DHS chief defends child border policies
WASHINGTON >> U.S. authorities encountered nearly double the number of children traveling alone across the Mexican border on Monday than on an average day last month, an official said Tuesday, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded the surge was a challenge.
The Border Patrol came across 561 unaccompanied children at the border on Monday, including 280 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the official said, offering a snapshot of how quickly events at the border have changed during the first two months of Joe Biden’s presidency. By comparison, it encountered a daily average of 332 unaccompanied children in February, which itself was a 60% jump from January. The peak was 370 during a Trump-era surge in May 2019.
The U.S. official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that were not intended for public disclosure, said the Health and Human Services Department was moving to open two additional facilities to process children traveling alone — one for 800 children at Moffett Federal Airfield near San Francisco and another in Pecos, Texas. It is also looking to expand a facility in Donna, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, to hold 2,000 people.
The Dallas Convention Center is scheduled to begin holding children as early as today with plans to accommodate up to 3,000.
Faced with criticism from all sides. Mayorkas said the situation was under control as he defended the administration’s policy of allowing children crossing by themselves to remain in the country.
“They are vulnerable children and we have ended the prior administration’s practice of expelling them,” Mayorkas said in his most detailed statement yet on a situation at the border that he characterized as “difficult” but not the crisis that critics have portrayed.
In the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, 1,856 of the roughly 2,500 children in custody on Monday were being held longer than the 72-hour limit dictated by agency policy, the U.S. official said.
The increasing number of migrants attempting to cross the border, which is at the highest level since 2019 and on pace to hit a 20-year peak, has become an early test for Biden as he seeks to break from his immediate predecessor, President Donald Trump, who waged a broad effort to significantly curtail both legal and illegal immigration.
Republicans in Congress have claimed that Biden’s support for immigration legislation and decision to allow people to make legal asylum claims has become a magnet for migrants, but Mayorkas noted that there have been surges in the past, even under Trump.
On Monday, the Border Patrol encountered about 4,700 people crossing the border illegally from Mexico, including 1,575 in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, the official said. That’s up from a daily average of nearly 3,500 across the border in February and higher than about 4,300 during the peak of the Trump surge in 2019.
The overall increase is blamed on a number of factors, including the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic in Central America and two hurricanes in the region.