WASHINGTON – Thousands of migrant children backed in U.S. detention facilities along the border with Mexico, part of a resurgence of immigration from Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence, following President Biden’s effort to take a more humane approach to overwhelm those who want to gain access. the country.
According to documents from the Federal Immigration Agency obtained by The New York Times, the number of migrant children detained along the border has tripled in the past two weeks to more than 3,250. three days permitted by law.
The problem for the administration is both the number of children crossing the border and what they have to do with it if they are in detention. Under the law, the children are required to move to shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, but due to the pandemic, the shelters until last week limited how many children they could accommodate.
The growing number of unaccompanied children is just one element of an increasing problem at the border. Border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January – more than double the rate at the same time a year ago and higher than in any January in a decade.
Immigration authorities are expected to announce this week that there were nearly 100,000 fear attacks in February, including encounters at port entries, according to people familiar with the agency’s latest data. An additional 19,000 migrants, including adults and children, have been captured by border agents since March 1.
“We are at a turning point,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent research group. “How fast can the government process people safely and humanely?”
The situation looks like the big wave of migrant children filling detention centers in 2014, which preceded the harsh action taken by President Donald J. Trump. Seven years ago, Mr. Biden, then vice president, traveled to Guatemala, declaring that “the current situation is unsustainable and unsustainable.”
Now Mr. Pray for its own migration challenge – one that its government refuses to call a ‘crisis’, yet can become a powerful political weapon for its Republican opponents and its efforts to legitimize millions of undocumented immigrants .
The president has proposed overhauling the country’s decades-old immigration system by making it easier for asylum seekers and refugees, expanding the legal path for foreign workers, increasing family immigration opportunities and threatening the masses. deportations significantly reduced. His state department announced Monday that foreigners who were rejected on January 20, 2020 because of Trump’s travel ban, could obtain visas without paying additional fees.
But his approach – to reopen the country’s borders broadly for vulnerable children with what he hopes will be a welcoming contrast with Mr. Trump’s erection of legal and physical barriers – is already a danger from the grim reality of migration patterns that have swept the world for years. Due to a change in tone and approach to mr. Trump’s defeat, migrants flee again from poverty, violence and the devastation left behind by hurricanes and heading north to the United States.
Hundreds of migrant families are also being released in the United States after being arrested at the border, causing predictable attacks by conservatives.
Liberal politicians condemn the expansion of detention facilities and railings against the continued imposition of Trump-era rules intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from immigrants. And advocates for families who during the government of Mr. Trump is divorced, pressure on the president to move faster to reunite them.
Together it has Mr. Biden placed in defense in the early days of his presidency, as he tried to show a tone completely different from his predecessor.
The immigration system that Mr. Biden envisages months, if not years, will be fully implemented, forcing the administration to find space for children and, for the time being, rely on a rule that quickly returns adults and most families back to their homelands. .
For the time being, Mr. Biden breaks his predecessor by not applying the emergency rule to children, meaning the United States remains responsible for caring for them until they are placed with a sponsor.
More than 1,360 of the children detained at border facilities have been jailed for longer than the maximum 72 hours allowed by law, despite being placed in shelters by Homeland Security, according to one of the documents dated Monday is. One hundred and sixty-nine of the children are younger than 13.
The Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that the number of children under its supervision is constantly changing. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
The shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services typically house about 13,600 young migrants, but until Friday space is limited due to measures to deal with the pandemic. On Sunday, the health agency had more than 8,100 minor minor children in its shelters, which according to the documents put the system off 13 days from its ‘maximum capacity target’.
The Biden administration has already opened a center for emergency infiltration of children in Carrizo Springs, Texas, a shelter whose use during the Trump administration came under fire.
The criticism comes from all sides, even if the president tries to navigate the smallest margins to get a one-time immigration bill through Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, said the continued detention of families in a tent facility “is not OK, has never been OK, and never will be OK.”
And Republicans are already pointing out that they intend to address the implications of Mr. Pray to put at the center of their efforts to re-enter Congress in 2022.
They pointed to the decision of Mr. Praying to gradually welcome back asylum seekers who had to wait months in Mexico under a Trump-era program. Mr. Trump, who used the power of anti-immigrant sentiment during his 2016 campaign, warned in a scathing statement last week about a ‘winding tsunami at the border’ and predicted that ‘illegal immigrants from every corner of the globe’ on us will descend. border and never be returned. ”
Mr. Biden, who was briefed on the issue last week, deployed his top administration officials to tour the border facilities over the weekend. The administration has made disaster relief funds available to border communities, diverted agents from the northern border to the southern border and is considering a pilot program that will place health officials at border facilities to expedite children’s search for a sponsor.
In anticipation of the arrival of even more children to the border, the government ordered the shelters on Friday to return to their full capacity despite the pandemic.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said Home Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a call last Friday that the government was in a hurry to make more room for children. to find. “You can not just say that we no longer have space,” said Mr. Thompson said. “You need to start looking.”
During the campaign, Mr. Biden supported the relocation of the detention of migrants and instead released them in the United States and tracked them with a single monitor or periodic calls while their immigration cases were being processed. The administration has drawn up a plan that will eventually release families from the detention facilities within 72 hours.
But for now, using the same pandemic rule as the Trump administration did, the Biden administration has continued to turn away most migrants except unaccompanied children.
And almost as soon as Mr. Biden came into office, top government officials publicly tried to discourage migrants from traveling north, saying it would take time to unravel Trump’s policies. Previous public messages, including the presentation of billboards in Central America to encourage migrants to stay at home, have failed.
“Realistically, there is a speech on a population of people who are desperate,” Mayorkas said in an interview. “It’s not going to work 100 percent, but if it’s effective at all, it’s important not only for what we’re trying to do, but also for the well – being of the people.
Some families are released in the United States. Border agents could not reject migrant families in South Texas because of changes in Mexican law banning the detention of young children.
Administration officials point to a spate of actions underway aimed at resolving a broken immigration system: improving communication between the Border Patrol and the health department, including whether the children who, after the long-term centers are transported, boys or girls; streamlining background tests for employees in the shelter; and the vaccination of frontier workers against the coronavirus.
They are also accelerating efforts to find new facilities to care for children during the weeks and months it takes to find family members or foster parents. They are considering unused school buildings, military bases and federal facilities that can be quickly converted into places that are acceptable to children.
And they are once again launching a program in Central America that enables children to apply for asylum without making the dangerous trek to the border. Mr. Trump ended the program, which, according to Biden government officials, would eventually reduce the flow of migrant children to the United States.
But all this will take time. Meanwhile, officials say, they acknowledge that the pressure on Mr. Praying will only increase.
“In every step we look at where the bottlenecks are and then try to eliminate the bottlenecks and yes, it will not be resolved tomorrow,” said Esther Olavarria, the deputy director of immigration at the domestic policy of the Withuis, said. Council. “But if you do not start doing all these things, you will never solve the problem.”
Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman contribution made.