Authorities are pulling out all the stops at the Mexican border amid the influx of migrants

Fear of an influx of immigrants On the border between the United States and Mexico. Before lifting a health measure that had been blocking access to the country since the start of the pandemic, the United States deployed more than 24,000 agents on Wednesday and adopted new restrictions on the right to asylum. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorcas acknowledged that the “coming days and weeks” could be “very difficult”. He said the authorities are already seeing “a large number of expatriates in some areas”.

The day before, the Democratic President Joe Biden He went so far as to admit that the situation was going to be “messy” when the device said “ Address 42 Thursday at 11:59 p.m. Washington time. This rule is supposed to limit the spread COVID-19, gave US authorities the option to immediately return all migrants who enter the country, including asylum seekers. In three years, it has been used 2.8 million times.

Nearly 24,000 additional agents

As his lifting neared, frontier towns such as Brownsville, Laredo, and El Paso saw the arrival of several exile candidates, most of them fromlatin america but also Chinal Russia or Türkiye. In El Paso, hundreds are sleeping on the streets. Mayor Oscar Lesser expects a wave of “12,000 to 15,000 people” at the end of the week.

To assist local authorities, the government on Wednesday announced the deployment of “more than 24,000 agents and law enforcement officers, as well as more than 1,100 coordinators” from the Border Police. It is without counting 1,500 soldiers sent by the Ministry of Defensein addition to the 2,500 already on site.

New restrictions

At the same time, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security ended new restrictions on the right to asylum. Announced in February, they were the subject of a mandatory consultation procedure and will go into effect Thursday night. Before presenting themselves at the border, asylum seekers, with the exception of unaccompanied minors, must now have been given an appointment on a telephone application prepared by the Border Guard, or they will be denied access. Asylum in one of the countries they crossed during their migration journey. Otherwise, their application will be presumed to be illegitimate and they may be subject to expedited removal procedures, which will prevent them from entering the United States for five years.

the United State It plans to increase repatriation flights, which will double or triple for some destinations. About 7,000 additional places will be created in detention centers so that migrants do not disappear into the country while they wait for their file to be examined. to encourage legal channels of immigration, Washington I planned to open a hundred “regional management centers”, located outside the country, where the files of candidates for immigration would be studied. The first is scheduled for Colombia and on Guatemala.

20 minutes with AFP