The number of people illegally crossing the United States-Mexico border has soared in President Biden’s first two months in office and is now expected to blow past all annual totals for the past two decades.
“We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Tuesday morning.
“There is understandably a great deal of attention currently focused on the southwest border,” Mayorkas said. “The situation at the southwest border is difficult. We are working around the clock to manage it, and we will continue to do so. That is our job. We are making progress, and we are executing on our plan.”
The DHS leader avoided the term “crisis” despite Republicans’ insistence that the Biden administration use stronger language to show that it recognizes the seriousness of the situation.
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Mayorkas revealed the department’s plan, including a way to reimburse local governments and pay for 100% of COVID-19 testing, isolation, and quarantine costs for migrants released from federal custody.
Adults who illegally come across the 2,000-mile southern border will continue to be immediately returned to their countries of origin, a process that the U.S. commenced last March to avoid filling border facilities with people during the pandemic. Returning adults to south of the border does not pose a challenge for the Border Patrol because it can be done quickly even with thousands of adults being apprehended at the border each week, Mayorkas said.
“Most” families are also being returned to their home countries, except for when Mexican authorities lack the shelter space to hold people, forcing the Border Patrol to take families into custody, according to Mayorkas. However, federal data shows that of the more than 18,000 family units encountered on the border in February, just 8,000 were returned south of the border. The majority of families were taken into custody, contradicting Mayorkas’s claim.
Those taken into Border Patrol custody are not to be held for more than 72 hours. Normally, most people would be transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for longer detention, but because ICE is underfunded and courts have blocked some facilities from detaining more than a certain number of people, an unspecified number have been released across the country.
The Biden administration chose in January not to return unaccompanied children from the border as the Trump administration had done. Since then, the number of children arriving at the border has surged to levels not seen since the 2014 unaccompanied minor crisis. Because children must be held in custody while the government searches for a sponsor in the U.S. to release them to, facilities have reportedly become overcrowded, yet the Biden administration will not let reporters inside to see the conditions.
Mayorkas, who worked in the DHS during former President Barack Obama’s two terms, blamed the Trump administration’s dismantling of the asylum process for the department’s struggle responding to more migrants and said his predecessor failed to consider how to carry out border operations amid the pandemic.
“There were no plans to protect our front-line personnel against the COVID-19 pandemic. There was no appropriate planning for the pandemic at all,” Mayorkas said.
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Customs and Border Protection is in the process of deploying more employees to hard-hit border regions and standing up additional tents as overflow facilities. It is creating joint processing centers so that children do not have to sit in Border Patrol custody for days before being transferred to childcare facilities administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. Over the weekend, Mayorkas called in the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist CBP with children in its custody. DHS also deployed 560 staff members as volunteers to help HHS.
