Campaign Context: What the data says about Sen. Cruz’s illegal immigration claims

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz is looking for reelection next year. On his podcast recently, Cruz once again criticized President Joe Biden on the topic of the border and said, “When Biden came into power, he inherited the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.”

Cruz has said this many times over the last few years. The wording he uses is “lowest rate of illegal immigration,” which is vague. There is no one metric that could measure his specific claim.

The data most related to Cruz’s claim is the number of apprehensions at the border, which seem to line up with what he is saying, for the most part.

According to a customs and border protection table chart, in Fiscal Year 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 405,000 apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol agents. Fiscal Year 2020 is the year Cruz has cited, and it was the last period before the start of the Biden administration. The last time there were fewer apprehensions that that was in 1972.

Cruz has attributed the numbers to the Trump Administration’s tough border policies.

But looking at the CBP chart again, the numbers in 2019, Trumps third year in office, actually spiked from previous years to about 860,000 apprehensions. There’s no denying the numbers spiked after the transition to the Biden Administration.

Furthermore, border apprehensions jumped from about 405,000 in FY 2020 to more than 1.7 million in FY 2021. In FY 2022, apprehensions rose past two million.

NBC News attributed much of that surge to growing instability in Central American countries, along with the easing of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions around the world and hope from migrants that the Biden Administration would be more than welcoming than the Trump White House.