Joe Biden faces historic record of arrival of migrant children to the United States, almost 19 thousand in a month

The President’s Administration Joe Biden faces a historical record with the arrival last March at the border of EE.UU. with Mexico than 18,890 single minor immigrants. It is the maximum figure for a single month since the current immigration authority began to record this data in 2009.

According to the Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, in English), the number of small ones intercepted in March doubled the total of February, when that agency detained 9,271 small ones.

The data confirms that the Border Patrol’s processing system is dealing with a complex situation aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, as the Government and pro-immigrant organizations have admitted, and that it is barely comparable to that faced by his predecessor Donald Trump. .

In May 2019, under the Trump administration, 11,475 children were detained on the border with Mexico, from where 132,856 undocumented immigrants crossed to the United States in that month, something that the then president described as a “crisis.”

The Biden Administration prefers not to talk about a crisis at a time when it is under pressure from immigrant aid organizations and Republican leaders who question the Democratic leader’s policy.

Monthly record in twenty years

But CBP figures in March reveal that arrests of undocumented immigrants at the border with Mexico reached their highest monthly level in 20 years.

Last month, border agents intercepted a total of 172,331 undocumented immigrants, an increase of 70.6% compared to the total of 101,028 in February this year, according to data updated this Thursday by the CBP.

Of the more than 172,000 immigrants intercepted in March, 168,195 were captured by CBP while crossing irregularly, while another 4,136 arrived at the border entry checkpoints, where in many cases they are declared “inadmissible.”

The figure of 168,195 detainees in areas between ports of entry is the highest in a single month since March 2001, when CBP arrested 170,580 illegal immigrants, according to official agency data reviewed by Efe.

This unprecedented record in two decades, added to the historical maximum in the arrival of minors alone, increases the pressure on the Biden Government, whose Secretary of National Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, visits the southern border for the third time this Thursday, when moving to El Paso and McAllen, in the state of Texas.

Children, a long-standing concern

The migration of children has, however, been a concern for recent US administrations.

In June 2014, then-President Barack Obama – of whom Biden was vice president – counted 10,620 minors who arrived in the border area at the height of the migratory crisis that occupied his government that year.

This time, American public opinion is sensitized to the situation of underage migrants, especially after the zero tolerance policy, under which Trump used to separate children from their parents arrested at the border.

Also still on the minds of Americans are complaints about the precarious conditions that children faced in the detention centers to which they were sent during the Republican government.

Just this week, the video of a 10-year-old Nicaraguan boy who was abandoned at the border and cried inconsolably for help when he was found by the Border Patrol showed the seriousness of the situation to which the little ones are exposed in their attempt to reach American soil.

“Scenes like this are very common, as smugglers continue to abandon children in desolate areas, regardless of their well-being,” warned US border authorities in a statement.