The United States border is closed.
This is how Joe Biden's government officials and the president himself insist on saying it by all possible means, in English and Spanish, who insist on sending the message that now is not the time to embark on the dangerous path north.
But unlike his predecessor, Donald Trump, who, taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis, stopped accepting asylum applications on the southern border, the Democrat has begun to open some doors for humanitarian reasons.
And those entries are being interpreted by thousands of migrants fleeing poverty, violence, and lack of opportunities in Central America as an invitation to try.
The apprehensions of undocumented migrants on the southern border are so many that, if the pace is maintained, they could reach higher levels than in the last 20 years, as the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, warned this week.
Despite the fact that his Government returns to Mexico all adults who travel alone and many families, the decision to host unaccompanied minors and certain parents with young children is saturating reception capacity.
The situation, which is portrayed on US television as a "humanitarian crisis," is drawing strong criticism from the Biden Administration, which faces its first major challenge two months after its arrival at the White House.
What do the numbers say?
The Border Patrol figures reflect an exponential increase in the arrival of undocumented migrants in recent months.
In February this year, border agencies apprehended more than 100,400 migrants.
To find a similar figure, one would have to go back to June 2019, the month after Trump reached an agreement with Mexico, obtained under threat, to stop illegal immigration.
A month earlier, in May 2019, arrests had exceeded 144,000, a record number in the last two decades.
That month, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed to receive more asylum seekers sent by the United States while they waited for a court to hear their cases under the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
The heavy hand on the southern border and the pandemic, by which the Donald Trump government invoked title 42 of the immigration law to close the border to non-essential activities and new asylum cases, drove the levels of arrests of undocumented immigrants. to just over 17,100 in April 2020. Since then, the apprehension figures have been growing month by month.
The rebound has been notable since the fiscal year began (in October 2020), especially in apprehensions of unaccompanied minors and family units, as the Border Patrol calls groups in which at least one minor and one parent or parent travels. legal guardian.
What has changed at the border?
On paper, things have not changed much at the border, which remains closed under title 42. However, Biden has ended the MPP program, which symbolized the former president's heavy hand with migrants, and is receiving the Asylum seekers waiting in dangerous cities in Mexico, in a move that will benefit 25,000 people.
In addition, in order to comply with two laws for the protection of children in force in the country and for humanitarian reasons, it has decided to welcome unaccompanied minors and some families with young children when Mexico does not have the capacity to receive them.
"Mexico's limited capacity has saturated our resources," National Security Secretary Mayorkas justified in a statement this week.
When that happens, he said, families are processed in the United States pending their applications for protection in the United States.
Mexico's lack of capacity to handle the large numbers of migrants on the northern border, which has been evident with the large migratory flows in recent years, is compounded by a legislative reform that came into force in January that prohibits the detention of Minor migrants, for which the Mexican authorities do not accept the return of families with young children when they cannot take them into shelters adapted for them.
What steps has the Biden government taken?
With the arrival of these people to the southern border, the facilities prepared to receive minor migrants have also been saturated.
In recent weeks, the Biden government has been forced to relax the protocols against covid in existing shelters in order to accommodate more migrant children, to deploy the federal emergency agency FEMA to attend the arrival of minors and families and build appropriate places to receive them.
This week, it was announced, for example, that a convention center in Dallas, Texas, will be adapted to accommodate up to 3,000 minor migrants.
Faced with criticism of the chaos at the border, the Biden administration insists that it is doing the right thing.
“What do you do with a child who arrives alone at the border?
Do you repeat what Trump did: take them away from their mothers, keep them in cells? ”The president asked himself this week in an interview with ABC.
“We are not doing that.
We are calling on HHS [the acronym for the Department of Health and Human Services] and FEMA to offer them safe facilities and so that they do not get out of control of the Border Patrol, which are not designed to hold migrants for long periods of time. time, especially children ”.
When a minor arrives at the border without family members, the Border Patrol must deliver them to HHS within 72 hours.
According to government data, in more than 40% of cases, minors who arrive alone at the border have a parent or legal guardian in the US HHS's job is to protect the child or adolescent until it is verified that they have a relative in the country who can take care of them.
What solutions do you propose to tackle the crisis?
With the Central American economy plunged into the crisis caused by the pandemic and the fatal consequences of hurricanes Eta and Iota that hit the region, especially Honduras, where they left thousands of families without a home, a means of subsistence or other hope other than To migrate, it is impossible to think of durable solutions without addressing the reasons that expel migrants.
The Biden government insists on asking Central Americans for patience to put in place a system that allows them to make their asylum applications from their country of origin.
"We have to control the disaster we inherited" from Trump, the president justified himself in his interview with ABC.
“Don't come now.
The idea is to implement a system so that they can request asylum in their countries of origin and not have to leave their communities, ”insisted Biden.
As he has advanced, the plan is to set up processing centers so that those who want to request asylum or other immigration benefits can do so in their own countries.
In addition, his Government has announced the reopening of a program to reunite Central American children and adolescents with their parents in the United States that was implemented by Barack Obama after the first unaccompanied minors crisis of 2014 and three years later was suspended by Trump .
The objective is that they can request reunification from their countries and travel once it has been approved, to avoid the dangerous path as undocumented.
Biden is also committed to investing more than $ 4 billion to tackle the root causes of migration in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the main emitters of migrant families.
But at the moment there is no clear timetable for how that investment will be made or which agencies would be in charge of supervising it in a region with high levels of corruption.
For this reason, in the face of the messages that ask for patience, the need makes migrant families cling to the hope of open doors, no matter how small, that they foresee that the arrivals of Central Americans to the southern border will continue to increase.
