San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Apprehensions by border agents hit 15year high
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration apprehended more than 170,000 migrants at the southwestern border in March, the most in any month for at least 15 years and up nearly 70% from February, as thousands of children remained backed up in detention facilities and border agents released an increasing number of migrant families into the United States, government documents obtained by the New York Times show.
More than 18,700 unaccompanied children and teenagers were taken into custody last month after crossing the border, including at port entries, nearly double the roughly 9,450 minors detained in February and more than four times the 4,635 unaccompanied minors who crossed in March of last year, the documents show.
The sharp increases underscored the political and logistical challenges to the administration of managing the flow of people coming from Central America, including the need to more quickly move unaccompanied children and teenagers into emergency shelters at military sites and conventions centers throughout the United States. Many of the children are seeking to join parents, relatives or other people they know who are already in the country.
But the increasing number of family members traveling together is creating another issue for the administration. For much of the winter, even as the United States took in the unaccompanied minors, administration officials invoked an emergency rule put in place by the Trump administration during the pandemic to turn away most migrant families and single adults crossing the border.
The situation is rapidly becoming more complicated. For one thing, the sheer volume of families arriving is growing fast, with border officials encountering more than 53,000 migrants traveling as families in March, more than double the roughly 19,250 in the prior month.
U.S. officials are also coping with a change in the law in Mexico, which has tightened its conditions for accepting Central American families expelled by the United States. Because of the new law in Mexico and a lack of space in shelters there for children, the United States can no longer send families with a child under the age of 7 back across the border.
At the same time, the United States does not currently have the capacity to detain large numbers of families, leaving border officials with few options other than to release them with orders to appear in the future to have their cases heard.
“We’re entering phase two of this extraordinary migration event,” said Cris Ramón, an immigration consultant based in Washington. “At this point, the scope of the individuals who are coming means the administration is going to have to now address the challenges of not only building capacity for unaccompanied children, but they’re going to have to expand this capacity for families.”
The overcrowding in facilities has prompted border agents to release more families into communities along the border, according to officials. Some of those who have been released were not fully informed about the details of their upcoming court appearances, those officials said.
Authorities have dropped off families with children at bus stations in border communities, where they then continue their journeys north to relatives in the United States. Border officials encountered more than 1,360 migrants traveling as part of families last Sunday and expelled just 219, according to the documents. On March 26, more than 2,100 families were detained and just 200 were turned back south.
Republican members of
Congress, vowing to make the issue central to their efforts to retake control of Congress, have repeatedly accused the administration of encouraging the surge in migration with President Biden’s pledge to have more compassionate policies toward migrants than those imposed under President Donald Trump.
More than 13,300 minors were held in the shelter system Friday, according to the department. The administration is projecting it will need more than 35,000 beds for minors in border facilities and emergency shelters by the end of May, according to documents.