For example, between 2018 and 2019, the number of migrants in family groups who crossed the border illegally increased from 77,794 to 432,838, an increase of 456 percent. The number of single adults apprehended increased by 30 percent, from 198,492 to 258,375.
Last year, 621,311 family units were arrested after crossing the southern border.
In recent years, increasing numbers of Mexican families displaced by cartels that control vast territories have been crossing the border to seek safety in the United States.
In the first eight months of fiscal year 2024, which began Oct. 1, the Border Patrol apprehended nearly 150,000 Mexican migrant families who entered the United States illegally, compared to 87,014 in 2023 and 17,040 in 2020.
“A large number of Mexican families have come and it is easy to send them back,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, because they can be bused back to their country.
The deportation of families and the exemption for unaccompanied minors under the new restrictions will almost certainly lead to family separations as desperate parents decide to send their children alone, often with smugglers, she said.
Last May, a four-year-old child was thrown into the United States over the steel wall that separates San Diego from the Mexican city of Tijuana. The child survived. Two years earlier, agents rescued two young sisters, three and five, who had been dropped off on the U.S. side of the barrier in New Mexico.
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2024-06-09 02:51:21
www.nytimes.com
