Title 42 is over. What does that mean?

As immigration becomes the center of political debate once again, we brought in someone to arm you with the facts and stats.

Title 42 ended last night. 

But like most people, our understanding of what that actually means is pretty basic: Title 42 is an old health-related immigration restriction policy that former President Donald Trump invoked during the pandemic to stop asylum seekers from being able to freely cross the U.S.-Mexico border to apply for asylum here. Now that it’s going away, a lot more people will suddenly start crossing the border. 

But we don’t know how to quantify the impact of the end of that policy, grasp the magnitude of the problem, or get a good sense of what it actually means for border communities, asylum seekers or average Arizonans. 

So we invited our friend Curt Prendergast back to use his many years of experience reporting on the border and federal courts in Tucson, which deals with immigration and other border cases, to give us some resources to arm ourselves with information about the impact of the end of Title 42 and immigration policy at large. 

The national political conversation, especially in Arizona, is about to re-center on immigration, a topic that people feel strongly about but rarely have a deep understanding of. 

The border is a complicated region, but too often our national debate on the topic is boiled down to a set of numbers that rise and fall. I can see it happening again with the end of Title 42. 

Politicians (and your angry out-of-state friends) are about to throw an endless barrage of numbers at you as they talk about the border. To understand those numbers, the first place you need to go is the CBP Newsroom Stats and Summaries page, which includes all the links we're going to talk about here.

It’s a treasure trove of data that until a few years ago would have required a public records request to obtain, which likely would take weeks or months to fulfill, if you knew what to ask for. 

But these days, you can download massive datasets of detailed border statistics at CBP's Public Data Portal. As a former border reporter, it blows me away that this data is now available so easily. (The U.S. Customs and Border Protection data team deserves a shoutout for the vast improvements they’ve made in recent years.)

These numbers form the backbone of the national political conversation about the border. If you spent an hour bouncing around this website, you would have a deeper understanding of the border debate than basically anybody you know.

The CBP stats page allows you to see how many times Border Patrol agents encountered migrants or asylum seekers and which countries they came from; how much fentanyl (or any of the other major drugs) was seized; how much money was seized; how many weapons and ammunition were seized; the list goes on and on. You can even track agricultural inspections.

You can use the drop-down menus to see data for specific areas of the border, such as the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector, or to sort by monthly totals, annual totals, or whether the items seized were inbound or outbound, and other measures. 

But the border isn’t just about illegal crossings and contraband. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people cross the border legally, fueling the economies and culture on both sides of the wall. 

Wanna know many times people legally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border since October? Nearly 93 million times, including about 12 million just driving or walking across Arizona's border with Mexico. Most of that comes from people living in the borderlands who cross the border to go to work, school, shop, or see family on the other side. In other words, this is a kind of X-ray image of day-to-day life on the border.

But you rarely hear that number. Instead, the attention goes to these numbers: 1.2 million encounters with migrants or asylum seekers who crossed without permission, including 270,000 in Arizona.

Take U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise’s recent tweet that gained traction among a handful of Arizona politicos claiming that “5 million people have illegally crossed the border since Biden became President.”

Is that a real number or bullshit? Scalise didn't give a source for that number, so how can you tell?

We can use CBP's Nationwide Encounters page to see where that 5 million number came from.

CBP reported about 1.2 million encounters so far this fiscal year, plus about 2.4 million in fiscal 2022 and 1.4 million for the months in fiscal 2021 after Biden took office. You end up with about 5 million encounters since Biden took office. Scalise's number checks out. 

But this is where they get ya. After seeing Scalise's statement, you might be tempted to think 5 million more migrants live in the United States than when Biden took office. 

But if you click the "Title 42" option in the "Title of Authority" you'll see about 2.3 million encounters were processed under Title 42, which means they were immediately sent back across the border. That leaves about 2.7 million crossings, which is still a lot, but only about half of Scalise's 5 million.

It also leaves out a lot of nuance about where these people are coming through the 2,000-mile-long border. 

Let’s look at the March statistics, the most recent available. Going west to east along the Border Patrol’s sectors, the agency reported about 23,000 encounters in San Diego; 4,500 in El Centro; 13,000 in Yuma; 34,000 in Tucson; 39,500 in El Paso; 1,200 in Big Bend; 24,000 in Del Rio; 5,000 in Laredo; and 18,000 in the Rio Grande Valley. You see how much it varies for each part of the border?

It would vary even more if you looked at the use of Title 42 in each of the Border Patrol’s sectors. But I’ve already thrown enough numbers at you.

As you can see, statistics can give you some insight into what’s happening at the border. But those numbers can't tell you the human stories behind families leaving their homes or the history of each country that shaped their situation. 

For that, look to those that live along and truly understand both sides of the border region. Small papers that dot the communities along the border can be hit or miss, but the Nogales International, the Arizona Daily Star and the El Paso Times do a great job of providing a local context to one of the biggest stories in the nation. Larger newspapers like the Republic, Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News often have the resources that the little ones don’t to follow and investigate big border stores. Here are a few reporters I think do a particularly good job: Rafael Carranza, Angela Kocherga, Lauren Villagran, Alfredo Corchado, Hamed Aleaziz and columnist Jean Guerrero. 

If you want a policy perspective, I’d recommend the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group that seeks out what it calls “sensible, well thought-out immigration and integration policies.”

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Curt Prendergast covered the border for the Arizona Daily Star and the Nogales International. You can reach him at prendergastcurt@gmail.com