CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Migrants are being flown from South Texas to El Paso only to be expelled back to Mexico by Customs Border Protection, The Dallas Morning News has learned.
The expulsions include children with their families.
The migrants, most who are legally seeking asylum, are flown to other cities after crossing the border in the Rio Grande Valley. Federal officials say the migrants need to be moved to ease overcrowding at processing facilities.
El Paso County officials and migrant advocates said Saturday they had been told they would receive as many as 270 migrants per day in two separate flights from the Rio Grande Valley. But instead, many migrants are being sent back across the border to Ciudad Juarez under Title 42, a public health order put in use during the Trump era that allows the government to immediately expel migrants at the border because of the coronavirus pandemic.
CBP has not said how many people have been expelled from the U.S. since the flights began last week, but The News has learned that at least 50 were expelled to Juarez on Thursday alone.
Landon R. Hutchens, a CBP spokesman, blamed the overcrowding in South Texas for the expulsions, saying the agency “was also anticipating” that migrants would be sent to a shelter, “but sometimes these decisions are impacted by other things.”
Hutchens stressed that while the Biden administration has stopped the practice of expelling immigrant children who cross the border alone, the expulsions of immigrant families and single adults continues under Title 42.
Hutchens said CBP must fly them across the state to facilities where there is capacity to process the migrants before expelling them.
The shuffling of migrants across the state and their rapid expulsion underscores the challenges facing the Biden administration as it tries to adopt a more humanitarian approach to immigration and unwind controversial draconian Trump policies while insisting the border is not open.
The move has flummoxed a Mexican state official and U.S. nonprofit organizations who had prepared shelters in this city for the overflow.
“This is a game changer and very concerning,” said Ruben Garcia, executive director and founder of Annunciation House, an NGO, which had prepared to receive the migrants flown in twice a day. He said the number of migrants arriving is “not even close to what we were told would be arriving.”
Marisa Limon Garza, deputy director of Hope Border Institute in El Paso. said she met a family of four who said they had just been flown from the Rio Grande Valley on Thursday and then expelled into Juarez.
“I don’t understand their logic; I can’t square it and I don’t understand the rationale, or how the rules are being applied to some people and not to others,” Limon Garza said. “This doesn’t make sense to me.”
The family was part of a group of 54 migrants from Central America that included 15 minors, said a Chihuahua state immigration official, adding that a 5-year-old Honduran girl was transported to a hospital with fever and fatigue.
As of late Friday, the girl remained hospitalized, said Enrique Valenzuela, coordinator of the State Population Council (COESPO) in northern Chihuahua, which oversees and coordinates help for migrants waiting to cross into the U.S.
“This is the first time I know of that we received people under Title 42 that were sent here after being picked in a border far away, people who had crossed in Reynosa, McAllen, thousands of miles away and expelled here,” said Valenzuela. “This is new and definitely very disturbing, especially during a pandemic.”
He said he hasn’t been told by U.S. authorities whether it would now be standard practice to pick up migrants in far away border regions, fly them to other border cities, and then rapidly expel them. He said shelters in Juarez are running at or near capacity, and called the coming days and weeks “very difficult, very complicated.”
Hutchens, the CBP spokesman, said agents have seen an increase in the number of migrants they encounter and “in order to process individuals as safely and expeditiously as possible, U.S. Border Patrol in Laredo, Del Rio, and El Paso Sectors are assisting RGV by processing these subjects at their respective sector’s processing centers.”
“The border is not open and CBP is still operating under Centers for Disease Control guidelines for the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said, referring to Title 42.
Hutchens said he couldn’t immediately say how many migrants have been transported to El Paso from South Texas only to be expelled into Juarez.
CBP has arrested and encountered more than 100,000 migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border over the four weeks ending on March 3, according to data released Wednesday.
Hutchens added: “It takes time to process people. We don’t know who these people are. They could be terrorists, trying to come into the country. They could be a member of a drug cartel with gang affiliations with several outstanding warrants. We just don’t know.”
The Biden administration has owned up to the difficulties it confronts as migration increases and Trump’s policies are slowly unwound.
“It is difficult at times to convey both hope in the future and the danger that is now,” said Roberta Jacobson, special assistant to the president and coordinator of the Southern Border, during a White House news briefing last week. “And that is what we’re trying to do. And I — I will certainly agree that we are trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Limon Garza and Garcia said this latest practice by the Biden administration shows the new administration “was not ready,” nor had the proper infrastructure in place, for the challenges along the border that members of Congress from the border, including many Republicans and Democrat Henry Cuellar of Laredo, are now calling a “crisis.”
“I think the Biden administration has had a challenging time inheriting agencies and systems that were so deeply broken by the last administration, and even administrations prior to that and now, it’s a confluence of events that make it incredibly difficult to turn the tide and right some of those wrongs and so they’re having to do that in real time,” said Limon Garza. “Hopefully this serves as a sobering wake-up call.”
News of the expulsions comes as a delegation of Republicans led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy visit El Paso on Monday to focus on immigration issues that Republicans are already signaling will be at the center of their efforts to retake Congress in 2022. They seem likely to take from the playbook used by former President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly ignited the forces of anti-immigrant sentiment during his 2016 campaign and four years in office.
Trump, in a scorching statement last week warned of a “spiraling tsunami at the border” and predicted that “illegal immigrants from every corner of the earth will descend upon our border and never be returned.”
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, called the delegation’s scheduled trip to El Paso the latest “political opportunity for Republicans to rile up their base, push xenophobia, bash the border, bash Biden and bash immigrants.”
Local officials on the U.S.-Mexico border are on high alert, anxious to avoid a humanitarian crisis and wary of tensions and hate crimes like what they witnessed Aug. 3, 2019, when a man from North Texas drove to El Paso to kill Mexicans to “stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Twenty-three people died and dozens were injured.
“This makes us concerned because people are stoking these racist and xenophobia fears and putting them on migrants and asylum seekers and we know El Paso knows what that can look like,” said Limon Garza. “We know August 3. We know January 6,” she said, referring to radical Trump supporters’ storming of the Capitol. “That’s not lost on anybody.”
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