Thousands of migrants were crowded under a bridge outside the border community of Del Rio on Thursday, part of a massive surge in migration across the Rio Grande this week that has overwhelmed the authorities…

The US Border Patrol said that more than 9,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, were being held in a temporary staging area under the Del Rio International Bridge as agents worked as quickly as they could to process them.

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The temporary camp has grown with staggering speed in recent days, from just a few hundred people earlier in the week. The authorities and city officials said they expected thousands more to cross the ankle-deep river between Mexico and Del Rio in coming days…

Gov Greg Abbott of Texas ordered the state police and the National Guard to assist border agents in Del Rio, saying the federal response had not been enough to quell the surge in crossings.

“The Biden administration is in complete disarray and is handling the border crisis as badly as the evacuation from Afghanistan,” he said…

The Southwest border has been inundated in recent months with a surge in unauthorized crossings not seen in more than two decades. More than 200,000 people crossed last month, bringing the total this fiscal year to more than 1.5 million.

But in recent days, the swelling crowds in Del Rio…have created a new humanitarian challenge.

Bruno Lozano, the city’s mayor, described on Thursday squalid conditions under the bridge that resembled a shantytown…The vast majority of those who arrived appeared to be fleeing Haiti, the Caribbean country still reeling from a series of natural disasters and the assassination in July of its president, Jovenel Moïse, local officials said…

Earlier this week, even more Haitians were caught trying to cross through the Del Rio region, a desolate 245-mile stretch of the United States border with Mexico…

The government also plans to fly some of the migrants to other parts of the border that are not experiencing the surge like Del Rio. And return flights to Haiti are set to begin on Monday, as well, which the Biden administration hopes will signal to other Haitians that they should not try to cross the southern border…

This latest surge in Del Rio comes during a small management shake-up at the Department of Homeland Security, with the secretary’s chief of staff, the assistant secretary for border and immigration policy, and the top prosecutor at Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently announcing plans to leave the agency at the end of the month.

The city of Del Rio, located in a southwest patch of the state on the Edwards Plateau…has experienced a relentless wave of migration since this spring, in part because its remoteness makes it easier to cross, officials said.

Immigration agents were releasing so many migrants into town in March that residents complained that the spike would drain the town’s limited resources. Victor Escalon, the South Texas regional director for the state’s Department of Public Safety, said dozens of arrests for criminal trespassing, of migrants crossing illegally, had overwhelmed the local jails…

Tiffany Burrow, the operations director for the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition’s migrant respite center, said she worried the group’s resources would not be enough to accommodate this week’s deluge.

“We can’t help that many people,” Burrow said. “The city is not going to sustain all these people. The city under the bridge could become bigger than Del Rio.”…

While waiting, the migrants have access to 22 portable toilets but no running water. They mostly eat food bought in Mexico, running back and forth across the Rio Grande. At night they sleep on packed dirt beneath the bright glare of floodlights, surveillance equipment and armed border guards.

What do you think about the growing migration crisis? Share your thoughts and a prayer in the comments below!

(Excerpt from BDNews24 and The New York Times. Article by James Dobbins, Eileen Sullivan, and Edgar Sandoval, The NYTimes. Photo Credit: John Moore/Getty Images).