Border Patrol apprehensions on the Mexican border reached an 11-year high in February as families and children from Central America continue to arrive in record numbers, creating “both a border security and humanitarian crisis,” Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said Tuesday. The impact is being felt most acutely in the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, he said, so CBP will open a new processing center to provide more efficiency and care in handling the modern face of migration.
“The El Paso sector alone has seen a 434 percent increase in apprehensions this fiscal year. The vast majority are family units and unaccompanied children arriving in large groups, which challenges the capacity in our facilities,” McAleenan said at a news conference in Washington, D.C. “Facilities housing migrants near El Paso have reached capacity and gone over capacity numerous times in this fiscal year … a situation that impacts both the efficiency of migrant processing and the quality of our care that we’re able to provide for detained migrants.”
McAleenan’s primary solution to the crisis—legislation that would allow for extended incarceration of children with their parents while courts decide their asylum claims—has been consistently rejected by Democrats. “It’s a terrible solution. It’s costly, it’s inhumane and it’s unnecessary,” U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said in an interview with Texas Monthly.
[For more on this story by ROBERT MOORE, go to https://www.texasmonthly.com/n...milies-and-children/]
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