“This place looks like a concentration camp, and we’re not supposed to have that in America,” said David Casillas, 44, a disabled veteran who tried to donate baby food on Friday to the hundreds of migrant families peering out through the fence. Border Patrol agents turned him away.
The makeshift encampment under the bridge, where immigration officials are detaining hundreds of migrants in a military tent with little hot food, was set up last week after the main border processing center in El Paso reached up to 400 percent of its capacity in the largest influx of migrants to the United States in years.
Similar scenes are unfolding at border stations across the 1,900-mile frontier, where Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said last week that facilities had reached a “breaking point.”
In McAllen, Texas, the Border Patrol’s processing center was holding 2,200 migrants on a recent day, well over the facility’s capacity of 1,500. “Were the conditions horrible? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess,” Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said after visiting the center last week. “I don’t think they were horrible, but by the same token it was gut-wrenching to see mothers and children sitting there in cages.”
The Border Patrol has been facing a record influx of migrant families since fall, but in recent weeks the numbers have begun to escalate substantially, thanks to the annual surge before the arrival of the deadly summer heat.
For months, federal officials knew that this spring was likely to set records, but only now is it becoming apparent how big the numbers will be. Apprehensions already dwarf the numbers of five years ago and echo those of the spring of 2014, when the arrival of the first migrant families from Central America transformed the nature of immigration along the southern border with Mexico.
“The current surge was totally predictable, and the Trump administration chose not to prepare for it. Instead it launched a raft of harsh deterrence measures that were totally ineffective,” said Wayne Cornelius, a migration scholar at the University of California, San Diego.
He and other critics said the administration had focused on measures to discourage migrants, including restricting their entry at border stations and requiring some asylum applicants to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed, instead of planning humane border reception facilities and working seriously to diminish the violence and poverty in Central America that is driving the migrations.
The influx has stretched every government agency on the front lines, from the Border Patrol, whose agents encounter migrants after they cross, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose officers normally process them for detention or release, as well as the Health and Human Services Department, charged with the care of children who come across the border without families.
In response to the surge, hundreds of agents are being diverted from ports of entry, where they facilitate international trade, to help process migrants. Immigration officers are being redeployed to the border from duties in the interior, and the government is trying to quickly expand capacity at shelters that take in migrant children.
Kirstjen Nielsen, Department of Homeland Security secretary, said Friday that the agency is setting up a “crisis-response effort.”
“The system is in free fall. DHS is doing everything possible to respond to a growing humanitarian catastrophe while also securing our borders, but we have reached peak capacity and are now forced to pull from other missions to respond to the emergency,” she said.
President Donald Trump threatened Friday to close the southern border next week, a day after he criticized Mexico and several Central American countries for not stanching the exodus.
“If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our southern border, I will be closing the border, or large sections of the border, next week,” the president said on Twitter.
Last week McAleenan reported that on Monday and Tuesday, the agency started the day with more than 12,000 migrants in custody. By Wednesday, that number had climbed to 13,400.
“A high number for us is 4,000. A crisis level is 6,000. Thirteen thousand is unprecedented,” McAleenan told reporters in El Paso.
In the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly 400,000 migrants were apprehended at the border, a low figure compared with the peak of 1.6 million in 2000. But experts predict that arrivals this fiscal year could hit 1 million, a level not seen since the record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This month alone, more than 100,000 migrants are expected to be apprehended at the border. “It is absolutely a crisis,” said Henry Lucero, ICE field director for Arizona. “We don’t have the resources to deal with all these individuals.”
Once a rare occurrence, encounters with groups of 100 or more migrants are now routine for immigration agents, who must round them up and transport them to a border station.
Even as rising temperatures make crossings in the Sonoran Desert more perilous, border agents recently intercepted 400 migrants traveling in families on a single day in Yuma, Arizona. An additional 300 turned themselves in south of Nogales, Arizona.
Lucero said the agency has had to redeploy agents from fugitive operations, who normally track down immigrants inside the country who have committed serious crimes, to assist at the border.
Meanwhile, released migrants are spilling onto city streets. Federal authorities have been dropping them off by the hundreds every day in McAllen, with city officials desperately trying to find them temporary accommodation.
“It’s one thing to find a place for 300 people to sleep and it’s another thing to find a place for 1,100 people to sleep,” said Kevin Pagan, the city’s emergency management coordinator. “It’s like you take an average high school football game down here and ask everyone to come over to your house after.”
No city has been as stretched by the crush of arrivals in recent weeks as El Paso, where a new migrant processing center designed to accommodate families and children is unlikely to open before June.
On Friday, the men, women and children packed in a pen beneath the international bridge that connects the United States to Mexico squatted on the ground, munching on sandwiches out of clear plastic bags while breathing in fumes from the cars above.
“I’ve never witnessed people kept under such conditions,” said Eusebio Ruiz, 59, a construction worker from Midland, Texas, who stopped briefly while crossing the bridge to peer at the migrants below. “It gives me no pleasure to see this.”
Customs and Border Protection officers wore blue surgical gloves and cloth face masks while standing on the perimeter of the fenced area where dozens of immigrants stood waiting to be processed.
The agency’s officials have said that migrants are spending 24 hours or less under the Paso del Norte Bridge awaiting transfer to a more formal detention facility.
But officials at Annunciation House, a local nonprofit that assists released migrants, said they were consistently hearing from families that they spent four or five days being processed by Customs and Border Protection.
“The longest that I heard was five days under the bridge, with a 9-year-old daughter. Another woman who had four days under the bridge with her 4-year-old, and she just broke down crying talking about how horrible she felt sitting in the dirt and rocks with her,” said Taylor Levy, legal coordinator for Annunciation House.
The significant change in the composition of the migrants, from single Mexican men to Central American families and unaccompanied children, has created unique challenges.
Unlike Mexicans, they cannot, by law, be swiftly deported to their home country, and families also cannot be indefinitely detained because of rules limiting the incarceration of children to 20 days.
Border infrastructure, largely designed for single males, has not adjusted to the demographic shift. The Border Patrol bolstered medical screenings after two children died in December. It has also received $30 million to upgrade the south Texas processing center and funding to construct the facility in El Paso.
Nielsen, Homeland Security secretary, sent a letter to Congress on Thursday describing the border crisis and measures to address it. She said she intended to request emergency resources and the authority to deport unaccompanied children to their home countries, which is currently only legal for minors from Mexico because that country has a contiguous border with the United States.
Authorities are working as quickly as possible to bolster capacity for migrant children, she said, but warned that “a potential overflow of children in DHS custody represents our most acute humanitarian risk.”
After closing down a desert encampment erected in 2018 in Tornillo, Texas, which drew fierce criticism from human-rights activists, the government began to expand a temporary shelter in Homestead, Florida, which now houses more than 1,700 minors, up from 1,200 in January.
“The volume of ‘vulnerable populations’ is unsustainable,” Nielsen warned in her letter. “Our system has been able to cope with high numbers in the past, but the composition of today’s flows makes them virtually unmanageable.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.