https://babylonbee.com/news/cartels-give...n=telegram

(03-10-2021 08:14 PM)Crebman Wrote:  

(03-09-2021 06:18 PM)maximus Wrote:  Purposeful destruction of this country

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

Yep. The unspoken Democrat goal is to eliminate the middle class. Only the elites and poor remain....

.....and the leftist clowns on here think they will come out on the “ good side” of this......fools

If these were ROOOSKIES!!! or in Sloe's* (in)capacity Chinese nationals would this be considered an invasion?

If not, why not?

Do we have a Country or not?



Suckers

Quote:Lawyers have apparently been denied access to a Texas border facility where hundreds of migrant children are being held.

The Border Patrol tent facility, which is located in Donna, Texas, is housing more than 1,000 people and has children sleeping in close quarters, with some sleeping on the floor due to a dearth of mats. Nonprofit lawyers are complaining that they have been denied access to evaluate the situation.

“It is pretty surprising that the administration talks about the importance of transparency and then won’t let the attorneys for children set eyes on where they’re staying,” said lawyer Leecia Welch. “I find that very disappointing.”

Some of the children at the tent facility have reportedly had to wait some five days to shower and have lacked soap while doing so, with just shampoo being provided, the lawyers said, according to the Associated Press. Some have complained about being housed there for more than a week despite Border Patrol’s three-day limit for detentions.

Phone calls to parents have allegedly been denied for some of the child detainees.

Welch, who works with the National Center for Youth Law, said that while the children do not appear to be in as bad of a situation as during former President Donald Trump’s administration, lawyers “weren’t able to lay eyes on any of it to see for ourselves, so we’re just piecing together” what the children said.

Lawyers are entitled to access child migrant facilities such as the one in Donna under the 1997 Flores agreement to conduct oversight of how the children are being treated.

The Washington Examiner reached out to both the Justice Department and the White House about the report of lawyers not being allowed access to the tent facility but didn’t immediately receive responses.

Democrats and Republicans have raised concerns about the influx of migrants at the southern border.

A group of more than two dozen GOP lawmakers wrote a letter urging President Biden to redeclare a national emergency as numbers of migrants swell and threaten to overwhelm facilities.

"There is a crisis at our southern border. It is critical that our leaders recognize the severity of the circumstances and respond accordingly," the lawmakers said. "Your administration’s refusal to enforce immigration laws has encouraged countless migrants to make the treacherous journey across our border. We urge you to recognize that an immigration crisis is underway and reinstate a national emergency concerning our southern border."

Customs and Border Protection is reportedly expecting a peak of some 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children to the United States in May. The projection passes the number of migrant children that came at any month during 2019’s humanitarian crisis at the border.

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Quote:A "staggering number" of migrant children detained at a Border Patrol facility in south Texas face overcrowded conditions, with some held for as long as seven days, lawyers who interviewed them on Thursday told CBS News.

Neha Desai, a lawyer representing migrant youth in U.S. government custody, said she interviewed children who said they were hungry, as well as minors who only showered once in seven days.

"Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor," Desai added, citing interviews with nearly a dozen unaccompanied migrant children held at the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility in Donna, Texas.

On March 2, the Donna complex was holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to an internal CBP document reviewed by CBS News.

Most of the minors said they had only showered once while in U.S. custody, even though they'd been held for more than five days, according to Desai. Some said they had showered twice.

"They all said they wanted to shower more and were told they couldn't," Desai said.

As lawyers representing migrant children in the federal court case over the landmark Flores Settlement Agreement, Desai and her colleagues at the National Center for Youth Law are entitled to interview minors in U.S. immigration custody.

Desai said she and one of her colleagues were only able to interview some of the hundreds of migrant children detained at the Donna facility, a large tent complex designed to detain unaccompanied minors and families with children for short periods of time. The lawyers said CBP denied them a tour of the facility.

The Donna facility, which opened last month, has been operating over its pandemic-era capacity for weeks, CBP acknowledged in a recent filing in federal court. The facility was holding 854 children on February 21 and nearly 700 two days before, according to the court filing, which also noted that social distancing "could not be observed at all times given the increasing numbers of individuals in custody."

The children interviewed included a young teenager in U.S. custody with her baby and an 8-year-old unaccompanied girl. Some of the children who traveled with older siblings were even younger, Desai said.

"There was a staggering amount of very young children," she said.

Many of the children were visibly emotional, Desai said, especially siblings of different genders who had been separated and placed in distinct sections of the Donna facility. The young detainees, Desai said, also reported not having access to outside activities. She said the children told her "about how they never saw the sun."

"One of them shared that he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window," Desai said, noting the children raised this issue during their interviews outside the CBP facility.

The minors Desai spoke to also said they had been denied phone calls to communicate with family members. "They were hysterically crying, wanting to talk to their family," she said.

"We appreciate the extraordinary challenge that the government faces in undoing the damage of the prior administration's immigration policies," Desai said. "That said, it is deeply concerning to see young children in facilities for days on end, unable to take a shower, call their families or see the sunlight."

The Department of Homeland Security said Border Patrol agents are working to "quickly and efficiently" transfer unaccompanied minors to the U.S. refugee agency, which Congress charged with housing these children.

"Addressing the flow of unaccompanied children crossing our southwest border is an important priority of this Administration and DHS," the department said in a statement to CBS News. "It requires a whole of government coordinated and sustained response."

During a call with reporters Wednesday, acting CBP commissioner Troy Miller said his agency was "struggling" with the number of migrant families and children in its custody. But he said CBP was offering children access to medical contractors, welfare checks, blankets, baby formula, hot meals and showers at least every 48 hours.

"Many of us, maybe most of us, are parents," Miller said. "I myself have a 6-year-old, and these Border Patrol agents go above and beyond every single day to take care of the children."

In an interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he saw "too many children" when he visited the Donna facility earlier this month. But he applauded Border Patrol agents for their "heroism," saying the children were well taken care of.

"There are no children in cages in the United States," Mayorkas said, according to a transcript of the interview.

A sharp increase in the number of unaccompanied minors entering U.S. custody along the southern border has severely strained the government's capacity to process them, creating significant humanitarian and logistical challenges for the Biden administration.

Nearly 9,500 unaccompanied children were taken into U.S. border custody in February — a 21-month high, according to government data.

According to government figures obtained by CBS News, more than 7,000 of these minors were transferred to shelters overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for housing them until a sponsor, typically a family member in the U.S., is located.

With nearly 9,000 children currently in custody, the refugee agency is scrambling to expand its bed space, which had been limited by social distancing measures. To accommodate more children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) relaxed those restrictions last week, citing "extraordinary circumstances."

The lack of bed space and upward trend of unaccompanied minors entering U.S. custody has led to a logjam of migrant minors in Border Patrol facilities, most of which were built to briefly detain adult men.

As of earlier this week, more than 3,200 unaccompanied children were stuck in Border Patrol facilities, according to CBP documents obtained by CBS News. Nearly 1,400 of the children had been held beyond 72 hours, the legal limit border officials have to turn over unaccompanied minors to the refugee office.

Desai said the children she interviewed on Thursday echoed one similar sentiment about their time in Border Patrol custody.

"Multiple kids said the exact same sentence: 'the only time I get up is to throw away trash or go to the bathroom,'" she said.

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Quote:A Texas border sheriff said changes in border security and immigration policies put in place by President Joe Biden led to a spike in drownings as increasing numbers of migrants cross the Rio Grande. Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez (D) said at least six migrants drowned since the start of the year while attempting to illegally cross from Mexico into Texas — triple the number of drownings from all of last year.

“I think it’s driven by the lack of this administration addressing immigration issues,” Sheriff Martinez said in a radio interview with The 830 Times in San Angelo, Texas. “In my opinion, when this administration came in, they threw the baby out with the bathwater, and they didn’t have a policy in place, and now they’re struggling to catch up, and from what I’m seeing, they’re not being totally factual as to what they’re doing with these immigrants.”

Martinez’s comments came as he reported the drowning deaths of at least six migrants in his single Texas border county in two months. The last drowning, a Cuban migrant found in an area upstream from the international border crossing, had been in the river for several days or a week, the sheriff said. He said there was probably another migrant with him, but that body had not yet been found.

“Last year, we had a total of two all year long, and one child that was never recovered,” the sheriff explained.

Sheriff Martinez accused the Biden administration of not telling the truth to the public about the dangers the current border crisis poses to the public.

“For example, they say that they’re testing them for COVID, but that’s not really happening unless they’re showing symptoms, and the Border Patrol is just too busy,” he said. “There are just too many immigrants to process and not enough personnel in the field to go after these little groups that are getting away.”

“This loss of life is very sad, and I wish this administration, both sides, would get together and come up with something that’s effective for everyone. They’re putting that burden on the border, on the citizens of our community. We’re dealing with it on a daily basis, and there’s not enough being done,” Sheriff Martinez concluded.

Val Verde County is located along the Central Texas portion of the Rio Grande River border with Mexico. It includes the cities of Del Rio and Comstock.

Martinez is not the only Texas border-area Democrat elected official to publically criticize the Biden administration’s policies and their impact on communities along the Rio Grande.

In February, Texas State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) complained about the numbers of migrants being released into the Rio Grande Valley communities without being tested for COVID-19, Breitbart Texas reported.

“(Border Patrol agents) were just dropping them off at the bus station without testing them. Obviously, that’s very alarming to all of us in that they’re coming from Central America and through Mexico and to be released into the United States without being tested for COVID is really unconscionable,” Senator Hinojosa told a local news outlet.

U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who represents the district that is home to the Laredo Border Patrol Sector, harshly criticized the Biden Administration’s lack of honesty about what is happening along the border, Breitbart’s Ian Hanchet reported.

In a Fox News Channel interview, Cuellar said:

I can tell you this, those numbers of people that are being released, they’re purposely withholding that information. They’ve been told not to withhold that information. I now know that they’re bringing people from McAllen over to Laredo, processing them in Laredo, and they’re going to release them in my community. … I’ve seen this before, don’t let the local communities know what you’re doing where they’re starting to bring people in from the valley, process them in Laredo, release them at a bus station. And, again, I’ve seen this before in the past.

Earlier this month, the South Texas congressman said the situation along the border is “not a crisis yet, but it’s going to get there very soon.”

“The number of unaccompanied kids, the number of families who are coming in are just increasing every day,” Cuellar told Fox News. “In my district, just a couple of days ago, 166 people. And it goes on, and just different numbers are going up. So, it’s not a crisis yet, but it’s going to get there very soon.”

The criticisms of the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies come as U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials report more than 64,000 migrants being apprehended by Border Patrol agents in February — just in the five border sectors headquartered in Texas. Nationwide, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 100,000 migrants after they illegally crossed the border.

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Quote:A U.S. Border Patrol source reports the number of migrant “got-away’s” tallied by the agency surpassed 118,000 for this fiscal year. In less than six months, the “got-away” number is nearly double that for all of Fiscal Year 2020. Last year, 69,000 illegal immigrants managed to avoid apprehension by the Border Patrol. Sources report the sharpest increase began in January as President Joe Biden took office.

This particular metric is usually not released by Department of Homeland Security officials. The numbers are achieved by counting illegal immigrants who ultimately escape Border Patrol apprehension after being observed by aircraft platforms and camera systems. In addition, Border Patrol agents using traditional “sign-cutting” techniques identify footprints crossing the border and count those that elude apprehension.

“That’s where it gets tricky,” says a Border Patrol agent with knowledge of the data who is not authorized to speak in the issue. “On a small trail, dozens can walk all over each other’s footprints, so you just do your best. Often, they’ll glue carpet to the soles of their shoes making detection even harder.”

The source reports that for these reasons, the got-away count is usually lower than reality. How much so is debatable as the latter method of counting is not scientific.

The spike in got-aways comes as U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials reported the highest number of migrant apprehension totals since 2006.

Despite the current administration’s refusal to call the immigration situation on the border a crisis, the recent surges are concerning. Many believe the impetus for the surges in illegal entries is being fueled by the promise of amnesty legislation. The administration’s new policies regarding lax interior enforcement and a reduction in removals are also believed to be contributing to the surge in activity along the border.

During a recent press engagement, Texas Governor Greg Abbott elaborated on his views about the border surge, “Because of the volume of people coming across the border, the Border Patrol that makes the arrest, they have to engage quite literally in babysitting. And while they’re doing babysitting, that provides an opportunity for the cartels to be able to bring other people across the border illegally.”.

Recent reports concerning the reduced patrols being conducted by the Border Patrol are likely contributing to the surge in the got-away count. The humanitarian needs of thousands of unaccompanied children crossing the border have impacted the Border Patrol’s ability to cover many remote areas. This situation is likely to worsen as the crisis develops.

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Quote:President Joe Biden’s deputies are making it easier for U.S.-based illegal migrants to import and pick up more so-called Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) at government shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Officials told reporters on Friday they would end a 2018 policy set by President Donald Trump. The Trump policy allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to scrutinize the U.S.-based people who offered to sponsor children and teenagers being held at HHS shelters.

“There will not be any immigration enforcement consequences for a family member or a sponsor who comes forward to be united with an unaccompanied child in our care,” one of Biden’s deputies told reporters Friday afternoon.

The proposed fix to the current traffic jam at the border likely will increase the cross-border flow — because it gives the green light to illegal migrants living in the United States to import more of their left-behind children — and to traffic in more teenage workers into child-labor jobs.

In the current crush, many of the children and teenagers are overstaying the 72-hour limit in the bare-bones border facilities. During Trump’s term, such crowding prompted jeering from migration advocates about “kids in cages.” So Biden’s deputies are using the media’s narrative of “kids in cages” as an excuse to remove curbs on the movement of more children and youths into the United States.

Many illegal migrants choose to leave all or some of their children behind in their home country as they sneak across the border or jump through the asylum and Flores border loopholes. The new Biden policy allows the large population of recently arrived migrants to get their children delivered to the border by paid coyotes — and then delivered to their U.S. homes by taxpayer-funded federal agencies.

But the Trump 2018 policy was adopted also because poor foreign parents agreed to let traffickers move their older teenagers into low-wage U.S. jobs until they worked off their smuggling debts — with interest.

A March 11 report by BuzzFeed News suggests that 35 percent of the current youth migrants claim to be 17, and 24 percent claim to be 16.

Biden’s officials insisted in a March 12 statement that “the new agreement does not change safeguards designed to ensure unaccompanied children are unified with properly vetted sponsors who can safely care for them while they await immigration proceedings.”

Outside the DHS, the view is quite different.

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a ProPublica reporter: “They want to help their parents,” she said in a November 2020 article.

ProPublica cited the case of Garcia, a Guatemalan youth who used the UAC loophole in 2018:

He was 15 and he had debts to pay, starting with the roughly $3,000 he owed for the “coyote” who guided him across Mexico from Guatemala. To finance the trip, his parents had taken out a bank loan, using their house as collateral. If he didn’t repay it, the family could lose its home.

…

Within a week of arriving, Garcia accompanied his aunt and uncle to the factory where they worked making auto parts. He got hired on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, cleaning newly made screws and bolts with an air blow gun. Workers wore safety goggles to protect their eyes from the shards of metal that blew in their faces. It was a dirty job. “I didn’t like it, working with so many oily parts,” he recalled. “And it was dangerous.”

Garcia was not directly employed by the factory. Instead, he got the job through an “oficina,” the word Spanish-speaking immigrants use to describe the dozens of temporary staffing agencies that employ hundreds of thousands of workers in Illinois. In some cases, the [migrant] teens interviewed by ProPublica — all but one of them male — say they don’t even know the name of the staffing agency that employs them; it’s just the place where someone told them they could find work.

In February 2016, the Washington Post‘s editorial board warned officials of labor trafficking into a hidden child-labor economy:

A recently released Senate report confirmed that HHS in 2014 placed at least six children with a ring of human traffickers, who then forced them to work at Trillium egg farm in Ohio for as little as $2 a day. According to a 2015 criminal indictment, the children were subjected to inhumane treatment — forced to work six or seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and the traffickers “repeatedly threatened the victims and their families with physical harm, and even death, if they did not work or surrender their entire paychecks.” The children were housed in trailers with “no bed, no heat, no hot water, no working toilets, and vermin.”

The Trillium trafficking case is symptom of a wider problem with monitoring unaccompanied minors once they enter the United States. The Senate report noted 13 other cases of post-placement trafficking of minors, with 15 more cases indicating signs of possible trafficking. Inexcusable gaps in HHS policies and procedures led to unaccompanied minors being placed with sponsors or relevant adults in a household without background checks.

The [Obama] administration says that it has strengthened its background-check procedures and that adults with serious criminal offenses are now disqualified from becoming sponsors … HHS and the Department of Homeland Security urgently need to establish a clear agreement as to which federal agency is responsible for monitoring the welfare of unaccompanied minors from the time they are placed with a sponsor until the time of their immigration hearings.

A 2016 Washington Post article explained the egg-farm labor trafficking scandal:

[O]ne Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

…

One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay.

Amid the border crush, pro-migration groups are pushing for even looser rules to help more migrants get into the United States. For example, some advocates want border agencies to allow foreign relatives to escort younger migrants through the border and HHS processes. According to a March 7 report in USAToday:

Other times, a grandparent who has raised the child since birth will take the arduous journey with them and arrive at the U.S. border – only to be separated from the child for weeks or maybe months, [Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services at the National Immigrant Justice Center] said.

“There should be a way legally for the children to be essentially reunified in place with the adult caregiver without having to go through the entire system,” she said.

Many of those demands will likely be approved by Alejandro Mayoras, the pro-migration advocate who is now secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

“The numbers are enormous, and we are working through it, and we have plans that we will be unveiling shortly to bring order to that,” he told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in a March 12 interview.

Mayorkas admitted some of the young migrants are picked up by traffickers:

What we need to do as a nation is, we need to invest and address the root causes so that parents do not need to send their children alone to leave their countries of origin, to leave their homes, to traverse Mexico, only to get to get to the southern border and to be placed in the hands of traffickers.

But Mayorkas also indicated he believes Americans have no choice but to watch as progressives extract an unending flow of poor migrants for use in Americans’ homeland:

What we are seeing is a pent-up demand for freedom and humanity, because, over the last four years, the border has been closed, our asylum laws have not been honored and our country’s values have not been advanced.

…

I’m incredibly proud to be in this administration and to serve a president who has made a commitment and lived up to that commitment to restore our nation’s identity as a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws.

Mayorkas claims the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants.” But more than 85 percent of Americans were born in America. and more than 50 percent favor a sharp reduction in the annual inflow of one million legal immigrants. Only about one-in-eight Americans favor policies to increase migration numbers, such as Mayorkas’s current policy of raising the inflow of Central American migrants through the 2008 Unaccompanied Alien Child back door.

The Trump 2018 policy was crafted when officials recognized many of the sponsors are not in the United States legally and were using coyotes — and the federal agencies — to deliver their Central American children to their addresses throughout the United States.

“We’ve arrested 41 individuals thus far that we’ve identified,” Matthew Albence, acting chief of ICE, said in September 2018. “Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens,” he added.

Roughly one-third of would-be sponsors backed out during the period when the policy was in effect, according to a pro-migration organization.

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Quote:CNN) -- Lawyers from the National Center for Youth Law say children haven't been able to shower or call their parents.

The team interviewed a dozen children in the government-run tent facility last week.

The border patrol blocked the group from touring the facility.

But the center's director said the children were terrified, crying, and worried about not being able to talk with the family.

Some said they hadn't seen daylight in days.

The allegations come as concerns mount over the growing number of children in customs and border protection custody.

A CBP spokesman said border patrol officials quote, "do everything they can to take care of unaccompanied children in their care."

However, a Homeland Security official said last week that the facility in Donna was 'significantly over-crowded.'

On Saturday, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security announced he is directing FEMA to join HHS in helping the border patrol.

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas believes the combined federal agencies can help provide emergency shelter for unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The announcement comes in response to the surge in unaccompanied children which has overwhelmed border facilities.

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Quote:Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Saturday that he has directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support a "government-wide effort" to house child migrants -- as numbers continue to spike.

The agency will support the effort to "safely receive, shelter and transfer unaccompanied children" attempting to get into the United States. It noted there has been a "record number of individuals, including unaccompanied children, at the southwest border."

"I am grateful for the exceptional talent and responsiveness of the FEMA team," Mayorkas said in a statement. "I am incredibly proud of the agents of the Border Patrol, who have been working around the clock in difficult circumstances to take care of children temporarily in our care. Yet, as I have said many times, a Border Patrol facility is no place for a child."

"We are working in partnership with HHS to address the needs of unaccompanied children, which is made only more difficult given the protocols and restrictions required to protect the public health and the health of the children themselves," he said. "Our goal is to ensure that unaccompanied children are transferred to HHS as quickly as possible, consistent with legal requirements and in the best interest of the children."

DHS said that FEMA "is now integrated and co-located with HHS to look at every available option to quickly expand physical capacity for appropriate lodging."

Rep. John Katko, ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said that it was a sign that there was a crisis at the border -- something the administration has so far refused to call it.

"By doing that they're admitting there is a crisis even though they won't say it," he said on "Fox Report."

He accused the agency of "peeling away" resources that could be used to combating the coronavirus pandemic, such as vaccine distribution, to focus on the border surge.

"This is outrageous," he said.

It is the latest move by the administration to cope with a dramatic increase in migrants -- including unaccompanied children -- in recent weeks. While it has noted that many of those migrants can be returned by Title 42 public health protections, child migrants cannot.

CBP encountered 100,441 individuals in February, a 28 percent increase over January, the agency said. Of those, 19,246 individuals were in family units; 9,457 were unaccompanied children (UACs) and 71,598 were single adults.

The number of migrant children in custody along the border has tripled in the past two weeks to more than 3,250. Meanwhile, it has been opening more facilities, including looking at using a Virginia military base and a NASA facility – and ending capacity limits due to COVID-19 in order to cope with the spike in child migrants.

Republicans and immigration hawks have blamed Biden policies for encouraging the surge -- particularly his rollback of Trump-era border protections like the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) and asylum cooperative agreements with Northern Triangle countries, as well as his call for paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the country.

"The Biden administration isn’t addressing a crisis, they’re exacerbating it," the Federation for American Immigration Reform's (FAIR) director of government relations, RJ Hauman, said in a statement. "This is yet another message that will be heard loud and clear by human smugglers and everyone in Central America — keep coming to our southern border, things will run smoothly once you get here."

Mayorkas has put out a call for DHS staff to volunteer to help CBP, calling the numbers "overwhelming." Meanwhile, acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller said this week that "we continue to struggle with the number of individuals in our custody, especially in a pandemic."

But the administration has doggedly refused to call it a crisis, with Mayorkas a week earlier calling it only a "challenge."

It kept up that stance this week, with multiple officials refusing to say the "crisis" word.

"You know, I think the...I’m not trying to be cute here, but I think the fact of the matter is: We have to do what we do regardless of what anybody calls the situation," Roberta Jacobson, coordinator for the southern border, said in a press briefing Wednesday.

"And the fact is, we are all focused on improving the situation, on changing to a more humane and efficient system. And whatever you call it wouldn’t change what we’re doing because we have urgency, from the President on down, to fix our system and make sure that we are better at dealing with the hopes and the dreams of these migrants in their home country," she said.

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Quote:El Paso Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (D) on Sunday said the crisis at the border is an "enormous challenge" that the Biden administration is working to address. Her take on the number of unaccompanied minors flocking to the southern border directly contradicts her previous take on the Central American caravans making the same trek.

"What I called a 'crisis' was the government's response that created the inhumane conditions where we had families and small children outdoors, in triple-digit temperatures, sleeping on rocks. That was truly a humanitarian crisis," Escobar told CNN's Jake Tapper. "There is no doubt, Jake, that what we're seeing today is an enormous challenge and it's unacceptable but we also need to acknowledge the flow of humanity arriving at our front door never stopped. The Donald Trump administration didn't stop them and what we're seeing today is a direct consequence of four years of dismantling every system in place to address this with humanity and compassion."

According to Escobar, the number of people headed for the border began almost a year ago, in April 2020, which means it's not a result of President Joe Biden's immigration policies.

Amazingly enough, the congresswoman applauded the Biden administration's "progress" on addressing the border crisis, particularly when it comes to unaccompanied children.

"I want to offer context for just how impressive – this unacceptable, okay – but I want you to know how impressive the progress has been, even in this short period of time," she explained.

Before the COVID pandemic hit, Escobar said she talked to unaccompanied minors who had been in custody between three months and up to one year.

"The Biden administration has shaved down that time to be between 30 and 35 days in a shelter before they're able to get those kids to their families," she said.

Tapper pointed out that Mexican President Andres Obrador referred to Biden as the "migrant president," because of the Biden administration's lax immigration policies. Escobar retorted by saying those comments take away from the humanitarian issues.

What the congresswoman said, however, goes in direct conflict with what she said in 2019, when the Central American caravans were flocking to the southern border en masse.

"I do want to emphasize, this is a very dark period in American history. We should be judged by what we allow to happen on our watch," Escobar told CNN's Christianne Amanpour.

The congresswoman said, at the time, that conditions were unlikely to change unless the United States faced international pressure.

"What we ordinarily see is the United States being the sort of the moral, ethical leader across the globe. We are no longer that moral, ethical leader," the congresswoman said. " ... It is shocking to the conscience that we are at such a low point on our history in the United States of America and it's going to take Americans phoning their representatives, getting engaged, tapping into their outrage, but also tapping into their humanity to demand change."

How is this simply a "challenge" and not a crisis? FEMA was deployed, not to help out with the normal number of illegal border crossings, but to assist Border Patrol in the overwhelming number of unaccompanied minors that have come to the United States. This was in response to a Texas facility being more than 700 percent of capacity. That's after the CDC rolled back COVID restrictions, which kept capacity at roughly 50 percent. In a little over a week we went from one facility operating at 50 percent capacity to another operating at 700 percent capacity. Customs and Border Protection is so desperate for manpower along the southern border that DHS sent out an email asking employees to volunteer their time for menial tasks, which would free up Border Patrol agents.

Either it's inhumane for people to sleep on floors in holding facilities, packed like sardines, or it's not. Either it's inhumane for people to live in unsanitary conditions with one toilet and no shower, or it's not. That shouldn't change based on what political party the president belongs to.

If these conditions were dubbed a "dark time" in American history, then what's taking place today should also be considered the same. It shouldn't be brushed off as merely a "challenge."

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Quote:President Biden is finding it increasingly difficult to unwind his predecessor’s immigration regulations as the administration grapples with a surge of migrants at the southern border.

Trump officials put in place some 1,000 different immigration measures, according to figures compiled by the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, creating a complex and lengthy process for an administration that is seeking to turn the page on the Trump era.

The administration is trying to unravel those rules in the face of immediate challenges. Officials on Saturday night said the Federal Emergency Management Agency will launch a 90-day effort to care for the influx of unaccompanied migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The move comes amid the administration's plea for patience on the immigration front.

“We can't just undo four years of the previous administration's actions overnight. Those actions didn't just neglect our immigration system; they intentionally made it worse. When you add a pandemic to that, it's clear it will take significant time to overcome,” Roberta Jacobson, President Biden’s southern border czar, said at a White House press briefing this past week.

In four years, the Trump administration effectively barred asylum-seekers from entering the U.S., limited green card access for those who might need public assistance, ended protections for immigrants who came to the U.S. amid unrest in their home countries, and created new administrative hurdles for those seeking to migrate or become citizens.

Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford University who runs the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, said one of the overarching goals of the Trump administration was “to grind things to a halt by adopting new restrictions, new requirements, promulgate new regulations and pursue endless policies and directives.”

That was often achieved, he said, through internal methods such as memoranda, guidance documents and legal opinions or through the lengthier rulemaking process.

“Undoing all of that requires, as to each policy, an assessment of what the replacement ought to be, what the legal requirements are for changing it, and what the operational and logistical challenges are for implementing a new policy,” said Guttentag, who served as a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Obama administration.

He said the task facing the Biden administration amounts to “bureaucratic archeology” in order to untangle each policy and the multiple ways it may have been implemented.

Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said Trump officials also used a layered approach by combining orders and regulations to take a duplicative approach on some policies.

“It was sort of an all-of-the-above approach using all the levers of power available to the executive branch to short-circuit the system entirely,” he said.

“Each one of those systems will require a deliberative process by the new administration to shield them from litigation challenges,” he added.

The Biden administration has already taken a number of steps to roll back Trump’s legacy on immigration, rolling out a new system for processing asylum claims for those waiting in Mexico and scrapping the public charge rule that would limit green cards for those who might need assistance.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and the administration has already hit roadblocks on other immigration efforts.

A federal judge in Texas halted Biden’s first major immigration order that sought to freeze deportations during his first 100 days in office.

“The administration tried to do something categorical. It tried to have a 100-day moratorium on deportations to give itself breathing space on some things,” said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan and DHS’s officer for civil rights and civil liberties under the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the number of apprehensions at the southern border increased 28 percent in February to more than 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Most of those apprehended are being quickly expelled from the U.S. under a Trump-era policy allowing swift deportation to guard against the coronavirus, a policy many immigration advocacy groups want to see eliminated.

Biden’s struggles on immigration extend to Congress as well.

The president has yet to nominate the heads of DHS agencies, and the administration’s plan to provide a path to citizenship to some 11 million people already living in the U.S. has been set aside by House Democrats as they focus instead on two bills that would offer citizenship to a smaller group.

Existing legal challenges to Trump immigration policies give the Biden administration another avenue to roll back regulations, though many are likely to be stuck in litigation for some time.

That means many of the Trump-era regulations will need to be reversed in the same way they were rolled out. While previous internal memos can easily be rescinded, regulations will likely need to be replaced with new ones, often requiring a rulemaking process that can last months if not years.

Even though internal directives can be more easily replaced, the increased pressure at the border adds practical obstacles in addition to the legal ones.

“Making changes has effects on the ground, and you have to work out how you’re going to manage those effects,” Schlanger said.

“If you do away with family detention, you don't do away with families coming to the border and seeking admission, so have to have systems in place that can step in and process those families. If you do away with the 'Remain in Mexico' program, then you’ve got this pent-up reservoir with people who are seeking admission to the U.S. It’s not just normal migration patterns or asylum-seekers; it’s all months and months and months of people all ready to come in just as soon as you tell them they can,” she added.

Some advocates want Biden to speed things along by undoing not just Trump-era policies but others that date back even before former President Obama.

Chris Newman, legal director at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said the Biden administration could have moved “yesterday” to scrap years-old agreements that allow local law enforcement to carry out some immigration enforcement.

But he also wants the administration to move more quickly on reversing positions in lawsuits.

The Biden administration already convinced the Supreme Court to toss challenges to the public charge rule and another on former President Trump’s policy forcing migrants to wait out their asylum cases in Mexico.

But there is a pending challenge to the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke temporary protected status (TPS) for individuals from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan.

“They could concede that the Trump administration's actions toward TPS were unconstitutional. They could reverse position in lawsuits and settle and concede,” Newman said.

But those urging patience, such as Loweree of American Immigration Council, say the administration needs to move carefully to ensure its policies hold up in court.

“Working to shield any changes from legal action to the greatest extent on the front end is critical to ensuring changes the administration works to implement actually endure over time,” he said.

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WATCH: Psaki Shifts Tone, Admits to Problem At Border But Blames Trump
https://rumble.com/veoc6h-watch-psaki-sh...dx&mrefc=6

Reporter Clashes with Jen Psaki When She's Cornered About FEMA Visiting the Southern Border
https://rumble.com/veoejh-reporter-clash...dx&mrefc=7

Quote:Federal officials will utilize the Dallas Convention Center to house up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant teens to respond to the overwhelming numbers crossing the border. Dallas officials notified city council members to the Department of Health and Human Services’ intent to utilize the convention center to house 15- to 17-year-old unaccompanied migrants for as much as 90 days.

The Associated Press reported from a leaked memo from Dallas officials to city council members saying the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center will start, later this week, housing migrant teen apprehended at the border. Officials described the temporary shelter as a “decompression center.”

The Washington Post cited two unnamed Department of Homeland Security officials who said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will operate the facility at the city’s convention center. The officials called it “an emergency measure the Biden administration is taking to alleviate extreme overcrowding at border facilities in South Texas,” the article states.

HHS officials did not specifically acknowledge plans to utilize the Dallas Convention Center in an email response to our inquiry.

HHS officials responded:

As a result of the compelling need to minimize [unaccompanied children] presence at CBP facilities and to provide a much more suitable environment and improved conditions at [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities relative to CBP facilities, HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is opening an Emergency Intake Site in Midland, Texas on Sunday, March 14, 2021. The site in Midland, Texas offers hard-sided shelter space for the children.

The immediate need for the Emergency Intake Site is the result of the rapid increase in the pace of referrals of UC from DHS to ORR for care. The site will provide a safer and less over-crowded environment where children are cared for and processed as quickly as possible and either released to a sponsor or transferred to an ORR shelter for longer-term care. The Emergency Intake Site is intended for use as a temporary measure.

The Emergency Intake Site will provide required standards of care for children such as providing clean and comfortable sleeping quarters, meals, toiletries, laundry, and access to medical services. A COVID-19 health screening protocol for all children will be implemented to follow CDC guidelines for preventing and controlling communicable diseases. Services will be provided by a combination of the American Red Cross, contractors, and federal staff – including teams from the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

The move to Dallas follows the secretive operation to move busloads of migrant teens to a former oil field workmans’ camp in Midland, Texas, on Saturday night, Breitbart Texas reported.

Breitbart Texas reached out to the Office of the Texas Governor for information about the operation that led to moving the children into the facility during overnight hours. An official said the Biden Administration is not forthcoming with information regarding the border crisis and the movement of these migrant children. Abbott received information about the plans late on Saturday night.

Breitbart Texas reached out to Breitbart reached out to Dallas County and City of Dallas officials regarding any plans they may have to work with HHS officials to provide shelter space. City of Dallas officials said they are, “working on a response.”

Link

Quote:White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended President Joe Biden’s handling of the migration crisis on the U.S. southern border, insisting he was working on “expediting” the process for unaccompanied minors into the United States.

“The president is focused on expediting what’s happening at the border at every step in the process,” she said.

Psaki said Biden continued “pushing” his team to “expedite processing at the border,” for the detained unattended minors and release them to vetted sponsors in the United States.

She refused to concede the crisis on the border had become a “disaster” after Biden deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assist with the response.

“I know that we always get into the labels here but I would say that our focus is on solutions,” Psaki said.

She said FEMA would help get unaccompanied minors access to more shelter space.

“Clearly the numbers are enormous,” Psaki said. “This is a big challenge and it certainly is a reflection of using every lever of the federal government to help address that.”

When a reporter asked if the White House believed they had a handle on the border crisis, she replied, “We certainly do.”

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Quote:Florida students were shocked to learn that President Joe Biden recently opened holding cells — which some call “cages” — for migrant children at the border, and that former President Donald Trump had actually signed an order that stopped family separation at the border.

One student said that she found the revelations, “shocking,” adding, “everyone made Trump look like a bad image, and [Biden]’s basically doing the same thing.”

Another student, however, expressed that she was not shocked, and that she expects that “from here on out, it’s probably going to get worse.”

Campus Reform released a video of the students’ reactions, in which reporter Addison Smith interviewed several students.

Watch Below:





“You can’t, like, put them in cages, if, like, anything, give them a chance to be able to secure themselves on American soil,” said a student.



Students also expressed their contempt for the so-called “cages” after seeing the photos of the holding cells, which looked like “shipping containers” with bars on the windows.

“I don’t like that all,” said one student. “I don’t really like the idea of ripping children from their families in the first place, and then keeping them in, like, glorified shipping containers. It’s not nice.”

“It’s like, it’s hard to even, like, explain your emotions, because it’s like, why would you put children in a cage, like, as if they were an animal, like, even dogs themselves, they’re not always in a cage their whole lives,” a second student said.

“It just kind of reminds me of the, what’s it called, like, the — what happened in Germany, Nazi, and, I forgot the name of it — the Holocaust,” reacted another student.

But after finding out that it was actually President Biden — not President Trump — who recently opened the holding cells shown in the photos, students shared their concerns about the current president.

“That is shocking, because I did not know that,” said one student. “Everyone made Trump look like a bad image, and [Biden]’s basically doing the same thing, so, yeah, that’s very shocking. I did not know that.”

“I mean, it sucks, he kinda — he went back on his word,” another student said. “I think Biden lied.”

“I don’t think there should be a double standard,” reacted another student. “I wouldn’t be okay with Trump doing it, and I’m not okay with Biden doing it,” said another. “I think Biden has always just been kind of, like, the puppet mouth of the Democratic Party.”

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Quote:Reports from local news outlets in Midland, Texas, reveal busloads of migrant children being moved under the cover of darkness into a local holding facility. State and local officials received little or no advance notice of the federal government’s plans to move these migrant children into their community.

“On Sunday, Governor Greg Abbott announced that the federal government planned to move some children from the border to a holding facility in Midland,” CBS 7’s Joshua Skinner reported. “The migrants arrived in buses overnight.”

Breitbart Texas spoke to officials operating under the umbrella of U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Monday regarding the movement of the unaccompanied migrants who had been apprehended by Border Patrol agents after illegally crossing the Rio Grande.

The source with knowledge of the movement–but is not authorized to speak on the matter–told Breitbart the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials opened a new facility in Midland at what they described as an abandoned oil worker or “mancamp.” NewsWest9 identified the facility as the “Cotton Logistics Midland Mancamp.”

HHS officials are also reportedly eyeing locations in Dallas that could include the Dallas Convention Center.

Responding to an inquiry from Breitbart Texas, HHS officials responded:

As a result of the compelling need to minimize [unaccompanied children] presence at CBP facilities and to provide a much more suitable environment and improved conditions at [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities relative to CBP facilities, HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is opening an Emergency Intake Site in Midland, Texas on Sunday, March 14, 2021. The site in Midland, Texas offers hard-sided shelter space for the children.

The immediate need for the Emergency Intake Site is the result of the rapid increase in the pace of referrals of UC from DHS to ORR for care. The site will provide a safer and less over-crowded environment where children are cared for and processed as quickly as possible and either released to a sponsor or transferred to an ORR shelter for longer-term care. The Emergency Intake Site is intended for use as a temporary measure.

The Emergency Intake Site will provide required standards of care for children such as providing clean and comfortable sleeping quarters, meals, toiletries, laundry, and access to medical services. A COVID-19 health screening protocol for all children will be implemented to follow CDC guidelines for preventing and controlling communicable diseases. Services will be provided by a combination of the American Red Cross, contractors, and federal staff – including teams from the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

CBS7 reports the new shelter is located near FM 1788 and County Road 150 in Midland County.

Breitbart Texas reached out to the Office of the Texas Governor for information about the operation that led to moving the children into the facility during overnight hours. An official said the Biden Administration is not forthcoming with information regarding the border crisis and the movement of these migrant children. Abbott received information about the plans late on Saturday night.

On Sunday, Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News, “We got surprise news, at 9:30 last night, from the federal HHS that they’re going to be sending some of these migrants to a holding facility in Midland.”

“If they’re going to be working with us, the governor of the State of Texas has to know what they’re doing,” Abbott continued. “How many of those people are going? Where are they going after that? What kind of COVID protocols are they using?”

Midland County Sheriff David Criner told the local CBS affiliate they are “closely monitoring the situation and the holding facility in Midland County for the safety and security of our citizens.”

HHS officials said they will continue to utilize “all available options to care for the children referred to us safely.” Some of the options include short-term and long-term solutions.

“In the short-term, we can ensure children do not spend more time in border patrol facilities than necessary by looking at all opportunities to increase our permanent/licensed network and use influx facilities when additional space is immediately needed,” HHS stated.
Additional shelter capacity will minimize the likelihood that children remain in Border Patrol stations longer than necessary and enhance child welfare for the vulnerable population of unaccompanied children.

HHS officials did not confirm or deny specific plans to utilize facilities in Dallas. Breitbart reached out to Dallas County and City of Dallas officials regarding any plans they may have to work with HHS officials to provide shelter space. An immediate response was not available.

The Associated Press reports a notification to Dallas City Council members reports the Dallas Convention Center will be used for up to 90 days beginning this week to house 15-17-year-old unaccompanied migrant children. Dallas officials described the site as a “decompression center.”

Link

Quote:The number of illegal immigrants trying to jump the border is on pace for the highest rate in two decades, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday, delivering a sobering account just a day before he is to face Congress.

He placed blame for the situation on Mexico’s lessening cooperation, on the conditions in other countries, on the coronavirus and on the Trump administration — but did not mention President Biden’s changes, which many migrants themselves are citing as their reason for coming now.

In particular, Mr. Mayorkas said the Trump team left “no plans” for protecting Border Patrol agents and others on the front lines from the coronavirus.

He said the country has experienced surges before, pointing to 2019 and 2014 — that latter year when he himself was deputy secretary. But he also acknowledged this time is looking even worse.

“We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” he said.

He said a majority of those are being expelled under a Trump-era coronavirus health emergency policy that the administration has kept in place.

But the Biden administration will not expel unaccompanied juveniles, and Mexico is refusing to allow expulsion back across the boundary of some other families. Reports at the border say those numbers range up to 1,000 a day. The families are being processed and released into communities.

He acknowledged the government is not doing COVID-19 testing, but said it is offering to cover costs if local officials and service providers will test.

Yet some communities lack the capacity to test, much less to quarantine those that do test positive. COVID positive rates run as high as 25% among some groups of migrants.

Local officials who can’t quarantine say those migrants are getting on buses along with the general public and disappearing into the country’s interior.

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Quote:“Saying it’s so, don’t make it so.”
– A friend’s 12-year-old son

The opposite is also true: Saying it ain’t so, doesn’t mean it ain’t.

All of which is more coherent than the Biden administration’s own statements about the border in the last month. The “Biden effect” is in full swing, with literally thousands of illegal aliens entering the country daily — with no COVID-19 checks, no social distancing in facilities and not enough facilities to handle the children in particular. But many of the newcomers were sure to wear their Biden t-shirts to the border.

And yet, even as we are overwhelmed at the border, the Biden administration is doing everything it can to not call the crisis at the border a, well … crisis. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki actually said recently that there are not enough facilities to handle the inflow of illegals, but it’s not a crisis.

Isn’t that a primary definition of a crisis?

So, what would qualify as a crisis? The Biden administration is being very careful not to say how they would even define when we’ve hit the point of crisis.

Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary under President Obama, notably said that anything over 1,000 illegals crossing the border per day is a crisis. This administration has never been below that number. In fact, they’ve been over 4,000 per day for some time now. And those are only the ones they are counting.

No ostrich ever stuck its head any farther into the ground than this administration. The one clear priority of the Biden administration as it relates to the border is to never, under even the worst of circumstances, admit that the border is in crisis.

Of course, the reason for this absurdity is that it is President Biden himself — personally — who has caused the crisis with both his rhetoric and his policies.

Even Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has noted these effects, while commenting that it is unsustainable. Others in Mexico have noted the immediate change in the drug cartels’ behavior when Mr. Biden took office, as they take full advantage of the situation at our border.

Now the administration is scrambling to use ICE transportation resources not to return illegals to their home countries, but to transport them farther into our own country (again, generally without regard to their COVID-19 status). So, while this administration puts restrictions on the domestic travel of Americans within the U.S., it invites in hundreds of thousands of illegals traveling in petri-dish-like conditions and ship them around the United States.

This is an “America Last” policy if there ever was one.

At the same time that Mr. Biden denies the crisis on our border, he is also advancing amnesty legislation and supporting H.R. 1, which, among other things, will lead to many of the illegals now crossing our border being registered to vote. Deliberately or not, these elements all send the same clear message: “Come to the U.S. immediately and illegally, and we will keep you.”

And so they do, in record numbers — beyond our capacity to handle them.

In the past, this had a name. It was called a crisis.

Link

Quote:DARE has been on top of all matters relating to immigration since its founding in 1999.

With Joe Biden at the helm, VDARE writers have been on top of the crisis unfolding at the Southern border.

James Fulford of VDARE revealed some of the latest border crossing numbers coming from the Border Patrol website, and they are quite shocking:

“The Border Patrol reports 100,441 apprehensions in February—nearly three times the number of last February (36,514).”

Over the last year immigration has been on the rise, and Fulford brings some broader context to it:

“This was the ninth straight month of increase from April 2020, when 17,106 were apprehended.”

The numbers that the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) and Office of Field Operations (OFO) used consist of the following:

Accompanied Minors
Family Unit Aliens (FMUA)
Single Adults
Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) / Single Minors
Since October, migration numbers have been consistently soaring. The trend for October (71,946), November (72,111), December (74,018), January (78,442), and February (100,441) is absolutely clear.

At the pace the U.S. is going, Fiscal Year 2021 border apprehensions could conceivably surpass 2020’s number in a month or two. For example, as of now, there have have been roughly 397,000 apprehensions in Fiscal Year 2021, while there were slightly over 458,000 apprehensions in the entire year of 2020.

The Biden administration has been derelict in its immigration duties which was to be expected. The radicalism that has engulfed Democrats and their surrogates is propelling them to embark on nation-destroying ventures such as pushing for open borders.

Ultimately, Democrats must be put in their place. And the best way to start is for America First Republicans to retake the U.S. House. Avoiding goofy issues such as tax cuts and having laser-like focus on immigration will propel nationalists to victory in 2022.

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Quote:White House press secretary Jen Psaki was squarely confronted Monday over the Biden administration's handling of the migrant crisis unfolding at the southern United States border.

What is going on?
Despite virtue-signaling from Democrats, unaccompanied migrant children are facing the same tragic living conditions under President Joe Biden's leadership that Democrats criticized during the Trump presidency.

The situation is so dire, in fact, that children are being forced to sleep on the floor and some can only take one shower per week. One facility in Donna, Texas, even reached more than 700% capacity. The Biden administration is now planning to house migrant teenagers in massive facilities like the Dallas Convention Center.

All the while, Psaki and other administration officials have flatly refused to call the situation a "crisis."

What happened Monday?
PBS' Yamiche Alcindor confronted Psaki over the administration's handling of the crisis, demanding that Psaki answer for the inhumane living conditions being forced on migrant children.

"There were lawyers who interviewed some children that were in facilities. The children described sleeping on the floor, being hungry, not seeing the sun for days. How is that acceptable for the Biden administration to keep children in those sorts of conditions given the fact that you said you were an administration that was going to be more humane than the previous one?" Alcindor asked.

In response, Psaki called the situation "heartbreaking" — then blamed former President Donald Trump.

"We are trying to work through what was a dismantled and unprepared system because of the role of the last administration," Psaki said.

But Alcindor pushed back, noting that migrant children are "hungry, sleeping on the floor, [and] not being allowed outside for days at a time."

"Why is that something that's not being outlawed right now? How is the administration not stopping that today?" Alcindor asked.

Psaki responded by admitting the living conditions are not "acceptable," but said the real "challenge" is that "there are not that many options."

"The options here are: Send the kids back on the journey, send them to unvetted homes, or work to expedite moving them into shelters where they can get health treatment by medical doctors, educational resources, legal counseling, mental health counseling. That's exactly what we're focused on doing," Psaki said.

"We have a lot of critics, but many of them are not putting forward a lot of solutions," Psaki complained.

Anything else?
Biden campaigned on reversing his predecessor's deterrent immigration policies. Critics say the reversal of policy is contributing to the growing migrant crisis.

"You just can't say, 'Yeah, yeah, let everybody in' — because then we're affected down there at the border," Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said recently. "The bad guys know how to market this."

In fact, migrant caravans that traveled north over the winter voiced expectation that Biden would honor his commitment to welcome migrants.

"We will advocate that the Biden government honors its commitments," Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group representing migrants, said in January.

Link

Quote:n an appearance on Good Morning America, Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appeared to warn individuals considering hopping the United States-Mexico border to hold off, and he suggested that the Biden administration is working on a plan to orderly process more illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.

“Do not come now,” Mayorkas said, matter-of-factly, when asked what his message to those planning to cross the border illegally might be.

“Give us the time to rebuild the system that was entirely dismantled in the prior administration,” he added.

As the Daily Wire reported earlier Tuesday, Mayorkas also admitted that the United States is on pace for the highest number of illegal border crossings in 20 years, though he did admit that the United States Customs and Border Protection is arresting adults and expelling them back into Mexico, accepting only unaccompanied minors and families with “vulnerable” children.

“We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years. We are expelling most single adults and families. We are not expelling unaccompanied children,” he said.

Indeed, the Biden administration is seeking comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, but Mayorkas appears to be referring to a separate plan, announced quietly last month, which would “slowly allow” as many as 25,000 asylum seekers into the United States from camps in Mexico, per the Associated Press.

The problem appears to be that, while President Joe Biden rescinded the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which forced asylum seekers to remain in camps south of the United States border until they could be processed by immigration courts — a stark change from the Obama administration’s so-called “catch and release” policy that allowed asylum seekers to remain in the U.S. — the Biden policy applies only to new asylum seekers, not those who traveled to the border under then-President Donald Trump.

“The Biden administration on Friday announced plans for tens of thousands of people who are seeking asylum and have been forced to wait in Mexico under a Trump-era policy to be allowed into the U.S. while their cases wind through immigration courts,” the AP reported. “The first wave of an estimated 25,000 asylum-seekers with active cases in the “Remain in Mexico” program will be allowed into the United States on Feb. 19, authorities said. They plan to start slowly, with two border crossings each processing up to 300 people a day and a third crossing taking fewer numbers.”

Mayorkas made a similar statement at the time, telling reporters that “the U.S. government is committed to rebuilding a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system. This latest action is another step in our commitment to reform immigration policies that do not align with our nation’s values.”

He did add that the change “should not be interpreted as an opening for people to migrate irregularly to the United States” but it seems to have had the opposite effect. The Washington Post reports that Customs and Border Protection are handling a record number of arrests and the situation shows no sign of decline. Adults who are arrested crossing the border illegally are being “expelled” back into Mexico under a lingering Trump administration anti-pandemic policy.

The Biden administration echoed that sentiment through press secretary Jen Psaki.

“We don’t want people to put themselves in danger at a time where it is not the right time to come, because we have not had time to put in place a humane and moral system and process,” she said.

Link

Quote:The Biden administration on Tuesday admitted that the southwest border is on pace to encounter more illegal immigrants than it has in the past two decades, but still refuses to call the situation a "crisis." At least one Democratic senator disagrees.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) thinks the Biden administration is sending the wrong message as Customs and Border Protection reports encountering more than 100,000 migrants at the U.S. border in February.

"Whatever message was sent — it was sure interpreted the wrong way," Manchin told CNN in an interview Monday night. "It's a crisis, oh, it's a crisis."

From day one, President Joe Biden sought to strike a completely different tone on immigration policy from the previous administration. He reversed several of President Donald Trump's border policies, including ending Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for processing and limiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement's enforcement actions against most illegal immigrants. The president also vowed to sign legislation granting amnesty and U.S. citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants.

In the view of migrants hoping to come to the United States, these actions established Biden as, in the words of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, "the migrant president." Their faith in this president was signified by those appearing at the border wearing Biden T-shirts saying, "Please let us in," clinging to the promises he made by word and deed, promises the Mexican government says "incentivize migration."

As a result, according to a statement from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the U.S. government is "on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years." While the administration claims single adults and families traveling together are being turned away at the U.S. border because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden has instructed border authorities to take custody of unaccompanied children and seek to reunite them with family or sponsors already in the U.S.

Reports say U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents have custody of 4,200 children in detention centers. The facilities housing these children are overwhelmed, filled beyond their COVID-19 safe capacity, and lacking essential resources like light, bedding, and enough food.

The kids held there are also being detained longer than the legally permissible 72-hour period before they should be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement. DHS facilities are at max-capacity, requiring CBP to keep custody of the children longer. There are also plans to house 3,000 male migrant teenagers at a convention center in downtown Dallas for up to 90 days to relieve the stress on other overcrowded facilities.

Last week, the Biden administration was forced to deploy FEMA to assist with the care for these children.

Compounding the problems at the border is a rise of violent crime as drug cartels, human traffickers, and smugglers take advantage of the migrants. Local officials from the border report violent incursions into their communities, including dangerous high-speed chases with police. Criminals apprehended by authorities include illegal immigrants previously deported for sexual assault, murder, and drug trafficking.

Reuters reported last week that criminal organizations are adopting "unprecedented" levels of sophistication to conduct their smuggling operations, including "briefing clients on the latest immigration rules, using technology to outfox authorities, and disguising smuggling operations as travel agencies."

Republicans accuse Biden of inviting this crisis. "This is all a direct result of wide-open borders policy by the Biden administration, failure to finish the fence, but most importantly, they're basically turning DHS into a welcome mat and they're just encouraging more dangerous journeys for kids," Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said Monday.

Mayorkas on Tuesday defended the president's policies, describing the current border surge as "difficult" but insisting it is "not new" and refraining from calling it a crisis.

"The situation at the southwest border is difficult," Mayorkas said. "We are working around the clock to manage it and we will continue to do so. That is our job. We are making progress and we are executing on our plan. It will take time and we will not waver in our commitment to succeed."

"We will also not waver in our values and our principles as a Nation," he said. "Our goal is a safe, legal, and orderly immigration system that is based on our bedrock priorities: to keep our borders secure, address the plight of children as the law requires, and enable families to be together."

He continued:

We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years. We are expelling most single adults and families. We are not expelling unaccompanied children. We are securing our border, executing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) public health authority to safeguard the American public and the migrants themselves, and protecting the children. We have more work to do.

This is not new. We have experienced migration surges before – in 2019, 2014, and before then as well. Since April 2020, the number of encounters at the southwest border has been steadily increasing. Border Patrol Agents are working around the clock to process the flow at the border and I have great respect for their tireless efforts. To understand the situation, it is important to identify who is arriving at our southwest border and how we are following the law to manage different types of border encounters.
Mayorkas said poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries were factors pushing migrants to seek refuge in the U.S. He also noted, "two damaging hurricanes that hit Honduras and swept through the region made the living conditions there even worse, causing more children and families to flee."

He savaged the Trump administration in his statement, accusing Trump of dismantling the asylum system.

The prior administration completely dismantled the asylum system. The system was gutted, facilities were closed, and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers. We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago.

The prior administration tore down the lawful pathways that had been developed for children to come to the United States in a safe, efficient, and orderly way. It tore down, for example, the Central American Minors program that avoided the need for children to take the dangerous journey to our southwest border.

The previous administration also cut foreign aid funding to the Northern Triangle. No longer did we resource efforts in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to tackle the root causes of people fleeing their homes.

And, there were no plans to protect our front-line personnel against the COVID-19 pandemic. There was no appropriate planning for the pandemic at all.
Going forward, the secretary said the Biden administration would work to set up new facilities to house migrants, increase COVID-19 testing, coordinate refugee resettlement with Mexico and Central American countries, and help unaccompanied children apply for asylum in the U.S. on the internet so they don't have to make the dangerous journey north on their own.

"The situation we are currently facing at the southwest border is a difficult one," Mayorkas concluded. "We are tackling it. We are keeping our borders secure, enforcing our laws, and staying true to our values and principles. We can do so because of the incredible talent and unwavering dedication of our workforce."

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Quote:On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” White House Coordinator for the Southern Border Roberta Jacobson stated that the Biden administration’s message that the border isn’t open is “getting out less than” the message conveyed by smugglers.

Jacobson said, “I think you have to understand that the smugglers are agile and quick and word of mouth gets through and they are exploiting people’s hope and desperation. Our own message is getting out less than smugglers’. We always know that. But we are doing everything we can, and that includes Spanish-language radio, social media, making sure that we convey the message that the border is not open, that the majority of people will be returned, and that it is not ever a good idea to come in this irregular fashion. But the smugglers’ message is very pervasive. They prey on people and they prey on their hope and they tell them things that simply aren’t true. But we are fighting back.”

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Quote:Representative Veronica Escobar (D-TX) said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that former President Donald Trump caused the current surge of unaccompanied children attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a video House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said, “This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration. There is no other way to clam it but a Biden border crisis.”

Escobar said, “It is so deeply frustrating to hear the minority leader’s comments. He comes into my community to use it as a prop. He knows full well we have been seeing this flow of humanity from Central America since 2014. This is not a new phenomenon. It has gotten worse over the last four years. In fact, that’s why you saw former President Donald Trump using every medieval, cruel policy possible to try and prevent what was happening instead of addressing the root causes and instead of creating an orderly, humane system. President Trump, for four years, we saw a dismantling of the asylum system. We saw him withdraw funding that would bring stability to the Northern Triangle. We saw him eliminate programs and processes that prevented children from making that trek and applying for asylum in their home country. The minority leader should not be surprised of the consequence of all of that.”

She continued, “The challenge of the Biden administration is dealing with a broken system obliterated by the previous administration, rebuilding it, but also facing the challenge of even more people fleeing their homeland because of hurricanes and because many of those children are ready to be with their parents and families. We can do this as a country. We have to work together. I would call on the minority leader and my colleagues to tell the truth. Only when we deal in truth can we really solve problems together. They can either join us in being part of the solution, or my fear is, what they are going to continue to do is seek ways to divide our country, fuel xenophobia, and racism. I want to warn them that their words and the fueling of that xenophobia, that racism, that hatred of the border, that fear of the border, there are consequences to that language and that rhetoric.”

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Quote:WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is restricting the information Border Patrol agents and sector chiefs can share with the media as a surge of migrants tests the agency's capacity at the southern border, according to four current and two former Customs and Border Protection officials.

The officials say the restrictions are seen as an unofficial "gag order" and are often referred to that way among colleagues. The officials requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media about the topic.

Border Patrol officials have been told to deny all media requests for "ride-alongs" with agents along the southern land border; local press officers are instructed to send all information queries, even from local media, to the press office in Washington for approval; and those responsible for cultivating data about the number of migrants in custody have been reminded not to share the information with anyone to prevent leaks, the officials said.

Multiple news organizations, including NBC News, have requested access to or photos from inside overcrowded border processing facilities holding unaccompanied migrant children; they have been denied. The DHS press office released one photo late Tuesday of a mother and child undergoing a health screening inside a border facility, but no wider shots to show conditions or sleeping arrangements.

At the height of the Trump administration’s child separation policy in June 2018, it allowed media to tour facilities where separated children were held.

The new restrictions have been passed down verbally, not through an official memo, the officials said. The unofficial policy has led some agents at the border to release videos that show mass arrests and surges of migrants without permission from Washington, two officials said.

Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security have not offered any media tours of the newly opened processing facility in Donna, Texas, which is reported to be over capacity with unaccompanied migrant children, a DHS official said.

Some of the restrictions, particularly for in-person tours, are due to Covid-19 precautions, said one of the current officials. But, as the current official said, while the Trump administration allowed some border ride-alongs for journalists during the pandemic, there has been "not a single one since January 20," the day President Joe Biden was inaugurated.

A DHS spokesperson said the agency is following standards set in 2014.

"Across the federal government, certain employees are designated spokespeople for their respective agencies and public statements are vetted to ensure accuracy. This standard and process has been followed at DHS since the Department's inception and across bipartisan administrations. Customs and Border Protection continues to publicly provide the same monthly data on the same schedule as it has since 2014," the spokesperson said.

The Trump administration's media strategy for DHS often focused on highlighting the dangers posed by migrants, at times inflating the risk. Politically appointed public affairs officials under President Donald Trump pushed local border sectors to publicize arrests and to take national media organizations to the border to see agents in action.

"Part of maintaining the public trust is to communicate regularly and often," a former official said.

A second current official, who has served in the past three administrations, said the current climate for Customs and Border Protection personnel is more similar to what it was during the Obama administration.

"It was more restrictive under Obama than under Trump, when there was more autonomy for each region to speak to the media," the second current official said.

With the change in tone from the Biden administration, which has committed to a more humane system on the southern border, some border agents have released videos without permission.

One such video was posted online over the weekend by the office of Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas. The video shows dozens of migrants, including young children, being shuttled across the Rio Grande by raft. A spokeswoman for Cuellar said that the video was shot in March but that "Congressman Cuellar is not able to say who gave him the video." Two officials, however, said the video came from a border agent.

Cuellar has previously criticized Biden for not visiting the border during the surge.

Another key piece of data is the number of unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody. While the number has historically been somewhat protected, as it is law enforcement-sensitive, a congressional aide said the data have been harder to accumulate amid a leak crackdown.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 1, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas committed to being transparent with the media, citing "another principle to which I intend to adhere throughout my tenure, and that's openness and transparency, and that includes the Fourth Estate."

Mayorkas was responding to a reporter who said that she had been denied access to Border Patrol facilities and that the agency had cited Covid-19 restrictions. Mayorkas said he would look into it to find out why access was denied.

In a statement released Tuesday, Mayorkas said DHS is "on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years."

The Biden administration finds itself in a difficult position when it comes to messaging about immigration. On one hand, it wants to show voters it has a more humane approach, while on the other hand it doesn't want to encourage more undocumented migrants to cross the border.

Speaking at the White House last week, Ambassador Roberta Jacobson, Biden's coordinator for the southern border, told reporters: "It is difficult at times to convey both hope in the future and the danger that is now. And that is what we're trying to do. And I — I will certainly agree that we are trying to walk and chew gum at the same time."

Link

Quote:Democrat President Joe Biden’s border crisis is rapidly spiraling out of control as new reporting on Tuesday evening indicated that the number of unaccompanied children being held in detention facilities is more than 300 percent higher than previously known.

CBS News host Norah O’Donnell said Biden’s border crisis was “growing larger and more dire by the day.”

“Tonight, we have got the stunning new numbers,” O’Donnell said. “Sources tell CBS News more than 13,000 migrant children who entered the country without their parents are now in U.S. custody. The government says even more adults are being turned back every day.”

In a tweet, O’Donnell noted that the 13,000 unaccompanied minors, which is significantly higher than the roughly 4,200 that were reported in U.S. custody at the start of the week, “are being held in U.S. custody for an average of 120 hours, far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.”

“Migrant children are being forced to sleep on gym mats with foil sheets and go for days without showering as the Border Patrol struggles to handle thousands of young Central Americans who are surging across the southwestern border, some of them as young as a year old,” The New York Times reported this week. “Many of the children interviewed by … lawyers in recent days said they had not been allowed outdoors for days on end, confined to an overcrowded tent.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was pressed on the issue during a Monday press conference by a reporter who asked how it was acceptable for the Biden administration to be keeping the kids in those conditions after promising to be “humane.”

Psaki responded by blaming former President Donald Trump for the situation by claiming that Trump dismantled the system when it was actually the Biden administration that dismantled many of Trump’s policies on the border that stemmed the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.

“And I understand the idea of these facilities not being desired by children, but children being hungry, sleeping on the floor, not being allowed outside for days at a time, why is that acceptable to go on, even for one more day?” the reporter pressed. “Why is that something that’s not being outlawed right now? How is the administration not stopping that today?”

“It’s not acceptable,” Psaki responded. “But I think the challenge here is that there are not that many options.”

Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan said last month that the Biden administration “designed” this border crisis.

“They’re bringing millions of people into this country who will now be counted on the census because Joe Biden overturned that, which leads to seats in the House [and] Electoral College in elections,” Homan said. “This is power over public safety, the quest for power over protecting American citizens.”

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Quote:President Joe Biden’s border and immigration policies are fueling a humanitarian crisis that is hurting and killing migrants seeking entry to the U.S., Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) said on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Biden’s policies towards border security and immigration are incentivizing human traffickers and drug smugglers that cause migrants to be hurt and killed, Fleischmann remarked.

“These poor human beings are being abused,” he said. “It’s dangerous. Many are sick. Many are dying. To the great credit of the United States and our great humanitarian heart, once they get here [and are] in the facilities, they are fed three meals a day at tremendous cost the American taxpayer, but before they get here it is a disaster.”

Transnational criminal cartels who smuggle drugs and persons are beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s “open borders” policies, Fleischmann held.

“The coyotes, the cartels — every ill actor — are benefiting from this, and President Biden is doing absolutely nothing to stop it,” Fleischmann stated.

Cartels “take advantage” of migrants’ families, Fleischmann said. “They charge a lot of money for this, obviously. Sadly, there’s a black market for this. … When they’re bringing Chinese nationals, they charge more than they do a family [from] Guatemala.”

Fleischmann traveled to parts of the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas and New Mexico on Monday and reflected on what he saw and heard from residents and Border Patrol agents.

“I saw chaos,” he said. “I saw disarray. I saw not only open borders, but a … failed border policy, failed immigration policy at all levels, and sadly, a crisis, a surge that could have been avoided but for the fact that Joe Biden and his minions created this demand. They created an environment that people from a host of countries — some friendly, some not — are just streaming over the borders.”

Calls for amnesty from Biden and Democrats fuel the humanitarian crisis driven by illegal immigration, Fleischmann said.

“If Joe Biden has a humanitarian heart, if the Democrats want to move past that empty rhetoric and political messaging, they will basically say, ‘Stop the migration and stop his executive orders that … continue to exacerbate this process,'” Fleischmann remarked.

He added, “At the border, it’s a crisis at several levels. It’s a drug crisis. Fentanyl is coming across. Heroin is coming across, and the Democrats again cannot break themselves from that political agenda, that political rhetoric, that political messaging, and the message is clear. The United States of America has to address the border crisis [and] has to address the immigration crisis

Biden’s call for migrants not to seek entry to the United States is meaningless without action, Fleischmann noted. The president made his statement in English on ABC, despite the majority of migrants crossing the southern border being Spanish speakers illiterate in English.

“Joe Biden last night says, ‘Well, please don’t come,'” Fleischmann said. “This is empty rhetoric. He’s got to start taking action. He’s got to lead as President of the United States. He refuses to do so.”

Link

Quote:Four individuals allegedly matching identities on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database have been arrested on the U.S.-Mexico border so far during Fiscal Year 2021.

“Three of the people arrested were from Yemen and one was from Serbia,” Axios reported. “The four arrests are more than the number of similar people taken into custody during recent full fiscal years.”

The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, commonly referred to as “the watchlist,” was created in the aftermath of the Islamic terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, after the 9/11 Commission Report found that government agencies did not share information about terrorist suspects in an effective and timely manner. DHS begins it’s fiscal year on October 1.

Republican lawmakers visited the U.S.-Mexico border this week amid the crisis that has unfolded under Democrat President Joe Biden, who said on Tuesday that he has no plans to visit the border.

Republican lawmakers made the following relevant remarks about terrorists being apprehended at the southern border [emphasis added]:

Rep. John Katko (R-NY): “The last thing I’ll tell you is something that very much concerns me as the Homeland Security ranking member, people they’ve caught in the last few days over there in sector three or monument three have been on a terror watch lists. Individuals that they have on the watch list for terrorism are now starting to exploit the Southern border. We need to wake up, we need to understand… And listen, Mr. President Biden, you’re an okay guy. Why don’t you just admit you made a mistake with this policy and go back to the way it was and keep America safe for all of us, and use that money that we’re wasting down here on our American citizens?”

Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX): “The Biden Administration and his policies have resulted in some winners and losers. The winners are the human traffickers who know that because we don’t have a secure border, that they can move these children. And when we looked in their eyes today, what we saw was children who were being taken advantage of exploited on that 22 day trip. And not only that, but the fact that we have folks who are on the terrorist watch list that are being moved into this country illegally, that are taking advantage of these bad policies that know, because we don’t have a strong, secure border,, that the border wall construction has stopped and been halted about 22 days ago, now they have something to take advantage of. We implore the Biden administration to come visit, to see what their policies have done to these children, what they have done to make our country less secure.”

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA): “And I just want to remind you, one of the things that we learned at the border today is that when 120 border patrol officers are taken from the border to a processing center, that leaves our border porous. And what did we learn? That there are drug traffickers and there are individuals on the terror watch list that are coming across our border illegally, from Yemeni, Syria, Iran. They’re coming here and they’re on the terror watch list.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy: “And don’t misconfuse border security with immigration. They’re two separate. Right now, we have a border that is not secure. Right now, we know drugs, we know terrorists, we know what’s happening to unaccompanied children coming across.”

Link

Quote:A Customs and Border Protection report reveals that in just one sector of the U.S. southern border, at least 44,000 migrants attempted to illegally cross in the month of February.

The March 17th press release buries the bombshell statistic in a report focusing on “large groups” of migrants attempting to enter the U.S. in Hidalgo County, Texas.

“In the month of February, agents in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Sector apprehended 16,583 Family Units and 11,242 UAC. This has marked an increase of over 100% in both categories. This year, RGV agents have encountered 19 groups of 100 or more people illegally entering the United States,” Customs and Border Protection notes.

The presence of over 11,000 UAC – or “Unaccompanied Alien Children” – and over 16,5000 multi-person family units, therefore, occurred in the first full month of Joe Biden’s presidency.

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Quote:The Biden Administration has been touchy about using the word “crisis” to describe the catastrophic flow of illegal aliens across our border ever since he took office. Most Republicans think it’s because of the Administration’s reluctance to admit failure. More likely, it’s because they don’t see it as a failure at all. In fact, their plans are succeeding – just a little bit more than they had expected.

The Biden Administration intentionally caused a surge of migrants across the border, and it started on the first day of Biden’s presidency. He announced a 100-day “pause” in deportations. That sent an immediate and undeniable signal to people in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. Migrants understood it as: “You have 100 days to make it to the United States—if you make it in, you get to stay.”

Biden’s acting DHS Secretary stated at the time that allowing “certain noncitizens ordered deported” to stay in the country “will allow DHS to ensure that its resources are dedicated to responding to the most pressing challenges that the United States faces….” That was revealed as a lie a few weeks later when the Biden Administration announced new guidelines that dramatically restricted ICE’s ability to deport illegal aliens. Under the new guidelines, it’s extraordinarily difficult for ICE officers to remove anyone who is not a convicted aggravated felon, a member of a gang, or a terrorist. ICE officers aren’t being reassigned to “more pressing challenges” like the acting Secretary claimed. They are literally being forced to sit behind their desks.

ICE officers report that the situation is desperate. They are unable to remove more than 80 percent of the aliens who would have been removed from the country under Trump Administration protocols. Undertaking the removal of a less-threatening illegal alien now requires getting special permission from the anti-enforcement holdovers from the Obama years who now run the agency. And that permission is rarely granted. As a result, morale in the agency is at an all-time low. ICE agents are witnessing the surge of illegal aliens across the border, but their leadership refuses to let them get out of the building to do their jobs.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the Biden Administration compounded the 100-day pause and the new ICE guidelines with the ending of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced asylum applicants to wait in Mexico for their future asylum hearings in American immigration courts. As I have written previously, this was a crucial reform because approximately 90% of the asylum claims are ultimately rejected; consequently, many of the applicants disappear into the fabric of American society and never show up for the hearing. With the end of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, some 25,600 asylum applicants waiting in Mexico were allowed in. And this was on top of the new wave of migrants heading for our border.

A massive 78,000 migrants showed up in January—a ten-year record for the month of January. In February, the number was even bigger—Customs and Border Patrol reported 100,441 encounters. The flow has jumped to an average of more than 3,000 border crossers daily. That’s roughly triple the typical 1,100 a day during the last year of the Trump Administration. And the general rule is that for every one migrant apprehended, another three successfully sneak in illegally. That means that more than half a million additional illegal aliens entered the United States during the first two months of the Biden Administration.

Meanwhile, Border Patrol officers have been taken off of their normal enforcement duties too. Instead of patrolling areas without border wall in order to keep illegal aliens out (which the Trump Administration recognized to be extremely important during a pandemic), Border Patrol officers are now spending their time processing the migrants into the country.

So who benefits from this absurd reality? First and foremost, the Mexican cartels. They have seen their trafficking numbers triple. And it’s not just human trafficking; it’s drug trafficking too.

But cynical politicians on the Left also benefit. They succeeded in turning California blue over the past two decades by replacing U.S. citizen voters with low-income migrants who vote overwhelmingly Democrat. New Mexico followed, along with Arizona which in the process of flipping. But Texas is the ultimate target.

It’s not an unexpected crisis. It’s a plan that yielded bigger results than the Biden Administration anticipated.

Link

Quote:Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that the surge of unaccompanied children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border was a “challenge ” President Joe Biden is managing after former President Donald Trump left the immigration system in “tatters.”

Castro said, “Trump left our immigration system in tatters through policies like Remain in Mexico, through metering, through Title 42, which allowed them to expel thousands of people and deny them entry including over 13,000 children. So he created a pent-up demand, this bubble of people who want to come in and claim asylum. That is part of what we’re seeing. It’s true that we’ve had people presenting themselves in waves before we saw that under President Obama, and we saw it in 2019 under Donald Trump.

He added, “Trump weakened our ability to handle the situations, so basically Joe Biden is left to pick up the pieces of a human rights catastrophe that Donald Trump left at our doorstep. Now the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to immigration is that with Joe Biden, you have someone who is competent. You have an administration that is actually taking the steps necessary to solve this challenge. You heard Secretary Mayorkas, but among other things, they’ve increased the inner agency cooperation, they have cut through a lot of the red tape that actually gets these children who are unaccompanied into acceptable housing facilities and then more quickly get them to host families, so they’re with their sponsor or host family instead of in one of his facilities. They have done the compassionate thing, which is not to say no, not to reject an eight-year-old or ten-year-old child when they present themselves as at the border unaccompanied. That reflects our values as Americans. I don’t consider this as a crisis. I agree it is a challenge. It could be managed and that the administration is effectively managing.”

Link

Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) - Full Interview
https://rumble.com/vet2u5-rep.-debbie-le...+News&ep=2

Quote:Where is Robert Francis O’Rourke today? In June 2018, while running unsuccessfully for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat in Texas, he was outside the gates of the Tornillo facility for unaccompanied alien children (UACs), megaphone in hand.

UACs are children who cross the U.S. border illegally and without a parent. There was nothing for O’Rourke to protest about the children’s treatment. Rather, he was protesting the Trump administration for enforcing immigration laws as passed by Congress.

Today the Biden administration is activating an identical facility at Carizzo Springs, Texas, for the same purpose. But no Beto, no American Civil Liberties Union, no parade of members of Congress who pilgrimaged to Tornillo. It’s as if child welfare is not their primary concern.

The surge of juveniles crossing the border since Joe Biden’s inauguration has overwhelmed the shelter program run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instituted to care for them while appropriate guardians are found in the United States. There are a reported 8,000 in custody—one media report puts the number at 13,000.

Many are being warehoused at Federal Emergency Management Agency “decompression” facilities or, even less ideally, in U.S. Customs and Border Protection stations pending assignment of a shelter bed. During the Trump administration, a peak of 15,000 children were in custody, and very rarely was any child not in the care of HHS within the requisite 72 hours.

The coincidence of this surge in illegal border crossings with Biden’s inauguration is hard to dismiss as incidental. A wave of children (and adults) has crashed against the United States’ southern border, apparently sensing a new lack of resolve among immigration policy-makers to enforce existing laws.

Mexico’s agreement to interdict this flow at their southern border with Guatemala has broken down—the children mostly come not from Mexico but Central America. It is also pretty clear that prior caravans of immigrants who tested our border security were recruited and subsidized. A recent Wall Street Journal photo of people waiting in Tijuana for entry showed them all wearing T-shirts reading “Biden, please let us in!” Perhaps the shirts were spontaneously silk-screened in Guatemala.

The existence of the UAC program is a testament to the compassion of the American people. Originally designed to care for a relative trickle of children entering the country alone, it has now swelled to consume a peak of $4.5 billion a year. The Biden administration is quietly making preparations for 20,000 in custody, which means the program will likely cost in excess of $5 billion this year, and the administration will have to go to Congress to request a supplemental appropriation.

And to what end? Through the lens of “America First,” what value do the American people derive from operating the largest child welfare program in the country?

If we had an orderly immigration process, juveniles without parents would likely not be a priority category for admission. The UAC program is largely defensive: we cannot abide having unaccompanied alien children roaming American streets, where many will become homeless and victimized. Nor can we allow persons with gang affiliation to enter the country unimpeded. The UAC program is made necessary because of Congress’ failure to enact rational immigration laws.

After the UAC program places a juvenile with an appropriate guardian here in the United States, some members of Congress, mostly Democratic but some Republican, want the federal government to maintain an ongoing relationship with that family unit. This would substantially increase the cost and scope of the program, and would be a step down the path of federalizing all child welfare, currently the responsibility of the states.

Other than interdicting the flow of children entering the country illegally, solutions to this crisis are hard to come by. Many on the left advocate simply not enforcing current immigration laws. So change the laws: damage is done to the legitimacy of any society that enacts laws it does not intend to enforce.

Or we can discharge children from our care faster if we are less scrupulous about whom they are placed with. This will lead to a repeat of the Obama administration scandal of placing children with human traffickers.

Under current law, children not from contiguous countries (Canada and Mexico) cannot be expeditiously returned to their country of origin. They are entitled to a status hearing, which needlessly takes many months to occur. Some number of children in the government’s care will not be released prior to their 18th birthday, when they will be handed back to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then returned to their country of origin (or not).

These are children for whom an appropriate adult sponsor could not be identified or whose verified gang affiliations render them unsafe to release into the United States. Rather than hosting such children for years in shelter facilities, their return can and should be expedited by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that adjudicates immigration cases. Even children who want to go home are not allowed to do so without a status hearing, which is unlikely to occur before they turn 18.

Maybe the worst aspect of this program is that it encourages parents to send their children into the United States, either in the hands of coyotes or alone across the Sonoran Desert and Rio Grande. Some lionize these parents, but I think they are guilty of the reckless endangerment of their children.

The one solution to this problem that should not be tolerated is to allow the program to grow ad infinitum. If it started as an expression of our compassion, it has become a gross and cynical abuse of that virtue.

Link

Quote:Jeff Bezos’ pro-migration Washington Post is warning President Joe Biden his failure to control fast-growing migration through the U.S. southern border threatens the Democrats’ political power in Washington, DC.

The warning was buried in the last paragraph of a March 19 editorial by the newspaper’s editorial board:

Mr. Biden, intentionally or not, has encouraged the flow, in the name of a more humane policy. Americans would be wise to welcome a new approach while insisting on orderly management at the border, along with focused enforcement and messaging, to prevent a surge from becoming a real crisis.

The editorial was mostly supportive of Biden, but it was headlined: “The influx of migrants isn’t a crisis. But it could become one without careful management.”

The editorial is worried that Biden’s policy is threatening Democratic power:

The main risks are political — for Democrats, forced to defend the administration’s border policies as they seek to retain control of Congress next year — and humanitarian, for unaccompanied minors who have been packed into ill-equipped border stations. Officials are deploying the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the border and opened additional facilities in Texas to handle an overflow that must not be allowed to get out of hand.

But the newspaper downplays Biden’s role in starting the migration and instead blames coyotes and cartels for supposedly fooling migrants into thinking that Biden will accept migrants’ entry into the United States.

In reality, the Biden administration demolished President Donald Trump’s multi-layer diplomatic and legal barriers to the inflow of migrants eager for jobs in the United States.

Since January, the administration has tried to keep the media focused on a small number of children amid the growing inflow of job-ready “Unaccompanied Alien Child” teenagers, the rising rush of “get-aways” adult male illegals, and the expanding flow of the illegals’ wives and children who are being allowed to enter via the nation’s expanding asylum doorway.

Administration officials are eager to portray this government-backed migration as driven by “push” factors in the migrants’ home countries, such as floods, crime, corruption. They are eager to downplay the “pull” factors in U.S. policy — such as the expanded asylum welcome — that help extract the next wave of migrants and send them on the dangerous trek to U.S. jobs, apartments, and K-12 schools.

But a March 20 news article in the Washington Post shows that poor migrants are rationally accepting Biden’s offer of easy migration into Americans’ jobs, apartments, schools, and society:

In the meantime, one clear message has resonated with migrants. The week after Rice’s border visit, [Rep. Henry] Cuellar [D-TX] visited a detention facility for migrant children in Carrizo Springs, Tex. Cuellar said he asked 16- and 17-year-olds whether they had heard Biden when he said not to come to the United States.

The teenagers looked at each other and said no, he recalled. Okay, Cuellar pressed, what about the messages from friends, neighbors and family saying now is the time to come — were they hearing those?

“They all raised their hands and said yes,” Cuellar recalled. “They said, ‘We see this on TV. We see images of people coming across. . . . We see people coming across, so we’re going to do the same thing.’”

“This,” the migrants told him, “is our opportunity to do this.”

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to legal migration, labor migration, and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

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Quote: senior-level law enforcement source with U.S.Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the Rio Grande Valley revealed the implementation of a plan to release migrant families soon after apprehension. The plan radically changes how illegal migrants have been processed in the past and orders Border Patrol agents to quickly release migrant families without notifying the immigration courts or issuing a Notice to Appear.

“This is insane, it is another pull factor that will overwhelm us,” a CBP official with knowledge of the plan told Breitbart Texas anonymously because he is not authorized to speak publically on the matter. “We are creating another entirely different class of aliens we will have to deal with years from now. We will never find most of these aliens once they are released.”

Breitbart Texas confirmed the report with a second official operating under the umbrella of CBP.

The implementation of the plan follows a short discussion of the matter reported on by Breitbart News late Saturday night.

The migrant families will be released without a Notice to Appear, a formal charging document that begins the removal process according to sources. The plan was implemented early Sunday morning and is now in effect.

The source states the plan allows for “prosecutorial discretion” by the Border Patrol for all migrants who enter with children to include whole family units. A one-sheet arrest report is completed, along with criminal record checks and a photograph of the migrant. The new process relies on migrants to tell officials what city they will be traveling to. The migrant is subsequently asked to report to the nearest immigration court office when they arrive so that they can place themselves into formal removal proceedings.

The source believes this to be an impossible feat for the immigration courts to achieve. He further added, “If we can’t process them with our staffing of thousands and are being overwhelmed, the minimal staffing of court clerks around the country will never catch up — even if the migrant shows up.”

Without a Notice to Appear, the migrants are free to travel about the country and are not officially placed into the immigration court system. The court cannot order the removal of a migrant in absentia for failing to appear for a future court date, the source explained. the existence of a removal in absentia order from the court allows immigration officials to remove the alien without appeal if they are later encountered. Under this new process, the migrants will not have a removal in absentia order for failure to appear officials issued no order to appear under the unprecedented plan put in place by the Biden administration on Sunday morning.

This is yet another pull factor that will entice more migrants to make the journey north. The source reports the new procedure is only being implemented in the Rio Grande Valley Sector of the Border Patrol in South Texas. This is troubling to the source.

“If they are not doing this in the Laredo or Del Rio Sectors, guess what, their traffic will come here to benefit from the immediate release, this plan will likely backfire,” the source explained.

The CBP official said this plan is a result of capacity issues at Border Patrol stations but feels this will only exacerbate the issues they are dealing with.

“We may be reducing the time it takes to release a family unit but if we encourage more to come once they find out it is quicker here, we’ll be in the same boat again,” the official concluded.

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Quote:Anchor Martha Raddatz said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the Biden administration was falling short on their promises of transparency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Raddatz said, “We join you this morning from El Paso, Texas. Mexico just beyond that fence you see right behind me. So many on the other side desperate to cross the border, and so many here on U.S. soil calling for change, pressuring the Biden administration is loathe to label this a crisis even as the tide of migrants surges.”

“The number of unaccompanied children and teenagers in border patrol custody reaching record numbers,” she continued. “Children forced to stay longer in overcrowded facilities. The media not allowed inside. The administration restricting access despite promising transparency, citing COVID and privacy concerns. The issue that at times plagued the previous administration now presenting a challenge to the Biden administration, one that shows no sign of abating any time soon.”

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Quote:The Biden administration drew fire from the governor of Texas after opening yet another facility in the state to address the number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the border. In the latest move, the department has opened an existing oil worker man camp in Pecos, Texas.

The facility, previously known as the Pecos Lodge North, will serve as the latest site to accommodate the massively growing numbers of unaccompanied migrant children illegally crossing the border. In a statement released on Saturday, HHS relayed the following information.

It is anticipated the Target Lodge Pecos North ICF will initially accommodate approximately 500 children in hard-sided structures with the potential to expand to 2000. Additional semi-permanent (soft-sided) capacity may be added if necessary, though ORR will always prioritize placing children in hard-sided structures over semi-permanent structures. ORR is committed to holding ICFs to the same or higher standards as state-licensed facilities. The Target Lodge Pecos North ICF will be used when the site is ready to safely receive children.

Using ICFs will help ensure children are moved into ORR shelters, where children receive educational, medical, mental health, and recreational services until they can be unified with families or sponsors without undue delay.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded quickly, saying the “Biden Administration continues to show that it is dangerously unprepared to handle the surge in illegal border crossings as they rush to open yet another facility for unaccompanied minors in Texas.”

The governor directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to ensure the facility has safe drinking water.

HHS recently opened facilities in Carrizo Springs and Midland, Texas to address the overcrowding in Border Patrol facilities designed only for the temporary detention of adult migrants. HHS is also temporarily sheltering UACs at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. The moves come as the Biden administration struggles to deal with seemingly uncontrollable levels of illegal entries at the southern border with Mexico

In a written statement released late Saturday, Governor Abbott said:

As this humanitarian crisis grows along our southern border, the Biden Administration continues to dodge questions that Texans are demanding answers for: Is the federal government tracking what countries these children are coming from and what COVID-19 variants they might have been exposed to? How long will these children be held in Texas? The Biden Administration’s refusal to secure our border, investigate the origins and potential trafficking of unaccompanied minors, and protect these vulnerable children will only worsen the situation and put innocent lives at risk. President Biden must act now to end this crisis.”

According to law enforcement sources, the latest effort by HHS to shelter more UACs may still not be enough. Sources in the Rio Grande Valley report over two thousand migrants per day were apprehended on three separate days last week. The same source, not authorized to speak on the matter, indicated 400-600 of those apprehensions per day were unaccompanied minors.

This latest announcement comes as the Biden administration received harsh criticism from Texas Governor Greg Abbott concerning the inhumane conditions at some of the other shelters recently opened in his state.

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Quote:The number of migrant children now held in U.S. custody surged past 15,000 on Saturday, with some 5,000 unaccompanied minors alone being held in a tent holding facility run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other stations along the U.S.-Mexico Border.

According to a CBS News report, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed HHS is housing nearly 10,500 unaccompanied minors in emergency housing facilities and shelters licensed by states.

The detention of these minors shatters the 2,600 children held at the peak of the 2019 migrant surge.

The news outlet reported unaccompanied migrant children are spending 136 hours on average in CBP custody, passing the legal time limit of 72 hours in a trend that first started last month, as Breitbart News reported.

CBS further reported border officials have encountered over 500 unaccompanied minors per day over the past 21 days. The number of encounters are expected to top the 9,400 minors that entered custody in February.

Such is the pressure on CBP officials they are considering a plan to release migrants apprehended in South Texas who claim asylum without issuing a Notice to Appear (NTA). Breitbart Texas confirmed with a senior CBP official the plan is being discussed.

AP reports since Joe Biden’s inauguration, the U.S. has seen a dramatic spike in the number of people encountered by border officials.

There were 18,945 family members and 9,297 unaccompanied children encountered in February — an increase of 168 percent and 63 percent, respectively, from the month before, according to the Pew Research Center.

The president and other administration officials in recent days have stepped up efforts to urge migrants not to come while at the same time denying any crisis exists.

Critics have pointed to public comments from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who earlier this month advised the administration’s message to migrants was “don’t come now” and a slip by Roberta Jacobson, the White House’s lead adviser on the border, who said in Spanish during a recent briefing the “border is not closed,” before correcting herself.

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Quote:n some of his first actions in office, President Joe Biden did away with the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which kept foreigners who tried to enter the U.S. illegally in camps in Mexico while they awaited hearings. Instead, Biden returned to a “catch-and-release” policy in which illegal aliens are allowed to enter the U.S.

Suddenly, the flow of foreigners to the border exploded. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents apprehended nearly 100,000 people at the border in February. Last April, just more than 16,000 were captured at the border, according to Pew data.

Now, Team Biden is blaming former President Donald Trump.

“Biden officials claim Trump officials did not fully cooperate with his transition team, hindering their ability get a realistic view of potential migration, and that Trump deconstructed the immigration and asylum system – which they then inherited,” The Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

“As we were coming into the administration, we knew we were inheriting an absolute mess from the previous administration — that there were aspects of our legal immigration system that had been gutted and a department that lacked the personnel to administer our laws,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the director of the White House’s office of intergovernmental affairs, according to CNN.

An unnamed administration official reportedly said: “When we came into office, like, it was a disaster. I mean, really. The staffing wasn’t in place, the structures weren’t in place.”

But former acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan told CNN that the Biden transition team was “specifically warned again and again and again,” adding that officials even modeled a projected increase in border encounters if Trump policies were withdrawn.

Still, a Biden official said they were ready for an influx. “Were we prepared? Yes,” the official told CNN. “Everyone wants to be like ‘crisis, crisis, crisis, crisis’ — but it’s like, you know what, actually, things are going really well. Yes, we brought in FEMA, but you know what? That was the responsible thing to do.”

The blame game comes as the Biden administration is reportedly considering releasing illegal aliens into the U.S. without issuing a Notice to Appear (NTA) — meaning they will depart custody without a court date, Fox News reported.

“Such a decision would be unprecedented if enacted and would place the responsibility of seeking an asylum hearing on the migrants through Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or legal assistance,” Fox reported.

Immigrants who are swarming to the U.S.-Mexico border say Biden “promised” them they would be allowed to enter the country, according to recent reports.

“Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” Gladys Oneida Pérez Cruz, a woman who traveled to the border with her son, told The New York Times. “He hasn’t done it yet, but he is going to be a good president for migrants.”

The Times said another woman in tears at the border said, “Biden promised us!”

After weeks of claiming all is well, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week acknowledged that “record numbers” of foreigners are overwhelming U.S. agencies, prompting the department to call in help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

“The federal government is responding to the arrival of record numbers of individuals, including unaccompanied children, at the southwest border. Since April 2020, the number of encounters at the border has been rising due to ongoing violence, natural disasters, food insecurity, and poverty in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America,” the DHS said. “The federal government is working around the clock to move unaccompanied children from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) care and to place them with a family member or sponsor until their immigration case is adjudicated. The risks posed by the spread of COVID-19 have made this mission all the more difficult.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) last week dubbed the situation the “Biden border crisis” and said some foreigners wore shirts saying “Biden, let us in.”

“Joe Biden and the Democrats … they don’t believe in borders. They don’t, therefore, think it is a crisis. They think this is a feature not a bug of their policy. They’ve literally turned detention centers — that are designed to turn people away at our borders — into reception centers. That’s what they’re gonna’ call them. What signal is that going to send? We’ve seen migrants wearing their shirts that say, ‘Biden, let us in,'” Cotton said.

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Quote:Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” the surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border was created by President Joe Biden and will get worse in the coming months.

McCaul said, “They’ve created the crisis. He says he has a plan. I haven’t seen a plan. They talk about humane conditions, humanitarian. They have created a humanitarian crisis down here at this border that you have seen now, and the reason why they are coming is because he says words do matter, and they do. The messaging is that if you want to come, you can stay. When Mayorkas says, we’re not saying don’t come at all, just don’t come, very irresponsible for the Director of Homeland Security to say. And in his words, we have the greatest not crisis because he won’t call it that, in 20 years.”

He continued, “There is a direct cause and effect on the messaging. But then to do away, you know, politics aside, to do away with what was one of the most successful negotiated agreements with Mexico and Central America to remain in Mexico and apply for political asylum now they’ve created this crisis of children coming in. The traffickers are smart. Cartels are smart. They know our laws, policies, and this started right after the election, and in the last two months, we’ve seen a real surge.”

He added, “I know on the border. When I was chairman of Homeland Security, and as a federal prosecutor down here — it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get a lot worse. Springtime, summer, more and more come over,” McCaul told “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “I predict a million people trying to get into this country by the summertime.”

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Quote:NBC host Chuck Todd during Sunday’s “Meet the Press” on NBC called the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is a political crisis “with no easy way out.”

Todd said, “It’s fair to call the deteriorating situation at the U.S.-Mexico border a crisis — even if the Biden administration refuses to use that word. But it’s more than that: It’s a political crisis for the new president, with no easy way out.

He added, “Republicans are quick to blame Mr. Biden for the growing number of migrants crossing the border, saying it’s his rhetoric and policy shifts that caused the surge in migrants. The Democratic administration says it was left with an unworkable immigration system left by President Trump. Conservatives want a big wall. Progressives want nothing less than humane treatment from migrants fleeing violence wherever it is, and a path to citizenship for those already here.”

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Quote: prominent photojournalist rebuked the Biden administration last week for allegedly blocking media from observing operations of immigration officials handling the migrant crisis at the southern United States border.

What are the details?
John Moore, an award-winning photojournalist for Getty Images, blasted Biden administration officials for obstructing media access.

In fact, the lack of transparency is so bad that Moore said he was forced to do his job — document the border crisis through the medium of photography — by working from the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Moore said that officials in the previous three presidential administrations did not block journalists from documenting immigration operations.

"I respectfully ask US Customs and Border Protection to stop blocking media access to their border operations. I have photographed CBP under Bush, Obama and Trump but now — zero access is granted to media," Moore said. "These long lens images taken from the Mexican side."

Moore later added, "The photographs in this tweet string were taken with a telephoto lens from across the border in Mexico. Until now, US photojournalists haven't needed to stand in another country to photograph what's happening - in the United States."

In fact, Moore said that federal authorities are even removing journalists from areas where migrants are entering.

"The vast majority of river crossings by asylum seekers happen on federal land in south Texas' Rio Grande Valley. The federal govt. controls access to those areas. The Border Patrol has been removing journalists who enter, including recently myself, CBS, others," Moore explained.

Moore went on to say:

There's no modern precedent for a full physical ban on media access to CBP border operations. To those who might say, cut them some slack - they are dealing with a situation, I'd say that showing the US response to the current immigrant surge is exactly the media's role. Photographing Border Patrol agents and immigrant encounters can and has been done respectfully without interfering with operations. Regardless, @cbp public affairs exists to work with media.

And Pandemic restrictions are not a valid excuse to block physical media access, especially to operations that are outside. There are easy alternative options to media ride-alongs. Showing the difficult and important work of @cbp agents in the field, while also photographing immigrants in a dignified way are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Transparency is key, even in a politicized environment
Anything else?

As TheBlaze reported, the Biden administration has enacted an unofficial "gag order" restricting officials and immigration agents from sharing details about the ongoing border crisis.

The Biden administration has also closed media access to detention facilities housing migrant children, a move that some Democratic lawmakers support.

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Democrats see a steady stream of illegals as a steady supply of future democrat votes. And that's all they care about.

Reagan had a deal with Tip O'Neill. Reagan did his part. O'Neill reneged on his. This issue has had plenty of bad blood since that.

Trump's policy of separating families at the border caused this crisis. Now, in order to avoid being separated, the parents are sending their kids unaccompanied.