Dozens of single, mostly male adult migrants were shuttled from a makeshift processing center in Texas to a local airport for flights to various US cities — marking the first time such a transfer has been captured on video amid the ongoing border crisis, according to a report Tuesday.
The scene began unfolding Sunday outside a parking garage in Brownsville, where a makeshift processing center was set up in a vacant office, Fox News said.
A video recording shows a line of men and women being escorted into the office, after which some of them left and got into taxi cabs that arrived to pick them up.
Fox News said it followed the cabs to Valley International Airport in Harlingen, about 30 minutes away, where some of the migrants reportedly said they’d been smuggled across the border with Mexico after paying a criminal cartel $2,000 each.
The migrants said they were headed to Atlanta, Houston and Miami, Fox News said.
The revelation of the operation came one day after updated figures from US Customs and Border Protection showed that more than 178,000 migrants were apprehended at the southern border last month, the highest number for any December on record.
The figure is also higher than the total number of migrants — 175,353 — that were stopped during the past three Decembers combined.
The shuttling of migrants into the interior US echoes one The Post uncovered last year, in which planeloads of underage migrants were flown into the Westchester County Airport north of New York City.
The Post saw some of the children transported in buses to a nonprofit residential center on Long Island and to a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike, where they were met by unidentified adults and driven away in cars.
But Fox News said what it witnessed was unusual because single adult migrants are typically expelled from the US under a federal law known as “Title 42,” which allows the government to deny people entry to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.
Former President Donald Trump invoked Title 42 after the COVID-19 pandemic struck and President Joe Biden continued the practice.
During a Tuesday news conference, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that she was “not sure” about the operation uncovered by Fox News but said that “we continue to be under Title 42.”
“Migrants who cannot be expelled under Title 42 are placed into immigration proceedings, and one of those avenues could be placement in an alternative-to-detention program in the interior of the United States,” she said.
“Sometimes, that means moving migrants to other parts of the United States to move to different detention facilities, where they wait for next steps in the immigration process, such as a court hearing, and are required to check in with a local [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] office.”
Psaki added, “So, that is something that’s certainly, something that is happening out there in the country and is consistent with our policy.”
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy — who Biden referred to on a hot mic Monday as a “stupid son of a bitch” — noted that the Department of Homeland Security has said that more than 47,000 migrants failed to report “just between March and August.”
“So, why let them into the US unsupervised in the first place?” he asked.
Psaki said that “those who do not show up will be subject to the repercussions of that.”
Nearly one-quarter of the 178,840 migrants stopped last month along the southern border had previously been turned back into Mexico under Title 42 at least once in the past year, according to CBP.
December’s 23 percent “re-encounter rate” was nearly double the average 14 percent rate for fiscal years 2014-2019.
“The large number of expulsions during the pandemic has contributed to a higher-than-usual number of migrants making multiple border crossing attempts,” CBP said in a prepared statement.
The December figure, which amounts to nearly 6,000 apprehensions a day, was up slightly up from the month before when Border Patrol agents recorded 174,744 encounters with migrants making illegal crossings.
The highest-ever number was recorded in July, when 213,593 migrants were stopped, according to CPB data.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel blasted Biden and his administration over the latest figures.
“Joe Biden and border czar Kamala Harris have failed — on their watch, cartels and smugglers are thriving, border officials are overwhelmed, our communities are less safe,” McDaniel said in a prepared statement.
“Biden’s failed open border policies are the root cause of this historic humanitarian crisis.”
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to address the issue of migration to the US during a Thursday trip to Honduras for the inauguration of President-elect Xiomara Castro, a spokeswoman said.
