Huge rises in migrant surge
Total at the border in March reached a two-decade high
WASHINGTON — The Border Patrol encountered more migrants at the southern border in March than it had in two decades as the number of unaccompanied children and families seeking refuge in the United States continues to grow.
The Border Patrol reported more than 172,000 migrant encounters last month — a 70 percent increase from February mostly attributable to single adults being repeatedly caught crossing the border. The Biden administration is immediately expelling those individuals under a Trump-era public health order, leaving them free to try again.
“There is a much higher number of single adults coming to the border than we’ve seen in 15 to 20 years because we’ve returned to a policy of allowing people, effectively, to cross the border multiple times without any consequences,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
At the same time, the number of unaccompanied children — whom the administration is not turning away — roughly doubled from February. The Border Patrol reported 18,890 encounters with those minors in March, the highest number ever recorded.
The surge in encounters at the border, and especially the treatment of children and families in migrant facilities, has emerged as the first major political quandary of President Joe Biden’s term. Republicans call it a “crisis” of Biden’s creation, blaming the uptick on his shift away from some of the Trump administration’s strictest immigration policies.
Biden has said he inherited a mess of an immigration system and has noted that encounters have been on
the rise since last April, though the peaks they have now reached have left the president’s administration scrambling to stand up shelters for unaccompanied children while social workers search for sponsors in the U.S. to care for them.
The Biden administration says it is making progress getting children out of crowded Customs and Border Protection facilities more quickly, with an average of more than 500 transferred to the Health and Human Services Department per day in March, up from 276 per day in February. That increased pace comes as the administration has opened 10 emergency intake sites across the state, including in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.
“In many ways, we haven’t learned any of the lessons we learned from 2019 about how to process families and children safely, and the Biden administration came into office with the previous administration having done effectively nothing to prepare for what everyone knew was going to be a busy spring,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Republicans have pointed to the migrant increases as evidence that Biden isn’t acting quickly or doing enough.
“The problem is getting worse and worse,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in an interview with conservative radio host Michael Berry this week. “I’ve been to the border many, many times, and it is by far the worst I’ve seen.”
“What has caused this crisis is Joe Biden has announced to the world they’re not going to deport people — in particular he announced we will not deport children,” Cruz said. “If you’re not going to deport a kid, guess what? They’re going to send you kids.”
Gov. Greg Abbott this week also blasted Biden, saying he “failed to plan for the influx of unaccompanied minors.”
Experts on immigration have said the situation is more complicated than Republicans have made it out to be. For years, there has been a flow of migration from Central American nations plagued by poverty, violence and political corruption, and the numbers have tended to ebb and flow seasonally, often increasing around this time of year.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also exacerbated many of those issues, they said.
“There is a place where there is absolutely a crisis, but that is not necessarily the U.S. southern border — but (rather) the realities in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador,” said Oscar Chacon, the co-founder and executive director of Alianza Americas, a network of migrant-led organizations.
Still, the increase from February to March is significant. The administration is increasingly admitting families, especially those with small children, as Mexico has said it doesn’t have the capacity to house them.
The Border Patrol encountered 52,904 families in March — nearly triple the number from the month before. The administration said it expelled 17,345 of them under the public health order. The number of families has still not reached a peak of 84,000 seen in May 2019, though it soon will surpass that number if the increases continue at current rates.
“This demonstrates the high demand to migrate in the region that smugglers have been able to tap into as they sell the idea that the U.S. is letting kids and families in through the border,” said Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
The new data also shows that the flow increasingly consists of families, rather than the unaccompanied children who have been the administration’s focus so far. Bolter said the influx is beginning to resemble that of 2019, when families made up more than half of apprehensions at the border.
“This just emphasizes that the situation at the border is not a new challenge, and the administration will need to prioritize solutions like having asylum officers adjudicate border asylum claims separately from the existing immigration court backlog so cases are decided in weeks or months rather than years,” she said.
The administration has said it is working to “stem the tide” by addressing the root causes of migration. That will include offering aid to the nations that migrants are fleeing, as well as looking for ways to expand legal avenues for people there hoping to come to the U.S.