United States border apprehensions jump in April

Apprehensions of undocumented immigrants at the US border with Mexico rose to a fresh 15-year high in April as the Biden administration failed to deter migrants, official data showed Tuesday.

US Customs and Border Protection reported it had interdicted 178,622 people trying to enter the United States without official immigration papers last month, up more than 5,000 from March’s high numbers.

The figure was also more than ten times that of April 2020, when a tough crackdown by President Donald Trump’s government was in place.

But migrants of all types — single adults, families, and unaccompanied children — have sought to take advantage of a perceived easier treatment from the administration of President Joe Biden to try and enter the United States.

In April the number of single adults trying to enter the country across the southwest border from Mexico rose 10 percent over March to 111,301, CBP said.

People arriving in family units, often with very small children, topped 50,000, down about eight percent from March.

And unaccompanied children, which the Biden administration is permitting to stay in the United States with relatives, numbered 17,171, down from 18,890 in March.

But those numbers were still far higher than in the months before Biden took office on January 20, and critics say he has sparked a “crisis” on the border.

“CBP continues to see a large influx of illegal migration along the Southwest Border,” said the acting CBP commissioner, Troy Miller.

CBP said 62.5 percent of those it detained were sent back across the border on the basis of Covid-19 pandemic controls.

It did not say how many of the rest were allowed to stay and how many may have been denied entry based on other protocols or laws.

Four-fifths of the migrants are from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Many from the three Central American countries say they are escaping poverty and pervasive violence in their countries, and ask for asylum when reaching the US.

Biden has deployed Vice President Kamala Harris to try and negotiate deals with the leaders of those countries to slow the flow of migrants northward.

But the administration has admitted that addressing the root causes of migration, poverty and violence, will take a long time.

In addition, it has struggled to resettle the tens of thousands of children who crossed the border without parents of the family.

The department of Health and Human Services and CBP had more than 21,000 children in their temporary housing facilities on Monday, a number that has not changed substantially over the past month.

Stephen Miller, who led Trump’s harsh crackdown on all immigration, said in a tweet that the CBP numbers “show the border catastrophe is raging even further out of control.”

This article has been posted by a News Hour Correspondent. For queries, please contact through [email protected]
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