US to step up deportation flights for migrants stranded at Texas bridge

The United States said Saturday it would ramp up deportation flights for thousands of migrants who flooded into the Texas border city of Del Rio, as authorities scramble to alleviate a burgeoning crisis for President Joe Biden's administration.
The migrants who poured into the city, many of them Haitian, were being held in an area controlled by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) beneath the Del Rio International Bridge, which carries traffic across the Rio Grande river into Mexico.
Video footage showed thousands of people under and around the bridge and more walking across the river, clutching their belongings.
The port of entry at Del Rio has been temporarily closed, and traffic is being rerouted to relieve the bottlenecks that had formed at the bridge.
Homeland Security said it would "secure additional transportation to accelerate the pace and increase the capacity of removal flights to Haiti and other destinations in the hemisphere within the next 72 hours."
The statement also said the Biden administration was taking action to "reduce crowding and improve conditions for migrants on US soil," and working with "source and transit countries in the region."
CBP has dispatched 400 additional personnel to "improve control of the area," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, unveiling its plans to contain the situation.
Border authorities have been overwhelmed by the number of migrants crossing from Mexico seeking admittance to the United States, as well as an influx of migrants from Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban's takeover of that country.
Political pressure had mounted on Biden to address the issue of immigration, with both Republicans and his fellow Democrats calling for quick action.
The US government processed and mostly expelled more than 200,000 migrants at the border in both July and August, the highest numbers in more than a decade.