The drop in unlawful border crossings also means Biden will close out fiscal 2024 with the least amount of illegal immigration of any 12-month period of his presidency.

The feat is a turnaround for the Biden administration after sustaining the highest number of illegal immigrant arrests under any president. The decline in border crossings could put Vice President Kamala Harris in a better position politically on the issue of immigration which has been of high concern to U.S. voters ahead of the November election.

Just under 56,000 immigrants were apprehended by the Border Patrol attempting to enter the country nationwide last month, bringing the year-long total of arrests to roughly 1.56 million between October 2023 and September 2024, according to an administration official who requested permission to discuss preliminary border data figures Friday evening.

The administration official said the September figure at the southern border made it the lowest month since August 2020 and lower than the monthly average in 2019.

All but roughly 1,000 of the nearly 56,000 immigrants arrested nationwide occurred at the U.S.-Mexico border. The remaining 1,000 were largely encountered at the Canadian border.

In total over the past year, Border Patrol agents encountered 1,557,358 immigrants at the northern, southern, and coastal borders.

That figure is down from 2.06 million in 2023, 2.2 million in 2022, and 1.66 million in 2021, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics available online.

Immigration has topped voters’ concerns this election cycle and Harris has had to make a case to voters that she can manage the border if elected president despite criticism that she did little in her “border czar” stint to address the root causes of migration.

Last week, Harris visited the Arizona border for the first time as the Democratic nominee. She stopped in Douglas to see border fence installed during the Obama administration and the port of entry.

The precipitous drop in illegal immigration since last December is a notable change of course for Biden, who oversaw the historic border crisis. The monthly number of arrests has slowly decreased over the past six months, dropping from 250,000 last December to 83,000 in June and falling since then after Biden implemented an executive order this summer that curbed crossings.

CBP has attributed several actions to the drop, as well as bilateral talks with Mexican government officials last December that have led to improved cooperation between countries in dealing with illegal immigration.

“We have executed the largest surge of removals and disruptive activities against human smuggling networks in the past decade,” said Troy A. Miller, a senior official performing the duties of the commissioner, in a statement in July. “We have redoubled our efforts, in coordination with partners throughout the hemisphere and around the world, to disrupt the criminal organizations and transportation networks who are putting vulnerable migrants in danger while peddling lies and profiting from them.”

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In June, Biden took executive action and implemented a new rule to turn away people at the border rather than release thousands who were crossing daily into the interior of the country to await court dates years down the road.

Official figures for September border data are set to be released in mid-October. Border Patrol arrests do not include immigrants encountered at the ports of entry.