The day before Title 42 was scheduled to end, hundreds of migrants gathered on the banks of the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas. Some of them, unable to wait any longer, cut a hole through a fence and made it to onto U.S. soil, before uniformed agents resealed the barricade.
The majority retreated and bided their time. Come midnight when the expulsion policy ends, said Elizabeth Guerra, a migrant from Brazil who described herself as “desperate,” she planned to turn herself in to American immigration officials.
Anticipating that thousands more will come all along the border, officials in Texas cities like Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso have declared state of emergency, which allows them to seek more resources from the federal government to transport and house the new arrivals.
In Brownsville alone, close to 2,000 people have already crossed in recent days, a pattern the Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, said he had not seen in a decade.
“It is straining our capacity,” said…
This article was written by The New York Times and originally published on www.nytimes.com