White House faces challenges amid surge of migrant children at border

Photo taken on Jan. 20, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

In a statement released on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump blasted Biden's handling of the emerging "border crisis," claiming the United States is being "destroyed" by the recent surge of illegal migrants at the border.

WASHINGTON, March 10 (Xinhua) -- Facing stressful challenges on immigration, the White House said Tuesday it is looking at new facilities to house a record number of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent weeks.

"We don't want them to be in the CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) facilities," said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. "We want them to be in shelters as quickly as possible and ultimately in families and homes where their applications can be processed."

Psaki said President Joe Biden's administration is considering additional facilities to move thousands of children out of temporary CBP facilities and into housing managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, where children will have access to education, health care and legal services.

"The people who are being let in are unaccompanied children," she added. "That was a policy decision we made because we felt it was the most humane approach to addressing what are very difficult circumstances in the region, and that means there are more children, kids under the age of 18, coming across the border."

The U.S. Capitol is seen in Washington D.C., the United States, on March 26, 2019. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Still, Psaki told reporters that the White House is "continuing to work to convey to the people in the region that this is not the time to come, that the majority of the people who come to the border will be turned away."

The number of unaccompanied migrant children in CBP facilities has exceeded 3,200 and thus hit a new high, according to internal agency documents dated Monday.

Among them, some 2,600 were awaiting placement in shelters suitable for minors, but there were just over 500 beds available to accommodate them, said a CNN report published Tuesday.

Furthermore, nearly half of unaccompanied migrant children have exceeded the CBP's three-day deadline to be moved into a proper children's shelter.

On average, unaccompanied migrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are held in CBP custody for 77 hours, longer than the 72 hours permitted under U.S. law, local media reported last week, citing CBP internal documents.

The fast growing number of unaccompanied migrant children is just one of the challenges the Biden administration is facing. Border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January, more than double the rate at the same time a year ago and higher than that in any January in a decade, said a report on Monday by The New York Times.

The data revealed the continued bottleneck in the U.S. immigration system, with more migrant children coming into custody than the government is prepared to care for, local analysts said, noting grim realities of migration patterns that have roiled the globe for years.

"We're at an inflection point," said Theresa Cardinal Brown with independent research group Bipartisan Policy Center. "How quickly can the government process people safely and humanely?"

People stand behind the border fence that divides the U.S. and Mexico in San Diego, California, the United States, Nov. 17, 2018. (Xinhua/Zhao Hanrong)

In a statement released on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump blasted Biden's handling of the emerging "border crisis," claiming the United States is being "destroyed" by the recent surge of illegal migrants at the border.

So far, the Biden administration has refused to call the situation at the southern U.S. border "a crisis," and has been trying to overhaul the nation's decades-old immigration system and offer paths to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants in coming years.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on March 1 that the Biden administration will allow migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border due to Trump's policies to reunite inside the United States.

"The prior administration dismantled our nation's immigration system in its entirety," Mayorkas said, calling the separation of thousands of migrant families under the Trump administration "the most powerful and heartbreaking example of the cruelty that preceded this administration."

However, Mayorkas said migrants need to wait and should not come to the United States now, citing travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and his department's unfinished work to rebuild its asylum and humanitarian programs.