Migrant surge draws scrutiny
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top immigration official testified before Congress on Wednesday that the Biden administration is “working around the clock” to handle what could be shaping up to be the biggest migrant surge at the southern border in two decades.
Meanwhile, Gov. Greg Abbott was in Dallas saying President Joe Biden’s team has no idea what it is in for after it ceased expelling unaccompanied children seeking shelter in the U.S. — something the Trump administration did until a judge halted the practice in November.
“The situation is undoubtedly difficult,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “We have a short
term plan, we have a medium-term plan and we have a long-term plan, and we’re executing on all fronts. And to address the situation at the border that is upon us right now takes time. And we are working around the clock to do it.”
As Abbott tells it, that around-the-clock work included federal officials “scrambling” on Saturday night to find a place to house thousands of children who have crossed the border in recent weeks, emailing the governor’s staff at 9:30 p.m. before settling on a location in Midland.
Abbott held a news conference Wednesday across the street from another such site, a Dallas convention center where the Biden administration is preparing to house as many as 3,000 migrant teenagers.
“I know from what’s going on on the ground, they are completely ill-prepared for this,” Abbott said, claiming there is “every reason” to expect the number of such locations housing migrant children to increase in the coming weeks.
The dueling appearances marked the latest in the first political dilemma of President Joe Biden’s term, as Republicans ramp up efforts to pin a growing surge of asylum-seekers and other migrants on the president’s shift away from immigration restrictions of the Trump administration.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton hinted he’s prepared to escalate matters, saying in a tweet he plans to sue the Biden administration “to protect against the growing COVID threat inflamed by Biden’s border crisis.”
In Brownsville, 210 of 3,000 migrants processed since Jan. 25 have tested positive for COVID-19, a 7 percent positivity rate, according to KRGV. That is slightly higher than the statewide rate of 5.9 percent on March 15.
Democrats and White House officials, meanwhile, say it’s a situation they inherited, blaming the Trump administration for leaving behind a mess of an immigration system and pointing out that border crossings have been increasing since last May.
Similar to other surges
Border Patrol reported 100,441 encounters with migrants in February, a 28 percent increase from January and a figure all but certain to increase even more quickly this month as agents at the border say they are overwhelmed by the flow of people seeking to cross. The vast majority of those encounters were with single adults, nearly all of whom are turned away immediately under a public health order the Trump administration put in place to help contain the coronavirus. The agency said about 25,000 of those immigrants had been apprehended before.
The Department of Homeland Security, however, has stopped using that order to expel unaccompanied children, 9,457 of whom arrived in February alone — a record for that month — according to Border Patrol data. That number was in line with surges in 2014 and 2019, which saw between 7,000 and 9,000 apprehensions of unaccompanied children a month with peaks above 10,000.
“Because of the pandemic and limited holding capacity for children, it has been a struggle to deal with the increasing number of kids,” said Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Bolter said it’s clear that the Biden administration is “prioritizing this issue and devoting significant resources to it, even though a lot of what’s getting out to the public may be dominated by the crisis narrative.”
Mayorkas, who was confirmed by the Senate six weeks ago, testified before the House Homeland Security Committee about the steps his agency has taken to get a handle on the situation.
That includes bringing in the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help the wave of unaccompanied children crossing the border, as well as working with Health and Human Services find care for the children, including more quickly vetting those in the U.S. who come forward as sponsors.
Homeland Security is also working with the Department of Justice to speed asylum cases, Mayorkas said. Additionally, the administration has restarted a program that allows parents legally in the U.S. to request refugee status for their children living in certain Central American countries.
End of Mexico wait
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, said some progress is showing. The time asylum-seekers spend in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody is about 30 days on average, down from as long as 90 days in 2019.
The biggest hurdle for the administration right now is increasing capacity of shelters, which have lost 30 to 40 percent of their maximum occupancy because of the pandemic, he said.
That’s why the administration has started using the Dallas convention center and other sites temporarily. But getting existing shelters back to full capacity could take time, as the administration needs to hire new staff, including caseworkers, set up testing protocols and more.
“There are just genuine logistical problems,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “You can’t just flick a switch and suddenly increase your capacity.”
Republicans said Biden officials should have been seen the surge coming and blamed Biden for “enticing” migrants by relaxing Trump’s policies. That included ending a requirement that asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for their hearings in the U.S.
“We’ve both seen this movie before, and we know the plot and we know the outcome,” U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Houstonarea Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, said.
“Deterrence does work,” McCaul said. “I think words do matter. I think you sent exactly the wrong message when you said, ‘We are not saying don’t come. We are saying don’t come right now.’ That is not a message of deterrence.”
Democrats, meanwhile, accused Republicans of engaging in “revisionist history.” The Trump administration, too, faced a massive surge in 2019.
“Unfortunately, some are so desperate to make Americans forget Trump’s failures, they have resorted to fearmongering about the challenge we face at the border,” said U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee. “Others are engaging in revisionist history, saying that all was well at the border under the last administration. Nothing could be further from the truth.”