More illegal immigrants have evaded border authorities and entered the United States since President Joe Biden took office than during the previous decade.
New data on “gotaways,” immigrants who are seen crossing the U.S. border and entering the country illegally while successfully evading law enforcement, shows that such illegal entries have exploded under the Biden administration, according to Fox News, which obtained the data via an open records request.
The records show that from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2020, more than 1.4 million gotaways were recorded entering the country illegally. The number of such illegal entries tagged in a year ranged from a low of about 86,000 in 2011 to nearly 172,000 in 2013.
During Biden’s term, the number of gotaways seen but not apprehended has jumped substantially, increasing every year of Biden’s presidency. In fiscal year 2021, the Department of Homeland Security recorded 387,398 gotaways. The next year, the number rose to 606,131. In fiscal year 2023, the number rose again to 670,674.
Altogether, roughly 1.6 million illegal immigrants were seen entering the country and evading apprehension from 2021-23, more than the entire decade from fiscal years 2010-2020.
The data on gotaways comes as a report indicates that Biden is planning to take executive action on the border to limit immigration if encounters pass a certain threshold. The president is considering signing an executive order that would shut down the border once encounters hit 4,000 per day. Total encounters do not include numbers from gotaways, which came within 30,000 of hitting the benchmark last fiscal year.
In 2019, Jeh Johnson, who served as Homeland Security secretary during the Obama administration, said that a daily encounter average of 1,000 per day would overwhelm Border Patrol. At 4,000 per day, he said the border would be in “crisis.” Johnson said he would start every day looking at apprehension numbers from the day before.
“And I’d look at them every morning, it’d be the first thing I’d look at. And I probably got too close to the problem, and my staff will tell you if it was under 1,000 apprehensions the day before, that was a relatively good number, and if it was above 1,000, it was a relatively bad number, and I was gonna be in a bad mood the whole day,” Johnson said at the time. “On Tuesday, there were 4,000 apprehensions. I know that a thousand overwhelms the system. I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like, so we are truly in a crisis.”
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