Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border plummeted after the Trump administration required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for court hearings in the U.S., according to a report.
When the policy took effect in the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector in May, arrests hit 14,000. By October, they had fallen 94 percent, or around 800, and have stayed there since, making Yuma the second slowest of the agency’s nine sectors on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to statistics cited by The Associated Press.
There have been several reasons for the recent drop. Anthony Porvaznik, chief of the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector, said the so-called Migration Protection Protocols have been a huge deterrent, based on agents’ interviews with people arrested.
In the neighboring Tucson sector, arrests rose each month from August to December, bucking a border-wide trend and making it the second-busiest corridor after Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Porvaznik attributed Tucson’s spike to the policy’s late implementation.
Over 55,000 asylum-seekers were returned to Mexico to wait for hearings through November, 10 months after the policy first took effect in San Diego. – READ MORE