(Image source from: Criticschronicle)

The United States border agents arrested almost 17,000 members of family units trying to cross the U.S. border with Mexico in September, a 31 percent augments over the preceding month, according to official statistics released on Tuesday.

In a news briefing with reporters on Tuesday, Trump administration officials pointed to the rise in migrant families as evidence of a "border crisis" since those groups are harder for immigration enforcement officials to keep in custody and expel because of the protections granted by U.S. law to migrant children.

Rights groups, on the other hand, dispute Trump's claim, saying that while there was an increase in apprehensions in 2018, on the whole, irregular immigration has been at a historic low over the last few years.

The Trump administration expressed alarm at the change in the makeup of migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from typically single adults to children and families traveling together.

About 40 percent of those detained in the fiscal years 2017 and 2018 were unaccompanied children or families with children, compared with 10 percent in 2012, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think-tank.

According to numbers released on Tuesday, U.S. border officials arrested nearly 397,000 people overall at the southern border in the 2018 fiscal year that ended September 30, an increase over the 304,000 apprehended in 2017 but mostly in line with arrest trends of migrants in the U.S. southern border over the past decade.

Border arrests dropped in the months after Trump assumed office in January 2017 but have rebounded over the past year.

Trump has sworn, to commence cutting millions of dollars in aid to Central America over a caravan of thousands of mostly Honduran migrants and refugees fleeing violence and poverty at home.

Zero Tolerance Policy

Last year, the Trump administration tried to prevent families from traveling to the border by instituting a "zero tolerance" policy, which incorporated separating thousands of children from their parents as the adults were put on trial.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the White House was considering strategies that may result in family separations.

Citing officials briefed on the issues, the Post said the Trump administration was looking at potentially asking detained asylum seekers to decide between staying in custody with their children for an indefinite period of time or letting their children to be sent to government shelters where kin members could seek custody.  

In Texas's Rio Grande Valley (RGV), where more migrants have arrested crossing between official ports of entry than in any other section of the 2,000-mile-long (3,200-km) border with Mexico, apprehensions sustained an increase in October, said the Border Patrol sector's Chief Patrol Agent Manuel Padilla.

There were more than 12,700 arrests in the RGV during the first three weeks of October, marking a 112 percent rise over the same period in 2017, Padilla said in a phone interview.

Sixty-four percent of those detentions were of family members or unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico, up from a rate of 51 percent in all of the fiscal year 2018, Padilla said.

More than 5,400 family units were detained in the first half of October, up 300 percent from the same period in 2017.

"Right now we're at maximum capacity when it comes to detention, and so is ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. Our detention capacity is just breaking at the seams," said Padilla, predicting border-wide family apprehensions would rise again in October. "This is not sustainable."

-Sowmya Sangam