Hungarian Border Guards Stopped Average of 738 Illegals a Day in 2022, Double 2021 Numbers

The Hungarian government says it apprehended some 269,254 “illegal entrants” at its southern border in 2022; a huge jump from the already high figure of 122,239 in 2021.

György Bakondi, chief security advisor to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s pro-borders government, warned “the number of illegal entrants is rising” and that “Hungary is still the main route for undocumented migrants coming from the Balkans with the aid of people smugglers” in an official news bulletin, with the border seeing an average of 738 migrants stopped per day.

The migrants, reported to hail chiefly from Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Morocco, and India, are said to have actually attacked Hungarian personnel on 265 occasions in 2022, leaving 12 police officers and 29 military servicemen with injuries.

1,924 people-smugglers from an astonishing 73 different countries were detained over the course of the year — “up from 1,277 in 2021” — with the annual border protection bill hitting around 650 billion Hungarian forints, equivalent to roughly 1.63 billion euros.

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