The number of Chinese citizens coming across the southern border from Mexico has skyrocketed to the fastest-growing demographic of illegal immigrants in recent months, triggering serious concerns among lawmakers in Washington.
Tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants have been arrested by Border Patrol agents over the past year, far beyond the hundreds to a couple of thousand seen in recent history preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Customs and Border Protection data. In 2022, fewer than 2,000 Chinese people were stopped at the southern boundary.
In the first half of fiscal 2024 (from October 2023 to March 2024), Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border caught 24,214 Chinese illegal immigrants who had come into the country by walking through unfenced areas. The figure is more than the record-high 24,048 Chinese immigrants arrested in all of 2023.
This year is on track to see 48,000 Chinese migrants arrested by the year’s end if the current rate continues.
Federal lawmakers who work on national security matters are growing more worried about the threat it poses to Americans should China, a country viewed as an adversary of the United States, try to embed spies or other bad actors in the migrant population 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 nationals that we see — the numbers are astronomical, especially in California and some of those areas,” Gonzales said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on April 16.
Of the 24,214 Chinese migrants interdicted at the 2,000-mile southern border over the past six months, 95% of arrests occurred in Southern California’s San Diego region.
Mayorkas said he shared Gonzales’s concern and was looking at ways to get China to accept its deported citizens back. At present, China will not allow the U.S. to return Chinese citizens 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 be banned because of how smugglers were using the app to facilitate human smuggling from China. The House last week passed legislation to force the sale of TikTok, and the Senate is poised to do the same as soon as Tuesday.
“Under the Biden administration’s policies, reports demonstrate that migrants receive step-by-step instructions from CCP-controlled TikTok on where to illegally cross into the United States,” Gallagher, who was set to retire from Congress following his vote on the TikTok bill Saturday, said at the time.
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.
