US Will Beef up Migration Staff at Southern Border

The administration of United States President Donald Trump says it's going to send employees from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to the U.S.-Mexico border to augment staff at the southwest frontier this summer, according to documents gathered by CNN.

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The TSA border assignment will begin in the next months and last between 45 and 60 days. Some 175 law enforcement officials and up to 400 security personnel from six U.S. cities are being asked to make the temporary transfer. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security representatives could not be reached immediately to confirm the report.

"There is now a need for more help from TSA at the SW border," Gary Renfrow, a senior TSA official, wrote in an email to his agency regional management, according to CNN. "We also understand that we are accepting some risk as we enter a very busy summer," Renfrow added.​​​​​​​

The government has said it is seeing a record number of people entering along the over 3,000km border with Mexico.

TSA law enforcement officials sent to the border will receive legal training and will assist the Customs and Border Patrol as immigration officers, the report said.

Since President Trump began to implement his anti-immigrant policies in 2017, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in material and human resources to halt migratory flows.

Among those policies was initially the idea of hiring at least 15,000 new officers, an amount that includes about 5,000 new officers for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and 3,000 for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Trump presidency had envisaged hiring 26,370 new border and immigration agents by the end of 2021, however, this recruitment campaign has dramatically failed so far.

In an article published by Workpermit out of the U.K., Daniel Waldron and Sanwar Ali say that “despite signing an order to hire an additional 15,000 immigration and border officials two years ago, there are now more vacancies since Trump took office,” as the migration-related U.S. agencies lose over 1,400 agents every year due to retirement and resignations.  

The U.S. government would need to hire up to 2,700 recruits a year to meet Trump's 2021 hiring goal.​​​​​​​