On Tuesday, a group of more than 250 people, the majority of whom were adult males living alone, crossed the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to agents of the Border Patrol who were waiting for them. As the middle of the day progressed, the migrants, the vast majority of whom were from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, formed a queue to board buses that would take them to a nearby processing center. According to Breitbart Texas, the size of the can vary, with as many as 500 individuals present in a single crossing.
Agents from the United States Customs and Border Protection were assisted in sorting migrants according to country, family unit status, and gender by members of the Texas Department of Public Safety Highway Patrol and the Texas Army National Guard. The few agents of the Border Patrol who were available to take custody of the migrants arrived in transit buses, as has become the norm in recent years.
As part of Operation Lonestar, members of the highway patrol and the National Guard stationed themselves at the major border crossings in order to reduce the number of migrants entering the country legally. March of 2021 marked the beginning of the operation.
The majority of the people who were detained on Tuesday will make an asylum claim, and then they will be allowed to remain in the United States while they await the resolution of their cases. A source within CBP who spoke on the condition of anonymity stated that a relatively small percentage of migrants among the huge groups are really removed.
Eagle Pass, which is located in the Del Rio Sector of the Border Patrol and has a local population of 29,000, is now in the lead position among all of the other border communities in terms of the number of migrants that have been apprehended. According to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in the month of June, more than 45,000 migrants were detained in the Del Rio Sector. The majority of this sum entered the area close to Eagle Pass. When compared to the same month in 2020, the number of migrants who were taken into custody in June increased by more than 1,300 percent.
The sheer number of people trying to cross the border in the relatively tiny border town in Texas is overwhelming the Border Patrol, which has led to overcrowding at Border Patrol stations as well as the recently constructed soft-sided processing center.
