US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday refused to provide a timeline for when President Joe Biden’s administration will open new facilities that will handle the surge of unaccompanied children at the nation’s southern border with Mexico. Talking to CCN, Mayorkas said that the administration established three new facilities last week and they are working on the system from “beginning to end.”

“The border is closed,” he said, talking to ABC news, and added, “Now is not the time to come. Do not come. The journey is dangerous.”

” We are working around the clock 24/7,” Mayorkas said. The Homeland Security Secretary was talking to CNN.

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When he was asked about the Biden administration’s timeline, he said, “We have dealt with surges in the past and the men and women of Department of Homeland Security will succeed,” reported CNN. 

“We are building safe, orderly and humane ways to address the needs of vulnerable children,” Mayorkas said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Mayorkas remarks came as America is seeing a surge in unaccompanied children in US custody, while the Homeland Secretary insisted that the southern border is closed.

While Democratic and Republican lawmakers call the situation a ‘crisis’, putting pressure on officials to rectify the issue, the US administration has refused to say so. 

With an estimated 15,000 migrant children or teenagers already in federal custody — roughly a third of them in facilities meant for adults — and with the nation on pace to see two million undocumented migrants arrival this year, the magnitude of the problem has become impossible to ignore.

When he was asked to be “more specific” and give a date, he declined, saying, it will be done “as soon as possible.” He added that the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated their efforts partly.

Defending the Biden administration’s work at the southern border, he blamed the Trump administration for dismantling the immigration system. He said the Biden administration has now rebuilt the system “from scratch.”