Each week, more illegal immigrants enter Texas than people who are born in the state during the same time period.

On Monday’s The Laura Ingraham Show, Dan Patrick, the Texas state Senator who is the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, said two weeks ago, Border Patrol agents “apprehended almost 10,000 people crossing the border, in one week.”

“Every week, week after week, we’ve been averaging for the last year apprehending between six and ten thousand people a week,” Patrick said hours before Texas Gov. Rick Perry formally announced that he would be sending National Guard troops to the border. “If we apprehend eight or nine thousand a week, that’s more people than are born in Texas each week.”

Patrick also said law enforcement officials have told him that somewhere between one in five and one in ten illegal immigrants are actually apprehended.

“Now, we think we catch one out of every five. That means twenty five or thirty thousand are crossing the border, that we don’t catch,” he said. “Don’t focus on the numbers that are apprehended, that’s the ones we catch.”



Patrick said “we didn’t have this great wave of young people” before President Barack Obama unilaterally enacted his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) plan in 2012, which was when the number of illegal immigrants coming across the border spiked even as the murder rates in Central American nations declined.

Since October of last year, nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant children have been apprehended. Next year, federal officials, as Patrick said, expect that number to rise to at least 150,000. Patrick emphasized that those numbers are just those who are caught.

“You do the math,” he said, saying that there are way more than 11 million illegal immigrants who are supposedly in the country, according to official estimates.