Ted Cruz accuses President Biden of creating 'manmade humanitarian disaster' at US border

US Republican Senator Ted Cruz has blamed President Joe Biden for a “manmade humanitarian disaster” at US southern border as the detention of asylum seekers, in particular unaccompanied migrant children, continues.

"You had children side-by-side lying on the floor, no beds, cots, lying on the floor, covered up in emergency reflective blankets and 10% of the population there is testing positive for COVID," Cruz said on Wednesday.

"It is a humanitarian disaster and it is manmade. Joe Biden caused this with political decisions made in the opening weeks of this administration."

Cruz along with fellow Senator John Cornyn of Texas led a 19-member delegation to the southern US-Mexico border and visited a migrant detention facility in Donna, Texas.

Republican lawmakers blamed the Biden administration's policies for the border crisis, including the termination of the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as "Remain-in-Mexico", which held asylum seekers in Mexico for their admission trials.

At a press conference held during the borer visit, the senators said US Customs and Border Protection’s detention facility in Donna, which was built to hold 250 migrants, now holds nearly 4,000.

"Donna is a gigantic tent city that they built to handle this massive crisis, this massive surge of illegal immigration," Cruz said. "They are not six feet apart or three feet apart, they're not even six inches apart."

The senator called the detention facility a tragic superspreader of COVID-19, saying “roughly 4000 aliens are cramped together into cages.”

President Biden has downplayed the significance of the border crisis, saying that "it happens every single solitary year."

The US president is accused of inciting a chaotic migrant rush on the US border with Mexico after he vowed to unwind many of the immigration policies of former president Donald Trump when he assumed office in January.

Republicans ripped Biden for undoing Trump’s policies, saying he created the border chaos with a "naive immigration stance."

Biden’s fellow Democrats also criticized his administration for using notorious Trump-era detainment facilities in Texas to keep migrant children as they had used the issue of detainment facilities to accuse Trump of putting “kids in cages.”

Former president Trump slammed Biden form the border migrant crisis, accusing him of inspiring a “spiraling tsunami.”

Trump said last week that he will most likely visit the border in the coming weeks.

The former US president urged Biden to finish the border wall, warning that if the “Remain-in-Mexico” policy is not reinstated, millions of migrants will pour into the US, “destroying our country.”

Around 100,000 migrants attempted to cross the border into the US from Mexico in February, compared to just 36,000 in the same month last year.

US data shows 9,457 unaccompanied migrant children were apprehended at the southern border in February.

There are more than 18,000 unaccompanied migrant children in US custody, over 5,000 of them are being held at facilities not designed for long-term housing.

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