Chris Lange, FISM News

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Twenty-one days into the month of October, the Department of Homeland Security finally shared Customs and Border Protection data for September in a late-Friday night data dump. The jaw-dropping numbers offer a clue as to why the report was released at a time least likely to garner media attention.

According to the report, border apprehensions last month reached 227,542 — a 12% increase from August and the highest number ever recorded for the month of September. The new numbers bring the total number of illegal crossings to a staggering 2,378,944 in Fiscal Year 2022, meaning that between October 1, 2021 and September 20, 2022, the Biden administration has seen the largest flow of unauthorized migrants into the U.S. in any single fiscal year. 

Additional revelations in the after-hours CBP report include troubling data showing that 20 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the border in September alone, bringing the total number of terror watchlist arrests for FY 2022 to 98. The number of arrests of migrants on the terror watchlist for the last five years was 26 combined, HotAir noted in comparison.  It took only 19 terrorists to carry out the deadliest attacks on U.S. soil in the nation’s history on Sept. 11, 2001. 

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, who has covered the border crisis extensively, wrote in a tweet that the numbers reflected in the September data are “more than quadruple” the 52,546 reported in FY 2019.

FY’22 September: 227,547
FY’21 September: 192,001
FY’20 September: 57,674
FY’19 September: 52,546

The FY’22 September border numbers are more than quadruple the FY’19 numbers, which was the year Trump had his own surge at the border. @FoxNews

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) October 22, 2022

“We have simply never seen these numbers before in our history, and the Biden open-borders policies are the reason,” former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Chief Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement, Breitbart News reported.

“As bad as it has gotten, things will only get worse, and I fear what major catastrophe could come next,” Morgan continued.

The news service further noted that the number of illegal immigrants that entered the U.S. from Oct. 1, 2021 to Sept. 20, 2022, exceeds the combined resident populations of 15 states, including Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. 

According to the CBP data, 103,000 migrants were apprehended at the Rio Grande, Texas checkpoint alone in September.

In the time since March 2021, when Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, law enforcement officials have apprehended nearly 320,000 unauthorized border crossers and have made over 21,000 criminal arrests. Among these apprehensions, 18,600 were charged with felonies. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in this time frame seized more than 342 million lethal doses of fentanyl, which The Center Square reported is “enough to kill everyone in the United States.”

“The time for excuses is over — the next Congress needs to take actual steps to hold this administration accountable for the chaos and carnage they have unleashed on our southwest border,” former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Thomas Homan, who is also a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement.

“This is a shameful episode in our history, and the ones who are suffering are not the elites in their gated and secured Beltway communities,” Homan continued. It’s the Border Patrol agents being overwhelmed on a daily basis. It’s the families who have been ripped apart losing a loved one to fentanyl or other drugs. And it’s the migrants themselves, who are worthless to the cartels once they’ve been paid. The next Congress better do something about it.”

It appears that illegal immigrants are being released into the interior of the U.S. as quickly as they are crossing the southern border. 

The Center for Immigration studies reported at the end of last month that, from February 2021 to August 2022, the Biden administration had released roughly 1.35 million illegal immigrants into the nation’s interior, based on CBP stats.

House GOP leadership last month released a “Commitment to America” plan for 2023 that, among several other items, includes immediate steps Republicans plan to take to address the border crisis should they regain control of Congress in the general election next month. In a section titled “A Nation that’s Safe,” the GOP vows to resume construction of the southern border wall that began under the Trump administration, enact proof of legal status requirements for U.S. jobs, and eliminate welfare incentives to discourage illegal immigration, among other items.

“Record illegal border crossings under this Administration have led to more drugs, more crime, and a demoralized Border Patrol who are hamstrung from carrying out their law enforcement mission. The situation at the border has become both a national security and humanitarian crisis and must be addressed immediately,” the plan states.