Border Arrests Plunge 61% in Last Five Years!

By Elizabeth Llorente

Published July 28, 2011

Border patrol agent Jeff Mielke secures plastic handcuffs on a group of undocumented immigrants caught in the Otay Mesa Mountain Range, just east of San Diego.

Arrests of people trying to cross the U.S. borders illegally have plunged 61 percent in the last five years, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Border patrol agents made nearly 1.2 million arrests along U.S. borders in 2005; in 2010, they made 463,000 arrests, the lowest level since 1972, shows federal data released Thursday.

The arrests cover all the U.S. borders – Southwest, Northern and coastal . The vast majority of the arrests, 97 percent, occurred on the Southwest border in 2010, continuing the pattern of previous years.
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The Homeland Security report speculated that the drop in the number of arrests over the five year period stemmed from U.S. economic conditions – which have weakened the pull of the jobs magnet – as well as stricter border enforcement. The number of agents patrolling the border has more than doubled over the last six years.

Proponents of tighter immigration enforcement cast doubt on the data, and said that illegal border crossings remain a critical problem.

Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which favors strict immigration policies, says lower rates of arrests don’t necessarily mean that illegal immigration is decreasing.

“There is the economic reality of the change in [U.S.] economic conditions,â€