The Biden administration is allowing border officials to move forward with a request to fly migrant children and families to states along the Canadian border due to a shortage of federal facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border where they are initially encountered, according to a report.
Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that first takes illegal immigrants into custody, asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use its airplanes to transport people deeper into the country. The planes are normally used for deportations, the Washington Post reported Friday afternoon.
U.S. border officials are looking to take immediate action to process and hold people coming over between land ports of entry. Just Friday morning, 1,000 children without parents and families were encountered by Border Patrol agents, who already have 1,000 other people in custody but have not interviewed and booked them into the system.
CBP told the Washington Examiner in a statement that it had not flown anyone to other facilities, but it did not deny recently having requested or considered doing so.
“CBP continually evaluates possible contingency plans and adjusts its operations as circumstances dictate, but currently there are no plans to transfer migrants from the Southwest border to the Northern or Coastal borders.”
Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain, a Republican, called the plan “deeply troubling” and urged the Biden administration not to move forward because of the risks it poses to U.S. communities amid the coronavirus pandemic.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS 14,000 MIGRANT CHILDREN WITHOUT PARENTS IN ITS CUSTODY
“We already know these illegal aliens are not being tested for the coronavirus before being released into Texas communities. We cannot let this happen in Michigan,” McClain said.
At present, CBP is not testing migrants for the coronavirus before releasing people into the country and is instead relying on nonprofit organizations and local governments to carry out testing and quarantine people. The Greyhound bus company reportedly is pushing the Biden administration to come up with a way to guarantee that migrants seeking to board its buses from the border have tested negative before being transported across the country. Migrants who are released rely on Greyhound and other bus companies to travel to their final destinations in the United States.
The air transfer of people from the border to other federal facilities far away is not unprecedented. The Trump administration opted to fly people to ICE facilities across the country during the 2019 humanitarian crisis. The Washington Post did not reveal if migrants flown from the border this time would be held in Border Patrol’s northern border facilities, which exist all the way from Maine to Washington state, or ICE facilities.
Biden administration officials said on Thursday that CBP had 4,500 unaccompanied children in its facilities and was struggling to move them to Health and Human Services facilities because the entire system is overwhelmed.
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During the peak of the 2019 border surge, when unprecedented numbers of migrant families crossed into the U.S., the Trump administration also used ICE flights to send families to different border sectors that had capacity to hold them.
