The authorities did not do the "best with the circumstances they were dealt". They did not have to send people without charge to one of the world's worst penal institutions. They did not have to slander them online with unproven allegations. They chose to do it, and then gloated.
Well you see, there was (is) a
refugee crisis from Venezuela outwards, during which the good will of other nations accepting refugees was exploited to spread
Tren de Aragua across the hemisphere, developing a
presence in the US, as well as performing
political assassinations in other nations allegedly on behalf of the Maduro regime that was
rejecting deportees at specifically the time that these Venezuelans were sent to CECOT, which is why they weren't just repatriated. Yes, they did not have to, but rather chose to reject refugee claims based on very broad standards that one would accurately describe as an overabundance of caution in the face of a real international threat.
I mean, how can you argue with this logic?
There's supposed to be logic there?
You're welcome to look around the site yourself, although I appreciate government data does not always come in the most user-friendly forms. You can also look up:
https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters . And again, the data findable here clearly demonstrates a marked increase in attempts to enter the USA from April 2020 onwards.
At that site, I click the link for data from 2019-2022, download the spreadsheet, sum up the numbers, and get the following:
2019: 977,509
2020: 458,088
2021: 1,734,686
2022: 2,378,944
If I follow links around to older data, I see years before 2019 hovering around that 400k-500k range. 2019 was, to that point, anomalously high, and 2020 went back down, and then 2021 really spiked upwards.
Breaking down 2020 by month:
January: 36,585
February: 36,687
March: 34,460
April: 17,106
May: 23,237
June: 33,049
July: 40,929
August: 50,014
September: 57,674
October: 45,139
November: 42,643
December: 40,565
January ('21): 78,414
February ('21): 101,099
Looking at that, there is a certain truth to the claim that there was an increase starting in April, but not because it was trending higher than previous years, but because March into April of 2020 was the primary Covid-19 lockdown period, and encounters were exceptionally low. There was an increase into the summer followed by an almost equal decrease approaching winter, presumedly a seasonal trend, but a consistent period over 3-4 months where the rate of encounters dropped each month. Then in January, the rate spiked dramatically.