More than 1.7 million migrant “gotaways” have illegally sneaked over the southern border without being apprehended during the Biden administration, according to newly revealed Border Patrol data.
The huge number of gotaways — defined as those who have been spotted by agents or via video cameras but not caught — is higher than the 1.4 million recorded in the entire decade from 2010 to 2020, according to the shocking statistics, obtained by Fox News.
The number of gotaways more than doubleed in the Border Patrol financial year 2021, which runs from Oct 1 to September 30, when 387,398 gotaways were counted, compared to 136,808 in 2020.
However that number was quickly dwarfed and almost doubled again to 606,131 in the 2022 financial year.
The in 2023 a new record was set with an eye-watering 670,674 migrants known to have crossed the border illegally without being apprehended accoding to the figures, obtained by FOX through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Since the start of the 2024 financial year in October, there have been over 175,000 gotaways and 1.3 million migrants apprehended by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), sources told Fox News.
The troubling increase in unencountered new arrivals contradicts Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s previous claim Biden had “done more than anybody” to secure the border.
“That [encountered] number is a large number, but what’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known gotaways,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens told CBS News in March, referring to the 2024 count at that time.
“If a person is willing to put themselves into harm’s way crossing through very remote, very dangerous conditions to evade capture, you have to ask yourself why. What makes them willing to take that risk?” Owens previously told a House Committee last year.
“That’s of concern to me. What’s also of concern to me is I don’t know who that individual is. I don’t know where they came from..
“I don’t know what their intention is. I don’t know what they brought with them. That unknown represents a risk, a threat. It’s of great concern to anybody that wears this uniform,” he added.
Part of the increased count of gotaways is due to there being more cameras and monitoring of the border areas in order to spot people, Owens pointed out.
“We have gotten more detection capability, we have…more on the way, we’ve got the additional processing coordinators, we are in a better situation than we were in years past,” Owens said in the March interivew.
The staggering gotaway data emerged a day after The Post broke the story that Biden was planning an executive action which would allow him to shut down the US-Mexico border once the number of migrant crossings hit 4,000 per day.
The terms of the order would match a provision in the bipartisan bill that failed to pass the Senate in February, which gave the president authority to expel migrants when daily crossings hit the same number.
The border has long been seeing more than 4,000 migrants crossing per day, with a daily average of 6,000 recorded daily in April, according to the CBP.
If 4,000 people apprehended at the border are allowed into the country, that is still up to 1.4 million people per year. A further 522,000 are also legally allowed into the US through the CBP One parole program.
Those numbers do not include the additional gotaways.
“Joe Biden’s failed Far Left open border policies have turned every community into a border community, jeopardized our national security, and destroyed countless American lives,” the House GOP conference said in a scathing press release Thursday.
“House Republicans know that border security is national security, and we will continue to fight to secure our borders by reimplementing President Trump’s successful policies,” they insisted.
