“As of Sunday morning, U.S. Border Patrol was holding more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in short-term holding facilities, including jail-like stations unfit to house minors,” CBS News reports.

“Nearly 3,000 of the unaccompanied children in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody had been held longer than 72 hours. CBP is legally obligated to transfer most unaccompanied minors to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the agency which oversees shelters licensed to house children, within three days of taking them into custody.”

“The Biden administration is mobilizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help care for the overwhelming number of unaccompanied migrant teens and children filling detention cells and tent shelters along the Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security said Saturday evening,” the Washington Post reports.

“The FEMA deployment will support what DHS called a 90-day government-wide effort at the border, where the Biden administration is struggling to care for a record number of teenagers and children arriving without their parents. The minors are arriving at a rate that far exceeds authorities’ ability to house them.”

Associated Press: “The Biden administration hopes to relieve the strain of thousands of unaccompanied children coming to the southern border by ending a Trump-era order that discouraged potential family sponsors from coming forward to care for them.”

Washington Post: “HHS statistics show that 70 percent of unaccompanied minors are male, and that about 75 percent are ages 15 to 17. Teenagers making the journey are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and force recruitment by gangs, smugglers and predators. Sexual assault is common.”

“Most unaccompanied minors cross the border into the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Some try to evade capture after crossing, but most seek out U.S. border agents to begin the process of making a humanitarian claim.”

“The magnitude of the crisis facing President Biden at the U.S.-Mexico border came into clearer focus Wednesday as the new administration was holding record numbers of unaccompanied migrant teens and children in detention cells for far longer than legally allowed and federal health officials fell further behind in their race to find space for them in shelters,” the Washington Post reports.

“More than 8,500 migrant teens and children who crossed the border without their parents are being housed in Department of Health and Human Services shelters as they wait to be placed with relatives or vetted sponsors. Nearly 3,500 more are stuck at Border Patrol stations waiting for beds in those shelters to open up, the highest figure ever.”

CNN: Biden’s border strategy faces crucial test amid dramatic surge of migrant children.

Mother Jones: “The public charge rule never generated anywhere near as much outrage as the Muslim ban or family separation. That was understandable. It was a 217-page piece of federal rulemaking whose true purpose was obscured by bureaucratic jargon. But it was Stephen Miller’s best chance for preventing people from the kinds of countries that his boss liked to refer to as shitholes from eventually voting in US elections.”

“By some estimates, the rule would have blocked hundreds of thousands of people from getting green cards each year. No other Trump regulation had the potential to so fundamentally alter how many people became Americans or what the country’s new immigrants looked like.”

Politico: “He’s only been in office for six weeks. … But he’s also being hampered by conflicting policies, staffing vacancies at the top, and in some instances, inaction. Foreign students who have been admitted to U.S. colleges this fall are struggling to secure visas, threatening to deprive U.S. colleges of billions of dollars for the second year in a row.”

“Refugees who expected to be admitted to the country after Biden proposed increasing the admissions cap have been turned away after the administration failed to make it official. And Biden’s administration has not withdrawn from court cases former president Donald Trump was pursuing to keep immigrants out of the country.”

“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will travel to Texas on Monday with roughly a dozen Republican members to assess the growing humanitarian crisis at the southern border,” Axios reports.

“The visit comes as President Biden is under increased pressure to address the overwhelming flow of unaccompanied migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border. Recent data shows an average of 321 kids being referred to migrant shelters each day.”

“Thousands of migrant children are backed up in United States detention facilities along the border with Mexico, part of a surge of immigration from Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence that could overwhelm President Biden’s attempt to create a more humane approach to those seeking entry into the country,” the New York Times reports.

“The number of migrant children in custody along the border has tripled in the past two weeks to more than 3,250, according to federal immigration agency documents obtained by The New York Times, and many of them are being held in jail-like facilities for longer than the three days allowed by law.”

NBC News: “A record number of unaccompanied migrant children are in Border Patrol custody and shelter beds are scarce, raising fears of a new humanitarian crisis at the southern border.”

Texas Democrats warn that a crisis at the border could be weeks or even days away, the Houston Chronicle reports.

The warnings come as the Biden administration moves to establish Ellis-Island-style rapid-processing hubs to release migrants into the U.S. within 72 hours.

“Fresh internal documents from the Department of Health and Human Services show how quickly the number of child migrants crossing the border is overwhelming the administration’s stretched resources,” Axios reports.

Playbook: “We all knew Biden’s massive immigration proposal was DOA in the Senate. What we didn’t realize until now: Not even the House will try to pass it.”

Politico: “Biden’s proposal is a top priority for progressives and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who say it’s critical to take action in the early months of his term. But Democratic leaders aren’t going to put a bill on the floor that will fail — which puts them on a tightrope as they try to keep all factions of their diverse caucus on board for a realistic approach to one of Washington’s thorniest issues.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the Biden administration’s task force for reuniting migrant families separated by the Trump administration will allow separated families “the option of being reunified either in the United States or their country of origin,” NBC News reports.

Mayorkas called the separation of thousands of migrant families under the Trump administration “the most powerful and heartbreaking example of the cruelty that preceded this administration.”

Matthew Yglesias: “What Democrats should want on immigration is not continuation of the cozy status quo, but a grand bargain that includes legal status and a path to citizenship for millions of long-settled undocumented people. And what they should want for workers is that anyone who has a job in America makes enough to live in America.”

“Bipartisan talks on immigration are nonexistent at the moment, while negotiations over a national minimum wage are fraught. A wage/enforcement deal that makes life uncomfortable for the Chamber of Commerce might be exactly the thing that drags Republicans back to the table on immigration while allowing the Biden administration to deliver on its promise of a wage increase.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who represents a district on the Mexican border, warned the Biden administration against easing up too much on unauthorized immigrants, citing their impact on his constituents, local hospitals and their potential to spread the coronavirus, Axios reports.

Said Cuellar: “You just can’t say, ‘Yeah, yeah, let everybody in’ — because then we’re affected down there at the border.”

President Joe Biden reopened the country on Wednesday to people seeking green cards, ending a ban on legal immigration that President Donald Trump imposed last spring, citing what he said was the need to protect American jobs during the pandemic, the New York Times reports.

Biden said that the ban did “not advance the interests of the United States.”

CNN: Here are the executive actions Biden has signed so far.