US President Barack Obama’s administration is looking for additional space to house families caught crossing the border with Mexico illegally, primarily for mothers with young children, officials said.
US Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the statement on Friday amid a surge of migrants seeking to enter the US from Central America.
Mayorkas did not say how many people the new family detention centers would house or where they will be located. The government currently operates only one such facility, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, with space for fewer than 100 people.
Mayorkas said that about 39,000 adults with children have been apprehended at the border since the start of the budget year in October last year. The administration has released an unspecified number of them into the US in recent months with instructions to report later to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices.
Mayorkas, the No. 2 official at the agency and former head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, told reporters he did not know how many people have been released or subsequently appeared as ordered.
Mayorkas said the administration will also send more immigration judges, ICE attorneys and other immigration officials to the region to help process migrants caught crossing the border illegally and, when possible, quickly return them to their home countries.
Immigrants crossing the border illegally have overwhelmed US immigration agencies. More than 174,000 people, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have been arrested in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley this year.
Other announcements the administration made about illegal immigration from Central America on Friday include: The administration will give the governments of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala US$9.6 million to help local authorities reintegrate returned immigrants; the US Agency for International Development will launch a US$40 million program to help improve citizen security in Guatemala and start a US$25 million crime and violence prevention program in El Salvador; more than US$18 million will be used to support community policing and law enforcement efforts to combat gangs in Honduras under the Central American Regional Security Initiative, or CARSI.
The US government will also provide US$161.5 million for CARSI programs focused on security and government challenges in the region.
The spike in border crossers — southern Texas is now the busiest border crossing in the country — prompted the Homeland Security Department earlier this year to start sending families to other parts of Texas and Arizona for processing before releasing them at local bus stops.
Family detention has long been a contentious issue for the department. In 2009, it was forced to shutter a large family detention center in Texas after legal challenges about the conditions of the facility. And in 2012, ICE abandoned plans to accept bids for a new family detention center in Texas amid complaints from advocates about the possibility of housing immigrant families in jails.
Also on Friday, US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner urged Obama to send troops to the southern border to help deal with the surge of children and other migrants. More than 52,000 children traveling alone have been caught crossing the border illegally since October last year.
Former US president George W. Bush deployed thousands of troops to the border during his second term to augment the Border Patrol as it bolstered its ranks. Since then, the agency has nearly doubled to more than 20,000 agents and the number of migrants caught crossing the border illegally has declined overall.
Meanwhile, the US Border Patrol will fly nearly 300 Central American migrants from south Texas to California for processing, an official said, as the government seeks to ease the workload on agents at the nation’s busiest corridor for illegal crossings.
There will be two flights today, with 140 passengers each, Paul Beeson, chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, said on Saturday.
The two flights were expected to continue every three days, Beeson said, but it is unclear for how long. They will be mostly for families with young children, but also carry adults. There will be no unaccompanied children.
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