The United States would be in a much worse position to combat the coronavirus if President Trump hadn’t implemented a series of reforms surrounding immigration, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan said this week.
“Look at where we’ve come because of this president, because of this administration, because of the tools, including the wall … We’re much better positioned now today to handle another threat to our country today through infectious disease,” Morgan told Fox News during an exclusive interview on Thursday.
His comments came as the administration faces heightened scrutiny over the way it responded to the pandemic — and in particular, how it limited immigration. According to Morgan, Trump’s policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols helped dramatically reduce the number of illegal immigrants it detained and processed from the height of the migrant crisis last May.
“Last May, one month, 144,000 individuals we encountered — most of that at the southwest border. We had over 20,000 individuals in CBP custody. And because of the network initiatives and efforts, including the wall, the wall system — in 10 months, we were able to drastically reduce that. We reduced the flow by over 100,000 per month,” he said.
He added that his agency is averaging less than 100 migrants in custody today “versus 20,000 ten months ago. We’re averaging about 500 to 600 encounters per day when back in May, that was thousands per day.”
Because of the unsustainable number of detainees, Morgan said the agency was releasing tens of thousands per day. If the current conditions were the same as in May, “that would have meant we would have encountered an additional 200,000 individuals coming across the border right now — 35,000 a week.”
“We were overcrowded,” he added. “That means, we would have been back in May, remember, we were being forced to release people to the shelters, at the bus stops, at a tune of tens of thousands a week, we were doing that.” – READ MORE
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