U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers are struggling to deal with an overwhelming surge in the number of migrants seeking to enter the country, especially in El Paso TX.
CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan was there Wednesday, telling reporters that the “breaking point” has arrived, and his agency faces an “unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our southwest border,” most acutely in El Paso.
McAleenan said “has warned Congress of the unfolding chaos and called for immediate action to ‘address this broken framework,’” the Washington Post reports.
CBP and Border Patrol agents detained more than 3,700 migrants on Monday alone and are on a pace to top 95,000 in March. That would still be well below the highest number apprehended in a single month — the more than 220,000 in March 2000, who were part of the record 1.6 million detained that year.
There are currently 12,000 migrants in Border Patrol holding stations that “are so dangerously overcrowded” — three to four times their capacity — “that CBP is releasing migrants directly into the United States for the first time in more than a decade,” the Post says. Many of those being held are seriously ill; others have “lice, the flu and chickenpox.”
McAleenan said that with the overcrowding and illness, he fears tragedy “is just a matter of time.”
Why the sudden, dramatic increase in illegal migration? McAleenan blames smugglers who bring asylum seekers from Guatemala and Honduras to the border, as well as “U.S. laws that he says encourage illegal migration because migrants are virtually guaranteed to be released in the United States,” says the Post.
But NPR reported recently that the Trump administration’s own immigration crackdown could also be a factor.
NPR quoted an expert on border security and migration as saying migrants know Trump wants to keep them out of the U.S., “So they have to do it now. It’s now or never.”
As a result, the Post says, families are confined to “cramped, unsanitary holding cells with little or no access to hot food and showers.”
A border security bill the president signed last month includes $415 million for improved medical care and living conditions for detained children and families, but CBP officials say a new facility in El Paso is unlikely to open before the end of summer.
Many asylum-seekers bolster their claim by crossing the Rio Grande River in Texas, where there’s a strip of U.S. soil between the river that marks the border, and a tall fence intended to keep them out.
Meanwhile, so many Border Patrol agents have been sent to help in El Paso that backup checkpoints have been closed on highways north of the border in West Texas and New Mexico, reports United Press International, making it easier for migrants who elude capture or are released to travel deeper into the country.
