Border Patrol agents facing “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world right now” as Biden threatens to end Title 42.
QUICK FACTS:
- A massive caravan of 15,000 migrants reportedly departed from Tapachula, Mexico—a city near Mexico’s border with Guatemala—on Monday bound for Texas’ southern border.
- “This for us is nothing,” said Venezuelan Migrant Rosan Marquez. “It can rain, it can thunder, nobody can stop us.”
- The caravan “may be the largest ever recorded in Mexico,” according to a report from The Guardian, the largest number of migrants in the caravan coming from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. But the group is also comprised of Haitians, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans and even citizens of India, Bangladesh, and several African countries.
- “This is the largest mass human migration I have seen in at least the past 10 years,” said caravan organizer and director of the non-profit Center for Human Dignification Luis Garcia Villagran, who indicated the caravan stretched more than 32 miles.
- The massive caravan comes as the Biden administration promises to end Title 42, the Trump-era rule that allows the U.S. to send asylum seekers back to Mexico in order to curb the country’s skyrocketing immigration rate. Roughly 2 million migrants have been expelled under Title 42 since it was implemented.
- Migrants point to Joe Biden’s policies as their reason for trying to enter America. “[Biden] promised the Haitian community he will help them,” Haitian migrants told Fox News Friday. “He will recall Title 42. He will help us have real asylum.”
- Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA), who recently visited the southern border, argued during a recent interview on “Fox & Friends Weekend” that the Biden administration is “ignoring” the border crisis. Carter reported that U.S. Border Patrol agents are “overwhelmed” and facing “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world right now.”
- Biden told “all those people seeking assylum” to “surge the border” during a 2019 Democratic debate while describing what he would do if elected president. (See video below).
BACKGROUND:
- Over the past three months, there has been a 300% increase in migrants flooding into Tapachula’s parks and shelters, as shelters once holding no more than 400 people now accommodate nearly 2,000.
- U.S. Border Patrol holding areas are already at 203% capacity as of May.
- There were more than 234,000 migrant encounters in April alone along America’s southern border.
- 3,500 illegal crossers per day are apprehended at the border, and that number is expected to rise to 18,000.
- CBP had over 1.6 million encounters with illegal crossers in 2021, and has already had 1.2 million encounters in the first seven months of 2022.
- More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, the deadliest year on record for drug overdoses, Townhall reports. 70,000 of those 107,000 overdoses involved fentanyl, a drug that mostly flows through the U.S.-Mexico border directed by drug cartels. In Biden’s first year in office, Border Patrol reported a 1,066% increase in the amount of fentanyl apprehended at the border, the agency in 2021 seizing 588 pounds of the drug, enough to kill the entire U.S. population multiple times over.
- World leaders are meeting in Los Angeles, California this week for the Summit of the Americas, where the Biden admin is expected to address migration issues with cooperation pacts that are supposed to signal to migrants that they will not be permitted to travel to the U.S.
