Trump seeks $4.5 billion to handle border surge

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration Wednesday asked Congress for an additional $4.5 billion in emergency funds for the U.S.-Mexico border as it grapples with a surge of Central American migrant families seeking refuge in the U.S.

Most of the money requested would be used to increase shelter capacity and care for the migrant families who have been fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries. Department of Homeland Security officials said they would likely run out of money without the extra cash.

“DHS projects it will exhaust resources well before the end of the fiscal year,” read the administration’s formal request letter to Congress, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The request is the latest effort by the administration to cope with what it calls a “crisis” that officials say has overwhelmed federal resources and capacity. Trump has railed against aides and Congress for failing to do more to address the situation, but has also made clear that he believes his hard line on immigration was key to his

2016 victory and intends to continue to push the issue.

It also comes a day after a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy in the care of U.S. Health and Human Services died after falling ill with a fever and chills. His death is under investigation. Two other children died in Customs and Border Protection custody late last year.

The fiscal 2019 budget already contained $415 million for humanitarian assistance at the border, including $28 million in medical care, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

But the White House now wants an extra $3.3 billion to increase shelter capacity for unaccompanied migrant children and for the feeding and care of families, plus transportation and processing centers.

Of the new request, $1.1 billion would go toward operational

support, including personnel expenses, detention beds, transportation and investigative work on smuggling. The remaining $178 million would be used for mission support, including technology upgrades.

Trump earlier this year declared a national emergency to circumvent Congress to get funding for a border wall.

Senior administration officials, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the request by name, insisted that the new money would not be used for border barriers and that the funds were different from those Trump has sought to access through his declaration of a national emergency.

PROJECTIONS: 1 MILLION

The number of families and children arriving alone at the border is now outpacing the number of single adults, putting new strains on the immigration system. The U.S. is on track to have as many as

1 million cross this year, the highest number since the early 2000s, when most of those crossing were single men from Mexico looking for work.

Border stations were not constructed to handle such a large volume of children and families, and they have been pushed to the breaking point.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered 50,036 unaccompanied children during the last budget year, and so far this budget year there have been 35,898 children. Their average length of stay in a government shelter is 66 days, up from 59 during fiscal 2018 and 40 in fiscal 2016.

Customs and Border Protection on Tuesday encountered its largest group to date: 424 people, made up mostly of children and families, in rural New Mexico.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said Tuesday before a House subcommittee that his department was running out of

money amid the increase.

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Russell Vought, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the crisis was overwhelming the ability of the federal government to respond.

“The situation becomes more dire every day,” he wrote.

The official request also said the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages the care of migrant children who arrive alone or who are separated from their parents by Homeland Security under certain circumstances, will exhaust its resources by June. The funding request includes $2.8 billion to increase shelter capacity to about 23,600 total beds for unaccompanied children.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., said her committee would take a thorough look at the request, but she blamed Trump’s administration for contributing to the crisis.

“As a country, we must do more to meet the needs of migrants — especially children and families — who are arriving in increasing numbers,” she said. “However, the Trump administration appears to want much of this $4.5 billion emergency supplemental request to double down on cruel and ill-conceived policies.”

Separately, Homeland Security officials said Wednesday

that they will start an “unprecedented” pilot program to test the DNA of families arriving at the U.S. border as soon as next week, calling the measure an investigative tool to root out fraudulent cases of migrants traveling with children who are not their own.

Under the pilot program, Homeland Security investigators can request cheek-swab DNA samples if they suspect that an adult and a minor claiming to be family members do not in fact have a parent-child relationship.

Officials say some migrants are taking advantage of “loopholes” in the U.S. immigration system that enable those arriving with a child to avoid detention and swift deportation.

A private contractor, Ande, which specializes in “rapid DNA” screening for law enforcement and other government purposes, will conduct the DNA tests at the border. Results will be available in two hours, Homeland Security officials said, after which samples and data will be destroyed.

Department officials said they have detected more than 1,000 cases of fraudulent families trying to cross the border since October, reaching that determination through document screenings and other traditional investigative methods.

BACKLOG OF CASES

Looming over the Trump administration’s struggle to curb illegal immigration is the backlog of 850,000 cases faced by the U.S. immigration court system.

The system has fewer than 450 judges nationwide to handle them. New asylum applications and other claims are piling up, creating long delays that Central American families know will allow them to remain in the United States for years while they wait.

Trump’s critics blame his administration’s overzealous enforcement approach for making the problem worse by arresting more people who can’t be quickly deported. But the delays have become a migration magnet, administration officials say.

Since Trump took office, the backlog has swelled by more than 200,000 cases. The president has grown so frustrated that he has been floating the idea of doing away entirely with U.S. immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, not the judicial branch.

“We don’t need a court system,” he told Fox Business Network anchorwoman Maria Bartiromo this week. “We have a court system that is — has 900,000 cases behind it. In other words, they have a court which needs to hear 900,000 cases. How ridiculous is this?”

He added, “What we need is new laws that don’t allow this, so when somebody comes in we say: ‘Sorry, you got to go out.’”

Trump on Monday ordered his administration to draft new regulations that call for courts to tighten the existing requirement to adjudicate asylum cases within 180 days. The measures seek to deter new asylum requests by imposing fees on applicants and limiting their ability to qualify for work permits while waiting for their claims to be heard. Trump hopes that faster scrutiny of asylum claims — and perhaps a higher bar for establishing “credible fear” of returning to their home countries — will turn more people away.

But to speed up the process and clear out cases, the government almost certainly will have to ramp up its immigration bureaucracy. The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the country’s immigration courts, is hiring judges faster than ever before. Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers last month that the administration has hired more immigration judges than in the previous seven years combined.

“We now employ the largest number of immigration judges in history,” he said. “That is having an impact on immigration cases,” he added.

Information for this article was contributed by Colleen Long, Jill Colvin and Andy Taylor of The Associated Press; and by Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti of The Washington Post.