THEY’RE HAUL IN THE FAMILIES
Clans traveling in big packs detained
Border Patrol agents in Texas recently detained two groups comprising hundreds of migrants who had crossed illegally into the United States, including nearly 50 unaccompanied children — some younger than 13, authorities said.
Agents in the McAllen Border Patrol Station stopped a group made up of 78 members of various families and 20 unaccompanied minors near Peñitas, Texas, on Sunday.
Then on Monday, agents in the Rio Grande City Border Patrol detained 107 members of various families and 24 unaccompanied children near La Grulla, Texas.
The Biden administration — which has been scrambling to handle the surge of families and unaccompanied minors crossing the border and overwhelming federal facilities — is predicting that rush will break records and last for another six months.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) on Tuesday revealed that Border Patrol had warned the administration that overturning Trump administration immigration policies would spark a spike in illegal crossings.
Now, agents are “at the end of their rope” trying to deal with the endless surge of migrants at the southern border, Van Duyne said on “Fox & Friends.”
“They’re doing what they can, but they’re also very frustrated realizing that they had actually warned this administration what would happen if they decided to push back on policies that were put in place by the previous administration that were working.”
Van Duyne said she recently visited a federal detention center and found that children were “packed and stacked on the floor” of the center that she described as a “processing plant.”
In a Twitter post, she linked to a video taken at the center that showed the floor full of migrants covered by foil blankets with room barely enough to roll over.
She wrote that President Biden refused to heed the warnings of Customs and Border Protection.
“Now, thousands of children are crammed into profoundly inadequate holding facilities as a direct result of Biden’s reckless actions,” she posted.
With thousands of children and families arriving at the border in recent weeks, Biden has been under pressure to be more transparent about the process.
The administration on Tuesday finally allowed reporters from The Associated Press and CBS inside its main border detention facility for migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley.
The crammed tent structure in Donna, Texas, is packed with more than 4,100 people, most of them unaccompanied kids — despite a 250person capacity.
The children were being loaded by the hundreds into eight “pods” about 3,200 square feet in size.
Many of the pods had more than 500 kids in them.
The youngest of them were kept in a large playpen with mats on the floor for sleeping.
The kids are processed in the Border Patrol tent facility before being taken to Department of Health and Human Services shelters and then placed with relatives or sponsors.
Biden, upon entering the White House in January, began signing a raft of executive orders rolling back his predecessor’s immigration policies, including stopping construction on the border wall and reversing the Remain in Mexico policy that forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their legal process plays out.
He also signed executive orders creating a task force to review family separations at the border and to examine federal agencies for policies that create “barriers to our legal immigration system.” The actions immediately prompted criticism that opening the border would result in a flood of migrants.