Just under 137,000 – that’s how many illegal aliens border agents have caught in the first three months of FY2017 alone, marking an increased surge in illegal alien border crossings during the last three full months of President Obama’s eight-year presidency.
Averaged out over those three months, CBP caught about 1,486 illegal aliens per day between Oct. 1 and New Years Eve.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported Thursday they’d caught another 43,272 aliens at the U.S. Mexico border in December, including 16,135 more family unit members and 7,243 unaccompanied children.
That’s on top of the 47,214 border crossers CBP apprehended in November, and the 46,184 aliens they caught in October.
CBP also reports an additional 51,912 inadmissible aliens were caught trying to pass through U.S. ports of entry so far this fiscal year.
By comparison, CBP reports they caught a total of 408,000 illegal aliens in all of FY2016. Judging by these figures, border agents have already caught a full third the number of illegal aliens apprehended in all of FY2016 in just 92 days.
The increasing numbers of illegal aliens caught at the U.S. border closely follows the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president. Trump campaigned on a platform of increased border security, including building a physical wall along the southern U.S. border, along with higher numbers of deportations for illegal aliens currently living in the United States. While Trump has appeared to scale back his rhetoric regarding deportable aliens already living in the U.S., he has continued to back his pledge of building a border wall.
A story published Thursday morning by Yahoo! News detailed the crisis at the border, claiming that the large numbers of aliens attempting to come into the United States is directly due to fears over an inability to do so once President-elect Trump takes office. Yahoo! reports:
One of them, Wilson, a 48-year-old builder, missed the birth of his daughter to make the journey. Getting to the United States before Trump takes control was more important.
"When I saw that man on the television saying how he hated migrants and was going to build a wall, I thought: 'It's now or never," said Wilson, who would not give his last name.
"So we all spent Christmas and New Year traveling to try to get here in time. We want to beat him to it."