https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-biden-117-000-unaccompanied-migrant-children-border
The Biden administration reportedly expects an unprecedented surge of unaccompanied migrant children showing up on the southern border in hopes of being admitted into the United States during its first year.
Border officials anticipate 117,000 children will arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or guardian in 2021, according to a White House domestic policy council document to be shared with President Biden this afternoon, which Axios reported Tuesday. The number is higher than the 68,000 taken into custody during the 2014 surge of solo children and the 80,000 who arrived during the 2019 humanitarian crisis at the border.
“I actually think that’s an undercount,” Victor Manjarrez, Jr., a former senior Border Patrol agent who teaches about law and human behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso, told the Washington Examiner.
Manjarrez pointed to the Biden administration’s decision to discontinue the 10-month practice of returning all unaccompanied children to Mexico rather than bringing them into U.S. custody as a leading factor for smugglers sending 2,000 children over the border each week this month. After taking office in January, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directed border officials not to send any single child south of the border, choosing instead to stick along the lines of a 2007 trafficking law that protected most single children from being deported.