Nearly 9,000 illegal border crossers took free flights home to Mexico City this summer in the eighth annual edition of a binational program aimed at saving lives.
The final flight of the Mexican Interior Repatriation Program left Tucson on Wednesday with 139 people aboard, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Vincent Picard.
The 8,893 people who participated are the fewest since the program was launched in 2004. At least 10,500 had participated each year, with a record 23,384 taking the flights in 2010, government figures show.
The decrease in participants this summer is likely attributable to a precipitous decline in Border Patrol apprehensions. Officials reduced the program this year to one flight a day, instead of two, because of that decrease.
Under the voluntary program, non-criminal Mexican illegal immigrants caught by the Border Patrol in Arizona are offered free flights to Mexico City. From there, they are given bus passes to return to their hometowns.
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The Border Patrol's Tucson and Yuma sectors are the only ones conducting this program.
In the Tucson Sector - the busiest for illegal border crossings since 1998 - apprehensions have plummeted to the lowest numbers since 1994. Across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, apprehensions have dropped to levels not seen since the early 1970s.
This year's program ran for 80 days, which is about the length of time the program has run for most years but is shorter than last year, when it lasted 120 days.
Eighty-five percent of this year's participants were men, Picard said. There were 328 juveniles who took the flights accompanied by their parents.
The U.S. government has spent nearly $86 million since 2004 to fly more than 116,000 people home. The exact cost of this year's program won't be known until the final invoices come in, Picard said. This year's program was expected to cost $9 million to $11 million.
Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com