As President Joe Biden rolled back several existing border initiatives, the number of people crossing illegally into the United States skyrocketed. In February—despite a week of freezing weather—Border Patrol apprehended 101,535 illegal border crossers along the southern border, according to Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety captain. Another 26,000 people evaded capture, he said.
Jones collected the provisional Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data from internal sources and it has been reviewed by The Epoch Times.
CBP told The Epoch Times that the official numbers would be available in the next couple of days.
The February number is almost triple the apprehensions from February 2020, when Border Patrol caught almost 37,000 people, while in 2019, on the cusp of the most recent crisis, the number was almost 77,000.