Visualized: 2022 U.S. Customs and Border Protection Statistics

Recently the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency released up to date 2022 statistics. We visualized the statistics below and compared the most recent years (2021 and 2022) with previous years (2017, 2018 and 2019) – we omitted 2020 due to the pandemic and annualized 2022 in order to make the comparison relative.

We found that the total number of enforcement actions increased by 235% – that is, the same number of agents are doing roughly two and half times the work. We found that criminal encounters increased 114% – or doubled. In addition we found that terror watchlist encounters increased by 16 times. This is a fairly large increase, but previous numbers were small – an average of 6 per year. – with 2022 containing 78 for the first 3/4’s of the year or 104 annualized. All of the increase and then some came from the Southern Border. Terror watchlist encounters from the Northern border decreased. Also notable, the portion of all encounters with terror watchlist individuals, while low (0.0036%) tripled.