On Monday’s edition of NBC’s “Top Story,” NBC News Homeland Security Correspondent Julia Ainsley discussed her reporting that 7,500 migrants were apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday and stated that the number is about what we’ve averaged over the past week and that the recent surge shows that the policies the Biden administration put into place when Title 42 ended, “are not having as big of an impact as they did initially.”
Ainsley said, “You and I were down there when they got to record highs, near 10,000 a day, just before the end of Title 42, then new policies came into place to make it more restrictive for asylum. And when we talked to people who were on the other side of the border in Mexico, thinking about crossing, they were kind of in a wait-and-see moment to see how tough these restrictions might be. We saw the numbers start to increase over the summer and now they are really rapidly increasing. We’ve been able to see in certain sectors some rises, some evidence of that rise, street releases when they’re not able to find enough room for shelters in cities like San Diego and Nogales, AZ. Then we’ve also been able to see the numbers of families rising in areas like Tucson and Rio Grande Valley. Now, this actually takes into account a snapshot of one day across the entire border, where they saw 7,500 crossings in a single day.”
She continued, “And I’m told that’s really on average about what they’ve seen the past week or so as these numbers are starting to rise, as they typically do this time of year, but it’s significant now, because it’s showing that those new policies put in place in mid-May, just when you and I left the border because of the end of Title 42, those new policies are not having as big of an impact as they did initially. And a lot of it is because Mexico can only take back so many migrants per day that they turn away. Migrants are learning that, starting to take things into their own hands, and starting to get frustrated when they’re not able to get appointments or try to get into the U.S. the legal way.”
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