Donna, Texas —First District Congressman Tracey Mann visited the southern border and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Facility in Donna, Texas. He said what he saw there was nothing short of a heartbreak.
In a social media report, Mann shared: The children I saw have been traumatized and been taken advantage of by Mexican cartels. These cartels are making hundreds of millions of dollars every day by exploiting children. Under the Biden Administration, cartels are the winners, and innocent children are the losers.
The daily average of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has nearly doubled since 2019, and there is no end in sight. By the end of the year, a projected 2 million migrants will cross the southern border.
Texas migrant facilities are over 700% capacity. The children are housed here until they are transferred into a long-term care facility. This transfer legally is supposed to occur 72 hours after being processed, but children reside there as long as 18 days.
After being processed, the children are separated into rooms meant to house 30 people, but instead, there are anywhere from 300 to 600 children at one time. Today, there are over 4,000 people being detained in the Donna facility.
The heartbreak doesn’t stop at the Donna facility. Last week, Texas Gov. Abbott called on the federal government to close a facility housing migrant children in San Antonio, due to complaints of abuse, sexual assault, and COVID positive children not able to be isolated.
President Biden’s policies paved the way for this full scale crisis. He promised citizenship – no pathway, just outright citizenship – to more than 11 million illegal immigrants and halted border wall construction.
Pres. Biden and VP Harris are doing nothing to stop the flow of illegal migrants crossing the border. We must end these disastrous policies; secure our border through a physical barrier, and patrol agents; and adhere to or modernize our country’s immigration system.