The situation at the U.S. border with Mexico has brought many changes to the country, including the way immigrants act when faced with arrest.
In the past, immigrants would largely hide from authorities to avoid being caught in the country illegally. But now, many asylum-seekers seek out Border Patrol and law enforcement after entering the United States to have a better chance of staying in the country.
With the surge of millions of immigrants crossing the border, law enforcement officials have been too overwhelmed to arrest immigrants who are just looking for work, seeking to do it legally, and want to avoid violence in their home country. Instead, their resources go to those who commit violent crimes.
The current immigration system also offers the newcomers a safety net from the country and the lives they left behind. In many cases, it can take years for an asylum claim to be processed and heard by a judge, and immigrants are safe from deportation while waiting for the court date.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress claim they are attempting to fix the border crisis, which saw more than 371,000 non-U.S. citizens try to cross into the U.S. last month, but they have different ideas about how to do so, and border experts claim that the problem does not have a simple solution.
“We do need more boots on the ground. We do need more border infrastructure,” Michael Neifach, a border security expert from the George W. Bush administration, told the New York Times. “But you can’t fix this by just doing that. We need to understand that the border is not the end of it.”
Since fiscal 2024 began in October 2023, the Biden administration has encountered more than 988,000 immigrants at the border in those three months, and there were more than 2 million encounters in the entire fiscal 2023.
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Border and sanctuary cities have felt the brunt of the border crisis. New York City has seen more than 150,000 immigrants flood its housing system since the spring of 2022, which has overwhelmed the city. New York has even offered to fly immigrants to other places through one-way tickets free of charge.
President Joe Biden has requested $14 billion from Congress to add more agents along the border, as well as more people to process and decide asylum claims. The amount is part of a larger $110 billion aid request that would allocate funds for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. However, no deal has been agreed to so far.
