The number of migrants arriving at President Joe Biden’s southern border hit a ten-year record for January, but his agency officials are blaming crime and disease for the growing migration.
The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency “has faced a growing number of individuals attempting to cross the southwest border, averaging about 3,000 arrests per day in January 2021,” said a 7:00 pm press statement by the agency, which added:
CBP believes this increase is caused by several factors, including underlying crime and instability in migrants’ home countries, which have been exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and inaccurate perceptions of shifts in immigration and border security policies.
However, establishment media outlets are reporting that many migrants — and their U.S. supporters — say they are heading north to accept Biden’s promise of jobs and free health care — as well as and life-changing citizenship for migrants who persuade government officials they were in the United States before January 1.
The Washington Post reported February 3:
A Central American official who closely monitors migration dynamics said smuggling guides have intensified their marketing efforts in Guatemala’s destitute rural highlands in recent weeks, recruiting customers by telling them the Biden administration is taking a softer enforcement approach.
“They’re saying Biden has given the green light,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Border officials registered 78,000 people in January, according to an agency webpage, which did not say how many were flown back to their home countries or were released into the United States. Just 36,000 migrants were caught crossing in January 2020.
The New York Times reported February 6:
Mother Isabel Turcios, a nun in Piedras Negras, Mexico, a small town across from Eagle Pass, Texas, described a chaotic situation with migrants arriving by the dozens by train each day and parking themselves on street corners and in abandoned houses, hoping for a chance to cross.
“There are many, many mothers with children coming,” she said. “They think they will be allowed to pass because there is a new president. Some are succeeding, not all.”
The Washington Post reported February 7:
On Sunday afternoon, Funes Peña was preparing to step on a plane for the first time — the last leg of a harrowing journey from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border that relied on the kindness of strangers to feed and clothe her and her children.
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It was on her second trip north, while she was making her way slowly through Mexico, that she received a call from a friend who had embarked on the journey to the United States a week earlier.
“She said, ‘Come, they’re really receiving mothers with children, families.’ And it was true, we made it,” Funes Peña said. “That was my goal, to make it.”
The Los Angeles Times reported January 20 the comment of an El Salvadoran women with a husband and three children:
“I was very afraid of Trump,” Gabi said, who asked to use her first name only, for safety. “That’s why I waited, seeking asylum here, because I wanted to do it legally.“With Biden I think we have a light in this darkness,” Gabi went on. “We hope he’ll let us fight for asylum inside, in a safe place for my children. … I want to stop running.”
More migrants are coming through the soft border to give birth in the United States. A Cuban woman, Nailet, was interviewed by the Associated Press January 1o:
Some pregnant mothers, like Nailet, who have been refused entry to the U.S. cross again while in labor. Their children become U.S. citizens by birthright. The Border Patrol generally releases those families into the country, though reports have emerged of immigrant parents and U.S.-born children being expelled.
Buried in the CBP’s statement on the apprehension numbers, CBP reported:
CBP remains fully committed to implementing President Biden’s immigration and border security-related executive actions, including the pause of construction on the Border Wall System and adjusting its operations to enforce the proclamations related to travel and entry to the United States.
Under the label of “adjusting its operations,” the agency is completing a large facility to process teenage and child migrants for delivery to relatives in the United States, and it is releasing many mothers and children into the United States without testing for coronavirus.
In a February 3 report for the Center for Immigration Studies, Todd Bensman reported:
One Border Patrol agent in the area told CIS that the migrants are now too numerous for local systems to process, just like the catch-and-release circumstances that powered the 2019 crisis.
“We are releasing hundreds from many different countries of origin because we simply don’t have enough room to hold them all,” the Border Patrol agent told the Center for Immigration Studies. “They are being released under what is called an O.R. which means ‘Own Recognizance’ – basically, a promise to arrive for their immigration hearing at some future date. We can’t hold them because they are crossing all day long in groups of 20 to 40, men, women, children.”
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