Child border crossings surging, straining US facilities

Some of the increase in adults is due to people who are repeatedly caught after being expelled under the public health order issued last year to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Other factors include economic upheaval caused by the pandemic and recent hurricanes that worsened living conditions in Central America. Officials say it's also likely that smugglers have encouraged people to try to cross under the new administration.

Mayorkas said the a surge in the number of children is a challenge for the Border Patrol and other agencies amid the coronavirus pandemic. But he rejected a Trump-era policy of sending them immediately back to Mexico or other countries.

"They are vulnerable children and we have ended the prior administration's practice of expelling them," Mayorkas said.

Though there have been previous migrant surges, including under Trump, Republicans in Congress say that Biden's support for new immigration legislation and his decision to allow people to make legal asylum claims have become a magnet for migrants.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, Sen. Jim Inhofe held up a photo of a small crowd of demonstrators in Tijuana, Mexico, wearing matching T-shirts with the words "Biden, Please Let us in" that circulated widely on social media in recent days.

"They're all coming across the border, they're coming fast, and they're wearing Biden T-shirts," said the Oklahoma Republican.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy led a delegation of a dozen Republican lawmakers on Monday to the border in Texas and blamed the Biden administration for driving an increase in migrants by actions that include supporting legislation in Congress that would provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people now in the country and halting border wall construction.

"The sad part about all of this is it didn't have to happen. This crisis was created by the presidential policies of this new administration," McCarthy said.

Biden pushed back in an interview Tuesday with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, noting previous surges under Trump and pointing out that his administration has been trying to discourage people from crossing while it works to restore an asylum system undermined by his predecessor. "I heard the other day that they're coming because they know I'm a nice guy. Yeah, well here's the deal. They're not."

Trump did, in fact, confront a similar surge in 2019 even as he rushed to expand the border wall system along the border and forced people seeking asylum to do so in Central America or remain in Mexico. A year earlier he forcibly separated migrant children from their families as part of a zero-tolerance campaign that became one of the most significant political challenges of his administration.

The Biden administration is allowing migrants who are under 18 years old and cross by themselves to remain in the country while the government decides whether they have a legal claim to residency, either under asylum law or for some other reason.

Mayorkas noted that 80% of the minors, most of whom are from the three Northern Triangle countries of Central America, have relatives in the U.S. and 40% have a parent. "These are children being reunited with their families who will care for them," he said.

The Biden administration last week ended a Trump policy that made relatives reluctant to contact HHS to retrieve children for fear of being deported themselves.

Besides setting up new temporary facilities to house migrant children, it is also backing aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to try to stem the flow of migrants at the source.

Mayorkas took swipes at the previous administration for dismantling an asylum system that would have enabled a more "orderly" immigration system, cutting aid to Central America and failing to vaccinate Border Patrol agents.

Also, he said the Biden administration is working to make the asylum process shorter and to make it possible to petition from an applicant's home country rather than make a dangerous and uncertain journey. "We have no illusions about how hard it is," he said, "and we know it will take time."