White House hurrying to accommodate border surge
WASHINGTON — As the Biden administration races to find shelter for a fast-growing migration surge along the Mexico border, they are handling the influx primarily as a capacity challenge. The measures they have taken are aimed accommodating the increase, not to contain it or change the upward trend.
The administration has quickly turned detention centers into rapid-processing hubs for families with young children, relaxed shelter capacity rules aimed at lessening the spread of the coronavirus, deployed hundreds of backup border agents to the busiest crossings and tried to mobilize the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with coronavirus testing and quarantining those who test positive. With bed space filling quickly, officials have drafted plans to put families in hotels in Texas and Arizona.
On several days this week, U.S. agents took more than 4,000 migrants into custody, nearly double the number in January. Roughly 350 teens and children have been crossing the U.S. border without their parents each day in recent weeks, four times as many as last fall, and many are stuck for days in dour detention cells waiting for shelter openings. While most adult migrants are turned away, unaccompanied minors are allowed to stay, as are some families with young children.
President Joe Biden will soon send top advisers to the border to assess the inflow and report back their findings, the White House said Friday. Although Department of Homeland Security officials have warned internally that the largest migration wave in more than two decades could arrive in the coming months, Biden officials have not said publicly what new legal or enforcement tactics they are considering, if any, to slow it.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, said the administration is treating the strain as a logistical and operational problem, “but whether they see it as a political problem is a different question.”
“Biden ran on being the anti-Trump,” she said. “He made clear that an emphasis on deterrence was not what he was going to do, and he got elected. So I think using enforcement as a primary means of managing what is happening at border is not what he wants to do.”
Biden ran for president on promises to repudiate his predecessor’s policies and make the United States more welcoming to immigrants again. Six weeks after taking office, he appears on a path to a crisis, despite months of warnings from veteran Homeland Security officials about the risks of abrupt policy moves during a pandemic and when millions of Mexicans, Central Americans and others are facing deteriorating and desperate conditions back home.
Border arrests and detentions were already at their highest levels in years when Biden took office, and the pandemic has severely reduced the government’s detention and shelter capacity. Biden quickly ordered a halt to border wall construction, curtailed deportations and ended deterrent measures such as former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that left thousands of asylum seekers stranded in dangerous border cities.
Republican leaders have accused Biden of triggering a crisis at the border, and they often highlight how the new president’s tone and tactics are less stern than those of the Obama administration. They have also seized on the border surge as a wedge issue for the 2022 midterm elections.