July 7, 2018

Border Crossings Are Either Up or Down, Depending on How You Look At Things

The latest figures for border apprehensions are out, and the news is either good or bad depending on how you look at it. If you look at the change from last year, apprehensions are way up:

With spring now in the books, apprehensions are up from 14,000 per month last year to 37,000 per month. That’s a big increase, and represents a big increase in attempted border crossings. But if you look just at June and just at absolute numbers, things are looking a little better:

These numbers jump around a lot from month to month, but at least it looks like border crossings aren’t just on an endless upward trend under Trump.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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