Newly released statistics from the Biden-Harris administration show that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has presided over the four worst years for illegal immigration in U.S. history. Last year, fiscal year 2024, had the second-highest number of illegal border crossings, according to the data.

The United States experienced 2,901,142 illegal border crossings during FY 2024, which ended at the end of September — the second-highest number on record. That is only a modest reduction from the all-time historic record of illegal immigration set the previous year at 3,201,144, according to statistics from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“The small decline in encounters of illegal aliens attempting to enter the country is hardly something to celebrate. 2,901,142 encounters is still greater than the population of Chicago and five times greater than the 646,822 such encounters in FY 2020, the last full year before the Biden-Harris administration took office,” Joey Chester, communications manager at Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told The Washington Stand. 

The vast majority of those crossings came through the southern border. During the last fiscal year, illegal border crossings at the southwest border totaled 2,135,005. While the number has fallen over the last two years, that is largely due to administrative changes that encourage illegal immigrants to present themselves at ports of entry, make an appointment with the CBP One app, or schedule a taxpayer-funded flight into the United States. The temporarily-suspended Cuba-Haiti-Nicaragua-Venezuela (CHNV) program alone flew an estimated 30,000 illegal immigrants each month into the U.S. homeland.

Patterns of illegal immigration changed and increased, Chester told TWS. “Declines in illegal crossings along the southwest border were offset by sharp increases along the northern border and dramatic increases in illegal aliens being permitted to enter the country through ports of entry. In addition to the restarted CHNV program, the administration continued its unprecedented abuse of parole authority to allow inadmissible aliens who schedule an appointment using the CBP One phone app to be ushered into the country,” he said.

The latest figures do not include 243,000 “gotaways” that evaded detection, CBP sources told Fox Business reporter Griff Jenkins.

The Biden-Harris administration has also made a deal with the Mexican government to hold 400,000 illegal immigrants in Mexico until after the presidential election, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The focus of the Biden-Harris administration in FY 2024 was eliminating the harmful political optics of mass illegal immigration, not putting a stop to mass illegal immigration,” Chester added.

Unfortunately, numbers games have not reduced the number of crimes committed by criminal aliens against U.S. citizens, the immigration expert noted. “This massive, deceptive, and illegal effort by the administration to redirect illegal aliens through ports of entry has done nothing to mitigate the impact of mass illegal immigration on the American public and the communities in which they live. Whether illegal aliens enter between ports of entry, or at ports of entry, rampant illegal immigration in FY 2024 continued to threaten the safety and security of the American people and impose unsustainable burdens on American taxpayers,” Chester warned.

Nor have open borders policies made children safer, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Tuesday.

Gangs exploit lenient Biden-Harris policies, which sometimes result in border enforcement officials sending unaccompanied minors to live with members of Central American-based transnational criminal gangs such as MS-13. A whistleblower told Grassley’s office of the practice, but “the whistleblower that brought this information to me has been taken off of that job,” Grassley told Perkins. “We’ve got these bad actors, and they’re capitalizing on the Biden-Harris open border policies and using kids as pawns.”

Grassley pointed out that President Donald Trump “was castigated when maybe 1,500 unaccompanied children could not be accounted for.” Now that a Democratic administration has seemingly lost dozens of times as many minors, “the press isn’t paying any attention to it.”

“I think the cartels are making more money from child trafficking and human trafficking than they are from drugs,” Grassley pointed out. The House Judiciary Committee revealed in February that human smuggling across the Rio Grande earned cartels $32 million a week. Thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s lack of enforcement, human trafficking has “become central to their business model,” according to a September 2023 report from the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“The kids are in the custody of the federal government to make sure that they’re in safe places, and our government doesn’t even know where they are,” Grassley insisted.

The federal government refuses to even tell Congress how many unaccompanied minors are presently unaccounted for, he said.

“The law requires that the administration — any administration — report to Congress on the status of thousands of unaccompanied minors. A federal law requires the Department of HHS, the Office of Refugee Settlement, to annually report” the information to Congress, said Grassley. “And in these four years of the Biden-Harris administration, there’s been no report to Congress.”

Grassley pointed out that he and his colleague, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), have introduced “legislation that should have passed the Senate unanimously to get these reports … a law to emphasize what the existing law was. And the Democrats wouldn’t bring it up” for a vote, “because I’m sure it’s embarrassing to them.”

“The tragedy is they’re saying their open border policy is compassionate, when in fact it is the furthest thing from compassion,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.