The border is even worse than you think

Here is what is most striking about the government's response to the unprecedented surge of illegal border crossers: It is entirely improvised. Jury-rigged. Thrown together in a scramble to accommodate thousands of migrants who were not coming just months ago. And the reason it is being improvised is that during his first days in office, President Joe Biden blew up the foundation of the government's handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border -- more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children. Now the government's leading agencies -- Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services -- are desperately trying to put together a new system to deal with the damage Biden's hurried and irresponsible acts have done. Under administration orders, they are no longer really trying to prevent people from entering the U.S. illegally. Rather, they are attempting to humanely house and feed the thousands, prior to releasing them into the country. The border's guardians are overwhelmed and increasingly giving way to bureaucratic pressure to let most people in. There is no better example of what is going on than the situation under the Anzalduas International Bridge that connects Mexico to the United States in Mission, Texas. It is about a mile walk through woods and a dirt road from the Rio Grande river. U.S. officials have set up a temporary processing center for migrants whose smugglers have let them off on the river bank in the dead of night and who have trudged to the bridge, guided at first by little signs with arrows, and then by the weird glow of huge temporary lights set up under the bridge. When they arrive, they get in line inside plastic fencing that guides them to a table where they give U.S. officials their rudimentary information, and then to benches where they will sit through the night waiting for a bus to take them to the dangerously overcrowded U.S. detention center in Donna, Texas.
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