Immigration: A closer look at asylum, crime and deportations ahead of Trump-Harris debate

PHOENIX - The matchup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump kicks into overdrive on Tuesday when the two candidates face off in Philadelphia in their first televised debate.

While the debate will likely cover many topics, immigration and border security are guaranteed to rise to the top of the list.

After several controversies in recent weeks, Trump has shifted back to the border as his main attack against Harris, whom he blames for security challenges at the southern border. He visited the Arizona-Mexico border last month, and his running mate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ariz., campaigned Wednesday in Mesa on immigration issues.

The debate will be a chance for Harris to articulate her positions on immigration and the border and to defend herself from Republican attacks. She supported a bipartisan border deal and accuses Trump of bashing the agreement for political gain in the election cycle.

These are the five key areas within immigration and border enforcement that may come up during the debate:

Migrant encounters dipped at the border

The number of migrants agents encountered crossing the southern border illegally has declined significantly in recent months. This comes on the heels of record numbers of crossings at the start of 2024, which Republicans have criticized on the campaign trail.

U.S Customs and Border Protection reported in July the fewest migrant encounters since February 2021 at the southern border. Officials recorded a total of 104,116, a decrease of more than 40% from the same month last year, according to the agency.

"In July, our border security measures enhanced our ability to deliver consequences for illegal entry – leading to the lowest number of encounters along the southwest border in more than three years,” Troy Miller, the agency’s interim chief, said in a written statement.

Data for encounters in Arizona demonstrated a downward trend from May to July. Arizona had 17,455 encounters in July compared with a high of 91,331 in December, according to CBP data. So far, agents have reported more than half a million encounters this year in Arizona.

The dip in arrests follows restrictions imposed on asylum by the Biden administration. That speeds up the ability for border officials to send migrants back to their home countries or Mexico.

Additionally, a crackdown on migration by the Mexican government that started in January has helped bring the number of encounters along the southern border down from a peak of 301,981 in December.

Asylum access at border remains restricted

At the start of June, President Joe Biden issued an executive order curbing access to asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border, restrictions that remain in place even though the number of migrant encounters has decreased.

The executive order authorized U.S. Customs and Border Protection to shut down the asylum process in between the ports of entry when the number of migrant encounters exceeded 2,500 over a seven-day period.

The restrictions do not apply to asylum processing at the legal border crossings. Customs and Border Protection issues 1,450 appointments daily for asylum seekers to make their claim at one of eight ports of entry, including the DeConcini port in Nogales.

The appointments are issued through the CBP One phone application. In August, the Biden administration allowed migrants to apply for an appointment from southern Mexico, instead of having to cross the country to the northern border with the U.S. or to central Mexico.

The Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin has been monitoring asylum access and processing at the southern border since June 2018. Its most recent report from August showed that wait times to get a CBP One appointment have gone up to eight or nine months in some Mexican border cities, since the app is the only guaranteed way to make an asylum claim at the border.

From January 2023 to July 2024, more than 765,000 asylum seekers scheduled an appointment through CBP One at the southern border, the center’s August report said. Most of these asylum seekers hail from Cuba, Haiti, Mexico and Venezuela.

Under the executive order, asylum restrictions will expire when the number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border reach less than 1,500 per day over a seven-day period.

The U.S. government also is denying access to asylum to migrants who attempt to cross the border in between the ports of entry under a “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule in place since May 2023. It bars access to asylum if someone tries to cross the border without a CBP One appointment or if they did not first apply for asylum at another country on the way to the U.S. The rule faces an ongoing challenge in federal court.

No link between migrants and higher crime rates

Republican leaders, including former president and current nominee Donald Trump, have made crimes committed by migrants living in the United States a key message in their election campaign strategy.

In Trump’s case, he has created political ads and frequently highlights specific cases involving migrants to describe most people coming into the country as criminals, despite little evidence to back that point. He has falsely claimed that other countries are emptying their jails and mental institutions and sent them to the border.

During his visit to the Arizona border on Aug. 22, Trump was joined by the families of crime victims who were reportedly killed by migrants.

There is no major evidence available to show that migrants are more likely to commit crimes than U.S. border residents, according to Alex Nowrasteh from the libertarian CATO Institute.

He pointed out that most U.S. states and the federal government don’t track crime by the immigration status of the person who committed it. But Nowrasteh highlighted Texas as an example where some information on this topic is available.

His review of homicide data in that state from 2013 to 2022 revealed that undocumented immigrants were 37 percent less likely to be convicted for murder than native-born residents. Meanwhile, legal immigrants were 63 percent less likely to be convicted than native-born residents.

“Those patterns are similar for all crimes in the state, but those are less reliable,” Nowrasteh said of his review. “Immigrants are coming to the U.S., and some of them are criminals, but they are bringing less crime than if they acted like native-born Americans.”

Overall crime rates in the United States have been decreasing since 2020, according to the federal government’s statistics. In Arizona, border communities like San Luis and Nogales are also among the safest in the state.

Backlog in immigration court approaches 4 million

The U.S. immigration court system is not an independent body, akin to the country’s judicial branch divisions. Instead, immigration judges are employees of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, under the direction of the U.S. attorney general.

The backlog of pending deportation cases before the U.S. immigration court system continues to break records year after year, despite numerous policy changes along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past decade.

As of July, there were 3.7 million pending deportation cases before immigration judges, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Four states, California, Florida, New York and Texas, account for about half of all cases in the backlog.

The largest increase has happened in the past year, when the backlog jumped from 2.7 million at the end of the 2023 fiscal year to the 3.7 million cases currently, an analysis of federal data by TRAC showed.

The backlog means that it could take several years for an immigration judge to adjudicate individual cases.

To help address the backlog, EOIR launched in May a “Recent Arrival” docket with the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize and expedite newer cases in some of the busiest immigration courts around the country.

The office also reduced the length of time it takes to hire immigration judges to six months, noting that it filled all 734 immigration judge positions for the past fiscal year. They’ve also digitized the process which has helped complete cases more quickly.

So far this fiscal year, judges completed nearly 757,000 cases. But they’ve received 1.6 million new cases during that same period.

An analysis from the New York-based Center for Migration Studies found that to clear the current backlog over the next 10 years, using historical averages of new and completed cases, would require hiring an additional 1,000 immigration judges.

To clear the backlog over five years would require hiring an additional 1,600 immigration judges, the center estimated.

Attempts in Congress to fund additional immigration judges have failed so far, most recently in a bipartisan border deal that would have added 100 judges. But the deal did not make it to the floor for a vote.

Most migrants deported do not have criminal records

Deportations have dramatically increased since the start of the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 142,000 immigrants, nearly double the number from the previous year.

Monthly figures from 2024 indicate that the agency is on track to deport more than 150,000 immigrants this year. Notably, most of these deportees have not been charged with a crime. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics reported the removal of 117,800 people without criminal records from October to April 2024. They make up about 76 percent of all deportations this fiscal year.

The increase in the number of deportations also indicates more removals are happening at the border, with an outsize share of the removals initially arrested by CBP officials, according to OHSS data.

Fewer migrants are being charged with a crime before deportation, a trend that, according to TRAC, has been declining for over a decade.

More deportations: Hundreds of Mexicans deported daily to Nogales after Biden's executive action

At the center of former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is a promise to carry out mass deportations. In April, Trump gave an interview with Time magazine, offering some details — though not concrete — about how he would implement the plan.

“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” Trump told the Times. “We have to have safety in our country. We have to have law and order in our country. And whichever gets us there, but I think the National Guard will do the job.”

The use of American military forces, such as the National Guard, at the border has historical precedent, but their deployment has always been in supporting roles for immigration agencies. Deployment of the National Guard to the southern border has been done by all four the last presidents: George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010, Donald Trump in 2018 and Joe Biden just this past year. However, a deployment of the National Guard or active-duty military to aid in deporting migrants within the interior of the country is an escalation that would likely meet legal challenges.

Trump said he would be willing to bypass a law that prohibits using U.S. troops against civilians.

“Well, these aren’t civilians,” Trump said. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Here's what happening at the border ahead of Trump vs. Harris debate