As construction crews continue to toil in Otay Mesa erecting eight prototypes for what President Donald Trump has called a “big, beautiful wall” to deter illegal entries into the U.S., a recent report says it’s harder now to enter the country via the southwest border than ever before.

The Department of Homeland Security said that by almost any measure — from apprehensions to the increased use of smugglers, even the increased rates the “coyotes” charge — getting into the country from Mexico is markedly more difficult that a decade ago.

The 20-page report estimates that between 55 percent and 85 percent of illegal border crossings are unsuccessful, resulting in either an apprehension or interdiction — a term that means when someone is either arrested or turns back to Mexico. That is up from 35 percent to 70 percent a decade ago.

The report from the Office of Immigration Statistics was produced after Congress earlier this year ordered the agency to study “the effectiveness of security between the ports of entry” along the border.


That area is the domain of the U.S. Border Patrol, and the report credits ramped up security along the frontier for the increased difficulty of illegal entries.

The report concludes “available data indicate that the southwest land border is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before.”

In addition to more effectively arresting or turning people back, the report estimated that the security is so effective fewer people are trying to enter a second time. Whereas a decade ago between 10 percent and 40 percent of people who had been caught or turned back did not try again, today 55 percent to 75 percent of people don’t make an effort to try again.

Smugglers fees have also jumped from what the authors said was “a few hundred dollars” in the 1980s to $4,000 today.


The report provides a statistical counterpoint to depictions of the border as a vast, leaky and lawless entry point for illegal immigrants.

“It represents a real contradiction in what the administration is saying about the border and what the facts are,” said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee U.S-Mexico Border Program. The immigrants rights advocacy group is opposed to the wall project.

“From our point of view this shows we don’t need additional enforcement measures, like building more wall infrastructure. That would be overkill.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment about the report’s findings Tuesday. In the past the agency has said that the wall would deter both illegal entries and other crimes, such as narcotics smuggling.


The report said there were marked declines over the past decade and more in statistics that measure illegal entries into the country. Apprehension by the Border Patrol fell to 408,000 in 2016 — the fourth-lowest total since 1972, and a 75 percent drop from 2000, when $1.6 million people were arrested.

The report also calculated that “got aways” — people who enter illegally, don’t turn back, and escape apprehension — have also dropped, from 615,000 a decade ago to 106.000 in 2016. The numbers of “got aways” comes from a variety of sources such as observations by agents, data collected by sensors and cameras, interviews with people who have been arrested and disclose others were with them.

The number of people estimated to successfully enter the country illegally has dropped, from an estimated 1.8 million in 2000, to just 170,000 in 2016.

But the report noted that 91 percent drop is based on a model developed for DHS by the Institute for Defense Analysis, and DHS is still working to “validate and refine” that model.


Twitter: @gregmoran


greg.moran@sduniontribune.com