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WASHINGTON The Biden administration on Friday released a budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year that would increase the number of immigration judges and allocate millions in funding to clear backlogs of hearings and asylum requests.
The administration is grappling with an influx of asylum seekers at the Southern border after inheriting a gutted immigration system from the Trump administration. Boosted funding for immigration programs, aid and reform in the budget request spans several agencies such as the Department of Human and Health Services, Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
President Joe Biden’s preliminary $1.5 trillion budget request to Congress seeks to spend $891 million on nearly 1.3 million outstanding immigration court cases, which also adds up to 100 new judges a 21% increase.
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The San Diego Convention Center, which initially received teenage girls when it opened as a temporary facility for unaccompanied migrant children last month, is now also taking in younger boys and girls as well.
The younger children are ages 5 to 12, and some, but not all, are traveling with older teenage sisters. Siblings are being kept together at the downtown San Diego building, according to Carol Fiertz, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, rather than separated by age and gender.
“Needs change,” Fiertz said on Monday afternoon.
The federal government asked San Diego officials for temporary use of the facility in March as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to expand the department’s capacity to hold migrant children in its custody after crossing the border. Children are supposed to be transferred to Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours, but many were staying in Border Patrol custody muc
A top official from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in charge of caring for unaccompanied immigrant children (UC) has described the surge of illegal border crossings as "unprecedented" while adding that the temporary shelters they've opened are providing "a crisis standard of care" to the minors.
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Two Ecuadorian girls dropped from the U.S. border wall by alleged smugglers have been transferred to a federal migrant child welfare agency, according to Border Patrol.
On Monday, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which manages a network of shelters for unaccompanied migrant children, placed the 3- and 5-year-old girls into shelter care, according to a Border Patrol spokesman.
A night-vision Border Patrol video captured the harrowing smuggling attempt in which a man can be seen straddling the 14-foot border fence in Sunland Park, New Mexico, then dropping the children, one at a time, to the desert floor on the U.S. side. In late March, the video, distributed by Border Patrol, captures the two men fleeing the scene on the Mexico side.