Texas mayor says border city has not been ‘overwhelmed’

Laredo Mayor Victor Trevino said on Sunday that his Texas city near the southern border has “not been overwhelmed” in the wake of the expiration of the pandemic-era immigration policy Title 42.

“There’s no doubt that we’re seeing historic challenges in our border. … But everything that we have been doing since the declaration of emergency has held up, and we have not been overwhelmed at this point,” Treviño said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” 

“But yesterday, we did receive around 700 migrants. And however, because we receive the overflow from El Paso and Brownsville, we’re still high alert,” Trevino said. 

Title 42 lifted last Thursday with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration, reverting migrant processing to the system under Title 8. In anticipation of the expiration date and shift in policy, many had braced for an expected surge of migrants at the southern border.

But Biden administration officials on Friday said they didn’t see “a substantial increase overnight or an influx at midnight.” On Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday that Border Patrol has noted a drop in encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border since the end of Title 42. 

Trevino said last week that Laredo was “boarding up like a hurricane” for an anticipated surge on Sunday surge of migrants, and had previously declared a state of emergency ahead of the Title 42 expiration.

But Trevino said on Sunday that that level of overwhelm hadn’t yet arrived. “We’re getting the buses, and migrants come in, they get processed, they get sent to our NGOs. And the- the amount of migrants we’re expecting initially, the big flow, is not here yet.”