Illegal Southwest border crossings were down 40% last month, according to just released Customs and Border Protection numbers -- a sign that President Donald Trump's hardline rhetoric and policies on immigration may be having a deterrent effect.
Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly himself announced the month-to-month numbers, statistics that CBP usually quietly posts on its website without fanfare.
According to CBP data, the 40% drop in illegal Southwest border crossings from January to February is far outside normal seasonal trends. Typically, the January to February change is actually an increase of 10% to 20%.
The drop breaks a nearly 20-year trend, as CBP data going back to 2000 shows an uptick in apprehensions every February.
The number of apprehensions and inadmissible individuals presenting at the border was 18,762 people in February, down from 31,578 in January.
It will still take months to figure out if the decrease in apprehensions is an indication of a lasting Trump effect on immigration patterns. Numbers tend to decrease seasonally in the winter and increase into the spring months.
But the sharp downtick after an uptick at the end of the Obama administration could fit the narrative that it takes tough rhetoric on immigration -- backed up by policy -- to get word-of-mouth warnings to undocumented immigrants making the harrowing journey to the border.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/08/politics/border-crossings-huge-drop-trump-tough-talk/index.html
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday March 13 2017, @09:16PM
More specifically, Reagan's foreign policy staff, some of whom were the same people who helped Nixon win in 1968 by shutting down LBJ's attempt to negotiate an end the Vietnam War, convinced the Iranians that they'd sell weapons to them in exchange for not releasing the hostages until after the new president was inaugurated. This was a crime under the Logan Act, and the first illegal act of a whole host of illegal actions taken by the Reagan administration that became collectively known as "Iran-Contra".
This isn't my opinion, it's the opinion of the courts that looked at the matter.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.