Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters during a visit to South Texas on Wednesday that the temporary facilities are part of a strategy to ease overcrowding at Border Patrol detention centers. The two tent cities will be built in El Paso and in the Rio Grande Valley town of Donna by April 30 as processing centers and temporary housing for Central American families and unaccompanied children detained after crossing the border from Mexico.

“It’s clear that all of our resources are being stretched thin,” said Mr. McAleenan, standing in front of a section of border wall in the town of Hidalgo. “The system is full and we are beyond capacity.”

Mr. McAleenan spoke to reporters the day after Attorney General William P. Barr issued an order to immigration judges that they deny some migrants a chance to post bail. The order, which is expected to be challenged in the courts, could keep thousands more in jail indefinitely while they wait for their asylum requests to be resolved, and appeared to be another effort to discourage migrants from seeking asylum. But it could also add to the overcrowding in detention centers on the border when it goes into effect in 90 days.

For weeks, federal, local and nonprofit officials along the border have been struggling to handle a spike in asylum-seekers from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Mr. McAleenan, on his first trip to the border as acting homeland security secretary, said the numbers have become unmanageable.

In March, officials encountered or apprehended more than 103,000 migrants, the most in any single month in more than a decade, he said. “Yesterday, in one 24-hour period, we had over 4,800 people cross our border, a new record for the modern era,” Mr. McAleenan said. “Almost 1,000 of them crossed in just three large groups, 375 people in the largest of those groups.”

Over all, the flow of migrants is low compared with the record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the latest surge has raised a host of legal and logistical challenges. In the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, the number of migrants apprehended so far this month is 8,928, already more than double what it was in April 2018. And in the El Paso sector, the number arriving in April is nearly eight times what it was last April.

The federal government has a history of using temporary emergency housing to deal with influxes of migrants.

The Obama administration also put migrants in tent camps, and in 2012, it turned a vacant dormitory building at an Air Force base in San Antonio into living quarters for migrant youths. Some of the Trump administration’s attempts to respond with similar measures have been met with widespread criticism.

The Border Patrol recently placed families in a fenced-in encampment under a bridge in El Paso with little hot food. That area was closed after an outcry from elected officials and migrant advocates, although hundreds of migrants were still being held in several tents next to a Border Patrol station.

Last year, officials built a tent city at the Tornillo border station, near El Paso, to house unaccompanied children. The Tornillo camp, with air-conditioned tents with bunk beds on a patch of desert, was originally built to house 360 teenagers. It was rapidly expanded and at one point had about 1,500 there. Costly and controversial, it was eventually shuttered.

The two tent cities now scheduled to open in El Paso and Donna will house hundreds of migrants at each site in structures that federal officials call “soft-sided facilities.” According to federal contracting documents, the Donna and El Paso tent cities will operate for eight months and will have kitchen equipment, shower trailers, laundry trailers, office space and security cameras. The estimated cost of the two sites is $37.2 million.

It was unclear how long the families and children would be held at the sites. Asked on Wednesday if officials planned to detain migrant families for longer periods there, one Border Patrol official said they were bound by law to release families after 20 days.

“But we are always looking for additional options to have in place to house people,” said the official, Rodolfo Karisch, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley sector. “Right now, if you look at every Border Patrol station that’s out here, we’re at overcapacity. So we do need some shelters here to help us house the people we have in custody.”

Federal officials have been trying various things to mitigate the demands placed on border cities, including taking migrants to bus stations and shelters run by nonprofit and religious groups in other towns. But that informal network of shelters is now flooded along the entire border.

On Tuesday, the mayor of Yuma, Ariz., signed a proclamation of emergency as the city struggled to handle the growing number of migrant families released by Customs and Border Protection officers there. The mayor, Douglas Nicholls, said he was seeking a “FEMA-type response” — help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or its equivalent to provide shelter, food and other assistance to the migrants.

Mr. McAleenan signaled the government’s willingness to work with local officials and nonprofit groups, meeting with several mayors of South Texas cities and touring a migrant shelter in the city of McAllen run by Catholic Charities. He did not take questions from reporters and did not comment about the Yuma mayor’s actions.

One of the mayors who met with Mr. McAleenan — Dr. Ambrosio Hernandez, a pediatric surgeon who is the mayor of the Rio Grande Valley city of Pharr — said the acting secretary was not there “to sway anybody.”

“He did most of the listening, we did most of the talking,” Dr. Hernandez said.

At the McAllen shelter, a former nursing home that on Wednesday afternoon was packed with about 400 migrants, Mr. McAleenan met with the Catholic nun who assists migrant families in South Texas, Sister Norma Pimentel, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

“At this point, I don’t know that we have any solutions that he proposed,” she said. “He said that he was going to work with us to make sure that for the solutions going forward, he would listen to what we have to say.”

Article Source