Last week, The Washington Post reported a remarkable bit of data: The number of people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2021 (that is, from Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2021) was the highest on record — more than 1.7 million.

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       Those numbers were propelled by the surge in apprehensions that began last spring after the inauguration of President Biden. Since March, there have been an average of about 190,000 apprehensions per month. But these numbers risk giving an incorrect impression about who is coming into, and, also important, remaining in the country.

       Again, the total is largely a function of the past seven months of apprehensions. That said, about 1-in-6 apprehensions in fiscal 2021 occurred under President Donald Trump. By the end of 2020, in part because of a surge after initial pandemic restrictions were put in place, the monthly apprehension figures were higher than nearly any other point in Trump’s administration.

       In fact, the pandemic plays an outsize role in understanding the apprehension data. The Trump administration introduced a policy under which migrants could be quickly removed from the United States on the basis of public health concerns. Those expulsions are referred to as “Title 42” removals, given that they rely on Title 42 of the Public Health Services Law of 1944. Other apprehensions are executed under the normal Title 8 authority of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

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       Title 42 removals are a deeply contentious issue. The Biden administration had pledged to end the practice, given that the removals generally prevent migrants from seeking the protection of political asylum. The surge of new coronavirus cases this summer and the ongoing increase in migrants arriving at the border, though, changed the administration’s mind.

       The effect is significant. More than half of those apprehended at the border since March — 55 percent — were subsequently removed from the country. Over the course of the fiscal year, more than 60 percent of apprehensions led to Title 42 expulsions. The effect of that is obvious below. The surge in migration that prompted the Trump administration to declare a crisis at the border included a month (May 2019) during which there were more Title 8 apprehensions than at any point in 2021. Of course, at the time, there was no pandemic and no Title 42.

       CBP categorizes migrants into three groups: unaccompanied children, members of families (meaning at least one child and one parent) and single adults. Most of those who are expelled under Title 42 fall into that last group.

       This is important because it likely contributes to another factor worth considering: many of those apprehended at the border are repeat offenders, people who were stopped crossing the border and then tried again. In fiscal years 2014 to 2019, an average of 15 percent of apprehensions were people who’d already been stopped at the border. Over the last four months, 28 percent of apprehensions were of people who had been previously stopped that month. In May, 38 percent were.

       Of course, those repeat offenders also likely inflate the number of Title 42 removals as well. But we have data from recent months on the fate of those who aren’t quickly expelled from the country. Most of them are either still in detention or were transferred to other law enforcement agencies due to outstanding warrants or other issues. It’s often the case that border apprehensions are conflated in political rhetoric with the idea that those migrants are then released into the country, but fewer than half of those who stayed in the U.S. were granted what CBP terms “humanitarian release.”

       The number of migrants released by CBP from March through August is equivalent to about 1-in-5 of those who were apprehended during that period. The number expelled under Title 42 is three times as high.

       Given the potency of immigration as a political issue, you will certainly hear that topline number about apprehensions used as a shorthand for what’s happening at the border. But that topline is inflated by repeat offenders and by people who are quickly sent back out of the country, among other things. Nuance fares poorly in such discussions, but it’s nonetheless useful to introduce it.