Illegal immigrants from 50 different countries — including China, Bangladesh, Turkey, Egypt and Romania — have been caught crossing into the US from Mexico, a top Border Patrol official testified Tuesday.
“People are traveling across hemispheres to attempt to illegally enter the US, using the same pathways as the Central Americans,” Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Patrol Agent Rodolfo Karisch said at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.
The revelation came as President Trump said he would not relaunch his administration’s policy of separating children from their families at the southern border — but continued railing against the surge of Central American asylum seekers seeking entry to the US.
Karisch said a caravan-size group of migrants flooded across the border each week in just a single sector, which he called the latest indicator of the growing migration crisis on the Mexico-US border.
“Much media attention has focused on caravans coming across from Central America,” said Karisch, who has been assigned to the sector since January after serving in Arizona.
“But the fact is that RGV [Rio Grande Valley] is receiving caravan-equivalent numbers every seven days.”
Karisch said Border Patrol has apprehended more asylum-seeking families crossing the border in the first five months of fiscal 2019 than during all of fiscal 2012.
Trump, meanwhile, refuted multiple reports said that he wanted the family separation policy not only revived but strengthened.
“We’re not looking to do that now,” he said during an Oval Office sit-down with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, his second White House visit since Trump took office.
But even as he disavowed it, Trump argued the policy was an effective deterrent to asylum-seeking migrants.
“When you don’t do it, it brings a lot more people to the border. I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you have many more people coming. They are coming like it’s a picnic, like ‘Let’s go to Disneyland,’ ” Trump said.
His comments also came as Customs and Border Protection officials revealed that 103,492 asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants were apprehended at the southern border in March — more than double the number last March and an increase of more than 26,000 from February.
Trump has railed against the rising numbers and is searching for ways to staunch the flow.
The president also angrily blamed his predecessor for instituting the separations in the first place.
“Just so you understand, President Obama separated the children. Those cages that were shown — I think they were very inappropriate — were by President Obama’s administration not by Trump.
President Obama had child separation,” he said, referring to steel cages at a border detention facility where children were kept.
Jeh Johnson, chief of the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration’s second term, has said children were only separated in rare circumstances, like when authorities suspected human trafficking or people falsely claimed to be parents of unrelated children.
Trump charged the border has become a gateway for criminals.
“We have murderers coming in. We have drug lords coming in. We have gangs coming in. We are stopping them, and if we don’t stop them, ICE is throwing them the hell out. We want homeland security and that’s what we’re gonna get!”