According to a top immigration expert and former immigration judge, the administration’s border bungling has let in up to 1 million migrant children, many now in public schools and receiving public assistance.

“It will take years — and probably hundreds of billions of dollars in federal, state, and local spending – for schools to accommodate the 500,000 to one million migrant children who have entered the United States since the start of FY 2022,” said Andrew Arthur, national-security and immigration expert.

“In the interim, expect your taxes to rise and your local schools (and teachers and pupils) to struggle,” added the legal expert with the Center for Immigration Studies.

The shocking numbers were included in Arthur’s blog for CIS, in which he was fact-checking a report about 500,000 migrant children entering the U.S. from October 2021 to last June.

He suggested that the numbers were low and used official sources to determine his range.

“According to DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), more than 325,000 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) were transferred by CBP to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) between October 2021 (the first month of FY 2022) and the end of June 2024, the vast majority to be released to “sponsors” in the United States,” he wrote.

He added:

“That figure does not include migrant children in family units (FMUs) who crossed illegally with adults and are now attending school here. Between FY 2022 and August 2024, more than 1.646 million FMU migrants have been apprehended at the Southwest border by Border Patrol agents. CBP, however, does not differentiate between adults and children in its FMU encounter figures. 

“Between the UACs and the kids in FMUs who have been released, however, likely somewhere between 700,000 and more than 1 million school-aged migrant children have entered illegally in the past three fiscal years.”

For perspective, he noted that New York City has 985,000 students, Los Angeles 634,000, and Chicago 378,000.

SEE THE LATEST POLITICAL NEWS AND BUZZ FROM WASHINGTON SECRETS

Illegal immigration during the Biden-Harris administration and the billions taxpayers have had to cough up to pay to house, feed, and service them have become a top issue in the presidential election, rivaling the economy and lingering inflation.

But Arthur doesn’t blame the children or the illegal parents for the crisis. He concluded that taxpayers can’t “put all the blame [on] the parents of those children. They plainly knew that they were breaking the law, but given how little the Biden-Harris administration did to prevent them from coming here illegally, they likely viewed it all as a welcome invitation.”