Biden border crisis: an insider's view

From The Epoch Times:

Exclusive: Border Agent Gives Inside Account of Overcrowded Facilities

The family-unit holding cells smell like urine and vomit. Fights break out in the unaccompanied-minor cells. Scabies, lice, the flu, and COVID-19 run rampant.

Up to 80 individuals are squeezed into each 24- by 30-foot cell, and there aren’t enough mattresses for everyone. Sheets of plastic divide the rooms.

“Any diseases that are in there, it’s being kept in there, like a petri dish. The smell is overwhelming,” a Border Patrol agent said, describing the conditions in a facility in south Texas. The agent, Carlos (not his real name), spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, for fear of repercussions.

Border Patrol agents on the front lines are getting so frustrated that they’re now risking their livelihoods to reveal what’s really going on in the illegal immigrant processing facilities.

One or two agents are left to control 300 to 500 people during a shift. No agent wants to report physical or sexual assaults between the aliens because they’ll get blamed for “letting it happen.” They’re also forced to separate a child from an extended family member because he or she is not a biological parent.

The number of unaccompanied minors—children under 18 who arrive without a parent—is buckling the system. The law requires Border Patrol to prioritize unaccompanied minors and transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours.

[...]

So far this fiscal year (from Oct. 1, 2020), Border Patrol has apprehended more than 29,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally. In all of fiscal 2020, just over 33,000 were apprehended, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics.

This year’s numbers are on a trajectory to surpass the 2019 crisis numbers, when 80,634 minors were apprehended.

CBP declined to provide the number of unaccompanied minors currently being held. “In general, CBP does not provide daily in-custody numbers, as they are considered operationally sensitive because CBP’s in-custody numbers fluctuate on a constant basis,” CBP spokesman Nate Peeters wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on March 23.

[...]

CBP and Health and Human Services have opened several extra facilities to deal with the influx, with the latest being the San Diego Convention Center.

Carlos confirmed that the majority of unaccompanied minors coming across the border already have parents or family members in the United States.

“Everybody that shows up here—even if it’s a 3-year-old kid with no one around—they all have an address on them. And they’ll give it to you: ‘Here’s my address; this is where you are sending me,'” Carlos said.

“And that’s what we do. This is the way we are being played.”
Most of the unaccompanied minors come from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

“We’re dealing with a different culture who’s not afraid to send all their kids under the age of five, knowing they’re going to get raped, knowing they’re going to get killed,” Carlos said. “You talk to the adults or the teenagers and they’ll tell you, ‘They raped three or four girls, and they kicked them off the trains.’ They’re going to die.”

Two-thirds of migrants traveling through Mexico report experiencing violence during the journey, including abduction, theft, extortion, torture, and rape, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has been providing medical and mental health care for migrants and refugees in Mexico since 2012.

Almost 1 in 3 women surveyed by MSF said they had been sexually abused during their journey—60 percent through rape.

[...]
A new directive from the Biden administration is allowing for family units to be released into the interior of the United States without a notice to appear—the paperwork that states the date an illegal immigrant must turn up in court to plead their case.

“There’s no repercussions. I’m not even going to give you a court date. You don’t even have to show up at court if you don’t want to. It’d be nice, but you don’t have to. That word gets out immediately. And I mean overnight,” Carlos said.

He said it’s now common knowledge that if you bring a child, you’ll be quickly released into the United States. They’re being transported all over the country, but popular destinations include Houston, New York, and California, as well as Maryland and Washington, D.C.

“They’ll put them in a hotel for a couple of days until their flight is ready to fly them to where they are going. That’s tax dollars,” Carlos said.

“There’s no end in sight. The people that we’re apprehending are warning us of the larger caravans that are on their way.”

He said President Joe Biden’s rollback of the Trump administration’s border policies is the direct cause of the surge.

“One hundred and ten percent. They were already ready before Biden was even in office. They knew that the doors were going to be open. And now we’ve got a point where we cannot stop it,” he said.

The administration hasn’t allowed media to access the processing facilities and, according to agents, it’s even requiring that agents in the field move illegal aliens they apprehend onto private land to process them.

And Trump was the totalitarian, right?  Kids in stinking, filthy, pestilential conditions, and a journalist lockdown?  Move along—nothing to see here.