EL PASO — The death this week of a second Guatemalan child in United States custody and the unusual release of hundreds of asylum seekers in downtown El Paso have put officials in this border city on edge.

Shelters, they said, are already overwhelmed in their ability to take in the migrants.

The release of dozens of families in a city park on Christmas Day stands in sharp contrast to the past, when immigration officials coordinated such moves with a network of shelters that have been assisting refugees for decades.

Along with the deaths of two detained migrant children in the last three weeks, the abrupt release has a web of organizations assisting migrants on both sides of the border concerned that more people could fall ill.

The leaders of organizations assisting immigrants are questioning why federal officials released the asylum seekers at a time when President Trump was criticizing Democrats over their resistance to funding a border wall. Some immigration advocates argued that the administration’s policies are effectively making thousands of Central American asylum seekers pawns in the standoff in Washington.

“Frankly, this is a manufactured crisis placing innocent children at risk of death,” said Fernando Garcia, director of the Border Network for Human Rights.

Mr. Garcia dismissed the administration’s assertion of heightened security risks on the border, emphasizing that the overall number of illegal border crossings are at a historic low while spending on the Border Patrol has surged.

But Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted in a statement that the country was experiencing an “immigration crisis,” laying the blame on judges seeking to protect the rights of detained migrant children. Ms. Waldman said such legal rulings reward parents for “bringing their children with them to the United States.”

“As long as activist judges continue to set national immigration policy they continue to put family units and innocent children in harm’s way,” Ms. Waldman said.

The death of the 8-year-old Guatemalan boy follows that of a 7-year-old girl from the same country while also in the custody of the Border Patrol. Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, said in a statement this week that the boy’s death was “deeply disturbing.” Still, Ms. Nielsen, who is set to visit El Paso on Friday to review immigrant detention facilities, avoided putting the blame on federal facilities.

Events in El Paso played out on Thursday as Mr. Trump repeated claims that illegal immigrants bring crime into the United States, despite studiesshowing otherwise.

The president cited a case in California in which a police officer was killedon Wednesday by a suspect thought to have entered the country illegally. The president repeated his call to build a wall on the border, with a partial government shutdown over funding for that project appearing likely to stretch into the new year.

The criticism from immigration advocates comes at a delicate time when shelters around El Paso are struggling to absorb Central American migrants released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While the administration has sought to limit asylum seekers, the dynamics of border crossings have shifted, with fewer single men from Mexico making the journey north, replaced by more families from Central America.

At the same time, shelters across the border in Ciudad Juárez are saying they are similarly overwhelmed after the Trump administration said that it had reached an agreement with Mexico’s government for Central American migrants to wait in Mexico while authorities analyze their asylum claims.

Amid confusion, the Casa del Migrante, a prominent shelter in Juárez operated by Roman Catholic officials, stopped accepting more refugees, citing capacity and resource constraints.

On the American side of the border, Ruben Garcia, the director of Annunciation House, El Paso’s largest operator of shelters for migrants, described frustration over Washington’s handling of migrants from Central America.

In a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Garcia, one of the most prominent figures assisting immigrants in the United States, said he could “foresee the creation of refugee camps in a city like Juárez” in case the Trump administration further tightens the admittance of Central Americans requesting asylum.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/us/immigrants-el-paso-release-death.html