The Border Patrol has been facing a record influx of migrant families since fall, but in recent weeks the numbers have begun to escalate substantially, thanks to the annual surge before the arrival of the deadly summer heat.
For months, the federal authorities knew that this spring was likely to set records, but only now is it becoming apparent how big the numbers will be. Apprehensions already dwarf the numbers of five years ago and echo those of the spring of 2014, when the arrival of the first migrant families from Central America transformed the nature of immigration along the southern border.
“The current surge was totally predictable and the Trump administration chose not to prepare for it. Instead it launched a raft of harsh deterrence measures that were totally ineffective,” said Wayne Cornelius, a migration scholar at the University of California, San Diego. ...
In the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly 400,000 migrants were apprehended at the border, a low figure compared with the peak of 1.6 million in 2000. But experts predict that arrivals this fiscal year could hit one million, a level not seen since the record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
