Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen issued a memorandum yesterday redeploying hundreds of border agents to respond to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Nielsen ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to accelerate the reallocation of up to 750 Border Patrol officers to sectors that are affected by the border emergency.
“The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it,” said Secretary Nielsen. “We will not stand idly by while Congress fails to act yet again, so all options are on the table. We will immediately redeploy hundreds of CBP personnel to the border to respond to this emergency. We will urgently pursue additional reinforcements from within DHS and the interagency. And we will require those seeking to enter the United States to wait in Mexico until an immigration court as reviewed their claims.”
Last week, in a letter to Congress, Nielsen warned that the nation’s border security system was reaching a breaking point with the nation facing a “system-wide meltdown” due to the overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants crossing over the U.S. border.
Nielsen writes in the letter, “We face a system-wide meltdown … We are witnessing the real-time dissolution of the immigration system.”
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Neilsen called the crisis a “humanitarian and security catastrophe,” and said without additional assistance, ICE would be forced to release illegal aliens in “large numbers.”
“The result is a dangerous and growing backlog of individuals in custody that has forced us to begin releasing large numbers of aliens … Without additional assistance, we will be forced to increase the releases of the single-adult population from ICE — the only population for which we can currently effectively enforce U.S. immigration laws,” Nielsen writes.
