After a week of denials about a border crisis, President Joe Biden and his administration is now dispatching senior members to the border to assess an "influx of unaccompanied minors."
"President Biden has asked senior members of his team to travel to the border region in order to provide a full briefing to him on the government response to the influx of unaccompanied minors and an assessment of additional steps that can be taken to ensure the safety and care of these children," White House spokesperson Vedant Patel said in a statement, per The Hill.
This comes in a week after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas declined to deem the wave of those gathering at the border a "crisis."
"It's gotten worse," Democratic Texas State Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa told The Hill. "I don't think, quite frankly, the Biden administration was aware of what's happening on the ground here, which you can understand because they're just coming in and trying to get people up to speed with what's happening, but I don't think they were aware there were that many coming across. The border patrol is overwhelmed, they're throwing their hands up because they don't know what to do."
Also, Republicans have railed on the administration for the crowded migrant children detention centers, including the reopening of one in Texas, and The Washington Post reported the administration is looking to convert family detention centers into border processing facilities.
"There are plenty of instances in which there have been more people, but the past administration went out of its way to dismantle the institutions that make for a functioning immigration system," director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University's Eric Hershberg told The Hill.
"So what this administration is having to do is to rapidly ramp up the capacity to process the people who arrive at the border, to figure out how to house them while their requests for immigration relief are adjudicated . . . and figuring out how to get them, once they're cleared epidemiologically, to family members who can care for them while they work through the immigration system."
Former President Donald Trump accused President Biden of creating the border crisis that he had abated.
"Our border is now totally out of control thanks to the disastrous leadership of Joe Biden," Trump wrote in a statement Friday. "Our great Border Patrol and ICE agents have been disrespected, demeaned, and mocked by the Biden administration. A mass incursion into the country by people who should not be here is happening on an hourly basis, getting worse by the minute."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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