According to Customs and Border Protection records, we’ve seen a 97 percent drop in the number of known gotaways—illegal aliens who successfully crossed into the United States—since the peak of the Biden border crisis back in 2023.
According to reporting from Breitbart News, peak numbers reached as high as 2,000 per day, but now appear to have fallen to oftentimes fewer than 50 per day across both the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders.
Breitbart’s Bob Price says oftentimes these known gotaways consisted of illegal aliens who waited until Border Patrol personnel and resources were tied up processing groups of hundreds of aliens who crossed in places like Eagle Pass. They were then smuggled by cartels—often along with weapons and drugs—into the United States.
Price went on to say that these gotaways were one of the biggest drivers of the overall border crisis, explaining: “Gotaways were a significant number—we’re talking about hundreds of thousands per year—on top of the more than 2 million a year that were apprehended.”
On top of being smuggled in with drugs and weapons, Price says many of these gotaways were among the “worst of the worst” criminal and terrorist illegal aliens. “These are people that are paying $25,000 to get smuggled into the United States. People from Middle Eastern countries, China, Venezuela. These are people who were paying high dollars.”
He says oftentimes these aliens would be more likely to be in those groups because they knew they’d be sent back immediately due to their criminal history or connections to terror.
Thankfully, with numbers so low across the nation, these known gotaways are much easier to track down, process, and deport—which in turn discourages more illegal immigration.