Emergency shelter in Texas border city expands capacity as more COVID-positive migrants released

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Biden Administration began flying some migrants back to Mexico

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin has the latest on the border crisis on 'Special Report'

An emergency shelter set up in the border city of McAllen, Texas for COVID-positive migrants has expanded its capacity to keep up with a torrent of cases.

More than 850 infected migrants have entered the facility after having been released into the city, officials said.

The city announced Wednesday that it was setting up temporary emergency shelters in response to a "rapidly escalating" surge of migrants flooding across the border — warning that the influx has become a "crisis."

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"Despite the City of McAllen and its community partners’ best efforts, the sheer number of immigrants being released into the city has become a crisis: a crisis the City of McAllen did not create and has proactively tried to avoid for seven years," the city said in a statement.

The city said more than 7,500 COVID-positive migrants had been released into McAllen by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) since February and more than 1,500 in the last week. Migrants who test positive are asked to quarantine with a local charity, but the centers are being overwhelmed.

The border town’s city commission subsequently approved temporary emergency shelter for the "overwhelming number of immigrants stranded in McAllen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection."

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As of Friday there were several hundred migrants staying at the compound, which had an initial capacity of 250. Officials said they were prepared to handle 650, but Mayor Javier Villalobos said later Friday on Fox Business that there around 850 people at the shelter.

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Vallalobos warned that migrants who are released don’t stay in McAllen, but move throughout the United States.

"The issue of whether they have COVID or not, ... they're going throughout the country and we need to do something. We need to stop it somehow; we need to stop the flow," he said on "Fox Business Tonight." "But we can’t stop it."

The situation at McAllen is the latest indicator of the continued crisis at the southern border facing the Biden administration and other border towns and states.

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More than 188,000 migrants were encountered in June and that number is expected to rise to more than 210,000 in July. June also saw a 25% increase in migrant family encounters and an 8% increase in unaccompanied children.

On Thursday, Health and Human Services announced that there were more than 830 apprehensions of unaccompanied children in a single day, significantly higher than the 30-day average.

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The Biden administration has acknowledged the risk of COVID-19 spread coming from the surge in migrants and has kept Title 42 public health protections in place, renewing them earlier this month. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it was flying those expelled via Title 42 into the Mexican interior, citing the Delta variant.

"As part of the United States’ mitigation efforts in response to the rise in COVID-19 cases due to the delta variant, the Department of Homeland Security has begun to transport individuals expelled under Title 42 by plane to the Mexican interior," a DHS spokesperson told Fox News.