President Joe Biden’s administration sought to end the Title 42 restrictions, but several Republican-led states took the White House to court to keep them in place. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to maintain Title 42 temporarily by ordering a stay on a lower court’s ruling to vacate the policy.

Now, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about Title 42 in its February 2023 session before making a final decision. Meanwhile, at the southern border, large numbers of migrants are crossing into the U.S.—and not all those without documentation are apprehended.

The Claim

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) tweeted on December 27: “Biden’s open-border policy has turned a humanitarian crisis into a national security crisis: Border Patrol counts more than 600,000 got-aways this year alone.”

The tweet was at the time of writing viewed by more than 234,000 people and generated more than 12,000 engagements.

The Facts

Official data for “got-aways” in the 2022 fiscal year is yet to be released by the Department for Homeland Security (DHS), but Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed to Newsweek the accuracy of the figure in Kennedy’s tweet. The CBP did not provide further comment.

A Fox News report in early October, which cited an unnamed source from the CBP, put the number at 599,000 for the 2022 fiscal year. A subsequent Fox News report on December 1 citing data it had seen said there were over 73,000 got-aways observed at the southern border in November alone.

A letter from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, dated October 19, 2022, noted “599,000 known ‘gotaways’” for the 2022 fiscal year, and cited a tweet by Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, who first reported the number.

In December, a news release from the office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, also stated that “in fiscal year 2022 there were nearly 600,000 gotaways” but did not cite a specific source for the figure.

The DHS Border Security Metrics Report is produced annually and contains the official estimate for “got-aways” for the previous fiscal year.

The most recent published data is its 2021 Border Security Metrics Report, produced in April 2022 and released in June, which covers the fiscal year from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2020.

Mayorkas told a congressional hearing on April 28, 2022, that there were 389,155 got-aways in the following 2021 fiscal year. But the DHS report for this period is not yet available.

The publication schedule for previous years on the DHS website suggests the next report will be published at some time during spring 2023, and will cover October 1, 2020, to September 30, 2021. The 2022 data may not be published until 2024 unless the DHS decides or is obliged to do so sooner.

By its nature, capturing accurate got-aways data is difficult.

“Got aways are defined as subjects at the Southwest Border who, after making an unlawful entry, are not turned back or apprehended, and are no longer being actively pursued by USBP agents,” states the DHS Border Security Metrics Report: 2021.

“Since 2014, USBP has implemented a standard, Southwest Border-wide methodology for determining when to report a subject as a got away.

“Some subjects are observed directly as evading apprehension or turning back; others are acknowledged as got aways or turn backs after agents follow evidence that indicate entries have occurred such as foot sign (i.e., tracks), sensor activations, interviews with apprehended subjects, camera views, and communication between and among stations and sectors.

“The scope of these data includes all areas of the Southwest Border at or below the northernmost law enforcement posture (typically a USBP checkpoint) within a given area of responsibility, and those individuals apprehended less than 30 days after entering the United States.”

These recordings of got-aways are an “observational estimate… based on direct and indirect observations” and the “primary methodological limitation of got aways is that the estimate aggregates potentially subjective observations from thousands of individual agents.”

The DHS noted its efforts to refine and improve the methodology for observing got-aways to improve the credibility of its data.

Per the DHS report, there were 136,808 recorded got-aways nationwide in the 2020 fiscal year, of which 135,593 were at the Southwest Border (there were 926 at the Coastal Border and 289 at the Northern Border).

In recent history, estimated got-aways peaked at 615,000 in 2006, the earliest year such data is available, per the most recent DHS report.

The Ruling

True.

We rate the 600,000 claim as true. The CBP confirmed its accuracy to Newsweek. However, the DHS has not at the time of writing published its official got aways statistics for the 2022 fiscal year.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK