Federal border officials reported a record variety of migrant crossings on the southern border in a Friday night release of statistics just before Christmas.
US Customs and Border Protection had 233,740 migrant encounters across the length of the nearly 2,000 mile south in November, the best ever recorded for that month and up from 178,845 for a similar period last 12 months, a greater than 30% increase.
No less than 16 percent of the migrants encountered had tried to cross the border into the US before.
The information dump from the Department of Homeland Security was first reported by FOX News and the timing led to speculation the Biden administration was attempting to keep the brand new numbers under wraps.
The news was tweeted by Fox’s Bill Melugin in a post that was retweeted by Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk late Friday who responded with two exclamation points.
“In a blatant Friday evening news dump going into Christmas weekend, the federal government has released the November border numbers,” Melugin tweeted.
Lots of the latest arrivals were from communist countries, corresponding to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Customs and Border Protection statistics show.
The Biden administration is under pressure to unravel the tidal wave of migrants crossing the southern border which is overwhelming frontier cities corresponding to El Paso, Texas where a whole bunch are sleeping within the streets. Last week, town’s mayor Oliver Leeser declared a state of emergency to take care of the influx.
Earlier this week, President Biden asked the Supreme Court to delay the termination of a Trump-era policy that allowed Border Patrol agents to return migrants to Mexico.
Title 42 was originally scheduled to finish on Dec. 21 but has been prolonged until after Christmas.
