We have long been aware of the flood of humanity arriving at the nation’s southern border for the past two years and the expectations that many of these migrants bring with them. (The “Biden, Let Us In” shirts are still showing up regularly.) Hundreds of thousands of these border jumpers escape without any form of processing and are classified as “gotaways” by the Border Patrol. Among those who are interviewed, most wind up being sent on buses and planes to other parts of country, much to the consternation of the liberals who had proudly declared their enclaves to be “sanctuary cities” until some actual people in need of sanctuary began showing up. But even among those who went through the full round of “processing” upon their arrival, problems have been developing. The Associated Press interviewed a number of asylum-seekers who found themselves being sent to addresses in other parts of the country where there was nobody prepared to accept them. In some cases, the addresses didn’t even exist. And the paperwork they were given to set up a future court appearance was frequently flawed while others received no paperwork at all, leading them to be “lost” in the system.

When Wilfredo Molina arrived in the U.S. from his native Venezuela, he told border agents he wanted to go to Miami but didn’t have an address. They directed him to what he thought was a shelter in midtown Manhattan but turned out to be a gray office building.

“It was a fake building. I didn’t understand what it was,” he said.

Molina was among 13 migrants who recently arrived in the U.S. who agreed to share documents with The Associated Press that they received when they were released from U.S. custody while they seek asylum after crossing the border with Mexico. The AP found that most had no idea where they were going — nor did the people at the addresses listed on their paperwork.

The reasons behind these seeming clerical errors are being hotly debated. A woman from the Colorado Housing Asylum Network is quoted as saying she believes that the Border Patrol is “attempting to demonstrate the chaos that they are experiencing on the border to inland cities.” That makes it sound as if she believes that Border Patrol agents are knowingly falsifying the migrants’ paperwork to create problems and draw attention to their plight.

Others suggested that the overwhelmed border agents are “just looking up any nonprofit address” they can find and sending the migrants to those destinations. There might be something to both of those theories, or it could just be a case where the Border Patrol is so vastly overwhelmed that clerical errors are bound to show up.

Some examples of the addresses erroneously put on some of the migrants’ forms included:

• The administrative offices of Catholic Charities in New York and San Antonio
• An El Paso, Texas, church
• A private home in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts
• A group operating homeless shelters in Salt Lake City.

Of those four examples, nobody at the listed organizations or buildings had been informed that migrants were being sent their way. Three of them, however, do sound like the types of places where charitable actions might take place and the migrants might find shelter. The private home is a bit of a puzzler, though it’s possible that the owners might have been listed among people having performed other charitable activities.

None of the issues being looked at by the Associated Press really have any bearing on the underlying problem, however. We’re not dealing with a question of where all of these people should “correctly” be sent. We’re facing the reality that we simply don’t have the capacity to process this many people in such a short period of time even if we wanted to or if they were following the correct legal asylum protocols. Huge numbers of them are winding up in already overcrowded shelters or out on the streets. Many simply disappear.

The system is breaking down. Or, more accurately, it’s already broken down and now we’re just watching the damage multiply. The responsibility for this lies with the people who sent out the invitation to the world, signaling that nobody would be turned away. And the world responded. Why wouldn’t they? But we’re being left with one heck of a mess to clean up as a result of the Biden border crisis.