President-elect Joe Biden will inherit a growing crisis at the United States-Mexico border, where for the past eight months, encounters of illegal immigrants have risen as migrants flee Mexico, Central America, and South America amid the coronavirus.
Federal law enforcement at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered 74,000 people at the southern border in December, approximately 4,000 people more than in November and October, the agency said Tuesday. It is an 82% increase from the 40,500 people encountered in December 2019.
“This rounds out a significant increase we’ve seen and been experiencing the last three months,” said Mark Morgan, acting CBP commissioner.
CBP did not reveal how many of the 74,000 people were arrested after illegally crossing the border versus how many sought to cross at ports of entry but were denied. However, in October and November, 95% of people encountered at the border had sneaked across, and the remaining 5% were denied entry at vehicle crossings.
Since the spring, the Border Patrol has immediately returned illegal immigrants to Mexico or their home countries instead of taking people into custody and allowing them due process. The initiative, known as Title 42, was implemented to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in small, crowded holding facilities on the border.
Morgan warned in June that CBP may see an increase in migrants fleeing their home countries in Mexico and Central America for the U.S due to economic peril prompted by the coronavirus pandemic and the natural disasters that have struck the region this year. He has also claimed that people are traveling to the southern border in hopes of being admitted before Biden takes office in two weeks.
The U.S. is not allowing asylum-seekers who arrive at the border into the country while they await court decisions, and refugee hopefuls are instead told to wait on the Mexico side of the border. An estimated 60,000 people have been camped out in Mexican border towns awaiting days in U.S. border courts, a process that takes months to years.
Over the weekend, several hundred Cuban citizens in Mexico rushed a bridge that connects Ciudad Juarez with El Paso, Texas, but they were blocked from entering the U.S. Morgan said in a call with reporters Tuesday morning that he is “greatly concerned” because unlike the 2019 humanitarian crisis in which half of the 1 million people encountered at the border were families, most people encountered this fall have been single adults.
“Caravans are already starting to form at greater numbers than we’ve probably seen in the past 10 months now,” said Morgan, noting that large groups have been moving north from South America and Central America.
Morgan added that the El Paso bridge incident is “just a microcosm” of what is occurring.
“We just had an intelligence brief this week where Panama has about 1,800 folks that they’re kind of caring for right now, but at the same time, they have almost just as many who have gone outside of that and went ahead and left Panama and made their way to and are making their way to the U.S. border illegally,” he said.
The government saw more than 977,000 attempts to cross the southern border illegally in fiscal year 2019, which ran from October 2018 through September 2019, making it the highest number since 2007. The humanitarian crisis at the border peaked during May, when more than 144,000 people were encountered at the southern border. While previous surges in illegal immigration were mostly Mexican men, last year’s surge included more families and unaccompanied children than single adults. Families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras made up 473,000 of the 977,000 illegal immigrants last year. More than 76,000 unaccompanied children were also taken into custody, federal data shows.
Morgan plans to leave his position in two weeks when Biden is sworn into office.
