Determinations for whether migrant families that have been taken into federal custody for illegally crossing the southern border are sent back to Mexico or released into the United States are more luck than anything else.
A senior Border Patrol official disclosed Friday that his agents decide each family’s fate based on a myriad of factors that can change at a moment’s notice and affect whether someone is able to claim asylum or is instead flown away. It comes down to how many are in its custody up and down the border, if Immigration and Customs Enforcement has room to take in families, and a plethora of other factors. Regardless of the circumstances prompting families to travel for weeks to get to the border, all are treated the same.
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“This isn’t a matter of us identifying a certain population,” said the official, who spoke on background. “Quite often, individuals have been under custody for too long, or some of the times, we are transferring folks that haven’t been processed yet, so it’s sort of a mix of both. And it really depends on who we have in custody at the time. And so, it is a little bit of an unknown as to what population gets transferred to El Paso. It really depends on what [the Rio Grande Valley] is holding at the time.”
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that the Department of Homeland Security had begun flying families who crossed in South Texas 700 miles west to El Paso. Families were then pushed back south of the border into Mexico. A Mexican law affecting its border city of Tamaulipas prevents families with children over the age of 6 from being sent back from South Texas, so, by flying them to El Paso, U.S. authorities are able to push them back out of the country.
President Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have each claimed that the majority of families that show up anywhere on the southern boundary are being returned to Mexico. Federal data from February indicates that 40% of the 19,000 family members taken into custody were actually removed from the country and that 60% were not sent back.
Monthly encounters of family members last month were significantly lower than the 88,000 seen at the height of the surge in May 2019, which holds the all-time record. However, more families are being apprehended in March. Those figures will be released in early April.
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Families released into the U.S. are supposed to be given documents that explain when to show up for court, which is not for years down the road due to a massive backlog in the immigration system.
