With tens of thousands of migrants entering the United States every month — including a high of 58,000 parents and children in April — officials at the southern border are nearly out of options on where to house the asylum seekers as they await a court hearing.
The Wall Street Journal took an in-depth look into the issue and reported that shelters are filling up, which has forced U.S. officials to bring people hundreds of miles into the U.S. where more space is available.
According to data cited by the Journal, the number of families that have illegally entered the U.S. in the first half of fiscal year 2019 is 374% higher than what it was last year. That has created a massive problem of where to house people after they are apprehended, apply for asylum, and then released into the general population as they wait for their day in court — which can sometimes be a years-long process, given that there is a backlog of nearly 900,000 cases.
"The migration flow and the resulting humanitarian crisis is rapidly overwhelming the ability of the federal government to respond," White House acting Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought said during a congressional hearing last week, the Journal reported.
A representative from the Border Patrol told the Journal the system that's been in place for years is fracturing under the massive amount of people — and families — coming through it.
"A lot of our stations were not built for this," Matthew Roggow said. "They weren't built for this [family] demographic."
The Trump administration has pleaded with Congress to change the laws so the asylum process — one of the central pieces of the border problem — can be less burdensome on the U.S. One idea pitched is to house asylum seekers outside the U.S. as they wait for their court dates.
This week, President Donald Trump briefed a group of Republican senators on a merit-based immigration system that's being discussed.
"We want to encourage immigration. But it's got to be through the legal system," a senior administration official said.
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