U.S. accelerating removal of Haitian migrants at border with Mexico

Thousands of predominantly Haitian migrants remained camped under a bridge in southern Texas on Saturday, as hundreds more headed toward the border a day after U.S. authorities moved some 2,000 of them to immigration processing stations.

The Department of Homeland Security said on Saturday that U.S. Customs and Border Protection would send 400 additional agents to the area by Monday morning to help speed the removal of migrants who have overwhelmed border officials in the town of Del Rio, Texas.

Such transfers will continue "in order to ensure that irregular migrants are swiftly taken into custody, processed, and removed from the United States consistent with our laws and policy," DHS said in a statement.

While some migrants seeking jobs and safety have been making their way to the United States for weeks or months, it is only in recent days that the number converging on Del Rio has drawn widespread attention, posing a humanitarian and political challenge for the Biden administration.

The city of about 35,000 people, roughly 230 kilometres west of San Antonio, sits on a relatively remote stretch of border that lacks the capacity to hold and process such large numbers of people.

DHS said that in response to the migrants wading into the Rio Grande and then sheltering in increasingly poor conditions under the Del Rio International Bridge that connects the Texas city with Ciudad Acuña in Mexico, it was accelerating flights to Haiti and other destinations within the next 72 hours.

DHS added it was working with nations where the migrants began their journeys — for many of the Haitians, countries such as Brazil and Chile — to accept returned migrants. Officials on both sides of the border said most of the migrants were Haitians.