Then there was the obscure public health statute known as Title 42 that the Trump administration invoked last year in response to the coronavirus crisis

As dusk closed in on the Texas border with Mexico, Melania Rivera and her 3-year-old twin boys climbed up the banks of the Rio Grande, at last setting foot in the United States.
Her former partner and their two older children had been in the U.S. since 2019, waiting for their asylum cases to be heard. Rivera, whose home in Honduras was destroyed by a hurricane in November, set out to join them after a relative in Virginia urged her to come quickly, saying border restrictions had relaxed under President Biden.

“He told me there was an opportunity,” said Rivera, 42, who was intercepted south of the city of Mission with seven other migrants by local police working with the Border Patrol.

The belief that the end of the Trump administration has opened the border has spread throughout the region alongside another rumor: Young children are the ticket in.
Human smugglers began pushing those ideas soon after Biden won the election in November, accelerating an exodus from Central America that was already underway after devastating back-to-back hurricanes and economic decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The message that now was a propitious time to head north was amplified on social media, television and radio in Central America.

Border crossings recorded by U.S. authorities climbed steadily through the summer and fall as countries lifted coronavirus lockdowns, then rose sharply this year, jumping from 78,442 in January to 100,441 in February — nearly triple the total for February 2020.

The increase is evident in the streams of families trudging north through the jungles of southern Mexico, in the crowded shelters of northern Mexican border cities and in southern Texas, where in recent days a constant flow of people has crossed the swiftly moving Rio Grande on rafts and turned themselves in to federal authorities.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week that U.S. agents are on pace to intercept more migrants on the southwest border in 2021 than they have in the last 20 years.
While the majority of those crossing are single adults, as has traditionally been the case, there has been a dramatic spike in the number of children making the trip.

Last month, 9,457 people under 18 arrived at the border without adults, up from 3,490 in February of last year and, according to the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, the fourth-highest monthly total in a decade.

More children are also coming with relatives. The number of migrants arriving in “family units” — which by government definition include at least one child — was 19,246 last month, up from 7,117 a year earlier.

“A lot of them think that now that Trump is gone, if they arrive with children it will be easy to cross into the United States,” said Gabriel Romero, a Franciscan priest who runs a shelter in southern Mexico that assisted about 6,000 migrants during January and February — compared with 4,000 all of last year.

“Easy” is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to the rumors.
Strict immigration policies were a Trump hallmark, such as a program known as Remain in Mexico that forced 70,000 asylum seekers to wait in Tijuana, Juárez and other Mexican border cities while their cases wound through U.S. courts.

Then there was the obscure public health statute known as Title 42 that the Trump administration invoked last year in response to the coronavirus crisis. It directed border authorities to rapidly expel hundreds of thousands of people with no due process or opportunity to pursue asylum.
Most notable has been Biden’s refusal to expel migrant children who arrive at the border without adults.

That means that young people like Michelle Rubio, a 17-year-old from Honduras who crossed the Rio Grande without a guardian on a recent balmy evening and was picked up by Hidalgo County constables can expect to eventually be placed into the care of her father, who lives in Virginia.
“There’s a lot of violence in my country,” Rubio said after following a handwritten sign posted by border agents near the river that said “asylum” until she encountered a convoy of local constables. “I can’t live there.”

As Rubio waited to be handed over to federal agents, she nervously fingered the wooden cross hanging from her neck.

Since late January, the constables have been discovering about a hundred migrants each night along the Rio Grande, said Sgt. Roger Rich. Many of them are solo children. Last month they found a 4-year-old Honduran boy on the riverbank who raised his shirt to show them a relative’s phone number, written on his chest.

This is not the first time large numbers of young migrants have appeared at the border.

One big rush occurred in 2014, amid a wave of worsening gang violence in Honduras and El Salvador . There was another influx in 2019, after Trump was pressured to end a policy under which he separated migrant children from their parents.

In recent weeks, officials have scrambled to keep pace with the latest increase, reopening a shelter in Central Texas and sending children to stay at new shelters in a former camp for oil workers in West Texas and at the Dallas convention center.

More than 5,000 unaccompanied children are in U.S. border agencies’ custody, and more than 9,500 are being held by Health and Human Services.

https://marvels-falconwintersoldier.tumblr.com/

https://mirdadnaysila786214.medium.com/from-san-francisco-to-pittsburgh-and-points-in-between-men-women-and-children-marched-2f339477cb49