New border numbers show DC doesn’t care to do the math (because they don’t care)

The other day, my 10-year-old said, “I’m terrible at math!” So my wife and I talked to her about how negative self-talk could lead to her never being good at math.

I told her that saying that same thing when I was younger helped make me bad at math.

Upon reflection, I realized that saying I’m currently bad at math could be setting a bad example of continuing negative self-talk. What I should’ve said was something like this: “If you keep telling yourself that you’re bad at math, you could end up being as bad as Washington, D.C., is at math. And they’re terrible.” 

Our federal government is the perfect example of an inability to do math because when it comes to border numbers, it appears that nobody back in Washington can even count.

While front-line border enforcement personnel are seeing mind-numbing numbers of migrants right now, the lack of a reaction of the part of their D.C. bosses shows me: (A) they are truly bad at math; (B) they don’t own calculators; or (C), they don’t care about the migrants or the border communities those masses affect — the border situation is simply the price that needs to be paid for their political talking points. (I choose “C” because I’m cynical.)

August’s numbers show a worsening crisis — bad enough that last year’s record numbers have already been surpassed — and there’s still a month to go in this fiscal year. 

The worst spot in the whole country, by the way, is Arizona.

In August, 232,972 migrants (about as many people as live in Scottsdale) were encountered on the entire Southwest border by Border Patrol agents and other Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. That’s about 100,000 more than July — and brings this year’s (incomplete) total to 2.86 million border encounters.

You’d think that President Biden … or Congress … or anybody in Washington could do just enough math to figure out we need more Border Patrol agents, more immigration judges and maybe more legal options to enter the country so that our border stops bulging. 

For the second month in a row, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector was the number one in the U.S. for sheer numbers. Agents there had almost 49,000 migrant encounters in August — a number that was up by almost 10,000 from July. 

3,075 of those encounters were with “unaccompanied minors.” 

Bad enough but when we add up all of CBP’s Arizona numbers for August and calculate in the high numbers seen on thermometers during that month, we arrive at some pretty scary numbers: Almost 3,800 unaccompanied minors were encountered in our state in August — the fourth hottest month in Arizona’s history.

Which makes me wonder… how many future encounters will the Border Patrol have with the skeletons of dead children? 

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