WASHINGTON—The Heritage Foundation’s homeland security team responded Friday to the release of new CBP apprehension numbers for September, which totaled more than 192,000 and marked the fifth straight month above 180,000 apprehensions. These numbers make one thing clear: The Biden border crisis continues with no end in sight.

Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary and Heritage visiting fellow: “Nine months after President Joe Biden took office, his administration’s border security strategy has failed. Instead of upholding the rule of law, the administration has chosen to open the border by eliminating effective, humane border security policies that were working, replace those policies with no alternative, and then process the subsequent historic flows of illegal aliens into the United States as quickly as possible. And make no mistake, contrary to the Biden administration’s spin, the vast majority of those apprehended at the southern border are being released into our communities, as CBP’s own publicly available numbers show. The men and women of CBP deserve so much better than this. They deserve leaders who will help them do their jobs, enforce the rule of law, and give them the tools they need. The Biden administration has done the opposite at every turn, and we’re all paying the price for it.”

Mark Morgan, former acting CBP commissioner and Heritage visiting fellow: “No doubt the Biden administration will try to spin these still sky-high numbers as some sort of win, but don’t be fooled. These 192,000 apprehensions are still more than 40,000 higher than the highest monthly total during the 2019 crisis, a crisis that then-President Trump quickly and successfully moved to solve. The Biden administration knowingly created a crisis because it sees a political benefit in mass illegal immigration, and thus it has no interest in slowing the historic surge to our border. More importantly, however, official apprehensions dropped slightly while the number of got-aways—those who evade apprehension and enter the country after escaping law enforcement—increased from August. The numbers remain at unsustainable highs, and now more illegal aliens are crossing the border without even being apprehended, as more and more Border Patrol agents are pulled off the line to process migrants through overcrowded CBP facilities and release them into the United States. This cannot continue.”

Lora Ries, former acting DHS deputy chief of staff and Heritage senior research fellow: “The Biden administration’s open-borders agenda is destructive, inhumane, and unsustainable. It’s become abundantly clear that the Biden administration sees these historic numbers as a feature, not a bug, and is content to continue processing tens of thousands of illegal aliens into the country, all in pursuit of new voters added to the rolls if Democrats ram through a massive amnesty. The American people are fed up with this. They are tired of seeing the Biden administration make a mockery of laws and deny the very crisis they created. It’s time for concerned citizens across the country to put real, unmistakable pressure on their elected representatives to get this crisis under control and restore order on our border. We have the power to force change, if only we will use it.”