It’s Tuesday, the traditional day for elections and for our pause-and-consider newsletter on politics and policy. We think of it as a mini-magazine in your inbox.

THE LATEST ON IMMIGRATION AND THE BORDER
By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
 
As we have reported, immigration and the border will likely be a top election issue this year — a drumbeat of concern for Republicans especially.  
 
This week, Senate Democrats are making a strategic move to remind voters that Republicans blocked a bipartisan compromise on immigration. They plan to force a symbolic vote Thursday on that compromise, purposefully setting it up to fail to show that more Republicans than Democrats oppose an attempt at a border solution.
 
For their part, House Republican leaders said the measure was “dead on arrival,” if the measure makes it to the lower chamber. (It’s not expected to.)
 
It made us think this was a good time to look at the latest numbers surrounding border and immigration policy.
 
The numbers
 
U.S. Customs and Border Protection released new numbers, last week, reflecting what happened in April. 
 
On the southwest border:

• The topline. CBP encountered fewer people trying to enter illegally between ports of entry. In April, the figure was nearly 128,900. That is a dip of more than 6 percent from March and a significant drop of 30 percent from April of last year. 
• That is the second-lowest monthly figure for encounters the U.S. has seen since March 2021, when numbers started spiking.
• That said, encounters are still historically high. This number is still much higher than it was between fiscal years 2009 and 2019, aka the pre-pandemic decade before Biden.
• One more piece of context you don’t see often. These current levels are closer to figures seen repeatedly in the Clinton and Reagan administrations. That is to say, this has been a chronic problem in past decades, but was quelled around the time of the 2008 recession and for the next 10 years. (Check out Figure 1 in this report from the Congressional Research Service a few years ago.)

• Data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows immigration courts are struggling to handle the large increase of asylum seekers encountered in the past few years.
• New cases. Since October, immigration courts have received 1.3 million new cases, but have completed just 517,000 in that time.
• The average wait time for cases in the system is now 530 days, a continued decline from more than 900 days in fiscal year 2021.
• Chances of staying in the United States. In the past decade, two-thirds of all asylum seekers were allowed to remain in the United States for asylum or another form of relief from deportation, according to a new analysis by Syracuse University. 

• In the meantime, the Biden administration has continued proposing new rules to bar entry to more migrants, especially some applying for asylum.
• The latest proposal would give officials a chance to turn away more asylum seekers at an earlier point in the process, when an asylum officer asks if they meet the threshold for “credible fear.” CBS News reported that officials see this as largely affecting those who are suspected of posing a threat to the U.S. —  a “limited” population, they said. This proposal is going through the finalization process now. 

There is no effort at a new immigration compromise in Congress and indeed, major legislation rarely passes this late in a presidential year, as lawmakers are already preparing to campaign and working across party lines becomes more difficult.
 
For now, the near future of immigration is in the hands of the Biden administration.
 
And from there, in the hands of voters who will decide which candidate should steer things starting next year.

THE ICC’S 'TREMENDOUS' MOVE