Biden’s border sees nearly half a million immigrant children arrive without a parent:
Nearly half a million immigrant children have arrived without a parent at the nation's borders during President Joe Biden's tenure, a milestone no other administration has come close to hitting.
In the three years since Biden took office and stopped returning to Mexico unaccompanied minors, a whopping 464,922 children have been encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection police nationwide, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal data from Feb. 1, 2021, through Jan. 31, 2024.
"The increase started when the Biden administration announced they were exempting children from Title 42 and announced that we would not be removing children," said Rodney Scott, the former Border Patrol chief under the Trump and Biden administrations who is a distinguished senior fellow for border security at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin.
A leading aid organization for child immigrants, Kids in Need of Defense, said the sudden implosion of children and teenagers crossing the southern border alone over the past several years was fully anticipated because they were barred from seeking asylum as a result of U.S. measures implemented at the border during the coronavirus pandemic.
"There had basically been a backup at the border. ... It was like releasing a pressure valve. So all these kids who have been waiting in really terrible conditions in northern Mexico were finally able to present for protection," said Jennifer Podkul, KIND's vice president for policy and advocacy. "People working on this issue were not surprised at all."
But that influx of minors in early 2021 has not gone away in three years — it's become the new normal.
A history of child migration --->READ MORE HERE
Mass release of children from border has put ‘unprecedented’ strain on US schools:
Tens of thousands of immigrant children who crossed the southern border alone and were released to an adult sponsor in the United States have been enrolled in public schools nationwide under President Joe Biden, putting educators in a bind.
Over the past three years, more than 8 million people have been encountered at the southern border, including nearly 500,000 unaccompanied children, which does not include children who arrived with a family member.
The impact of so many children arriving in the country and enrolling in schools nationwide has not been insignificant, according to immigration policy experts.
"Although the majority of U.S. schools receiving unaccompanied minors and other immigrant children are not new to serving this population, many educators have described the number of newcomers arriving in the 2023-24 school year as unprecedented," said Julie Sugarman, associate director of K-12 education research at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, in an email.
Children who come across the southern border are protected from immediate removal in most cases and will be transferred from Border Patrol custody to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS will then look for a relative or parent in the U.S. to release the child as he or she awaits immigration proceedings years down the road, though the child may be let go to an unrelated adult if a family member cannot be found.
"They have a right — just like other children living in their community — to enroll in local schools regardless of their or their sponsors' actual or perceived immigration or citizenship status," the HHS website states. "State laws also require children to attend school up to a certain age."
This particular influx of children into the country has caught educators by surprise.
Since Biden took office in early 2021, Department of Homeland Security data show that 464,000 children have crossed the border alone. --->READ MORE HERE
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