The number of immigrants caught crossing the Southwest border continues to fall sharply, Obama administration officials said Friday, a decline due in large part to the end of the surge in people coming from Central America.
The numbers of unaccompanied children caught at the border, 15,627, is down 45% from the same time a year earlier. The totals have fallen dramatically since their peak last June, when a flood of children and families fleeing crime and poverty in Central America provoked a border crisis.
Johnson said he believed the decline in detentions was a good indicator that fewer people were trying to cross illegally. He said the massive investment in increased border security over the last decade — with drones, sensors, more than 600 miles of new fences and a doubling of the size of the Border Patrol — was showing results.
"The word's gotten out that it's now harder than it used to be to cross our southern border," Johnson said, adding that people were now more reluctant to pay hefty fees to a "coyote," or smuggler, to take their relatives north. "People risk a failed investment."
Johnson said he had asked for funding for even more high-tech measures. "Surveillance technology is the wave of the future," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-border-security-20150425-story.html
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