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 Putting TRAC to Work |
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Peterson Institute for International Economics |
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April 2024 |
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The effect of lawful crossing on unlawful crossing at the US southwest border
By Michael A. Clemens
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The database I use comprises two parts. The first is anonymized individual-level data on the full
universe of inadmissible migrant encounters by the US Border Patrol (USBP) and the CBP Office
of Field Operations (OFO) between October 2011 and May 2022. These records were obtained by
the Syracuse University Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) from the US Dept.
of Homeland Security via a series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The second
part is detailed totals of migrant encounters and dispositions published directly by the CBP Public
Data Portal for the period October 2018 through July 2023. I combine the two parts by taking the
latter, directly-reported figures as authoritative for the dates they are available, after verifying
that the two series exhibit a near-perfect match during their several years of overlap (October
2018–May 2022). I then collapse all observations to monthly totals, keeping only encounters at
the Southwest border. Though the raw data often refers to fiscal years, in this paper years refer
to calendar years unless explicitly noted.
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Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
Copyright 2024
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