The United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will redeploy some 750 officers at the country’s border to tackle migrant humanitarian needs and to record the numbers of migrants individuals and families entering into the country through the Mexican border, agency’s head said on Wednesday.
According to Reuters news reports, the CBP agency is also redirecting service’ personnel and trying to expanding medical, food and transportation contracts in order to meet migrants’ humanitarian needs, while also maintaining security at the US-Mexico border, the agency’s commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during a media conference in Texas’s Paso.
Kevin said, “There will be impacts to traffic at the border. There will be a slowdown in the processing of trade.”
The highest number of migrants movement was noticed this month, March, in a decade with more than 100,000 migrating at the US ports of entry, Kevin said.
Kevin said around 40 per cent of the CBP personnel were operating in regions like El Paso taking care of migrants’ humanitarian need.
Kevin said: “We are doing everything we can to simply avoid a tragedy in a CBP facility. With these numbers, with the types of illnesses we’re seeing at the border, I fear that it’s just a matter of time.”
For the very first time the agency, in a decade, is directly freeing migrants into the USA when the immigration and customs enforcement was unable to offer humanitarian needs to overcrowding, Kevin said.