Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday as pressure mounts from Democrats and Republicans to respond better to the rising number of people who have attempted to enter the country illegally since President Biden took office.
DHS said Mayorkas will visit the city of El Paso in western Texas along with a bipartisan group of senators. Border officials will brief the group on its operations, including how they take people into custody, care for, and transfer or release families, as well as the thousands of children arriving without parents at the southern border each week.
National and local media were excluded from the trip, and no press briefing was scheduled.
Despite pledges of transparency, the Biden administration has prevented the public from seeing any photos or videos from inside federal facilities where migrant children and families are being held in overcrowded rooms for longer-than-permissible periods — all amid the coronavirus pandemic.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS 14,000 MIGRANT CHILDREN WITHOUT PARENTS IN CUSTODY
Journalists and immigration attorneys have complained for weeks about being barred from the facilities that now house thousands of illegal migrants. And while White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the Biden administration supports transparency, she has not indicated when access would be allowed and deferred to the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.
Reporters have not been allowed inside buildings and tents where thousands of families and children have passed through after being apprehended on the border and then transferred to other agency facilities for longer-term holding. The media were also not permitted into federal facilities prior to the Biden administration except for in rare circumstances in which the facility invited reporters for a tour. Any person visiting such a facility, including lawmakers and media, must lock up his or her phone, camera, and any other recording devices in lockers before entering areas where people are held.
In 2018, amid controversy over the Trump administration’s family separation policy, images went viral showing children in Border Patrol processing centers in Arizona and Texas held in fenced-in rooms and sleeping on mats. Although the photos led to harsh criticism of Trump, they had been taken by the Associated Press in 2014, while Barack Obama was president.
The lack of images and video from the facilities helped generate enormous interest in leaked audio recordings of migrant children who had just been taken from their parents published by ProPublica in 2018. Congressional Democrats played the audio during hearings on Capitol Hill. The publication has not indicated how it got the recordings.
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In February, more than 100,000 people were encountered attempting to enter the United States from Mexico, nearly all between ports of entry where vehicles and pedestrians are supposed to be inspected before admission into the country. That figure is up from 78,000 in January. The Biden administration revealed Thursday that it has more than 14,000 migrant children without parents in its custody.
