Former President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson told Morning Joe on Friday the high number of migrants being appended at the U.S.-Mexico border shows it is a crisis.
Johnson said when he oversaw the department, he would be put in a bad mood if over 1,000 people were appended at the border in a given day. Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said they had detained more than 4,100 migrants on Tuesday.
“And I’d look at [the numbers] every morning, it be the first thing to look at, and I probably got too close to the problem. My staff will tell you if it under 1,000 apprehensions the day before, that was a relatively good number. If it was above 1,000 it was a relatively bad number and I was going to be in a bad mood all day,” Johnson said.
“I know that 1,000 overwhelms the system. I can not begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like so we are truly in a crisis,” he added.
Johnson later clarified there are things he agrees with what the Trump administration is doing to deter the migrants and there are things he does not agree with.
Current Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen reiterated how the situation at the border is “dire,” partly because their holding facilities are overflowing:
.@DHSgov facilities are overflowing, agents and officers are stretched too thin, and the magnitude of arriving and detained aliens has increased the risk of life-threatening incidents. I call on Congress to fix this broken system!
— Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) March 29, 2019
My greatest concern is for the children, who are put at high risk by this emergency and who are arriving sicker than ever before after traveling on the treacherous trek.
— Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) March 29, 2019
Watch above, via MSNBC.
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