House Speaker Johnson, Rep. Issa tour US-Mexico border in San Diego

SAN DIEGO — With immigration policies at the forefront of the presidential election season, Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana joined fellow Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California on a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego on Thursday, pressing for stronger tools to deter illegal crossings and noncitizen voting.

Their visit comes as migrant encounters along the southern border continue to plummet.

Over the past several weeks under President Joe Biden’s executive order restricting access to asylum, apprehensions by Border Patrol have decreased by 55 percent along the southern border, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

The San Diego sector, the busiest along the border last month, averaged 460 encounters per day last week, down 62 percent from the beginning of June, just before the new restrictions took place, the agency said Thursday.

Johnson was critical of the current administration’s border policies, calling Biden’s executive order “a little too late” and “not solving the problem.”

Under the executive action, arriving undocumented immigrants are screened by an asylum officer only if they specifically state, without being prompted, that they fear being returned to their homeland. They will also be screened under a higher standard. Some groups of migrants are exempted from the policy, including unaccompanied children and those with CBP One appointments.

The asylum restrictions are enacted when the average number of undocumented-migrant encounters at the southern border reaches 2,500 a day in a given week, and they must drop to a weekly average of 1,500 per day to be lifted. The current average sits at about 1,800 per day, according to DHS.

“The president’s executive order last month has been touted as a success because the number of encounters by the Border Patrol have decreased, and that’s right, fewer people are being encountered by the Border Patrol between ports of entry,” said John Anfinsen, executive vice-president of the National Border Patrol Council, who joined the congress members Thursday. “But that’s not the whole story.”

Anfinsen said that asylum seekers are now primarily showing up at ports of entry and airports. “So essentially the only thing that changed since the executive order went into effect is that the processing is happening in a different place,” he said.

According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, officers at ports of entry across the southwest border processed nearly 47,000 undocumented immigrants in June. The vast majority of those encounters — 89 percent — were people arriving for scheduled appointments to be screened for asylum eligibility through the CBP One app, according to CBP.

The congress members spoke to the media in an area near the San Ysidro Port of Entry known as Whiskey 8, where volunteers have been providing humanitarian aid to migrants, many of them asylum seekers, arriving at the border.

Nearby, a dozen migrants from Ecuador, Mexico and Jamaica waited between the border fences to be picked up by Border Patrol and processed. Among them was Raúl Cedeño from Ecuador, who said he left his country to escape violence and seek better opportunities.

“It’s a blessing to be here on U.S. soil, safe, after all this journey,” he said.

Cedeño said he had heard about the policy limiting asylum but still decided to take the journey, worried about his future.

Adriana Jasso, program coordinator with the American Friends and Services Committee, who has been at the site nearly daily since September, said that in her conversations with migrants, she has noticed that many of them are encouraged to make the trip to the border after hearing about cases of people who have made it, rather than because of any developments during the election season.

Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, conducted his own border tour last week and insisted Biden’s executive action was working.

“Apprehensions are down, crossings are down, street releases have basically stopped,” Levin, who represents a swath of coastal northern San Diego County and Orange County, told the Union-Tribune in an interview.

Levin visited the Border Patrol’s Otay Mesa processing facility and said he was encouraged by what he described as an “orderly” environment that was clean and not overcrowded.

The reduced number of people at Otay Mesa has created a ripple effect, he said, enabling CBP staff to reopen the San Clemente and Murrieta checkpoints, which have been closed for some time.

Levin continued to call for support for a bill, passed by the House in April, focusing on beefing up tools to combat maritime smuggling. The measure would extend U.S. customs waters from 12 to 24 nautical miles to allow a quicker interdiction of the vessels approaching the U.S. coast. It now awaits action in the Senate.

There were roughly 450 suspected human smuggling boat landings in San Diego County so far this year, Levin said.

Johnson on Thursday also touted pending legislation: the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which recently passed the House. The bill seeks to require individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship and identity to vote in a federal election.

Noncitizen voting, already illegal in federal elections, appears to be rare. However, some states have reported issues. Ohio recently reported finding 137 suspected noncitizen voters on rolls, while a 2022 audit by Georgia’s secretary of state found more than 1,600 suspected noncitizens had tried to register to vote over the past 25 years but were thwarted by election officials.

A study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast across 42 jurisdictions — or 0.0001 percent. Those 30 occurred in only two of the jurisdictions and were referred by election officials to authorities for further investigation or prosecution, according to the report.

Staff writer Kristina Davis contributed to this report.