It’s getting ‘in tents’
Prez: ‘Very nice’ shelters while asylum-seekers wait
President Trump said Monday that he wants to construct “tent cities” to house migrants while they wait in the United States to see if they’ve been granted asylum.
“We’re going to put up, we’re going to build tent cities,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham. “We’re going to put tents up all over the place. We’re not going to build structures and spend all of this, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re going to have tents.” He promised they’d be “very nice.” “And they’re going to wait and if they don’t get asylum, they get out,” Trump said.
He and others in his administration have voiced concern that migrants abuse the system by applying for asylum and then disappearing into the country, never to be heard from again.
“The problem is, they release them in and then they have the trial three years later and nobody shows up,” Trump told Ingraham. “But . . . unlike Obama and unlike others, we are going to take the people, we’re going to put them in and they’re going to wait.”
Last week, a senior administration official — whom the White House wouldn’t identify suggested asylumseekers were being trained by “NGOs and radical left-wing organizations” to make “preposterous utterances that cannot possibly be taken as true.”
The US already uses tents to house many migrants who have crossed the border, such as unaccompanied minors. But asylum-seekers are often released on the expectation they will return for hearings.
Meanwhile, the US is sending 5,200 troops to “harden” the border with Mexico, the Pentagon announced Monday after Trump warned that the caravan of Central Americans heading north is “an invasion.”
The new deployment marks a dramatic increase in the military presence at the border, which already has 2,000 National Guard members.
The first 800 troops were dispatched Monday. The additional 4,400 will be sent this week to Texas, Arizona and California and will likely staff ports of entry, at least in the early phases of the military mission.
The Pentagon has dubbed the mission Operation Faithful Patriot.
Also Monday, several hundred migrants tried to cross the Suchiate River from Guatemala to Mexico en masse, but were met by Mexican federal police who blocked them.