CBP Source Says Known Border 'Got-Aways' Fell Below 40 a Day in September, Down 98.5% From 2023 Peak

A source inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection told Breitbart Texas that the agency's running average for known got-aways nationwide fell below 40 per day during the first two weeks of September. That's a 98.5 percent drop from the peak of the Biden-era border crisis, when daily got-away counts topped 2,000.

Breitbart reported the agency recorded fewer than 550 known got-aways over that 14-day stretch. For comparison, a Breitbart Texas report from April 2023 found more than 400,000 illegal aliens evaded apprehension in just the first six months of fiscal year 2023, a daily average above 2,200.

A got-away, in CBP's own terminology, is someone agents or surveillance systems confirm crossed illegally but did not catch. The count comes from agents on patrol, stationary game cameras, aircraft, sign-cutting, and third-party reports. It is, by definition, a partial number. CBP cannot count crossings nobody sees, sees but misidentifies, or that leave no trace. A drop in known got-aways could mean fewer people are crossing, or it could partly reflect changes in patrol coverage, detection technology, or where agents are looking. The source material doesn't rule either explanation in or out.

Breitbart Texas published the original account based on its CBP source. The site truth4freedom.wordpress.com ran a verbatim reprint crediting Breitbart as the origin. 100% Fed Up's write-up cites the same Breitbart Texas report as its source for the same figures. That's one original claim from one anonymous agency contact, carried three times, not three independent confirmations.

What local officials are seeing

Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose Texas county sits along a stretch that saw heavy smuggling traffic during the Biden years, told Breitbart Texas his deputies have handled only two smuggling cases on local roads since January. At the height of the crisis, his office regularly dealt with high-speed pursuits, including a December 2022 rollover crash near Brackettville that killed four illegal aliens who were ejected from the vehicle.

In Eagle Pass, Texas, once the epicenter of the 2023 crisis, Assistant Police Chief Beto Garza told Breitbart that his officers now encounter illegal border crossers only occasionally, a sharp change from the overwhelming volume the city faced three years ago. Officers there still support Texas Governor Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star.

How the administration is framing it

CBP posted a video Friday, September 18, captioned "Walls Work," tying the numbers to physical barrier construction. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is quoted crediting existing presidential authority rather than new legislation: "Congress never had to act. We knew that the nation's laws were there, and the president had the authority to do it." DHS's own post marked the milestone as "16 straight months" of reduced crossings under President Trump.

Those two framings aren't identical. One credits infrastructure, the other credits enforcement policy and executive authority. The sourcing here doesn't establish which factor, or what combination, is actually driving the number down. A reasonable skeptic would note that "got-aways" is an estimate built on what agents happen to detect, and an administration eager to show results has an obvious incentive to publicize a favorable internal metric rather than release the full underlying data for independent audit.

None of that means the reported decline is fabricated. Anecdotal accounts from Sheriff Coe and Assistant Chief Garza, both speaking from direct local experience rather than national statistics, point in the same direction. But the specific 98.5 percent figure, the sub-40-per-day average, and the 550-over-14-days count all trace to one CBP source speaking anonymously to one outlet.

CBP has not publicly released got-away data for fiscal year 2026 comparable to the fiscal year 2023 figures Breitbart cited from its April 2023 reporting. Whether the agency publishes an official, auditable version of these numbers, rather than leaving them to anonymous sourcing, remains an open question.