EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) — Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Friday visited the border city of El Paso, Texas, where he received briefings on a migrant processing center and the transfer of unaccompanied migrant children.
Mayorkas visited the CHS Trail House in the East El Paso County community of Montana Vista, which houses unaccompanied minors after they are released from federal processing facilities. The house is under contract by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to provide care and services for unaccompanied migrant children and began operations in September.
The secretary traveled to El Paso with “a bipartisan delegation of senators” to be briefed on how unaccompanied children arriving at the border are processed, housed and transferred. The two-sentence press release announcing the visit did not say which senators accompanied Mayorkas to the border.
This visit was closed to the media due to privacy and COVID-19 precautions, the release announcing the visit said.
But NewsNation affiliate Border Report has learned that neither of the two Republican senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, were with Mayorkas.
“No press. No cameras. What is Biden hiding?” tweeted Cruz on Friday under the hashtag #BorderCrisis. “Next week, I’m bringing 15 senators to the border (and) DHS said no to our request to bring media.”
Cornyn, another stakeholder in what the Biden administration has taken to calling the “immigration challenge,” has already been to the U.S.-Mexico border recently and plans to return.
“Sen. Cornyn was not in El Paso today, but he was on the border last week and will be back on the border next week,” said Libby Sharp, Cornyn’s Texas press secretary.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, did make it to El Paso and wasn’t pleased with what he saw.
“One thing is certainly clear from my visit. The Biden administration’s dismantling of the previous admin’s policies with no consideration of the ramifications has incentivized migration, and increased Border Patrol manpower is critical,” he tweeted.
Portman added that Border Patrol agents are concerned about the rapid increase in unaccompanied migrant children, which increased 62% between January and February. Total encounters with unauthorized migrants topped 100,000 in February.
Earlier on Friday, a handful of migrant advocates praised Biden for rolling back Trump-era immigration policies but urged him to send funds to properly care for the unaccompanied minors and other newly arrived migrant families.
“This something that shouldn’t be the responsibility of nonprofit organizations. We are doing it because we believe in our humanity and in our community. But this is something that needs an institutional response,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights. “We need massive resources on the ground not for detention centers but to assist these people.”
The activists opined the Biden administration was not prepared for the uptick in migration flows, though they said they don’t see an immigration crisis as much as a brewing humanitarian crisis if the federal government doesn’t send needed funds to assist the new arrivals.
This was Mayorkas’ second trip to the border this month. On March 6, he visited a tent facility in Donna, Texas, where CBP processes undocumented migrants. On the same day, he visited the migrant detention facility at Carrizo Springs, Texas.
