As Immigrants Are Packed Into Encampments, Border Patrol Struggles With Overcrowding

In March, there was widespread public alarm after a spillover of migrants in El Paso forced hundreds of them to spend days underneath a bridge with little hot food, torn Mylar blankets and gusts of desert dust. Now, a similar crowded encampment, fenced in with portable toilets, water coolers and camouflage netting draped overhead for shade, appeared over the weekend near the border’s busiest crossing point for migrants from Central America, in McAllen, Tex. The makeshift containment area popped up next to a Border Patrol station in a bustling industrial area of the Rio Grande Valley city. It appears to be a result of the continuing stream of people crossing the southern border despite everything the Trump administration has tried to slow immigration. In April, for the second month in a row, the authorities arrested more than 100,000 immigrants at the southern border, the highest totals in over a decade. That pace has persisted into May. On a single day last week, May 10, agents in the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector arrested more than 400 immigrants who had illegally crossed the Rio Grande. Apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley sector have averaged 1,600 a day recently, with 1,100 of those being members of families, a 250 percent increase from this time last year, according to the Border Patrol. To deal with the increase, the Department of Homeland Security is reassigning some Transportation Security Administration staff, including federal air marshals, to the border. Two large tents with a total price tag of $37 million have been built, one in El Paso and the other 20 miles from McAllen in the border town of Donna, which has already exceeded its 500-person capacity since it opened less than two weeks ago. A Border Patrol official said the agency planned to build a second tent in Donna, next to the existing one. Plans for additional tent encampments appear to be in the works, as well. Editors’ Picks The Best Green Salad in the World A New Mom, Her Nannies and the Often Exploitive Labor of Motherhood James Charles, From ‘CoverBoy’ to Canceled As of last weekend, more than 8,000 migrants were in federal custody in the Rio Grande Valley, more than double the Border Patrol’s holding capacity in South Texas. The facility most migrants pass through after they’re arrested there, adjacent to the new makeshift encampment, has a capacity of 1,500...MORE