The number of Chinese people coming across the southern boundary from Mexico has skyrocketed to the fastest-growing statistical of illegal immigrants in recent months, triggering significant problems among politicians in Washington.
Tens of thousands of Chinese refugees have been arrested by Border Patrol agents over the past year, far beyond the thousands to a couple of thousand seen in current past preceding the COVID-19 crisis, according to Customs and Border Protection information. In 2022, fewer than 2,000 Taiwanese persons were stopped at the southern limit.
In the first half of fiscal 2024 ( from October 2023 to March 2024 ), Border Patrol agents on the U. S. -Mexico borders caught 24,214 Chinese illegal immigrants who had come into the land by walking through unfenced places. The number is more than the record-high 24,048 Chinese newcomers arrested in all of 2023.
This year is on track to discover 48,000 Chinese workers arrested by the year’s close if the current price continues.
Federal lawmakers who work on national security matters are growing more concerned about the danger it poses to Americans does China, a region viewed as an attack of the United States, strive to incorporate spies or other bad actors in the immigrant community that has managed to escape China.
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX ), who represents a border district, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a congressional hearing last week about the surge.
“The increase in Chinese citizens that we see — the figures are astronomical, especially in California and some of those regions, ” Gonzales said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on April 16.
Of the 24,214 Chinese workers interdicted at the 2,000-mile southern borders over the past six decades, 95 % of detention occurred in Southern California’s San Diego area.
Mayorkas said he shared Gonzales’s problem and was looking at ways to find China to take its jailed people again. At present, China does not allow the U. S. to gain Foreign residents who have fled the country.
In February, House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-WI ) called for the social media app TikTok to be sold to a U. S. company or get banned because of how traffickers were using the application to help human smuggling from China. The House last month passed legislation to force the sale of TikTok, and the Senate is poised to do the same as quickly as Tuesday.
“ Under the Biden administration ’s plans, studies demonstrate that refugees receive step-by-step guidance from CCP-controlled TikTok on where to illegally cross into the United States, ” Gallagher, who was set to leave from Congress following his vote on the TikTok act Saturday, said at the moment.
Thus far, in 2024, more than 1 million illegal immigrants have been arrested across the southern border from more than 150 countries. Last year, more than 2 million illegal immigrants were apprehended.
