Sunday, March 07, 2021

Biden administration rushes to accommodate border surge, with few signs of plans to contain it

As the Biden administration races to find shelter for a fast-growing migration surge along the Mexico border, it is handling the influx primarily as a capacity challenge. The measures are aimed at 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 last 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 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...Biden officials emphasize that they are taking a different approach, at times deflecting skeptical questions about their border management strategy by bringing up Trump’s widely denounced separation of migrant families in 2018 and the “Remain in Mexico” policy that left hundreds stranded in squalid tent camps while awaiting U.S. court hearings that never came..“Obviously, we’re going to have more kids crossing into the country since we’ve been letting more children stay and the last administration inhumanely kicked them out,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Friday, when asked whether Biden accepted responsibility for the growing surge. “We’re going to tread our own path forward, and that includes treating minors with humanity and respect,” Psaki said. Less clear is what the administration will do if unauthorized crossings continue on a record-breaking path. The latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show Mexican adults and children crossing at levels not recorded in years — a change from 2019 when Central American families made up the largest group of asylum seekers. Mexico’s economy contracted 8.5 percent last year, and many Mexican migrants appear to be fleeing states scarred by some of the country’s worst drug cartel violence...MORE

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