House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the number of migrant children and teenagers currently held in custody at the southern border a “humanitarian challenge,” blaming the Trump administration’s handling of immigration for the uptick.
“This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the childrens’ interest.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the surge of migrant children crossing the Southern border “a humanitarian challenge,” adding that the Biden administration has inherited a “broken system at the border.” https://t.co/UNXhabLMfs pic.twitter.com/on69lT7LLX
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) March 14, 2021
As of last week, more than 3,400 children were in custody in warehouselike detention facilities, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
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Due to more hospitable shelters already being at 94% capacity, many detained minors have been staying an average of 107 hours in the facilities, longer than the legally allotted time of 72 hours, according to NPR.
On Saturday, the Biden administration announced it would deploy the Federal Emergency Management Agency to aid the situation at the border over the next three months.
Pelosi praised the move, calling it a step to manage border issues better than the Trump administration.
“This again is a transition to what was wrong before to what is right,” Pelosi said.
However, Biden administration officials say it’s been a challenge to keep up with the demand of children needing services at the border, most of whom are under U.S. care for an average of 37 days.
“We are not in a place where we’re going to be able to meet the demand that we are seeing,” an official close to Biden said. “Every day, we are bringing new beds online, but it takes a lot of time, unfortunately, in terms of our licensed care-provider network. We are aggressively adding hundreds of beds by the week to our care-provider network.”
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Last week, Customs and Border Protection authorities said there were more than 100,000 attempted illegal crossing in February, an uptick from 78,000 who tried to cross in January. Law enforcement also noted a 50% increase in drug seizures last month.
