Attributable to Troy A. Miller, Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner, Customs and Border Protection
Press Release.
“The encounter levels we are currently seeing across the southwest border are presenting a serious challenge to the men and women of CBP. To meet this challenge, we are using all available resources to ensure the safety and security of our agents and officers, and the migrants who are often misled and victimized by the transnational criminal organizations. These smugglers are recklessly putting migrants into harm’s way: in remote locations across the border, onto the tops of trains, or into the waters of the Rio Grande. We continue to go after the smugglers and are implementing new measures to impose consequences on transportation companies including bus and van lines used by smuggling organizations and nefarious actors to move migrants through northern Mexico and to our southwest border. CBP and our federal partners need additional funding from Congress so that we can continue to effectuate consequences for those who do not use the established pathways.”
On Background:
Large groups are being transported up to the border in mass and pushed across in an attempt to overwhelm Border Patrol capacity to guarantee their release.
In places where we are encountering large groups, we are generally able to accomplish our goal to move everybody that is gathered overnight in from the field that day,
Border Patrol’s out there to both establish security, to triage, and when there are major medical emergencies, they’re there on site to assist and elevate people to higher level care.
We’re resourced for about half of the volume of encounters we’re currently seeing and responding to, and CBP is currently funded through a continuing resolution. We can’t spend more money than we have and we are pulling all the levers we can to provide additional support.
Even when CBP increases intake, the flow of added people increases commensurate with increased intake.
We have suspended operations at crossings in San Ysidro, Lukeville, El Paso, and Eagle Pass and moved over 100 OFO staff as well as several additional law enforcement personnel outside of CBP down to the impacted areas.
To help with the unprecedented numbers we are currently seeing across the southwest border, the Department of Justice (Bureau of Prisons) is supplying transportation support at locations along the southwest border.
Pseudo legitimate travel agencies are emerging in cities like Dakar advertising travel to the US. They advertise visa free travel to Europe to Senegalese, which when you get a Schengen visa allows travel to the Western Hemisphere. They sell complete packages to connect them to a smuggling organization that will then facilitate their movement up to the border.
We are working with partners throughout the hemisphere and around the world to really make sure that we are bolstering people’s access to protections in the right ways and taking action to prevent people from trying to exploit different travel mechanisms.
We continue to work closely with the government of Mexico to highlight different nationalities transiting directly into Mexico and to the southwest border. The Mexican government announced in the fall the imposition of transit visa requirements on a number of nationalities.
We are looking at these organizations and transportation networks which have built out a large bus line in Sonora. These companies are operating dozens of buses a day to random spots on the border to facilitate migration. We are working with our Mexican partners and looking at all available opportunities and pursuing investigatory actions on these companies where there’s US Nexus.
We continuing to monitor the increased use of rail to move up into towards both Piedras Negras and Juarez. It’s a safety and security issue for the migrants. We’ve seen dismemberment, we’ve seen deaths, these are families, these are children. These are unaccompanied children riding the rails being exploited by the transnational criminal organizations. They’re riding up to the border 1000s at a time then cross, sometimes 500 to 1000 at a time, which poses significant challenges for the men and women of CBP, and, frankly, for the safety and security of the migrants.
