Through this election season and since he declared his presidential candidacy, President Trump has been calling illegal immigration a “crisis.”Last week, he said, “I would like to provide an update to the American people regarding the crisis on our southern border, and crisis it is.” The numbers tell another story, Politico reports. “Crisis” typically describes a problem that’s getting worse. According to Customs and Border Protection, arrests along the southwest border — the standard metric to calculate illegal border crossings — numbered 396,579 in fiscal year 2018. That’s lower than the average over the previous decade (400,751). It’s also lower than the number of border arrests in fiscal 2016, 2014 and 2013.
It’s true there were more border arrests in 2018 than in 2017, but in 2017, border arrests had dropped to a historic low; to find a year with fewer border arrests, you have to go back to 1971. A September 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security was able to boast — somewhat inconveniently as Trump sought to secure funding for a wall along the southern border — that “the southwest land border is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before.” Border arrests over the past decade, averaging 400,000 annually, are very low compared with recent history. In the 1980s and 1990s, border arrests seldom fell below 1 million. Border arrests peaked at 1,643,679 in 2000, and remained at or near 1 million until the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency.