White House officials along with members of Congress are traveling to the southern border Wednesday to visit a facility being used to house migrant children amid the current surge at the US-Mexico border. They are touring a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, as the Biden administration grapples with the massive influx of migrants at the…

‘Flat-out just doesn’t care’.

Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday that Vice President Kamala Harris is “the worst possible choice” to oversee security at the border.

“She’s about the worst possible choice that one could make,” Ducey said during a speech at the University of Arizona. “In no point in her career has she given any indication that she considers the border a problem or a serious threat.” . .

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem.

Biden made the announcement as he and Harris met at the White House on Wednesday with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas and other immigration advisers to discuss the increase in migrants, including many unaccompanied minors, arriving at the border in recent weeks.

In delegating the matter to Harris, Biden is seeking to replicate a dynamic that played out when he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president. Obama turned to Biden in his first term to lead the White House effort to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq and oversee implementation of stimulus in response to the Great Recession.

“When she speaks, she speaks for me,” Biden said, noting her past work as California’s attorney general makes her specially equipped to lead the administration’s response.

Biden, who has faced stiff criticism from Republicans over the increased flow of migrants, is hoping to show Americans he’s taking the situation at the border seriously. He also wants to prevent the growing humanitarian and political challenge from overshadowing his administration’s ambitious legislative agenda.

But the high-profile assignment for Harris, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and is expected to run for the White House again in the future, could be politically fraught.

“Needless to say, the work will not be easy,” Harris said. “But it is important work.”

Harris is tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders, administration officials said. She’s also tasked with developing and implementing a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.

Biden suggested President Donald Trump’s decision to cut $450 million funding in 2019 to the region was partly to blame for the situation.

Among the other reasons for the current increase: the thousands of Central American migrants already stuck at the border for months and the persistent scourge of gang violence afflicting the Northern Triangle countries.

Still, the numbers of both unaccompanied minors and families encountered at the border are lower than they were at various points during the Trump administration, including in spring 2019.

For Harris, the assignment gives her the first big opportunity to step to the front of the stage on a matter of enormous consequence for the administration. As the first Black woman elected vice president, Harris arrived on the job as a trailblazer. It has remained opaque how Biden would utilize her.

The move echoes not only Obama’s decision to deputize Biden but also Trump naming Vice President Mike Pence to lead his coronavirus task force and President Bill Clinton handing Vice President Al Gore environmental and technology portfolios early in his presidency.

It’s been a mixed bag for vice presidents in recent history who have been made the point person on delicate matters, said Joel Goldstein, the author of “The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden.”

Pence’s efforts on the coronavirus were stymied by Trump’s hijacking of the task force’s daily briefings early in the pandemic. Dick Cheney, who had been charged with leading George W. Bush’s search for a vice president only to take the spot himself, carved out what was seen by many critics as a shadow presidency in which he had an outsized influence on shaping Bush’s national security policies.

And Gore faced headwinds from Republicans in Congress who were reluctant to give him a win ahead of his unsuccessful 2000 run for the White House.

“Some of the risk versus reward depends to some extent on the vice president’s relationship with the president,” Goldstein said. “Whether or not the president had their back. Whether the president’s going to allow you to be in a position to accomplish things and be perceived to accomplish things.”

Biden made the announcement as a delegation of White House officials and members of Congress was traveled to the southern border on Wednesday to tour a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, where more than 750 migrant teenagers are being held.

The Biden administration has in recent weeks moved to open more than 10,000 new beds across the Southwest in convention centers and former oilfield camps. It notified Congress on Wednesday that it will open a new 3,000-person facility in San Antonio and a 1,400-person site at the San Diego convention center. HHS is also opening a second site in Carrizo Springs and received approval from the Defense Department Wednesday to begin housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.

While acknowledging a “big problem” with the rising numbers of migrants, Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., one of five lawmakers to tour the facility Wednesday, credited the Biden administration with treating young migrants far more humanely than the Trump administration.

In an interview after the tour, Torres described children accommodated four to a room, and said she saw no signs of overcrowding. The young people attend school, have access to health care and are given weekly COVID-19 tests. Lawmakers were told 1 in 10 children are testing positive for the virus, but none at the facility had been hospitalized, she said.

“When I look at those kids, I see myself,” said Torres, an immigrant from Guatemala who arrived in the U.S. with her family as a child.

The White House faced criticism for limiting media access to Wednesday’s tour, keeping it to just one TV crew. It has still not allowed media to enter Border Patrol facilities where large numbers of children are detained or HHS sites that it rapidly opened under pressure. The Carrizo Springs facility was established in 2019 during the Trump administration and re-opened in February.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is leading a separate delegation of GOP senators to the border later this week, decried the lack of press access as a “muzzling” of the media by the Democratic administration.

“Joe Biden doesn’t want you to see,” Cruz told reporters at the Capitol.

Merchant reported from Houston and Lemire from New York. Associated Press writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.

Hundreds of migrant families, including babies and pregnant women, were detained under the Anzalduas International Bridge, sleeping in the dirt, without much food or medical care, people who were released said.

The family-unit holding cells smell like urine and vomit. Fights break out in the unaccompanied-minor cells. Scabies, lice, the flu, and COVID-19 run rampant. Up to 80 individuals are squeezed into each 24- by 30-foot cell, and there aren’t enough mattresses for everyone. Sheets of plastic divide the rooms. “Any diseases that are in there, […]

The post Border Agent Gives Inside Account of Overcrowded Facilities appeared first on NTD.

The border crisis continues to get worse in California as even the San Diego Convention Center is being used to house illegal immigrants.

by Kaylee Greenlee

The Biden administration ignored career immigration officials’ warnings of an impending surge in the number of migrants arriving at the southern border, The Washington Post reported.

The administration has repeatedly refused to refer to the situation as a crisis, despite a seeming inability to curb the increasing flow of migrants, the Post reported. The administration’s mixed messaging, which often appeals to liberal activists, has hampered efforts to halt the influx of migrants at the southern border, according to the Post.

Senior Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials briefed the Biden transition team during the transition period on the potential risks of lifting former President Donald Trump’s policies and said it could lead to a surge in unaccompanied migrant minors, one current and two former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told the Post.

The president’s transition team understood the potential risks and acknowledged multiple issues that could emerge as a result of repealing Trump-era policies, DHS officials told the Post.

Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary, said he talked to the Biden transition team about potential risks related to migrants and confirmed that career CBP officials warned of a looming crisis, the Post reported. However, Biden repealed several of Trump’s policies including border wall construction and paused deportations for 100 days within his first week of taking office.

A federal judge blocked President Joe Biden’s moratorium on deportations in January, according to the Associated Press.

“It’s one thing to hear it from political appointees, but career folks were telling them the same thing. They should have been better prepared,” Wolf said, the Post reported. “And I know they were briefed in detail by CBP.”

CBP encountered over 100,000 migrants at the southern border in February alone, including more than 9,000 unaccompanied minors, according to the agency. The Biden administration decided to allow unaccompanied minors to enter the country and remain in custody until they are matched with a sponsor in the U.S., according to the Post.

The Department of Health and Human Services currently has over 10,000 unaccompanied minors in its custody, according to the Post. An additional 5,000 unaccompanied minors are estimated to be in CBP facilities.

“When you create a system that incentivizes people to come across, and they are released, that immediately sends a message to Central America that if you come across you can stay,” Democratic Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez told the Post.

“It incentivizes droves of people to come, and the only way to slow it down is by changing policy at our doorstep. If they don’t change the policy, the flow of continued migration traffic isn’t going to stop or slow down,” Gonzalez added.

The Biden administration has continued expelling single migrant adults and some family units to Mexico under Trump’s Title 42 public health order. However, the Mexican government said in January it would stop accepting some families, forcing the U.S. to admit parents with children under 7 years old, according to the Post.

– – –

Kaylee Greenlee is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Biden Team Ignored Warnings from Career Immigration Officials That Their Actions Could Cause a Border Crisis appeared first on The Georgia Star News.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that he and a delegation of 17 Republican senators will visit the temporary migrant overflow facility in Donna, Texas, as part of their upcoming tour of the U.S. southern border on Friday. Cruz had previously announced that he would lead the delegation of lawmakers to visit the U.S.-Mexico border amid an influx of illegal border crossing, particularly by unaccompanied minors. The overflow facility in Donna made headlines this week after photos of children at the facility sleeping in crowded conditions, either on floor mats or on the floor, were released to the media. “Tomorrow night, 18 senators are going to be traveling down to the Southern border, traveling down to Texas, to see first-hand the crisis that is unfolding, to see firsthand the over 100,000 illegal immigrants who were detained last month, to see the over 15,000 children that are in [the] custody of the Biden …