U.S. Rep. Jason Smith: Overcrowded detention centers, overwhelmed agents on the southern border

Detention centers in the McAllen, Texas, area of the Rio Grande Valley are overcrowded with migrants seeking asylum and border patrol agents are overwhelmed, a Southeast Missouri congressman said Friday after visiting the border.

U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, R-Salem, Missouri, was one of five House members who visited this section of the border Thursday and Friday. The group included four Republicans and one Democrat.

This stretch of the border with Mexico is “the busiest of all the border sectors,” the 8th District congressman said.

“We visited the main, legal port of entry at McAllen. We visited the detention centers. We saw drug smuggling,” Smith said.

While the delegation was there, they saw a major drug bust.

Smith said it was “one of the largest drug busts I have ever seen in my life. They busted a semi full of coconuts that had liquid meth inside.”

Border Patrol agents were “cutting open coconuts and pulling out balloons of meth. They said it was millions and millions of dollars worth of meth,” Smith said.

Agents said 36 tons of meth are confiscated weekly in that sector of the border, according to Smith.

“What we saw was not something that was unusual, apparently,” he said.

Several detention centers are along this area of the border.

They are overcrowded, Smith told the Southeast Missourian before leaving McAllen.

“People are sleeping on the concrete floors,” he said.

More than 8,000 people a week are entering the country at that border spot alone, he said.

Last month, across the entire southern border, 144,000 immigrants were detained, the highest monthly total in 13 years, Smith said.

“It doesn’t sound like a crisis. It is a crisis,” he said.

During the visit, the lawmakers witnessed 19 people who had just crossed the Rio Grande illegally to enter the United States.

“And everyone had a child strapped to them like they were an accessory,” he said.

Many migrants are coming across the border from Mexico and seeking asylum as families. But in many cases, adults are seeking to pass off children as their own in order to be released from custody.

The majority of migrants are released within 20 days, Smith said. That’s because the federal government is not allowed to keep unaccompanied minors or families with children in detention for more than that amount of time.

“They know if they have a child that they won’t be sent back,” the Republican lawmaker said.

Smith said, “It is a humanitarian crisis. It is a national crisis.”

Since December, 200,000 families have been released in the United States “because they cannot be detained,” Smith said.

The migrants are given court dates, which can be two to five years down the road. Most don’t show up, he said.

Smith said, “It is totally a broken system.”

He added, “I have never seen anything like it. It is worse than I even imagined.”

Mexican cartels are making millions of dollars smuggling people across the border, he said.

“They literally will use children over and over to try to get people through,” Smith said.

The federal government has started a pilot program of DNA testing in the Rio Grande Valley sector to determine whether migrant adults are related to the children accompanying them.

Smith said 25% of the tested adults were found not be parents of those children.

Border Patrol agents, he said, told the lawmakers “they need more personnel, more technology, better infrastructure.”

Like President Donald Trump, Smith believes the United States needs to construct more miles of border wall.

But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and other Democrats who previously have visited the border have argued a wall is not an effective or cost efficient answer.

Smith, however, said Congress “needs to do its job” and provide more funding to secure the border.

As things stand now, “we are a country that has virtually open borders,” Smith said. “It just takes 20 days.”

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