Migrants coming to the United States now say they're hastening to enter the country before November because they're afraid President Joe Biden could lose his reelection bid to former President Donald Trump, who has vowed to close the border.
Colombian brothers Ricardo, 20, and Sebastian, 18, spoke with the New York Post after illegally crossing the border in Arizona last week.
"We think with the elections, it will be harder," Ricardo told the outlet.
"We don't want Trump," Sebastian said.
The brothers said they claimed asylum after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, citing threats from criminals in their home country of Colombia. They turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents in Yuma, Arizona, who released them to the Yuma Regional Center for Border Health after scheduling asylum hearings for them in October.
The local nonprofit provided the siblings with assistance while they waited for a bus to the Phoenix airport, the Post reported. The pair later boarded a flight bound for New Jersey.
They reportedly spoke with their mother by phone while at the aid group and she was waiting for them to arrive in New Jersey.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump allies are already drawing up plans so he would be ready to deliver the "largest mass deportation effort" in the history of the country on day one if elected to a second White House term in November.
The 45th president, who's running to be the 47th, has said he would use the military, as well as local law enforcement, to accomplish his goal of deporting "nearly 20 million" migrants.
Since January 2021, when Biden took office, nearly 7 million foreign nationals have entered the U.S. illegally, with approximately 1.7 million having entered without being apprehended.
The Biden administration has also allowed nearly 600,000 migrants to come into the country through its CBP One phone app entry program and another 400,000 more through its parole program that lets Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans fly to the U.S. directly.
According to recent polling, a 56% majority of Americans disapprove of the way Biden has handled immigration and border security.
Under a new program announced last week, senior administration officials said that the immigration court cases of certain migrants headed to Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City would be expedited as part of a broader effort to curb illegal immigration in the run-up to the Nov. 5 elections.
Additionally, the administration is planning to draft an executive order that would shut down the border once a threshold of 4,000 migrants per day has been reached.