Biden faces mounting pressure over border crisis
Children attend the funeral of Rubelsy Tomas Isidro, a Guatemalan migrant murdered alongside 18 other people in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas last month, during his funeral in the village of Durasnal in Comitancillo, Guatemala, on Saturday.
US President Joe Biden faced mounting pressure on Monday from Republicans over his handling of a surge in migrants, including thousands of unaccompanied children, arriving at the US-Mexican border.
While successive administrations have dealt with seasonal spikes in migration, Biden’s critics claim he has driven the latest uptick by taking a softer stance on the flash point issue than his predecessor Donald Trump.
On January 20, his first day in office, Biden scrapped several of Trump’s contentious immigration policies, including halting new construction of a border wall and proposing legislation to create a citizenship pathway for the nearly 11 million people living illegally in the United States.
Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy of California, who leads his party in the House of Representatives, described Biden’s policies as having created “more than a crisis.”
“You can continue to deny it but the only way to solve it is to first admit what he has done, and if he will not reverse action, it takes Congressional action to do it,” McCarthy told a press conference on the border in the Texas town of El Paso.
Republican congressman Chuck Fleischmann said Biden’s administration had “created an environment” that caused an increase in migration.
Other Republican lawmakers said human traffickers were profiting from Biden’s policies.
White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said Biden had inherited “a dismantled and unworkable system” from Trump.
“Like any other problem, we’re going to do everything we can to solve it,” she said.
In February, the US Customs and Border Protection agency arrested about 100,000 people at the southern border. That included nearly 9,500 unaccompanied children, a 28 percent jump over January.
In line with a pandemic-rooted policy adopted by Trump, who cracked down on immigration both legal and illegal as part of his “America First” doctrine, the Biden administration is deporting most of the undocumented people.
But unlike Trump, Biden has opted against expelling minors who show up unaccompanied and are filling shelters set up to hold them, with limited capacity because of the coronavirus crisis.
Still, Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez said authorities in his community at the southern tip of Texas were not overwhelmed.
“I don’t feel that it’s a crisis for the city of Brownsville,” he told reporters.
He said about 150 migrants daily are processed in the city.
Most leave within 24 hours.
