Apprehensions at border reach highest level in at Least 15 years

The Biden administration apprehended more than 170,000 migrants at the southwest border in March, the most in any month for at least 15 years and up nearly 70% from February, as thousands of children remained backed up in detention facilities and border agents released an increasing number of migrant families into the United States, government documents obtained by The New York Times show.

More than 18,700 unaccompanied children and teenagers were taken into custody last month after crossing the border, including at port entries, nearly double the roughly 9,450 minors detained in February and more than four times the 4,635 unaccompanied minors who crossed in March of last year, the documents show.

The sharp increases underscored the political and logistical challenges to the administration of managing the flow of people coming from Central America, including the need to more quickly move unaccompanied children and teenagers into emergency shelters at military sites and conventions centres throughout the United States. Many of the children are seeking to join parents, relatives or other people they know who are already in the country.

But the increasing number of family members travelling together is creating another issue for the administration. For much of the winter, even as the United States took in the unaccompanied minors, administration officials invoked an emergency rule put in place by the Trump administration to turn away most migrant families and single adults crossing the border.

The situation is rapidly becoming more complicated. For one thing, the sheer volume of families arriving is growing fast. US officials are also coping with a change in the law in Mexico, which has tightened its conditions for accepting Central American families expelled by the United States.

The United States does not currently have the capacity to detain large numbers of families, leaving border officials with few options other than to release them with orders to appear in the future to have their cases heard.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said last month that the administration was expecting this year to encounter the most migrants at the border in 20 years.

“There’s no break on this,” said Ronald Vitiello, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and chief of the Border Patrol under the Trump administration. “It just gets a lot worse. It’s really unfortunate.”

© 2021 New York Times News Service