are released to the United States to await processing, which sometimes takes years.
In 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded nearly 2.5 million “encounters” along the southern border, including 302,000 in December alone.
Migrant arrivals have plummeted since then, with only about 179,000 migrant “encounters” recorded in April, according to the most recently released CBP statistics.
But experts warn that this slow pace is unsustainable.
