EXCLUSIVE: Fox News obtained the first photo taken from inside the El Paso Service Processing Center in Texas, dated March 8, from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
The photo, which shows a mother and two children, that authorities transported from the Rio Grande Valley sector to El Paso, came after Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, visited El Paso’s facilities on Friday with a bipartisan group of senators.
“We are currently experiencing a large number of meetings in the West Texas / New Mexico region. These meetings include unaccompanied families and children,” CBP chief Gloria Chavez of El Paso Sector told Fox News in a statement. about the current situation there. “The largest population in the El Paso sector is unaccompanied children, with an increase of 96% in relation to February” 2020, in the accumulated result for the year.
A family of migrants transported from the Rio Grande Valley to El Paso, Texas, the Sector’s Central Border Patrol Processing Center does an initial health check by a contractor who oversees the health and well-being of family and minor units unaccompanied there. (Photo: US Border Patrol)
Border agents found more than 3,300 undocumented and unaccompanied children in the El Paso region this fiscal year. There has been a 64% increase across the country in the number of migrant children arriving in the United States, Fox 40 Sacramento reported.
There were 30,077 seizures at the border in February 2020. In February this year, the CBP found 100,441 migrants on the southern border – an increase of 28% over January 2021 – and carried out 72,113 explosions. The number of meetings at the border has been increasing since April 2020, according to the CBP.
A migrant who spoke with Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins on Friday said the flow of migrants arriving at the border “will never stop”.
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CBP cannot expel children under United States law, so they are temporarily held in facilities like Northeast El Paso, which has a capacity of 1,040 migrants. The El Paso facility and others on the southern border are expanding to the maximum, creating conditions of overcrowding amid the coronavirus pandemic, while the Biden government works to find more space and resources for those arriving at the border.
“The recent increase in unaccompanied children, in addition to family units, is starting to impact our capacity,” said Chávez. “We are working closely with Health and Human Services [HHS]/ Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR) for the placement of children, since CBP’s ability to get children out of their care is directly linked to the space available at HHS ORR. “
A family of migrants crosses the border to El Paso, Texas, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (AP Photo / Christian Chavez, Archives)
She added that since March 8, “the El Paso Sector has received a varying number of [of] daily family units in the South Texas region. “
“We are very fortunate to have such a diverse group of people with different missions aware of the COVID 19 pandemic, working together as a community, both in Mexico and in the United States, to balance our national security, health and well-being responsibilities. workforce and those in our custody, and keeping our communities safe, “said Chavez.
In the meantime, Mayorkas did not answer questions from the press during his visit to the El Paso facility on Friday, where he received an instruction “on the processing, shelter and transfer of unaccompanied children,” according to DHS.
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He and the senatorial delegation also visited the new Centralized Processing Center in El Paso, “where unaccompanied children and families are processed and sheltered before being transferred to Human and Health Services,” said DHS.
Although the numbers have risen at the border for months – mostly unaccompanied children (UACs) and family units – they have skyrocketed since President Biden took office. The number of UACs in custody has tripled in recent weeks, while there were more than 100,000 migrant encounters in February.
Critics blame the dramatic liberalization of immigration policy and the reversal of Trump-era border protections for encouraging the flow and removing the tools that helped with the migrants’ protocols or allowed them to return to their countries of origin.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas listens to President Joe Biden’s speech before signing an executive order on immigration in the White House Oval Office on Tuesday, February 2, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo / Evan Vucci)
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Visited the southern border with 12 other Republican lawmakers on Monday and called the situation “worse than a crisis”.
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“I thought I was going to see a crisis, but this is really a human sadness,” he told Jenkins. “We have our brand-new unit to look after these children and they built it beyond capacity, thinking they would never reach it. Today, they just marked the anniversary that they broke capacity – more than 1,040 children, and it’s just growing by the day. day.”
The Biden administration has said it is moving to replace the “cruelty” of Donald Trump’s previous administration with a more “human” system and warned that it will take time. But he refused to acknowledge that there is a “crisis”, preferring to describe it as a “challenge”.
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The government is considering transporting migrants across the United States-Mexico border to processing facilities in Canada in an effort to ease the pressure on southern migrants’ facilities, The Washington Post reported for the first time.
Adam Shaw and Griff Jenkins of Fox News contributed to this report.