CBP Official Tells Congress Delays at Border 'More Dire' for Commercial Traffic
Randy Howe, CBP executive director for operations in the Office of Field Operations, testified April 9 that a typical wait exactly a year ago at the El Paso Port of Entry in Texas was 15 minutes for cargo trucks. "Yesterday, wait times were as long as 250 minutes," he said -- more than four hours. "At the end of the day, 63 trucks were not processed."
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Howe, who was on a panel testifying in the Senate on the crisis at the border, said the delays are a direct result of 545 CBP staff being reassigned from ports of entry to help manage the flow of asylum seekers between ports of entry. Howe and others on the panel told Senators that the best things they could do to stem the flow of Central American families seeking asylum would be to pass legislation that would undo the Flores court settlement, which does not allow for children to be detained more than 20 days; pass legislation that would address how people from non-contiguous countries can be deported; and pass legislation requiring nationwide use of e-Verify, which makes it harder for undocumented immigrants to work on forged papers.
Also on April 9, National Foreign Trade Council President Rufus Yerxa sent a letter to Kevin McAleenan, current CBP commissioner and acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, telling him that the government must find a way to address irregular migration "without impeding the free flow of commerce" between Mexico and the U.S.. "Because of delays and uncertainty at the border, U.S. companies are being forced to reroute cargo through other ports of entry, a costly exercise that may not always be possible since certain types of cargo are more efficiently, and sometimes exclusively, moved via truck," Yerxa said.