Drop in migrant crossings isn’t unique to Texas

TEXAS – The Houston Chronicle reports that Gov. Greg Abbott regularly credits his $11 billion border security crackdown with driving down border crossings in Texas. But a new analysis of federal data shows three of the four southwestern border states have seen crossings decline significantly this year, and Texas had the most crossings of any state in July. “Illegal crossings into Texas are DOWN 85% thanks to Operation Lone Star,” Abbott wrote on the social media site X earlier this month. In another post last week, the Republican governor wrote that hundreds of miles of razor wire the Texas National Guard has strung along the border has “helped to decrease illegal immigration by about 85%.” Crossings have dropped 86% in Texas since December, when the Border Patrol logged record apprehensions.

But they have also fallen 84% in Arizona and 55% in California, two states with Democratic governors and no comparable border initiatives, according to an analysis of federal data by Adam Isacson, a researcher at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy group. “Texas’s big border crackdown hasn’t deterred migration any more than other border states,” Isacson wrote on X on Tuesday. Abbott’s office said the governor launched Operation Lone Star to “fill in the dangerous gaps” left by the Biden administration, and that since its launch in 2021, crossings have similarly declined 85%. “Until President Biden and Border Czar Harris step up and do their jobs to secure the border, Texas will continue utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to the Biden-Harris border crisis,” Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said in a statement. The state-level analysis is the latest evidence that a major slowdown at the southern border this year has little to do with the state’s ongoing crackdown. The biggest declines came in January, after Mexico stepped up enforcement under pressure from the Biden administration, and in June, after President Joe Biden issued an executive order that shut off asylum processing when more than 2,500 migrants illegally cross into the U.S. in a single day. Border-wide crossings fell from 249,740 in December to 124,216 in January, according to the analysis. In May, the Border Patrol logged 117,905 apprehensions in the four border states. By July, they tallied just 56,408. Texas had the largest share of those, with 16,991, just ahead of California’s 16,471.