Authorities said there were more than 9,500 children in custody with the Department of Health and Human Services and about 4,500 in the United States Customs and Border Protection. This represents an increase from the beginning of this week. The average length of stay for a child in HHS custody is 34 days, an official added.
But as the number of children in federal custody increases, the White House is under pressure to come up with an answer that will alleviate the problem while maintaining Biden’s more humane approach.
In a briefing to reporters on Thursday, senior government officials insisted that it was the policies of former President Donald Trump that left them in the current situation and said that flows of migrants are expected.
“Children who present themselves at the border are not a national crisis,” said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“January 20 was not suddenly the moment when the border became different. The numbers go up and down all the time,” said the official. “Adults are being rejected. Most families are being rejected. We can sue and protect children who come to our borders for help as required by law and our administration is doing that.”
Despite government efforts to minimize the current increase in migrants, the CBP is on track to find more individuals at the border than in the past 20 years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Tuesday. He said the agency is finding children aged six to seven.
Mayorkas’ television appearances this week, along with employee briefings, were designed to show that the government is in control of the issue. Biden attracted harsh recriminations from the Republicans, but also from some Democrats, for his way of dealing with it.
Government officials said on Thursday that the majority of adult migrants and migrant families were being expelled. But they acknowledged that there are limitations to Mexico’s ability to welcome migrants, especially those with young children. And they repeated that the Biden government would not expel unaccompanied minors.
“We are dealing with the hand that has been given to us. The president has inherited a mess,” said an official. “We have a whole government approach to cleaning up the mess.”
The government’s focus now is to expand the capacity of its facilities and accelerate the processing of unaccompanied children, which would allow them to get out of government care more quickly, officials said on Thursday.
This includes changing Covid-19 protocols to increase the number of people allowed within each facility, opening new facilities and paying for flights or transportation for children to meet with relatives or guardians.
The authorities also emphasized that they are working through diplomatic channels to try to address the causes of migration from Central America, which include violence, poverty and – this year – two devastating hurricanes.
But these efforts are long-term. For the time being, the government has said it is trying to rapidly increase the capacity of the new CBP facilities in Texas and Arizona to house incoming migrants and, at the same time, provide a basic level of comfort.
One official said the temporary processing facility operated by CBP in Donna, Texas – which houses the majority of unaccompanied children arriving at the border – “was designed to be able to provide the best care possible under the circumstances.”
The official said they included three meals a day, access to regular snacks, freedom of movement, phone calls, showers and occasional moments of leisure outdoors.
“There are what I would say are the people who are doing the best they can to provide care in a facility that is not really designed to house a large number of children,” said an official.
Media requests to visit Donna’s facilities have been repeatedly denied, as DHS cites Covid’s restrictions. And while the White House said on Wednesday that it would discuss public disclosure of photos taken by a government delegation at Donna’s facilities earlier this month, it seemed unlikely a day later.
“There was a private briefing, an internal briefing from several weeks ago. We don’t normally provide these materials publicly, but we want you to be able, or that a media pool can have its own visual aids and get its own images of these facilities,” said the White House press secretary Jen Psaki.