United States Customs and Border Protection say they nabbed more than 100,000 immigrants at the United States-Mexico border in March, more than 40,000 more than in the next busiest March on record, in 2014.
“The agency seized around 92,607 immigrants at the southern border last month, including 53,000 family units and 8,900 unaccompanied immigrant children,” according to the Washington Examiner, and just-released CBP numbers.
The total isn’t surprising, least of all to CBP, which warned early on in March that it could be one of the agency’s biggest months yet, on top of a series of record-breaking months. In January, CBP intercepted nearly 60,000 migrants. In February, nearly 80,000.
The latest numbers have left the agency stretched to the maximum.
“More than 103,000 migrants were apprehended or deemed inadmissible at the southern border in March,” an official told the Examiner. “We continue to face an unprecedented and unsustainable surge of migrants flooding to our border.”
In a series of tweets revealing the information, CBP also noted that this is the largest number of “family units” they’ve seen, and that the vast majority of immigrants appearing at the border — 76% — are not from Mexico, but from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, countries whose residents are taking part in “migrant caravans” of thousands of asylum seekers, which snake their way through Mexico to official United States border crossings in places like El Paso, Texas, and Tijuana.
If the trend keeps up, CBP could see more than 1.2 million apprehensions in 2019, far more than the agency can sustain with limited detention space and limited funds to handle the medical and personal care 1.2 million people require. Already, CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities are filling up, and CBP has been forced to create temporary shelters — often camps hastily constructed under overpasses or in vacant lots — to house the thousands of migrants requesting to be granted temporary asylum within the United States.
The system simply can’t process asylum seekers that quickly, and CBP, determined to avoid the Obama Administration’s “catch-and-release” program, which allowed asylum seekers to live in the United States while their claims were being processed, provided they eventually showed up for an asylum hearing. On top of that, the system also isn’t designed for long-term care, and CBP is struggling to provide things like basic medical care, which most caravan migrants require.
President Donald Trump continues to call the situation on the border an emergency, but little is being done to allocate funds to relieve the trouble. Instead, a number of immigration activist groups have actually blamed the Trump Administration for failing to notice or attend to the matter before it reached critical levels.
To make matters worse, it appears several new caravans are forming in southern Mexico. Although Mexico does try to intercept large groups of migrants at its southern border, savvy organizers are now pushing potential migrants to cross the Mexican border individually and then meet up in southern Mexican border towns to form up into a caravan.
Wednesday, AFP reported that a caravan is forming in northern Honduras, and it already has somewhere between 800 and 1,000 members.