The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has released its February statistics on apprehensions at the border and it's a doozy :

That red line represents what's going on just so far this year.

According to the El Paso Times:

Federal immigration law enforcement leaders said the United States is facing a massive “border security and humanitarian crisis” and is at a “breaking point” while highlighting El Paso as an example of the overwhelming number of migrants coming to the U.S. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan and United States Border Patrol Chief of Operations Brian Hastings held a news conference Tuesday in Washington D.C. to announce the large increase of apprehensions being made by Border Patrol agents. The latest statistics show that agents are on pace to break the record numbers of migrant crossings set last year.

More than 76,000 illegal border crossers were caught in the month of February alone, with 66,450 of those either unaccompanied "children" (read: gang-aged young men) or else people traveling as claimed family units, authentic or otherwise. Some of the press seems to be misreading the charts to suggest that the entire total was 66,450, but the official statistics (shown in the chart above) demonstrate that that number was just the 'moms and kids' of the group. There were more than 10,000 others, seen on the chart above it, and with a harder time claiming asylum as single adults, rest assured, not all of those crossers were actually caught.

It's not really that surprising, either - it's right on track with a major Gallup poll of Latin Americans released last month showing that five million foreign nationals south of our border are planning to come to the U.S., legally or otherwise in 2019. The Gallup poll found a 40% rise in the worldwide desire to immigrate, and Central American countries showing some of the highest percentage totals within that group - 52% of Salvadorans and 47% of Hondurans wanting to leave. The Guatamalan stats must be comparable, given the very large numbers of those nationals being apprehended at the U.S. border, although Guatemala is about twice the size populationwise of the other two.

What is shows is a crisis unfolding in not-so-slow motion. That kind of spike in illegal U.S. border crossings - and those are only the apprehended ones, not the ones who slipped in illegally and got away with it, is a human wave.

Obviously, something is pushing the number higher, and based on a reading of its local presses, it's not conditions in Central America, from where most of the illegal border crossers originate. There's a pull factor driving this, likely in the fact that a wall is supposed to be going up, and it's being obstructed by Democrats in Congress and their leftwing activist and lobbyist buddies, throwing out a smogs of lawsuits, accommodated by left-wing judges willing to rewrite the law. When the odds rise of a successful entry to the U.S. without a need to go through the legal immigration process, would-be illegal migrants hear a dinner triangle is ringing.

I threw out this argument last month:

So long as the U.S. is enmired in Democrats' blockage of any funds for a border wall, yet the talk goes on of building, the message to illegal migrants is to move. Get in before the wall gets built while the Democrats are still arguing. This is the window. Don't wait for the border wall to get built. Get in under the wire. That very dynamic is a good argument for why President Trump should just skip the shenanigans with the Democrats, declare an emergency, and build the wall. The longer this drags on the more the human waves are going to build. And as Gallup reports, we're looking at a tsunami.

and I still think it's operative.

Democrats of course, are deeply wedded to the notion that importing a socialist-minded electorate in need of government services is the key to their ambitions for permanent one-party rule. This is obvious enough in California where illegal immigrants are continuously coddled, offered a banquet of goodies from the state as an incentive to migrate, as well as unusual state protections coming at the expense of even rule of law to ensure they are never deported. Illegals even have a major role in the ballot-harvesting electoral apparatus, which was instrumental in the strange picture of deep-red Orange County suddenly going "blue," to ensure that illegal crossings remain encouraged and protected.

With Democrats in Congress now promoting the nonsense that all border enforcement is "racist," (see what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been up to, here), it's pretty obvious that the border crisis (which they deny is a crisis) is actually something they want.

That means that even with editorials such as this one, from the New York Post, arguing that stats show the crisis is real and Congress must do something about it, Congress isn't going to do anything about it.

Only a wall is going to do something about it. That's all we have left. President Trump's declaration of an emergency then, is the right course of action. The crisis is congressionally made, and that's the emergency.



