White House refuses to call migrant surge at border a ‘disaster’ but deploys FEMA to help

“I know that we always get into the fun of labels around here. But I would say our focus is on solutions. And this is one of the steps that the president felt would help not become a final solution but help expedite processing, help ensure that people who are coming across the border have access to health and medical care. Clearly, the numbers are enormous. This is a big challenge,” Psaki responded.

The Biden administration announced this weekend it was deploying the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the border to help care for thousands of unaccompanied migrant teenagers and children.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION DENIES THERE’S A BORDER CRISIS, BUT HERE’S THE REALITY

Doocy then outlined that FEMA’s mission is to help people “before, during, and after disasters.”

“We’ve heard you say that it’s a problem, that it’s a challenge. Is it now a disaster?” he asked.

“I appreciate the opportunity — I do like your mask. But I will say that FEMA is there to help ensure that the people who are at the border, who are coming across the border, have access to HHS and ORR shelters. That we can swiftly place them with vetted families. They’re playing a number of roles there to address what we feel is a significant problem and a significant challenge,” Psaki responded, adding, “We haven’t been hiding about that.”

The White House has shied away from calling the influx of migration a “crisis,” instead opting to describe it as a “challenge.”

“The men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are working around the clock, seven days a week, to ensure that we do not have a crisis at the border — that we manage the challenge, as acute as the challenge is,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said earlier this month.

However, law enforcement officials and political leaders in states along the southern border have repeatedly warned that immigration has turned into a crisis situation.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was deploying National Guard troops to combat the “smuggling of people and drugs into Texas.”

“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” Abbott said. “Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open-border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans. We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”

The number of unaccompanied migrant children in CBP’s custody nearly tripled in a two-week period, while one migrant facility in Donna, Texas, was at 729% pandemic-era capacity at the beginning of March.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

“Donna is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis,” Leecia Welch, a lawyer and senior director of child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law, told CNN. “We understand the administration inherited this disaster, but I cannot stress enough how urgent the situation is with the growing number of young unaccompanied children. We spoke to numerous distraught children who don’t understand why they can’t talk to their parents, see their siblings at Donna, or get some fresh air.”

The news comes as more than 100,000 migrants were encountered at the border in February, and agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas are encountering 1,500 migrants a day.