PHOENIX — Every Arizona governor since Janet Napolitano in the early 2000s has had a beef with the White House over the border.
Gov. Doug Ducey is the latest.
“The system is broken,” Ducey said Friday at a news conference in Douglas, a border community in southeastern Arizona. “Joe Biden has broken our border.”
According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the long-term trend over the last 20-plus years shows a sharp plunge in Southwest border crossings.
Ducey's last public visit to the border was last summer. He signed a section of President Donald Trump's new wall near Yuma, with the then-president by his side.
Trump endured his own border surges. A zero-tolerance policy that separated migrant children from their parents grew out of a 2018 spike.
Border apprehensions in 2019 hit their highest level in 12 years.
In June of 2014, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer was in Nogales touring hastily set up facilities to care for some of the thousands of children who had crossed the border on their own.
"Dang it, the federal government has a job to do,” she said of Democratic President Barack Obama’s Administration. “Unfortunately in Arizona I got sued by the federal government to do their job…and lost."
Brewer was alluding to the SB 1070 case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2006, Democrat Napolitano got into a showdown with GOP President George W. Bush over her demand that he pay for Napolitano’s posting of National Guard troops at the border.
The long-term trend of Southwest border crossings shows a sharp decline over the last two decades, despite Congress' persistent failure to reform the nation's immigration laws.
Border apprehensions peaked at more than 1.6 million in 2000. The most recent low of about 300,000 apprehensions came during Trump's first year in office, in 2017.
Now the Biden Administration is dealing with its own surge.
Southwest border apprehensions soared to 100,000 last month alone. For the first five months of the fiscal year, apprehensions are near the total for all of last year.
It comes after the Biden Administration relaxed Trump policies on accepting asylum seekers and unaccompanied children.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has warned that border apprehensions could hit levels last seen 20 years ago.
Here in Arizona, the Border Patrol's Tucson sector has posted a 206% increase in apprehensions over the first five months of the fiscal year versus a year ago. In the Yuma sector, apprehensions have soared by 324%.