Passing Through Series

Since this service started, 60 immigrants have showed up at our southern border. By the end of this service, 190 more will have joined them. Roughly 250 people show up at our southern border every day in the hopes of either legally or illegally entering our country.

We have a big problem. According to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, we are “expected to reach the highest number of people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in two decades” (Shabad, R., NBC News.com, March 16, 2021).

Two-hundred and fifty people an hour comes up to 6,000 people a day. That’s 1,700 more people than the entire city of Canton with a population of 4,227 (2019 Census). Think about that for a minute. The entire city of Canton plus a thousand more from, say, Waynesville, attempting to enter our country every day … every day, not year. Right now, the number is 170,000 people a month … that’s over two and half times the total population of Haywood County. At the current rate, over two million people a year will cross over our southern border seeking a home or work or refuge in our country.

Most alarming, says Mayorkas, is the sharp increase in “unaccompanied children.” “We are expelling most single adults and families,” says Mayorkas, but they are not turning back unaccompanied minors (Shabad, R., NBC News.com, March 16, 2021). Customs and Border Protection agencies report that they are seeing well over 500 unaccompanied children attempting to cross the border a day … up from an average of 313 per day just a month ago (Shabad, R., NBC News.com, March 16, 2021). Again, that’s “per day.” The Customs and Border Protection stations report that they currently have over 4,200 children in custody … almost three thousand of them are being held over the 72-hour legal time limit (Shabad, R., NBC News.com, March 16, 2021).

The Federal Emergency Management Agency … FEMA … is rushing to build what they call “decompression centers” in Dallas and Midland, Texas, in an attempt to help the Department of Health and Human Services, who have been tasked with the responsibility of taking care of all these children while they wait for a sponsor. “Part of the problem,” say Mayorkas, “is that the Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t have the capacity to take in the current number of children” (Shabad, R., NBC News.com, March 16, 2021).

As if this weren’t unprecedented enough, we also have COVID to deal with. According to Migrant Protection Protocols, all migrants must be tested before crossing the border. The crushing number of migrants showing up at the borders, however, has made testing almost impossible. The New York Post reported that the number of migrants testing positive for the coronavirus before being released into the U.S. by the Border Patrol is surging (Batalova, J. & Alperin, E. Spotlight. New York Post, July 10, 2018). In the town of Brownsville, Texas, for example, 185 migrants tested positive for COVID-19 last week at the city’s main bus station … up from 108 just the week before.

I don’t know if you heard what I just said … these were migrants about to board buses to destinations unknown. Felipe Romero, a spokesman for Brownsville, Texas, said that there is little that Brownsville can do to restrict the migrants from traveling beyond Texas other than advising them to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention safety precautions and quarantine (Batalova, J. & Alperin, E. Spotlight. New York Post, July 10, 2018). My question is … quarantine themselves how and where?

According to the Center for Immigration Studies (March 31, 2021), migrants are either being flown or bused to various cities within the United States. Buses from border towns like Del Rio and Laredo, for example, send out a charter bus filled with migrants every day, seven days a week. “They often drop their Haitian, Venezuelan, and Cuban passengers in Florida and New Jersey. Those from Nicaragua and other Central American nations have been delivered to Tennessee, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and to large cities in Texas such as Dallas and Houston” (Bensman, T. “Catch-and Bus: Thousands of Freed Border-Crossing Immigrants Are Dispersing Across America.” Center for Immigration Studies, March 31, 2021).

Here’s the thing that you need to keep in mind. All these figures represent migrants who have been apprehended or detained by the authorities … we have absolutely no idea how many slip across the border undetected and unscreened. As Newsweek pointed out, “There is currently no system in place to track if migrants have been tested after they leave [Non-Governmental Organization] shelters and [Custom and Border Protection] custody” (Newsweek, March 25, 2021). As Felipe Romero said, we can only hope that they follow CDC guidelines and quarantine themselves if they get sick.