The country’s top border official expects a dramatic rise in the number of migrants who flee home countries in Mexico and Central America and head to the United States in the coming months due to economic peril.
“What we are seeing right now is that while our economy is struggling, it is by far worse in Mexico, Northern Triangle countries, really in the Western Hemisphere really,” Mark Morgan, who is performing the duties of acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, testified Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security panel.
“What I’m concerned is we’re going to see the same pull factors that we have historically, but it’s going to be magnified because what we like to say – the accelerant of COVID,” said Morgan. “Their economic conditions are going to be far worse than ours. We anticipate that we’re going to see an increase, another surge of migration due to the economic conditions and the economic pull factor coming forward. It is a significant concern for us.”
Border Patrol agents who monitor open and fenced areas between official crossing points averaged 750 arrests of illegal border crossers daily in May. That figure is down from more 4,400 arrests each day last May amid the border crisis. Arrests are an indicator of how many people are trying to cross.
Ninety-five percent of people encountered by agents are immediately returned to the last country they passed through, in this case Mexico, instead of being held in Border Patrol custody and then possibly being moved to longer-term detention as their immigration cases proceed. The fast-track deportations affect asylum seekers and were put in place in March following a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against detaining people in closed quarters.
Border Patrol detains an average of under 200 people nationwide daily, down from 20,000 at the peak of last year’s migration surge, Morgan said. Agents are encountering an average of 50 children daily who arrive without a related adult. Under the CDC recommendation that CBP is following, children are being returned to countries of origin, but Morgan said he was not aware if they were being reunited with parents or family in their home countries. He said it was the home country government’s job to do so.
The Trump administration in the last year has implemented several programs to speed up removals and deter unauthorized entries into the country, including ending “catch and release.” Trump officials said migrants came to the U.S. because they knew they would be released from overcrowded facilities into the country without their claiming asylum. But last year, hundreds of thousands of migrant families who did not claim asylum were released into the U.S. amid the border crisis.
