Biden Directs FEMA To Help Thousands Of Migrant Children In Detention Facilities

President Joe Biden has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assist in processing the staggering number of minors in detention camps at U.S.’s southern border.

Approximately 4,000 children are in Customs and Border Protection facilities according to White House estimates. Acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Troy Miller then said that 9,457 children and teenager’s were detained at the southern border without parents.

“What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the children’s interest,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said on This Week.

The Biden Administration also called on the Department of Homeland Security to volunteer “to help care for and assist unaccompanied minors” Customs and Border Protection facilities. The Biden administration hopes to move migrants from Customs and Border Protection facilities to shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

“A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,” Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security secretary, said in a statement on Saturday. “Our goal is to ensure that unaccompanied children are transferred to H.H.S. as quickly as possible.”

A majority of Customs and Border Protection facilities are in Texas where Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has blamed Biden’s effort to rollback the punitive Trump-era border security regulations as the cause of increased asylum-seekers. “They express surprise and shock about the fact that they are overwhelmed, when the Border Patrol and really everybody here in Texas has known that this is coming,” Abbott said in a press conference on Sunday.