Migrant mini-caravan breaches border near site of Trump wall rally
Hours after President Trump appeared in El Paso Monday at a rally to demand border wall money, a massive group of illegal immigrants breached the border a few miles away.
Border Patrol agents say 311 migrants strolled around the end of the border fence in Sunland Park, New Mexico, and walked into the U.S., where they were arrested just before midnight.
Almost all of them were families or unaccompanied alien children (UAC) from Central America, part of a stream of mini-caravans who have traversed Mexico over the last year, finding holes in American border security.
Sunland Park is just across the state line from El Paso, where Mr. Trump appeared at a rally to draw attention to the border situation.
He bragged that his administration had started a new round of wall-building along the Rio Grande — apparently a reference to six miles of fencing being constructed in Mission, Texas.
Mr. Trump also pointed to the wall that had been built a decade ago in El Paso, which the president said had cut crime and illegal immigration. City officials disputed the president’s crime claims.
Sunland Park, meanwhile, has quickly become ground zero for the immigration debate.
A group of congressional Democrats visited the location last weekend as part of a fact-finding border mission. Led by Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, they returned to say that while they saw “challenges,” there was no “crisis” that required more fencing.
Also over the weekend, a group of pro-Trump activists stood along the border as a human wall, apparently following a presidential tweet suggesting that people could take the place of actual fencing if Congress didn’t pony up the money for a barricade.
Two days later the 311 migrants walked across where there was no wall.
The Sunland Park group was the second mini-caravan arrested in New Mexico on Monday.
Earlier in the day a group of 330 migrants was nabbed on the other side of New Mexico.
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