MIGRANT SURGE
DHS chief defends policies.
WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities encountered nearly double the number of children traveling alone across the Mexican border on Monday than on an average day last month, an official said Tuesday, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded the surge was a challenge.
The Border Patrol came across 561 unaccompanied children at the border on Monday, including 280 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the official said, offering a snapshot of how quickly events at the border have changed during the first two months of Joe Biden’s presidency. By comparison, it encountered a daily average of 332 unaccompanied children in February, which itself was a 60 percent jump from January. The peak was 370 during a Trump-era surge in May 2019.
The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Health and Human Services Department was moving to open two additional facilities to process children traveling alone — one for 800 children at Moffett Federal Airfield near San Francisco and another in Pecos, Texas. It is also looking to expand a facility in Donna, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, to hold 2,000 people.
The Dallas Convention Center is scheduled to begin holding children as early as Wednesday with plans to accommodate up to 3,000. Another makeshift holding center in Midland, Texas, that opened last weekend for 700 children had 485 on Monday.
Faced with criticism from all sides. Mayorkas said the situation was under control as he defended the administration’s policy of allowing children crossing by themselves to remain in the country.
“They are vulnerable children, and we have ended the prior administration’s practice of expelling them,” Mayorkas said.
The increasing number of migrants attempting to cross the border, which is on pace to hit a 20-year peak, has become an early test for Biden as he seeks to break from his immediate predecessor, President Donald Trump, who waged a broad effort to significantly curtail both legal and illegal immigration.
Republicans in Congress have claimed that Biden’s support for immigration legislation and decision to allow people to make legal asylum claims has become a magnet for migrants.
Some progressive Democrats and others, meanwhile, have assailed the Biden administration for holding migrant children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facilities longer than the allowed 72 hours as it struggles to find space in shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The overall increase is blamed on a number of factors, including the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic in Central America and two hurricanes that battered the region. U.S. officials have also conceded that smugglers have likely encouraged people to try to cross under the new administration.
Migrants who are under 18 years old are being allowed to remain in the country while the government decides whether they have a legal claim to residency, either under asylum law or for some other reason.
The U.S. is continuing to expel most single adults and families either to Mexico or to their home countries.
“The situation we are currently facing at the Southwest border is a difficult one,” Mayorkas said. “We are tackling it.”