Apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the southwest U.S. border with Mexico declined in January 2018, the first monthly drop after eight straight increases.

Typically, experts estimate that for every illegal immigrant apprehended, one makes it through to the interior. The 35,822 illegal immigrants arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol or taken into custody at a port of entry represents an 11 percent drop from December.

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This included a steep decline in unaccompanied minors; that number dropped 21 percent, from 4,078 to 3,227. So-called family units, the term the government uses to describe adults traveling with children, dropped from 8,120 in December to 5,656 last month. That is a 30 percent decline.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials said the numbers still are too high, and they point to the need for congressional action to allow for the easier deportation of unaccompanied children (UAC) who show up at the border.

Because of court rulings, U.S. authorities can only turn back youth from Mexico. Children who make the journey from Central America cannot be held and routinely get free transportation to sponsors in the United States.

“Once again, this month we saw an unacceptable number of UACs and family units flood our border because of these catch-and-release loopholes,” Department of Homeland Security acting press secretary Tyler Houlton said in a statement.

“To secure our borders and make America safer, Congress must act to close these legal loopholes that have created incentives for illegal immigrants and are being exploited by dangerous transnational criminal organizations like MS-13.”

The border apprehension figure in January was lower than the 42,463 who arrived in January 2017, former President Barack Obama’s last month in office. Apprehensions then declined each month until hitting a low of 15,766 in April. Most experts attribute the steep drop to President Donald Trump’s tough immigration rhetoric.

But the numbers steadily have risen since then. Experts warned not to draw too much meaning from a single month’s data.

“It’s kind of like the stock market,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “It’s hard to tell a trend from any one month.”

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Mehlman, whose organization favors stricter immigration enforcement, said January’s number could be the result of any number of factors, such as the weather.

“What you have to look for is trends, and the trends have been skewing upward,” he said.

Immigration analyst Jessica Vaughan agreed. “It’s always good when the numbers decline from the previous month,” she said. “It remains to be seen whether this can be sustained.”

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Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said the second half of 2017 demonstrated the limits of the power of rhetoric alone to slow illegal immigration flows. Lasting change must be backed up by improvements to border security and interior enforcement policies, she said.

“As far as I know, there has been no change in policy that can be attributed to,” she said. “There’s no cause for celebration yet, or any cause to give up on the wall.”

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage image: Migrants…, CC BY-SA 3.0, by Gémes Sándor/SzomSzed; photo credit, article image: Central American Migrants Find Quarter in Southern Mexico, CC BY 2.0, by Peter Haden)