Between 2018 and 2019, for example, the number of migrants in family units who crossed the border illegally increased from 77,794 to 432,838, an increase of 456 percent. The number of single adult migrants apprehended increased by 30%, from 198,492 to 258,375.
Last year, 621,311 family units were approved after crossing the southern border.
In recent years, as Mexicans have been displaced by the cartels that control swaths of the territory, families have been crossing the border in ever-increasing numbers to seek refuge in the United States.
During the first eight months of fiscal 2024, which began in October. On January 1, the Border Patrol apprehended nearly 150,000 Mexican migrant families entering the United States illegally, compared to 87,014 in 2023 and 17,040 in 2020.
“A large number of Mexican families have arrived, and they are easy to send back,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, because they can be sent back to their country on board planes. ‘a bus. .
The removal of families and the exemption for unaccompanied minors, under the new restrictions, will almost certainly lead to family separations, as desperate parents decide to send their children alone, often with smugglers, he said. -she declared.
In May last year, a 4-year-old child was dropped into the United States over the steel wall that separates San Diego from the Mexican city of Tijuana. The child survived. Two years earlier, agents rescued two young sisters, ages 3 and 5, who had been dumped on the U.S. side of the fence in New Mexico.