Biden team heads to Texas as border pressure mounts
Harris set to lead Central America diplomacy efforts
WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday took steps to demonstrate how seriously the Biden administration is taking what the president called “serious spikes” in the number of migrants heading to the southern border.
President Joe Biden held a meeting in the White House with top immigration officials where he announced Vice President Kamala Harris is now in charge of pursuing diplomatic solutions with leaders of Mexico and the Central American countries that residents are fleeing, including El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Meanwhile, Biden dispatched a delegation of senior administration officials and lawmakers to Texas, where they let a TV camera follow them inside shelters set up to house migrant children — a first after pressure mounted in recent days for the administration to let reporters document conditions at the facilities.
The situation at the border has emerged as the first major political dilemma of Biden’s term as Republicans continue to hound the administration to acknowledge a “crisis” as the number of migrants arriving approaches peaks seen during 2019 and 2014. But White House officials are increasingly pushing back, blaming Trump administration officials for “sitting on their hands” as border crossings began to rise last year. NBC News on Wednesday quoted anonymous Biden administration officials who claimed Biden’s presidential transition team urged the Trump White House in December to begin opening influx shelters because border crossings were increasing.
“This new surge that we are seeing now started with the last administration but it is our responsibility to deal with it humanely and
to stop what is happening,” Biden said in the White House.
Republicans have blamed Biden’s shift away from the stricter policies of the Trump era for causing the surge. U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas plan to lead a group of at least 18 GOP senators on their own trip to the border later this week as they seek to keep the heat on the president.
“It is a crisis that was created by the Biden administration, by their own policies,” Cruz said on Wednesday. “As soon as Joe Biden was sworn in as president, he halted construction of the wall. He reinstituted catch and release and he ended the remain in Mexico policy — and this crisis is unfolding and getting worse and worse and worse by the day.”
Immigration experts, however, have rejected that characterization, saying the current influx of migrants is part of an ebb and flow that has been occurring for years now.
‘Stem the tide’
An analysis of border crossing data released this week by Tom Wong, the director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, found “no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies.”
“Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure,” Wong, who worked in the Obama White House, wrote in the Washington Post.
The vice president’s role will be to try and “stem the tide,” administration officials said Wednesday. That will include offering aid to those nations, as well as looking for ways to expand legal avenues for people there hoping to come to the U.S.
“While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law and that we also — because we can chew gum and walk at the same time — must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek as the president has described to come here,” Harris said.
Other Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso, have also said more needs to be done to alleviate the corruption, poverty and violence in Central America.
“Americans must finally acknowledge that the real crisis is not at the border but outside it, and that until we address that crisis, this flow of vulnerable people seeking help at our doorstep will not end anytime soon,” Escobar wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday.
Wednesday’s trip to Carrizo Springs, meanwhile, was the latest to the border by senior officials in recent weeks as the administration scrambles to change policies for handling asylum cases in the middle of the surge. That includes an increasing number of unaccompanied children who the administration has begun housing in makeshift facilities across the state as officials work to find sponsors to care for them in the U.S.
The administration has in recent weeks moved to open more than 10,000 new beds across the Southwest in convention centers and former oilfield camps. That includes plans to soon house as many as 3,000 children at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, as well. It is also using the Dallas convention center and a facility in Midland.
As of Tuesday, 810 children, all boys, were housed at the Carrizo Springs shelter’s eight buildings, which have the capacity to house 952, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the facility. Since opening last month, the shelter has housed 1,026 children, 216 of whom have been placed with sponsors.
Video from the shelter showed teenagers playing soccer, tables with shoes and clothes and lines of children walking outdoors.
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat who was part of the group that toured the Carrizo Springs site on Wednesday, said it was in the best condition of the more than dozen facilities she’s visited over the last several years.
Garcia said she visited a classroom where children cited getting an education as their reason for coming to the U.S.
“That was very revealing to me. And yes it was just one classroom,” Garcia said. “But that’s what it’s about — it’s about opportunity, it’s about an education, it’s about that second shot we all dream about.”
Garcia said she still wants to visit Border Patrol intake facilities that are more crowded to see the conditions there for herself, but that she is confident the administration has greatly improved conditions at the facilities to which it sends children.
“I feel good that this is going in the right direction,” Garcia said. “People need to keep in mind … the Biden administration inherited a system that had been dismantled, where staff was not hired, where networks for placement of children were eroded and frankly everything was done to help.”
Limited press access granted
The White House has been under increasing pressure to allow the media to document conditions at facilities housing migrants, where it has so far denied access.
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, earlier this week leaked pictures from inside a crowded U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facility in Donna, near Mcallen, showing dozens of people, including small children and teens, packed into makeshift rooms with clear plastic walls, lying on padding on stone floors and covered with silver foil blankets.
The administration later gave ABC News footage from inside the Donna facility and another in El Paso. That footage showed similar conditions to the pictures released by Cuellar.
Cruz accused the White House of “hand-picking” a TV crew and cherry-picking which facility it allows media to document as he continued to call for the administration to allow reporters to join the senators at the more crowded Donna facility later this week.
The Biden administration says it is working to alleviate the cramped conditions in Border Patrol facilities such as the Donna site by more quickly moving children into the care of the federal refugee resettlement office, which runs facilities such as that in Carrizo Springs. There are plans for a second site in Carrizo Springs, and officials are also exploring housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso.
But the U.S. is exhausting capacity almost as quickly as it can add it. A week after opening, the convention center in downtown Dallas is at nearly 2,000 teenagers, just shy of its 2,300-bed capacity.
In some cases, Border Patrol has released families with no criminal records without assigning them court dates because of dwindling space in shelters.
This story contains material from
the Associated Press.