U.S. Border Patrol allows 8 migrant caravan members to enter country near San Diego; dozens more wait

They’re not sneaking in. They’re not swimming across the Rio Grande. The much-ballyhooed “migrant caravan” showed up at the border late last night near San Diego, and the Border Patrol was waiting for them. The Border Patrol gave instructions and the caravan members followed them. Some got to come in, some didn’t.

It’s hard to make the case that they’re flouting U.S. law. They’re doing what authorities are telling them to do, which is what you’d expect of people seeking asylum:

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol informed Mexico it could let in eight people from the group of 20 migrants who had taken up position outside the border access point in San Ysidro, California, according to the organizers of the caravan. Caravan organizer Viridiana Vidal, from Pueblo Sin Fronteras, said agents rushed to the migrants camping outside, saying, “We are ready now.” Mothers and children were let in first, according to Vidal. Three mothers, four kids and one 18-year-old man, traveling alone, were let in, Vidal said. The eight migrants were taken in at about 7:30 p.m. local time after waiting about 30 hours outside of the facility. “As [U.S. Customs and Border Patrol] Commissioner [Kevin] McAleenan indicated yesterday, we reached capacity at the San Ysidro port of entry over the weekend, and were temporarily unable to bring additional persons traveling without appropriate entry documentation into the port of entry for processing,” CBP said in a statement Monday night. “We began processing undocumented arrivals again on Monday. Depending upon port circumstances at the time of arrival, individuals presenting without documents may need to wait in Mexico as CBP officers work to process those already within our facilities.”

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It’s harder to defend all the histrionics going on around all this, with activists demonstrating and people scaling the wall and sitting on the top of it. If it was just a matter of dozens of people showing up at the border and asking to be allowed in, then following Border Patrol instructions, there would really be nothing about that you could criticize. It’s the fiasco it’s been turned into by people with an agenda that’s made it such an exercise in the absurd. There is a process involved with seeking political asylum, and by definition it’s complicated precisely because it usually involves people who lack the proper documentation. They need to go through interviews in which they make the case that they were facing oppression and had no choice but to flee as they were. U.S. officials have to determine if that claim is credible. The whole thing is hard to do when you’ve got people shouting with megaphone and people sitting on the top of walls just to make spectacles of themselves, but this is immigration 2018. The news media long ago bought into the idea that this caravan is everything it claims to be – people in desperate need of asylum with no choice other than to do exactly what they’re doing. But U.S. officials still have to go through the established process of determining if that’s really the case. In spite of everything, they’re trying to get it started and do it as professionally as they can. The crowd and the demonstrators aren’t making it any easier.