How a Stephen Miller Fox News Appearance Launched the “Border Crisis”

Is there a crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border? It depends on your definition of crisis.

The monthly number of individuals being apprehended there for unauthorized crossings is higher than it was two years ago, pre-coronavirus, and given seasonal trends this summer’s totals might end up being higher than those observed at any point during Donald Trump’s term. But on an absolute basis there are still fewer crossings being documented than there were during the summer of 2019, and many fewer than were routinely recorded during the first decade of the 21st century. Joe Biden has terminated a number of Trump administration policies that were designed to make the process of applying for legal asylum in the U.S. more difficult, but hasn’t lifted the “Title 42” emergency declaration under which many of the individuals who are apprehended are expelled from the country on COVID-19 grounds before they can begin that process. You could also argue that a state of affairs in which any number of people are trying to make their way through dangerous terrain into a system that will not admit all of them, resulting in frequent deaths and the use of permanent, prison-like holding facilities, is a crisis by definition. But that’s been the status quo in the Southwest for a long time.