Over 600,000 people illegally made their way into the United States without being apprehended by border agents during the 2023 fiscal year, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed Tuesday.
Mayorkas disclosed the number during a hearing on national security on Capitol Hill, in which he insisted the gotaways have been a problem at the border for “decades.”
“The phenomenon of gotaways is something that has been a challenge for the department of homeland security for decades,” the Biden-appointed secretary said.
Astonishingly, he added: “In fact, it is a powerful example of a broken immigration system.”
Customs and Border Protection figures released since the financial year ended on Sept 30 showed 900,000 migrants had been allowed into the country legally along the southwest border under humanitarian parole, allowing them to pursue asylum applications.
When the number of added to the number of Gotaways, that makes 1.5m migrants who have crossed the border in the last year, many of whom are now straining services in major metropolitan cities including New York, Chicago, Denver and Washington D.C.
During the Tuesday hearing, Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kansas) said the total number of gotaways alone since Biden took office in 2021 was 1.7 million people, a stat which was backed by the findings of the Republican Comittee on Homeland Security and published last week.
Since the new year started, that number hasn’t let up, with CBP chief Jason Owens sounding the alarm, saying over 1,000 people a day are still slipping over the borders.
“These are individuals whose identities & purpose we do not know,” Chief Owens wrote on X.
“That is why you need every Border Patrol agent to be in the field and on patrol,” he said.
Since the 2024 fiscal year began, Owens estimated more than 18,000 gotaways have already made it into the US between October 1st and 16th.
As migrants continue to stream across the southern border, Arizona has found itself hit particularly hard in recent weeks.
Over the weekend, Border Patrol agents at the Tuscon Sector in Pima County apprehended around 2,600 migrants, raising the total number of people detained there to 3,200, according to the Arizona Daily Star.
Pima County spokesman Mark Evans said they were expecting to see 800 to 900 migrants released daily as they are processed.
“Those are the kind of numbers we were seeing at end of September and early October when we were in crisis,” he said.
Meanwhile, a band of around 5,000 migrants bound for the US border departed on foot from Tapachula, one of Mexico’s southernmost cities near the Guatemalan border, on Monday, headed for the border.
The group had been waiting in the city after applying for transit papers there, but set out after failing to receive them.
At the head of the column, the migrants carried a white cross painted with drops of red blood and the phrase “Containment is my death, liberation is life” written in Spanish.
On Tuesday they arrived in Huehuetán, after marching about 16 miles.
With Post wires.
