WASHINGTON – Thousands of migrant children are being held in US detention centers along the border with Mexico, part of a wave of immigration from Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence that can overwhelm President Biden’s attempt to create a more humane approach for those looking to enter the country.
The number of migrant children in custody along the border has tripled in the past two weeks to more than 3,250, according to federal immigration documents obtained by The New York Times, and many of them are being held in prison-like facilities for more the three days allowed by law.
The problem for the administration is the number of children crossing the border and what to do with them when they are in custody. According to the law, children should be transferred to shelters administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, but because of the pandemic, shelters until last week were limiting the number of children they could accommodate.
The growing number of unaccompanied children is just one element of a growing problem at the border. Border agents found a migrant on the border about 78,000 times in January – more than double the rate at the same time last year and higher than any January in a decade.
Immigration officials are expected to announce this week that there have been close to 100,000 seizures, including meetings at the port entrances in February, according to people familiar with the agency’s latest data. Another 19,000 migrants, including adults and children, have been captured by border agents since March 1.
“We are at an inflection point,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent research group. “How quickly can the government prosecute people safely and humanely?”
The situation is similar to the huge wave of migrant children who filled the detention centers in 2014, which preceded the harsh repression imposed by President Donald J. Trump. Seven years ago, Mr. Biden, the vice president at the time, traveled to Guatemala and declared that “the current situation is unsustainable and unsustainable”.
Now, Biden is facing his own migratory challenge – which his government has refused to call a “crisis”, but which could become a potent political weapon for his Republican opponents and frustrate his efforts to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants.
The president proposed to reform the country’s decades-long immigration system, making it easier for asylum seekers and refugees, expanding legal avenues for foreign workers, increasing opportunities for family-based immigration and greatly reducing the threats of deportations in pasta. His State Department announced on Monday that foreigners rejected after January 20, 2020, under Trump’s travel ban, could try to obtain visas without paying additional fees.
But his approach – to reopen the country’s borders widely for vulnerable children with what he hopes will be a welcoming contrast to Trump’s construction of legal and physical barriers – is already at risk from the grim realities of the migration patterns that shake the world for years. Noticing a change in tone and approach after Trump’s defeat, migrants are once again fleeing the poverty, violence and devastation left by hurricanes and heading north towards the United States.
Hundreds of migrant families are also being released to the United States after being apprehended at the border, which has generated predictable attacks by conservatives.
Liberal politicians are denouncing the expansion of detention facilities and protesting the continued imposition of Trump-era rules designed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus by immigrants. And defenders of families separated on the border during the Trump administration are pressing the president to move more quickly to bring them together.
Together, they put Biden on the defensive in the early days of his presidency, while he tries to demonstrate a tone very different from that of his predecessor.
The immigration system envisioned by Biden will take months, if not years, to be fully implemented, forcing the government to fight to find space for children and, for the time being, to rely on a rule that quickly returns adults and many families to their countries of origin. .
For now, Biden broke with his predecessor by failing to apply the emergency pandemic rule to children, which means that the United States is still responsible for looking after them until they are placed with a sponsor.
More than 1,360 of the children detained at the border facilities were held for longer than the maximum 72 hours allowed by law, despite having been sent to shelters by Homeland Security, according to one of the documents, dated Monday. market. One hundred and sixty-nine of children are under 13 years old.
The Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that the number of children in its custody is constantly changing. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
Shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services typically house some 13,600 young migrants, but as of Friday, space was restricted because of measures to deal with the pandemic. As of Sunday, the health agency had more than 8,100 unaccompanied minors in its shelters, putting the system off 13 days from its “maximum capacity goal,” according to the documents.
The Biden administration has already opened an emergency influx center for children in Carrizo Springs, Texas, a shelter whose use during the Trump administration has met with reactions.
Criticism comes from all sides, even as the president tries to navigate the narrower margins to pass a single immigration bill in a generation in Congress. Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said the continued detention of families in a tent “is not OK, it was never OK, it will never be OK.”
And Republicans are already signaling that they plan to put the consequences of Biden’s immigration agenda at the center of their efforts to resume Congress in 2022.
They pointed to Biden’s decision to gradually get back asylum seekers who were forced to wait months in Mexico under a Trump-era program. Mr Trump, who harnessed the power of anti-immigrant sentiment during his 2016 campaign, warned in a hard-hitting statement last week about a “border spiraling tsunami” and predicted that “illegal immigrants from all corners of the earth will descend over our border and will never be returned. ”
Biden, briefed on the matter last week, sent his top government officials to visit the border facilities this weekend. The government has made disaster relief funds available to border communities, redirected agents from the northern border to the southern border and is considering a pilot program that would place health officials at border facilities to speed up the search for children for a sponsor.
Anticipating the arrival of even more children at the border, the government instructed the shelters on Friday to return to full capacity despite the pandemic.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who heads the House’s Homeland Security Committee, said Alejandro N. Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security, told him on a phone call last Friday that the government was rushing to find more space for children. “You can’t just say that we don’t have any more space,” said Thompson. “You have to start looking.”
During the campaign, Biden supported the move to detain migrants and instead release them to the United States and track them with an ankle monitor or periodic phone calls while their immigration cases are processed. The administration drew up a plan that would eventually free families from long-term detention centers in 72 hours.
But for now, using the same pandemic rule as the Trump administration, the Biden government has continued to reject most migrants, except unaccompanied children.
And almost as soon as Biden took office, senior officials publicly sought to discourage migrants from traveling north, saying it would take time to unravel Trump’s policies. Previous public message campaigns, including posters in Central America to encourage migrants to stay at home, have failed.
“Realistically, it is about addressing a population of desperate people,” Mayorkas said in an interview. “It will not work 100 percent, but if it is effective, it is extremely important not only for what we are trying to do, but for the well-being of people.”
Some families are being released to the United States. Border agents have been unable to refuse migrant families in South Texas due to a change in Mexican law that prohibits the detention of young children.
Government officials point to a flurry of actions underway with the aim of fixing what they say is a broken immigration system: improving communications between the Border Patrol and the health department, including whether children are transported to childcare centers. long stay are boys or girls; simplify background checks for shelter staff; and vaccinate 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 relatives or foster parents. They are considering unused school buildings, military bases and federal facilities that could be quickly converted into child-friendly locations.
And they are restarting a program in Central America that will allow children to apply for asylum without making the dangerous journey to the border. Trump ended the program, which Biden government officials said would ultimately reduce the flow of migrant children to the United States.
But it will all take time. In the meantime, officials say, they acknowledge that the pressure on Biden will only increase.
“At every step of the way, we are looking at where the bottlenecks are and then trying to eliminate them and yes, that will not be resolved until tomorrow,” said Esther Olavarria, deputy immigration director for White House Council Domestic Policy . “But if you don’t start doing each of these things, you will never solve the problem.”
Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman contributed reports.