WASHINGTON, March 14, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – The Biden administration ordered the
government’s disaster emergency agency Saturday to help with a surge in
migrant children crossing the southern border that has overwhelmed processing
facilities.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called upon the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support an effort to temporarily house
thousands of children who crossed the US-Mexico border alone amid criticisms
that authorities were holding them for long periods in overcrowded
facilities.
The Health and Human Services (HHS) department is currently holding about
8,800 migrant children and the US Customs and Border Protection has hundreds
more in their charge, with more arriving every day.
In February alone CBP detained 9,457 unaccompanied migrant children at the
southern border.
Facilities are overcrowded and authorities are doubly challenged by
restrictions related to Covid-19.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that FEMA would be
part of a 90-day effort to ensure the children are safely sheltered and
transferred to people who will take care of them, usually relatives already
living in the United States.
“The federal government is responding to the arrival of record numbers of
individuals, including unaccompanied children, at the southwest border,” the
department said.
“Since April 2020, the number of encounters at the border has been rising
due to ongoing violence, natural disasters, food insecurity, and poverty in
the Northern Triangle countries of Central America.”
The nearly two-month-old government of President Joe Biden faces growing
pressure from migrants, apparently encouraged to try to enter the United
States by his rejection of previous president Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance”
policy toward undocumented immigrants.
While migrant adults and families continue to be sent back to Mexico when
they are caught, unaccompanied children are being processed and get help
resettling with US relatives.
“Our goal is to ensure that unaccompanied children are transferred to HHS
as quickly as possible, consistent with legal requirements and in the best
interest of the children,” Mayorkas said in a statement.