As Trump threatens tariffs, migrant families keep coming

EL PASO, Texas (AP) — On Wednesday, Border Patrol agents near downtown El Paso encountered a group of 1,036 migrants who had entered the country illegally — the biggest cluster the agency has ever seen. At one point in May, a holding cell designed for 35 migrants was crammed with 155. Six children have died in U.S. custody since September, three in the past month.

U.S. authorities are overstretched and overwhelmed by an unprecedented surge of Central American families arriving at the southern border. It is against that backdrop that President Donald Trump threatened this week to slap tariffs on goods from Mexico unless it cracks down on the flow of migrants.

“It is certainly a crisis at this point, and it does not lend itself to quick fixes,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Clinton administration and is now a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Border Patrol arrests have jumped sharply over the last year but are still well below historic highs of the early 2000s. What’s different is the type of people crossing: Able-bodied Mexican men have been replaced by Central American families with children, many of them impelled to make the journey because of grinding poverty and violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Juan Carlos Santos, 34, walked past the end of a bollard-style fence in New Mexico with his 9-year-old son, Yair, and was picked up by Border Patrol agents. On Friday, he was at the El Paso Greyhound station, bound for Washington, where he has a cousin who lent him money to pay a smuggler.

Santos said he wanted to stay in Honduras but gave up after a year of unemployment. The farmworker hopes to bring his wife and 2-year-old daughter after paying his debt to his cousin.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/as-trump-threatens-tariffs-migrant-families-keep-coming/