As Immigrants Are Packed Into Encampments, Border Patrol Struggles With Overcrowding

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In March, there was widespread public alarm after a spillover of migrants in El Paso forced hundreds of them to spend days underneath a bridge with little hot food, torn Mylar blankets and gusts of desert dust.

Now, a similar crowded encampment, fenced in with portable toilets, water coolers and camouflage netting draped overhead for shade, appeared over the weekend near the border’s busiest crossing point for migrants from Central America, in McAllen, Tex. The makeshift containment area popped up next to a Border Patrol station in a bustling industrial area of the Rio Grande Valley city. It appears to be a result of the continuing stream of people crossing the southern border despite everything the Trump administration has tried to slow immigration.

The government’s attempts at deterrence have included separating migrant families, deploying American troops to the border and returning asylum-seeking immigrants to Mexico while they await an immigration court hearing. The efforts have not worked, and makeshift facilities like the new one in McAllen have sprouted up along the 1,900-mile border in recent months to accommodate the new arrivals.

In April, for the second month in a row, the authorities arrested more than 100,000 immigrants at the southern border, the highest totals in over a decade. That pace has persisted into May. On a single day last week, May 10, agents in the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector arrested more than 400 immigrants who had illegally crossed the Rio Grande.

Apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley sector have averaged 1,600 a day recently, with 1,100 of those being members of families, a 250 percent increase from this time last year, according to the Border Patrol.
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