At border, Abbott blames Biden for surge of migrants
Experts say increase in apprehensions part of years-long trend
Gov. Greg Abbott visited the U.s.-mexico border Tuesday and accused the Biden administration of inviting a wave of new migrant crossings and causing a health and security crisis in Texas.
“It is clear they are completely unprepared for what is going on at the border now,” Abbott said of the administration. “And they’re going to be even more unprepared for what will be happening in the coming months.”
The governor’s aerial tour and meetings with border patrol came as Republicans ramp up their efforts to pin the influx on President Joe Biden’s shift away from Trump-era immigration restrictions. Even some Democrats along the border have warned of an emerging “crisis.”
Experts say the big increase in apprehensions in recent weeks is the latest in a seven-year flow of people fleeing poverty, violence and political upheaval in their home countries, which started in 2014. At its peak in 2019, there were as many as 130,000 apprehensions in a single month along the Mexican border. There were 75,000 such apprehensions in January, the most recent federal data show.
The Obama and Trump administrations took varying approaches to stemming that flow, mostly sparking political battles without making headway on longer term solutions.
“U.S. politics and politics around immigration are not built for the long term,” said Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “They’re built to respond to short-term crises.”
While President Donald Trump was successful in the short term at curbing the number of migrants en
tering the country, Bolter said any shift away from his restrictive policies — which essentially ground the asylum system at the border to a halt — was bound to create an influx. Among the policies Trump enacted was a requirement that asylum seekers wait in Mexico for their hearings in the U.S. Some 29,000 people were in that queue amid an asylum backlog that reached 500,000 cases.
Short-term solutions
Even before Biden took office, apprehensions at the border were on the rise.
The Biden administration has since ended the remain-in-mexico policy and is preparing to convert its immigrant family detention centers in South Texas into rapid-processing hubs to screen migrant parents and children with the goal of releasing them into the United States within 72 hours.
But Biden has largely left in place a Trump-era public health order that allows authorities to turn away the migrants at the border — and officials have said they’re still denying entry to the vast majority of those arriving.
Unlike Trump, however, Biden is no longer using that order to expel children. And Mexico recently passed a law against detaining migrant children, so the flow of children and families to the U.S. has only increased.
“These policies were effective in the short term for what the Trump administration wanted to do, which was not let in people who were migrating to the U.S. from Central America,” Bolter said. “These solutions the Trump administration had weren’t necessarily effective in the long term. These people are still wanting to come to the U.S.”
Biden says he is set on long-term fixes including reforming the asylum system and offering more aid to the countries places migrants are fleeing. With crossings up, though, he has been forced to focus on the immediate problem.
Over the weekend, the administration sent a group of senior officials to Texas, where they toured a Carrizo Springs migrant children shelter and are expected to report back to the president this week. The Department of Homeland Security has also started flying hundreds of migrant families from South Texas to El Paso to ease overcrowding at facilities in the Rio Grande Valley.
More kids crossing
It’s unclear just how many migrants are crossing into Texas, but numbers have been rapidly increasing. The number of families detained jumped 62 percent from December to January, the most recent available data shows. Apprehensions of children rose 18 percent.
The bulk of the apprehensions in recent months have been single adults, though apprehensions of unaccompanied children are also on the rise and could be on the cusp of a surge, experts said.
Border Patrol apprehended 5,700 unaccompanied child migrants in January, the most recent data available, and anecdotal evidence suggests that number rose considerably in February, said Bolter of the Migration Policy Institute. The 2014 and 2019 surges saw between 7,000 and 9,000 apprehensions of unaccompanied children a month with peaks above 10,000, she said.