Migrants, many from the Middle East, were filmed easily crossing the border into California with no intervention Wednesday morning — a day after President Biden signed an Executive Order intended to drastically tighten the border.
According to the White House, Tuesday’s order would temporarily suspend the entry of migrants over the southern border once the number of daily border encounters exceeds 2,500 over seven days.
Bill Melugin, a National Correspondent for Fox News, documented Wednesday’s border crossings in California on X.
“We encountered groups of men from the Middle East crossing illegally into Jacumba, Calif. including “Special Interest Aliens” from Egypt, Jordan, & Turkey,” Melugin posted, later adding there was another “mass illegal crossing taking place.”
“A Jordanian man told me he came here for work, not asylum,” he added.
On Wednesday afternoon, dozens of people were pictured lining up at the border wall in the area near San Diego — which became the busiest area for migrant crossings in the nation April — awaiting Border Officials to admit them into the US for processing.
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond has called for tougher border measures, writing on X: “No one should be allowed to cross illegally into the United States. Why are we going to let 2,500 people cross illegally? That’s like saying we will allow 2,500 car thefts before we do anything about it.”
Border Patrol told Fox 260,000 migrants have crossed in to the San Diego border sector since October and 78% of those have been released into the US.
Biden’s proclamation was apparently designed to stem the tide of migrants flooding to the US, which has seen over 7 million arrested for crossing illegally since Biden came into office.
Meanwhile, in Texas, the city of El Paso’s migrant dashboard shows authorities currently have 1,500 migrants in Customs and Border Protection custody as of Wednesday morning, with 500 additional migrants encountered Tuesday — representing a significant portion of the 2,500 number in Biden’s order.
In Yuma. Arizona, mayor Douglas J. Nicholls told local news site AZfamily.com the area’s facilities, which have the capacity to hold around 500 people, are completely full.
“We are assisting other sectors, so our facility is at 100% capacity,” he said. “If we got a surge of 1000, 1500 people, it could overwhelm and catch us… From a perspective of managing the whole system there are still some very high levels of concern.”
Despite Tuesday’s order, many experts believe that the “crackdown” will make little difference.
Lillian Serrano, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, says that the migrants won’t pay attention to Biden.
“We don’t really expect any executive action to have an impact on the amount of migrants that arrive to our country,” she told Border Report.
“They’re not watching what the president does, they’re driven by need and their plight. What we might see is a push of migrants to remote paths into the country that will increase the number of deaths and human suffering.”