More than 700,000 ‘overstayed’ in US

Canada tops slot

SAN DIEGO, Aug 8, (AP)L: More than 700,000 foreigners who were supposed to leave the United States during a recent 12-month period overstayed their visas, the Homeland Security Department said Tuesday.

President Donald Trump has focused border security efforts on erecting a multibillion-dollar wall with Mexico. But the latest annual figures underscore how visa overstays are a big driver of illegal immigration. An estimated 40 percent of the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally stayed past their visas.

There were 701,900 visa overstays from October 2016 through September 2017 among visitors who arrived by plane or ship — more than the population of Vermont or Wyoming.

The total number of overstays is much larger but has not been quantified because it doesn't include how many people arrive by land.

The cost and technological hurdles to develop a checkout system at congested land crossings are enormous. Last year, authorities occasionally captured fingerprints from people in vehicles at three crossings with Mexico and plan to test facial recognition technology on pedestrians at two Arizona crossings with Mexico.

In 2016, Homeland Security published the number of overstays for the first time in at least two decades. From October 2015 through September 2016, there were 739,478 overstays among visitors who arrived by plane or ship.

Overstays accounted for 1.3 percent of the 52.7 million visitors who arrived by plane or ship during the latest period, an improvement from the overstay rate of 1.5 percent a year earlier.

Canada again occupied the top slot for overstays, followed by Mexico, Venezuela, the United Kingdom and Colombia. Nigeria, China, France, Spain and Germany rounded out the top 10.

The overstay rate was much higher among students and foreign exchange visitors, with 4.2 percent staying after their visas expired, a decline from 5.5 percent the previous year.

Meanwhile, the 3-year-old boy with a bowl haircut and striped shirt silently clung to his father in the back of a US Border Patrol truck.

Trump

Their shoes still muddy from crossing the border, the father and son had just been apprehended at a canal near a border fence in Arizona on a muggy night in July. Before the father, son and two older children could make it any farther, a Border Patrol agent intervened and directed them through a large border gate.

The father handed over documents that showed gang members had committed crimes against his family, one of the ways immigrants who seek asylum try to prove their cases. After a wait, he and his children were hauled away in a van to be processed at a Border Patrol station about 20 miles away in Yuma.

The encounter witnessed by The Associated Press illustrates how families are still coming into the US even in the face of daily global headlines about the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policies. The flow of families from Central America is especially pronounced in this overlooked stretch of border in Arizona and California.

The Border Patrol's Yuma Sector has seen a more than 120 percent spike in the number of families and unaccompanied children caught at the border over the last year, surprising many in an area that had been largely quiet and calm for the past decade.

So far this fiscal year, agents in the Yuma sector have apprehended nearly 10,000 families and 4,500 unaccompanied children, a giant increase from just seven years ago when they arrested only 98 families and 222 unaccompanied children.

The Trump administration's policy of separating families did not seem to be slowing the flow. The Border Patrol here apprehended an average of 30 families per day in June, when the uproar over the policy was at its peak, an increase from May. Yuma is now the second-busiest sector for family border crossings next to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

Agents and border crossers here have many things to contend with. Parts of the border are urban, with fences and canals on the US side directly across from a home's backyard in Mexico. The sector includes Arizona and part of California, along with the Imperial Sand Dunes and Colorado River.

While drug smugglers and other criminals use the vast desert to cross illegally, most families and children simply walk or swim across into the US and wait to be arrested, according to Border Patrol spokesman Jose Garibay. Many travel in large groups, he said.

Garibay says he was once on assignment when he encountered a group of over 60 families and children.

Dealing with large numbers of families and children has proven to be logistically difficult for the agency. There are only so many vans to transport the immigrants to the sector's processing facility in Yuma.

Many don't understand why so many families and children from Central America are coming to the US through this stretch of Arizona and braving its extreme summer heat, when the more direct path takes them to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, more than 1,000 miles away.

Garibay said migration patterns are largely controlled by the cartels that smuggle people across. The Mexican state of Tamaulipas that borders the Rio Grande has been experiencing extreme violence by drug cartels that the head of US Customs and Border Protection recently said are fighting for "every inch" of control of the river where migrants are often smuggled in Texas.

Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute says it's noteworthy that most of the border crossers in the Yuma sector are Guatemalans. He said it's possible many are headed for California and that crossing through the Yuma area may be the safest and simplest way to do that.

HOUSTON:

Muddy

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Also:

Opponents of a President Barack Obamaera program shielding young immigrants from deportation will go before a federal judge who they hope will rule that the program cannot continue.

Three federal judges have ruled against President Donald Trump's administration's efforts to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. But a new lawsuit was filed in Texas before Judge Andrew Hanen, the same judge who ended another Obama effort to expand protections for immigrants in the US illegally.