If the February border numbers were unprecedented, the March border numbers appear to be unfathomable. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has published the March border numbers, which reflect a “system-wide emergency” in the view of top border officials. “The impacts to legitimate trade and travel cannot be overstated,” said CBP Deputy Commissioner Robert E. Perez in a statement. “As this crisis continues to worsen, it undermines CBP’s ability to perform its dual mission of protecting our borders and facilitating legitimate trade and travel.”

Here are nine shocking statistics from the March data and the cumulative numbers of illegal aliens and family units crossing this fiscal year.

103,492: The total number of illegal aliens and inadmissible aliens apprehended at and between points of entry in the month of March. That is the highest monthly number since April 2007. But as former Border Patrol head Mark Morgan told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, last decade, “1/3 of those apprehended were repeat offenders so the realistic number of migrant apprehensions was well below what’s reflected.” As such, it’s likely that this month is at or near an all-time record.

1.2 million: How many in a year if March’s pace continues. But Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) predicts that with the weather getting warmer over the next few months and the incentives for illegal immigration unaddressed, the numbers will grow larger. The first week of April seems to indicate this.

$168-180 billion: The lifetime cost of 1.2 million illegal aliens per year, using the input and methodology of the Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camarota to calculate the cost of illegal aliens to the American taxpayer.

57,271: A record number of family unit apprehensions (number of people apprehended with family members) in March. That beats the record we just set last month by a whopping 40 percent. That is more than three times as large as the first Central American wave at the peak of the 2014 migration during Obama’s tenure. Even just the unaccompanied minors (who are often split off from family units for strategic reasons) totaled 9,398, which in its own right rivals all but the two busiest months of the 2014 UAC surge, which was without the family units.

189,584: The number of family unit apprehensions between points of entry for the first six months of fiscal year 2019. This far surpasses the numbers for any previous full year.

218,645: The number of family unit apprehensions between points of entry since Judge Dana Sabraw ruled last July that all parents or adults brought with children must be released with the children. During that last nine months, as many family units have been apprehended as in the previous 33 months.

4,647%: The percentage increase in monthly family unit apprehensions between points of entry since the low of the “Trump effect” in April 2017 through February 2019. There’s been a 370 percent increase in family units for the first half of this fiscal year compared with the first half of FY 2018.

422,334: The total number of illegal aliens and inadmissible immigrants, including single adults, who have been caught at our border. That is almost twice the rate of last year, which in itself was a dramatic increase from FY 2017.

104: The number of large groups, defined as 100 or more, coming in at once to surrender to border agents and shutting down their resources. There were 13 such groups in FY 2018, mainly in the latter part of the year when this phenomenon began. It was almost unheard of in previous years.

One of the surprising data points from this month is the surge in single adults in addition to family units. While two-thirds of the illegal immigrants were family units or unaccompanied minors, the number of single adults increased in raw numbers by 30 percent over February. This is likely the result of the family units filling up the detention centers to such a point that even the single adults are being released for a lack of space. This has likely incentivized even those who can’t find a child to use as a ticket into the country to make the trek and try their luck at the border.

Yesterday, I presented 10 ways to disincentivize the border flow. But it is self-evident that unless the administration changes tactics, we have not reached rock bottom at the border yet. (For more from the author of “9 shocking March stats from the ‘system-wide emergency’ at the border” please click HERE)

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In 1984, the WSJ published an op-ed, “In Praise of Huddled Masses.” “We propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders.” Well, 35 years later, that is exactly what we have. Our government is now telling us that the laws, which actually say the opposite, compel them to let anyone in. We didn’t even need a constitutional amendment to create open borders. We just needed judges.

As we allow nearly everyone into our country and release them into our communities, the “mother of all caravans” is forming in Honduras, according to media in Mexico. Was there ever a time in history when we allowed this to go on? Remember, our current laws have been in place since 1952, and the updated asylum statutes have been in place since 1980. We’ve been through this before, only then, as I demonstrated with the case of the Haitian boat people in 1993, our government shut it down immediately. But there is another case we should study that is even a better apples-to-apples comparison to what is going on today, and that is the way we shut down the asylum surge of Nicaraguans in south Texas in 1989.

Following the coup of Sandinista Marxists against the Somoza dynasty in 1979, a number of people fled the country and requested asylum at our border. In total, 126,000 applied for asylum, but that was spread out over the period 1981-1990. However, unlike with those coming now from the Northern Triangle countries (and increasingly from Nicaragua), many of these individuals were legitimate asylees, and some were actually wealthy individuals tied to the ruling family or the Contras, whom the U.S. was supporting against the Sandinistas. In fact, this was a part of the strategy of the Reagan administration to combat communism. So, we definitely had a vested interest, unlike today, in bringing some of these people in.

But towards the end of the 1980s, the migration became a flow of impoverished individuals simply fleeing economic conditions in Nicaragua. In 1988, Hurricane Joan left 432 people dead and 230,000 homeless. It was certainly a sad situation, as we see today with the devastation of hurricanes in the Caribbean, but it clearly has nothing to do with asylum. According to the Congressional Research Service, between June 1988 and March 1989, the totality of this iteration of Nicaraguan migration, 18,000 Nicaraguans crossed the border at Brownsville, Texas, most of them declaring asylum. That was regarded as an emergency situation at the time.

Now, think about that for a moment. The entire crisis was over 18,000 individuals coming in over nine months. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of Central American families and teens come in over the past nine months, and the trajectory has just accelerated to unprecedented levels with no end in sight.

What did the Bush 41 administration do when the Nicaraguan crisis was about one-twentieth the size of today’s crisis? Beginning in March 1989, the Bush administration detained all of the asylum-seekers in tent cities in south Texas, similar to the procedure used in Florida during the first wave of Haitian boat people in 1981. Bush’s Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) began immediately rejecting the unqualified claims during initial screenings. As I have suggested the administration do today, they sent all their adjudicators to the tent cities, denied the claims, and immediately sent unqualified claimants back, which is what is actually required by law.

”We intend to send a strong signal to those people who have the mistaken idea that by merely filing a frivolous asylum claim, they may stay in the United States,” said Alan C. Nelson, then commissioner of the INS. He added, ”This willful manipulation of America’s generosity must and will stop.”

And indeed, the message reverberated loud and clear to the next group of potential migrants. According to an April 10 archived article of the Miami Herald, “U.S. Border Patrol statistics compiled in McAllen, Texas, showed that 603 non-Mexican aliens were arrested between Brownsville and Laredo in the first 10 days of April, down from 1,899 for the same period in March.”

So, was the signal sent to the next wave of bogus asylum seekers?

According to the Herald, “The Border Patrol estimates that the Nicaraguans who left home before Feb. 20 had all passed through the immigrant pipeline by March 12. For the month since then, arrests of non-Mexicans each week have declined steadily, from 711 to 438. … The number of asylum applicants has dwindled spectacularly. Since Feb. 20, the figure has dropped to 10 per week, down from December, when 2,000 people per week presented themselves at south Texas centers to ask for asylum, INS says.”

That flow was slowed to a trickle after just a few months and 18,000 asylum requests, even though there were more legitimate requests among them than today’s. In fact, according to the New York Times, “Initially, as many as 87 percent of asylum claims by Nicaraguans were approved.” Now there have been hundreds of thousands of Central American families all coming in for economic reasons. There have been no coups in their home countries or any political dynamic that would create legitimate asylees. Violence has actually been down in all three Central American countries.

The obvious question is how many more illegal immigrants need to scam this system for our government to react? Texas cities are now being overrun by the cost of this humanitarian and security crisis, something that was not allowed to happen in 1989.

It’s important to remember that nothing has changed since 1989. Our immigration system is operating under the same laws passed in 1952 and 1980. If anything, we toughened up asylum law, among other parts of the INA, in 1996. What was good then is good now. And as far as the Flores settlement is concerned, the 1997 agreement that supposedly binds our government to release at least the children within 20 days, Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas believes it no longer applied as of 2013.

Moreover, this administration can promulgate a new regulation and vitiate the Flores agreement. On September 7, 2018, the administration moved to promulgate a new regulation on detaining minors, and the 45-day period for public comment has long passed. It’s unclear why the administration has not moved to implement the changed policy.

Finally, even if still abiding by the Flores 20-day limit, DHS should be able to adjudicate the cases in less than 20 days if it implements the emergency plan to construct tent cities.

Either way, the administration is going to have to assert precedent, statute, case law, and separation of powers to stand up to the lower court resistance, because no other era of our government would have allowed this to continue for nearly this long.

What we need now even more than a wall is a will — a will to enforce the laws we already have. (For more from the author of “How Our Government Stopped the 1989 Asylum Surge Before It Got out of Control” please click HERE)

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