Since President Joe Biden took office, more undocumented immigrants have managed to evade border authorities and enter the United States than in the previous decade, new data indicate.

According to data obtained by Fox News through an open records request, the number of “gotaways”—immigrants who are observed crossing the U.S. border illegally and evading law enforcement—has surged under the Biden administration.

The records indicate that from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2020, over 1.4 million gotaways were recorded entering the country illegally. The annual number of these illegal entries ranged from a low of approximately 86,000 in 2011 to nearly 172,000 in 2013.

During Biden’s term, the number of gotaways—immigrants seen but not apprehended—has significantly increased each year. In fiscal year 2021, the Department of Homeland Security recorded 387,398 gotaways. The figure rose to 606,131 in 2022 and further increased to 670,674 in fiscal year 2023.

Altogether, roughly 1.6 million illegal immigrants were seen entering the country and evading apprehension from 2021-23, more than the entire decade from fiscal years 2010-2020, Fox News reported.

EXCLUSIVE: Internal CBP data I obtained via FOIA request reveals 13 years of known gotaways data at the border, showing gotaways have *exploded* under the Biden admin compared to the Trump & Obama years.
This is the first time these numbers have ever been revealed.

FY2010… pic.twitter.com/LUQU5v87b2

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 15, 2024

The data on gotaways coincides with a report suggesting that Biden plans to take executive action to curb immigration if encounters exceed a certain threshold. The president is considering signing an executive order to close the border once daily encounters reach 4,000. This figure does not account for gotaways, whose numbers came within 30,000 of this threshold in the last fiscal year.

In 2019, Jeh Johnson, who served as Homeland Security Secretary during the Obama administration, stated that a daily average of 1,000 encounters would overwhelm Border Patrol. At 4,000 encounters per day, he described the situation as a “crisis.” He said that he would begin each day by reviewing the apprehension numbers from the previous day.

“And I’d look at them every morning, it’d be the first thing I’d look at. And I probably got too close to the problem, and my staff will tell you if it was under 1,000 apprehensions the day before, that was a relatively good number, and if it was above 1,000, it was a relatively bad number, and I was gonna be in a bad mood the whole day,” Johnson said at the time. “On Tuesday, there were 4,000 apprehensions. I know that a thousand overwhelms the system. I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like, so we are truly in a crisis.”